my friend bought a ride from a waymo for shits and giggles. i was actually intrigued about how the car made decisions on its own and sorta nerd sniped me to learn more about machine learning (not llms).
there’s probably some evil thing the self driving car companies are doing that im not aware of, but I was just interested in the ML aspect.
I’ve never seen a Waymo in person but I’ve seen plenty of edge cases while driving that I wonder how any self driving car would handle it.
Just one recent example: I was at a red traffic light crossing another road that had virtually no visibility to the right due to thick vegetation. Just as the light turned green I heard the sirens of approaching fire trucks from the direction where I couldn’t see. I waited, and didn’t actually see them until they were about 20 feet from the intersection. My gut feeling is that pretty much any self driving car would have seen the green light and then driven right into the path of those approaching emergency vehicles. And what would have happened next? Would the self driving car have slammed on the brakes once it saw the fire trucks? Would it have just continued, forcing the fire trucks to stop?