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Two giants, Tesla and Waymo, are vying for dominance in self-driving technology, a growing multi-billion dollar market.
But before a winner can be decided, each company must overcome different hurdles.
With about 700 self-driving cars already taking passengers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, Waymo has an early advantage as the company has established a track record that its self-driving technology software works well in congested city traffic.
Founded in 2009 as a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Waymo has the resources of a multi-trillion-dollar company.Playing Chess“While Tesla is playing checkers.”
Others aren’t so sure.
Andrei Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former senior director of AI at Tesla, said in a recent “No Prior Information: Artificial Intelligence” podcast Despite the common opinion that Waymo is ahead of Tesla, he thinks Tesla has the advantage.
“I know it doesn’t seem that way, but I’m still very optimistic about Tesla and their self-driving program,” Karpathy said. “I think Tesla has a software problem and Waymo has a hardware problem, that’s how I would put it. And I think the software problem is a lot easier.”
Tesla has been able to widely deploy its fleet of vehicles around the world on a scale Waymo could only dream of, so when Tesla irons out the kinks in its self-driving software and gets it to a point where it can actually be deployed, “it’s going to be really amazing,” Karpathy said.
“So right now it looks like Waymo is winning,” Karpathy said, “but when you think about who’s actually scaling in 10 years’ time and where the bulk of the revenue is going to come from, I think Tesla is still ahead in that sense.”
Karpathy also addressed one of the biggest criticisms of Tesla’s self-driving system: its reliance on cameras rather than lidar sensors to navigate the environment.
“I’m not sure people realize that Tesla actually uses a ton of expensive sensors,” he said, adding that the electric vehicle maker uses sensors at a different stage in the deployment process than Waymo. In other words, Tesla uses lidar in its data collection process to help inform the vehicle’s camera system, an approach that Karpathy said is more scalable.
From now on
Some industry experts say it’s hard to compare Tesla and Waymo, but for different reasons.
Dan O’Dowd, CEO of The Dawn Project, an advocacy group that has campaigned against Tesla’s driver-assistance software over consumer safety concerns, argued that Waymo is far more advanced than Elon Musk’s company.
He noted that Waymo recently rolled out robotaxis to the public in major cities like San Francisco, totaling 100,000 self-driving rides per week. In contrast, Tesla has yet to prove that its Full Self-Driving system is fully autonomous, despite Musk’s repeated declarations that the company is nearly there.
“Tesla has nothing approaching self-driving cars,” he told Business Insider.
Kevin Chen, a former software engineer in the self-driving industry who has worked with both Tesla’s FSD and Waymo, told Business Insider that he thinks there’s some validity to Karpathy’s comments.
He considered Tesla a “pioneer” in using machine learning for its self-driving software, and said the company has an edge in manufacturing self-driving hardware at scale, given that there are millions of its cars on the road today.
But he also argued that Tesla’s self-driving hardware doesn’t solve the problem of driverless cars.
“With the current state of machine learning and AI, I’m not sure we can achieve driverless quality with a camera-only approach,” he said. “And that raises the big question: Are we waiting for a breakthrough in AI to solve this problem? Or are we waiting for a breakthrough in chip manufacturing?”
Meanwhile, Waymo is developing an autonomous system that could eliminate the need for human drivers, but the company still relies on remote control. More challenging driving situations Something that requires human intervention.
The engineer added that the two companies are very different, but agreed that the problems facing Tesla and Waymo are very different: Tesla’s self-driving system doesn’t work yet, while Waymo’s system works but is very expensive.
“The sensors and computers in the cars are very expensive,” Chen said of Waymo. “Maintaining the maps is quite expensive, and in the long term, you have the financial challenge of owning and operating all those vehicles. So if you want to expand Waymo significantly and have to have all those vehicles on your balance sheet, you have to figure out how to fund it.”
Representatives for Tesla and Waymo did not respond to requests for comment.