Waymo is no spring chicken. Birthed in the moonshot seeking unit of Alphabet owned Google — Google X, this was the wacky self driving car project of Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page more than a decade ago. Today, it has been spun off into a company of its own called Waymo - and it is quite safe to say, they are the pioneers of self driving car technology. However, they have often been challenged by Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Waymo is so far ahead in self driving that it has even launched a ride sharing service without drivers
Waymo perhaps for the first time taken-on Elon Musk's company on social media in the wake of a post by Tesla's head of AI and computer vision Andrej Karpathy.
Waymo has been gung-ho about its technology for a while and its use of the LiDAR has been pioneering. It is also something Tesla avoids using on its AutoPilot. Both companies have two different approaches to self driving something Karpathy outlined.
"Do not assume that we can get away as an industry with HD lidar maps for global deployment of these features. I would take lidar maps, and especially the flow of all the lanes, traffic, and so on, and think about how you can predict an intersection without assuming lidar maps,” he said.
undefinedWould you say that your technology is orders of magnitude more advanced than the more vocal competitor with a misleading branding?
— Carl Koinberg Henrikson (@CarlKoinberg) November 10, 2020
Though for once Waymo was not to be left behind as it tweeted, " We've asked ourselves a lot of questions over the last decade. Now, we want to answer the questions you've asked us about our fully autonomous technology.”
In a response to a tweet, Waymo's official twitter handle emphatically said “yes” claiming its technology was superior than its “vocal” rivals which is a swipe at Tesla.
Tesla's CEO Elon Musk has been hyping its new self driving beta which has been trained on the Dojo supercomputer
