Dan Gallagher

The worry with Uber is that, of course, they run this massive network of human drivers.

If robo-taxis become this wave of the future, that they're going to be displaced because maybe way more people would prefer robo-taxis over human drivers.

So right now, there's two cities in which Waymo cars are operating essentially through the Uber app, and that's Austin and Atlanta.

And so when Uber got those deals...

The investors thought, oh, maybe there is a place for Uber in this autonomous car world.

But then Waymo has announced several cities since that it plans to expand in that don't include Uber.

They're also going into another city doing a partnership with Lyft and some of the cities they offer their cars on their own app.

I don't know if it's super clear yet what the ultimate future is going to be.

The cars are really expensive.

They need to get a return on investment.

So there's a good case to be made that Uber can boost that utilization because there's just more people using that platform to get rides.

They're making a lot of investments.

They're trying a lot of things.

It's hard to dismiss a company that has such a massive platform of people already using it for rides because the new players have to build a similar platform, and that takes a long time.

Well, most of it is, yes.

Especially with Google and what they said on their earnings call is like, yeah, the bulk of it goes to essentially the AI infrastructure.

And a lot of it goes to specifically the chips and the servers to power that.

They're in a race to build up AI services, get as much market share, getting users really accustomed to their AI platforms.

So for Google, you know, they have Gemini.

Gemini competes with ChatGPT and Cloud and these other kind of AI models.