It seems to me that among the recent Gemini headlines (which I find personally quite overblown, as Meta’s very advanced AI displayed the same flaws, and Microsoft’s Copilot was shown to display some real nonsense as well), people have kind of lost track of the autonomous vehicle business.
Waymo is by far the most advanced technology of all autonomous vehicle companies in existence. I’m not sure if people are fully aware that Waymo already has a commercial driverless taxi service in operation. I haven’t tried it but watched videos and it seems to work amazingly well. People love to nitpick autonomous vehicles and say “oh x and y are not working perfectly well”, but let’s be real, human taxi drivers are far from perfect and the service seems to be working far, far better than the average taxi driver. This week, Waymo received approval to run their commercial service in Los Angeles.
While most carmakers dabble in their own autonomous driving technology, many of them also have collaborations with Waymo. I see real potential for Waymo to become the de facto provider for most carmakers – the way that for years, many parallel charging networks existed, and very suddenly the majority of carmakers signed on to Tesla’s solution as the dominos kept falling one after the other.
With all the news around ChatGPT, most investors seem to use “AI” interchangeably with “chatbot” or more generally “LLM” or “image generation”. But autonomous driving is in fact AI as well.
Google also owns Deepmind which has been at the absolute cutting edge for AI for many years now. I feel like most people overlook this because you can’t just go to Deepmind.com and have a conversation with their AI. But they are doing some incredibly advanced stuff in scientific fields. Monetizing all of that is going to be a different story but I feel that from a technology standpoint, Google is very much doing impressive things:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/29/1084061/deepmind-ai-tool-for-new-materials-discovery/amp/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04043-w
