<story><title>Autonomous trucking upstart Embark has gone from $5B+ to basically worthless</title><url>https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/autonomous-driving-spac-embk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>supernova87a</author><text>Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary&amp;#x2F;analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry?&lt;p&gt;Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray?   Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?&lt;p&gt;Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they&amp;#x27;re the ones to be able to solve it?  Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?&lt;p&gt;It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal?   (and I&amp;#x27;m not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model)  Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thrashh</author><text>The way I think about is that when we drive as humans and an obstacle appears, we have over 15 years of knowledge that we have to determine our next step. And we coalesce a lifetime of knowledge in a matter of seconds.&lt;p&gt;These modern algorithms do not try to implement general AI. They do not work with 15 years of knowledge. They just recognize some patterns with no understanding of what they’re are looking at. It’s a different and 
 easier approach but I think it has some severe limits that will
never be overcome.&lt;p&gt;To me it’s like a software programmer that copies Stack Overflow snippets but doesn’t really understand programming. They get only so far</text></comment>
<story><title>Autonomous trucking upstart Embark has gone from $5B+ to basically worthless</title><url>https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/autonomous-driving-spac-embk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>supernova87a</author><text>Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary&amp;#x2F;analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry?&lt;p&gt;Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray?   Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?&lt;p&gt;Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they&amp;#x27;re the ones to be able to solve it?  Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?&lt;p&gt;It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal?   (and I&amp;#x27;m not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model)  Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lnsru</author><text>It’s closer to 3 decades today starting with European project: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Eureka_Prometheus_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Eureka_Prometheus_Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Looks like, that some problems can’t be solved just throwing money at them. Modern hardware is light years away from the one in Prometheus Project. Radars, lidars and cameras are superior now. Heck one can design and build dedicated ASIC for cheap nowadays. Maybe taking Nvidia Drive and tweaking it is just not enough to get there.</text></comment>