As self-driving slowly becomes a reality across US roads, sparks between the top two players in the space have begun flying.
Elon Musk has told Google’s Jeff Dean that Waymo “never really had a chance” against Tesla. Jeff Dean is Google’s legendary programmer who is currently the Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research. Dean had shared a post about Waymo on X calling Waymo the “most advanced” large scale current application of AI.
“Waymo’s system, fueled by careful collection of a large volume of fully autonomous data, is the most advanced, large-scale application of embodied AI today. Very proud to see this level of engineering rigor tackling safe autonomous driving making the roads safer for everyone (and it has been nice to see various Google research collaborations with Waymo be a part of these advances!),” Dean had posted on X, while linking to a blogpost that gave details about how Waymo engineering and AI systems worked.
An X user asked Dean for his thoughts on Tesla, which also has been rolling out its self-driving services in some US cities. “I would be interested to see your arguments compared to Tesla who also claim to be the most advanced large scale application of embodied AI,” user @CMantseris asked.
Dean said that Waymo’s systems were far more proven than Tesla’s. “I don’t think Tesla has anywhere near the volume of rider-only autonomous miles that Waymo has (96M for Waymo, as of today). The safety data is quite compelling for Waymo, as well,” he said. Many of Tesla’s rides currently have a safety driver at the wheel, and thus can’t be considered “rider-only”.
But this led to a reaction from Elon Musk. “Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla. This will be obvious in hindsight,” he replied to Jeff Dean.
Musk has long been predicting that his Tesla self-driving system — that doesn’t use LiDAR — is superior to Waymo’s LiDAR enabled cars. Musk says that given how human beings drive using only their vision, on-board cameras should be enough to create self-driving systems, and having a LiDAR in the mix could cause confusion for the AI. Waymo, though, has resolutely used LiDAR in its self-driving cars, and has seen plenty of success, with its cars now operating as self-driving taxis in several US cities and even on highways. So successful has been Waymo’s rollout that it now does more rides in San Francisco than Lyft.
Musk, however, is still sticking to his camera-only approach. His approach, if it works, could take a while to mature — it could be a while before cars collect enough data to be truly autonomous with just camera systems. But Musk seems to believe that once his camera-only system becomes robust, it’ll be much easier to deploy and run than Waymo’s cars, which require more instrumentation. It remains to be seen which approach works out, but at the moment, both sides seem convinced that they’re on the path to first making self-driving mainstream.
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