r/SelfDrivingCars

I am curious what people think of Wayve. For those who don't know, they are a start up based in London working on autonomous driving. They are known for their vision end-to-end approach. They believe in the "embodied AI" approach, ie train AI directly from vision input to understand the world and make driving decisions. They have shown some demo autonomous drives through London. Recently, they showed off LINGO-2 where they combined a LLM with their e2e so that the system can both drive and also answer queries about what it is seeing and doing.

I can certainly see the appeal of their approach. Being able to train AI to drive a car anywhere by simply giving it data would be a very cheap, scalable approach. And combining it with a "chatGPT" like LLM that can communicate its thinking and take directions would be very practical.

But I would like to see more concrete real-world results, like some actual supervised deployments or disengagement data. I feel like their work is very "theoretical", if that is the best word. They basically show off simulation models used to train their AI. That's cool. But that does not tell me how good their autonomous driving actually is. They show off LINGO that can output simple explanations like "I am slowing down for that pedestrian crossing the street". Again, that is cool. So the AI knows to slow down for a pedestrian crossing the street. But that is very simple driving task. It does not tell how what situations the AV cannot handle or how reliable it. They've also shown some short clips of demo drives with supervision through London. I am not bashing Wayve. I kind of like them. But it feels like they are still in the early stages of development/training and not ready for actual driverless yet. What I would love to know is: How close are they to actual driverless deployment or are they still in the very early stages of development?

Thanks!