This seems to be wishful thinking on the part of Uber, and also Tesla. Google StreetView data is probably sufficient. Waymo's expansion into new cities does not seem to be delayed much by the need for more data.
Most of the reported problems with self-driving come from transient situations. More mapping data will not help with those.
China has the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, where traffic cams and other sensors let vehicles see beyond their own sightlines.[1] That's been going on since 2020. That's the ultimate in sensing - full real time road info.
The Beijing test area is getting some expansion. The new direction seems to be to focus on airports and railroad stations, so that driverless cars can be aware of congestion in detail. That makes sense.
[1] https://sinocities.substack.com/p/inside-chinas-connected-ve...
You can’t be the CTO of Uber wanting to do AVs, and get the data collection requirement shockingly wrong.
Waymo’s bottleneck has never been data. When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
Waymo is able to deploy with less (but targeted and high quality) data collection by having world class simulation capabilities. Not that they haven't collected huge amounts of data as it's no doubt important (I've heard their onboard storage is transferred and emptied every few days), it's just not a bottleneck. They have the most efficient operation in the AV industry.
The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.
I think it's more about detecting changes to the world. You need boots on the ground, so to speak, to see that new speed limit sign or the new lane paint. The Waymo vehicle can no doubt react to changes in the world when it encounters them, relaying them back to the mothership, but it's better to know about them in advance.
It'll shock you to know that you can simply get this from governments, some even provide this in API form
I'd be surprised if this is a thing outside the biggest US (and European, for that matter) cities, judging from Google StreetView there are lots of streets in US cities/towns with almost no paint lines at all.
Then there's roads with just the center line markers with no road should markings.
Then there's a whole class of roads of lines over "demarked" old lines that weren't demarked well, or lines fading that should've been painted a long time ago.
I'm surprised you've never seen a non-perfect road?
A human doesn’t need to be shown every single road that exists in order to drive.
And I don't like the idea of even more data being harvested and used.. I just find the dismissal.. odd.
No one is suggesting the latter.
Again, I’m not suggesting this. Bottleneck has a specific meaning. It means Waymo is limited by not having the ability to collect data. Well, clearly that’s not true because Waymo already has a reasonably scaled deployment across a dozen cities that no one else has and can handle millions of scenarios.
Real world data is absolutely required, but more of it doesn’t give you magical self driving ability as Uber’s CTO suggests. If it were the case, you’d see Tesla achieve fully autonomous driving years ago.
Exactly. plus any delivery company/dashcam company can provide a bunch of data where ever there is any sizeable population.
About 8 years ago, that data would have been really valuable, but at best its nice to have.
the only thing that is valuable is the breadth of different cars, but even then its not that much of a differentiator.
Tesla on the other hand has billions of miles of data, yet because there is a limit to camera-only techniques, that data isn't that useful is it? They have no ground truth data to evaluate their camera system on, which is why sometimes you see those Teslas driving around with lidar rigs mounted on them. Going camera-only is just asking for trouble.
Of course, Waymo still has much more room for improvement. But it's much more efficient to supplement less but higher quality IRL data with large amounts of synthetic data, than to run a million data collection vehicles 24x7 because most IRL data is boring and useless.
Waymo said 6 years ago they simulate 20 million miles every single day [1]. Clearly, it's working for them given their scale of deployment right now.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
Is that the right kind of model for this particular application?
Well, TBF, the tesla data was complete garbage with earlier vehicles. They had cheap and somewhat bad cameras in the earlier vehicles that was only somewhat recently updated. And even then, I don't think Tesla is at the end of their hardware journey. I think they don't think that either, which is why they've gone to a subscription only model for self driving vehicles.
Waymo, on the other hand, has gathered less data, but more high quality data. They do the expensive mapping of a city which is a big part of why their vehicles have early on been able to do some pretty impressive feats. The drawback is getting that high quality data takes a lot of time and resources.
I dunno about that. Tesla seems completely adrift, pretending to pivot with random forays into humanoid robotics or whatever, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if they exited the consumer vehicle space altogether within the next decade. They have no answer for Chinese competitors.
As far as the self driving, they may be far off still, it’s hard for me to get a read on that and this vehicle is a bet that they will be able to achieve it - right down to the braille in the cabin, so maybe that’s why they still fail. The thing I will say is that despite the PR disaster that the CEO is, which gives us that feeling that the company has lost its mind, it seems they are still quietly doing some advanced engineering.
