The Waymo self-driving car product seems like it will be quite transformative to entire industries once they get clearance to deploy it further than San Francisco where it is already providing rides day in and day out. Or does that not count for some reason?
Disclaimer: I own Google stock simply by virtue of being invested in mutual and index funds, as are most people.
Isn't that the product that had to scale back recently because it required an average of two humans per car to remotely operate it?
I'm (mostly) genuinely asking. I might have it confused with another company, and I have to admit I don't follow self-driving closely.
But also, Waymo was an acquisition (slightly arguable, since Google merged it with its own self-driving efforts, but the founding team was acquired). I asked for an example of an innovative product created from scratch at Google.
You're thinking of Cruise. Waymo has not scaled back in any way, and in fact is in the process of expanding to LA with a limited pilot through the winter.
I don't think the fact that some of the first people on the team had worked together previously makes Waymo not "created at Google". The project they worked on before, the DARPA challenge, was not a commercial product, and at the time no company was seriously investing in self-driving cars as a viable technology. This isn't like YouTube, which was a well-known brand and viable business pre-acquisition. It was Google resources that made it possible to build the rest of the Waymo team, lobby governments to allow self-driving cars on the road, work with hardware manufacturers, and leverage the rest of Google's software stack, ML expertise, street view data, and datacenter capacity to build and train the driver.
You're thinking of Cruise, which had to stop operations for malfeasance. If you want to tell me that the Google Self-driving Car Project, which is what Waymo was called before it was spun out from Google, didn't come from Google, I'm not sure what to say.
Disclaimer: I own Google stock simply by virtue of being invested in mutual and index funds, as are most people.