Alphabet To Invest Another $5 Billion Into Waymo (techcrunch.com) 21
During Alphabet's second-quarter earnings call today, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat announced the organization will spend an additional $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary, Waymo. "This new round of funding, which is consistent with recent annual investment levels, will enable Waymo to continue to build the world's leading autonomous driving technology company," said Porat. TechCrunch reports: Porat noted that Google will focus on improving overall efficiencies in its "other bets" segment, which includes innovative projects that are distinct from the tech giant's core search and advertising business. Other companies in this segment are Verily, Calico, Google Ventures and drone company Wing. "Waymo is an important example of this, with its technical leadership coupled with progress on operational performance," Porat continued. The executive noted that parent company Alphabet's 10-Q form, which has yet to be filed, will have more details.
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Laundering 5 billion as a tax concession
There are some tax write offs for bad investments, but not enough to cover the losses. Bad investments make no sense as an intentional strategy.
a self driving vehicle no one asked for?
Speak for yourself. I am absent-minded, and much prefer daydreaming to driving. I'll be first in line for an SDC. Millions of disabled and elderly will be there with me.
For that much we can all get personal drivers (Score:2)
For that kind of money, it would be cheaper to hire an army of chauffeurs and forget the AI and camera thing.
They could call it something cool like Uber or Lyft.
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For that kind of money, it would be cheaper to hire an army of chauffeurs
$5B is $16 per American.
A chauffeur won't take you far for $16.
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This is "additional $5b". And Uber/Lyft are shared services yet provide personal drivers.
Pedantic much?
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I've never been in a Waymo so can't speak to that but I've been in a Tesla using full self drive. Hopefully Waymo is much better because the Tesla was fucking terrifying the way it drove.
I'm opposed to computer driven cars, not because something like Waymo can't navigate the super well mapped streets it is limited to driving. Under normal circumstances it may be a better driver than the typical person fucking with their phone, yelling at their kids and eating a donut.
My thing about them is for the emergen
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All the wrong people have the money (Score:1)
No one needs an autonomous car, except for companies who want to make money without hiring humans.
All that money could be better spent on initiatives to better help real people, which is why we need to start taxing the bejesus out of rich people and corporations, and putting that money to effective use, directly.
If they have $5 billion to throw around, then they have too much money.
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No one needs an autonomous car, except for companies who want to make money without hiring humans.
No one "needs" a car, period, sort of. Our lives are easier because we have a car. But there are those that can't drive, like children, older folks, blind people, drunk people, some disabled people, etc. Those people could take public transit in the same sense that everyone else could do the same. But those people's lives are easier with an autonomous car.
The problem isn't that there isn't a need or a market. There is clearly a market. The problem is that autonomous cars currently don't work. And by
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a car that only is reliably autonomous 99.999% of the time is not usable.
Human-driven cars are far less reliable than that.
Why does an SDC need to be more reliable than an HDC?
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Re: All the wrong people have the money (Score:2)
Re: No one needs bot-cars (Score:1)
Elderly people past their driving years want to be able to get around without waiting for a driver.
Sunken cost fallacy (Score:2)
Musk could learn a thing or two from the Goog (Score:2)
It seems to me that Teslas and Waymos have roughly comparable safety records in the area of autonomous vehicles . . . yet Waymo continues to operate quasi-autonomous vehicles with impunity, while Tesla gets the hairy eyeball from everybody every time one of their tinker-toys screws up (generally, with human assistance, I should add).
Apparently, Elon Musk isn't as smart as he likes to think he is. Google's obviously figured out how to get rid of some of the excess population in the USA without getting yell
discovering reality (Score:3)
The thing about AI is that getting 90% of the way there is easy, and the remaining 10% is impossible.