The world model is basically intended as a more true-to-life simulator.
You can imagine improving i.e. a specialized math model (problem in, theorem out) with a normal LLM that knows lots of problems and theorems generally.
Also, Uber’s data might be useful for eval, not training (e.g « here is how Waymo would behave vs human drivers therefore it is safer »)
Accidents and near-collisions are exactly the kind of scenarios perfect for simulation. You don't test them out in the real world and risk injuries/deaths. You need to have confidence they're handled before you deploy.
Do you hear yourself?
https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/
That AI part is doing a lot of heavy lifting. They're using real data. We already know synthetic data is dangerous. Explains a lot of if you think it's more reliant on that than real data.
Uber did invest early in self driving back in 2015, but in 2018 there was a fatality which pretty much deleted their whole program. And looks like it's taken them way too long to try picking it back up.
Real-world data spoils faster than a gas station banana.
If your AV company is relying on data from six years ago, you're going to kill someone.
The original title says "self-driving" and that's much more clear.
I saw the title and thought it can't be AV, they must mean AI and made a typo.
This isn't a pivot, this is them trying to sheepishly reenter the race they were dramatically ejected from.
They run trucks for Fedex in Texas and wants to offer an "Uber Freight network"
There's nothing stopping the car makers from running their own taxi service and they already have networks of mechanics and cleaner as well as some level of storage. They'd need to scale up, but they don't need to start from zero.
Ubers success is in large part build on not having to own AND MANAGE their cars. With self-driving cars that advantage disappears, unless they're gaming that "drivers" will buy the cars and lease it to them.
Don’t they [1][2]?
[1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/examples/1929/tesla-lea...
[2] https://electrek.co/2020/10/24/tesla-collecting-insane-amoun...
I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.
Self-driving is possible but it requires a massive sustained investment in custom hardware on the car, in real and simulation testing, in painstaking software developlment covering tens of thousands of scenarios, realtime remote control failsafes, fleet management capabilities in every city. Waymo is the only company that comes close to the right approach. All these other Elons, GM, Uber CEOs are just jangling shiny objects in front of investors. A moonshot on the financial model for what are otherwise mature stagnant businesses.
Can the drivers charge a monthly late for hosting the sensors?
Seems par for the course. Nintendo turned legions of Pokemon Go players into unpaid sensor grids for delivery robots.
He said he “didn’t care and besides what was he going to do about it anyway, it’s going to happen no matter what”
I asked if he had ever heard of collective bargaining or knew about unions and he said no.
I think we’re only about another generation before the only purpose for human labor is to train and check the outputs of a machine.
[1] Here's how you know:
“Our goal is not to make money out of this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”I think enough people haven’t been in a Waymo to realise that the technology is basically here, and that we’re like 10 to 20 years of doubling away from AVs doing tens of millions of trips a day in America. By the time anyone has invested in true mass production of AVs, we’ll already be so far down that path that the policy deck will be dealt.
My Subaru can lane keep in a Wyoming blizzard. There isn’t some unsolved technical problem with snow for any system with radar, i.e. anyone who isn’t Tesla.
Keep in mind that like a fifth of Americans and half of humans live somewhere is rarely or never snows.
Couldn't come soon enough [1].
> Given that it doesn't really even work too well in places with good signage, lane markings, etc
Works fine in Phoenix, Miami and Los Angeles. Plenty of neighbourhoods there have non-existent, defaced and degraded signage and markings.
> Until it's real, it's nothing to get alarmed about
I don't think there is anything to be alarmed about, period. Driving is a silly job when you think about it. We made these machines to do our bidding, not enslave us behind their wheels.
My belief in a smooth roll-out is reinforced by those who would probably oppose AVs also not believing it's real. Once the first factory mass manufacturing AVs breaks ground, any limited local opposition can be preëmpted.
So what are we walking into? Not 8-11 billion happy cows. A crisis. People deciding not to reproduce. The human population declining. The irony as we achieve a technical pinnacle while justifying our own extinction by choice. The great filter as it turns out is actually capitalism, a race to business efficiency against all else including the incentives of your very own species. This is the mind virus.
