PJ Vogt

A bicycle?

During that time spent wondering, the car did not slow down.

Soon after Elaine Hertzberg's death, Uber halted its testing program.

We reached out to Uber for comment.

A spokesperson said that the fatal collision was indeed a tragedy, which had a significant impact on Uber and the entire industry.

There would be other competitors who would shut down after similar accidents.

There would also be Tesla, which by 2020 was publicly marketing a product the company called full self-driving, but which absolutely was not.

Meanwhile, Waymo had slowly continued to develop its tech.

Their robotaxis would be ready for riders by 2020.

The team had gotten an unexpected boost from a technology that was, at the time, very little understood.

In 2026, when most people talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation defaults to products like ChatGPT and Claude.

But artificial intelligence has been a core part of driverless cars going back two decades.

In the 2010s, neural net advances meant that you could now begin to feed a computer system large amounts of data and watch as its perception, prediction, and decision-making abilities improved.

Here's Sebastian Thrunn.

That technology of massive data training was with us from the get-go, but has become more and more and more and more important.

The surprise for all of us has been that size matters.

When you put a million documents into an AI, it's fine.

100 million is fine.

But when you put 100 billion documents into an AI, it is unbelievably smart.

And that, I think, shocked everybody, myself included.