My point wasn’t that these systems will never work in some capacity - my point is that they’re taking a lot longer to roll out than people predicted, and that the internals of these systems aren’t end-to-end ML models - it’s ML-based perception feeding in to a lot of traditional robotics code, with ML models handling certain prediction tasks in certain spots.
You clearly know more than me but it definitely looks like it all fit neatly into a 5-10 year timeline which imo is insane for something of this magnitude.
The common refrain in 2015 was that we were < 5 years away from having self-driving cars operating at scale without the need for a safety driver in most major cities in the US.
At this point we have a public robotaxi service in one suburban area and two robotaxi services operating under restricted domains in SF that are open to the public behind a waitlist. The cars have problems with rain, fog, or snow, and expanding to a new city still takes a ton of time. Having joined the industry after the hype of 5 years ago, the reality now is nowhere near the vision companies we’re selling back then.