But that said, supposing we are looking at 60 years from now having a few billion fewer people on Earth, just by attrition (lack of replacement) that is not automatically bad. We could afford to shrink in population - if there’s a floor to that contraction. If indeed there are way too many people in a decade for the available human jobs, then it could be the equilibrium is just a lower population. Which could be temporary - who knows what the future could bring, such as possible space colonization, which may need more humans and also give people the hope that I think Gen Y and Z have lacked, which is one reason for their low repro rates.
The complete destruction of the human through exploitation and control, as seen in the article, is a major reason people are too unhappy to start families.
The worst part? Most people don't even know why, so there's never a general public reaction to fix it.
the only real argument for continued growth in to preserve the current structure of investment. that's your great filter, and it will result in economic collapse which isn't the same as extinction.
It’s here and it’s been here for decades - it’s just finally impossible to ignore or wave away
Gig workers are self-chattelizing because there is no floor to the depravity that society will accept, and an endless supply of people who will chattelize themselves for a moment of pleasure
Or perhaps they "chattelize" to survive?
There's not much pleasure to be had from gig work apart from the freedom to perhaps choose your own hours and perhaps be free of a human boss. Both of which are quite the opposite of chattelizing, in the short term.
They have birthday parties and loving embraces in deprived ghettos that have community solidarity
The most beautiful human interactions I’ve ever seen are in the absolute most deprived poor places including when I was working in the fucking Balad hospital in 2010
Virtue does not come from work
"I rarely get to see my kids. That's a risk you have to take."
I’ve been waiting for someone to pull that one out as a gotcha…
But hey good for you for doing a bunch of searching about me personally (because I intentionally use my name so that people can do precisely what you’re doing) which indicates that I have triggered you to the extent where you’ve taken time out of your day to go and look me up personally
And your quote, inflammatory marketing slop that it is, is top and center in the images after searching your name once. "A bunch of searching" is not required. There's not much out there about you that requires digging into, just the usual founders' must-haves (crunchbase profile, paid write-ups, personal blog etc). Nothing special there either.
But please do enjoy the extra attention from me. Because that is special. To me.
The pleasure of being an Uber driver? Wouldn’t the better analogy be survival for most gig workers?
it is simply how do I get more money sex property attention etc…
There are no monks door dashing
Might want to remove the "Wizard" from your bio, it'd be far more accurate.
people want to get money so that they can have an “enjoyable life” very few indeed dedicate themselves to a virtue or an ethics above pleasure
“enjoyable life” as defined through pretty much the entirety of written human history consists of sex and play
So yes humanity is demonstrably composed of egoist consuming hedonists
Okay. How does this advance the discussion? Obviously then that means opposing that means being anti-human.
If I may play his game:
He writes to boost his own ego. By way of making his claim, he seeks to appear wise and wizardly, for who else but he could have made such an astute observation and present it with such confidence; it must certainly be true and he must certainly be better than us.
And who would make such a claim, but the one who is pure enough to see through the muck and see the truth of the claim? He must not be one of the egoist consuming hedonists! He must be outside of them to have seen them!
Or not, perhaps he is one of these egoists and he knows it, and will happily admit it. And by doing so, he will raise himself up even further. For he knows his faults and he is not ashamed to have us know them too. We shall soon see.
In the end, he will soon have more sex. (He already got the attention.)
If it is required to take action in the world as a person or anything that has the capability to do things then by function there is energy required to take action
If the actions of that population are detrimental to the global population, because local measurement of global externalities is ignored, then you have a population that is self-destructive simply because it cannot communicate or coordinate across all of the places that’s having impacts
The systems you currently live in are antihuman…yet entirely composed of humans acting for their own individual gain without the capability of considering the collective whole
Is it anti-human to suggest that existential threat that stems from a total failure of the biological organism to coordinate at the scale that it’s individual impacts have ?
Is it antihuman to claim that the population does not have the capability of being able to counter its own accelerating self-destructive behavior?
The majority of people have absolutely no choice for their actions
FTFY
Especially given that for an increasing number of folks the alternative to doing what you're told is starvation (food insecurity), homelessness, and death (from lack of healthcare).
The poorest Americans remain among the richest people in the world and across human history. Many people don't have material choices. Almost every American does.
The fact of Harriet Tubman disproves your claim
collective bargaining or unions do not prevent technological progress, but merely retard it in the hopes that their members can benefit at the cost of progress for everyone else. Look at dock workers and how they tried to prevent automation with unions.
Reminds me of when dockworkers resisted the shift to cargo containers. Those ports ultimately lost business in the end.
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
It sounds like a terrible business plan.