Comment by ButlerianJihad
16 hours ago
That is often in my mind, indeed.
Furthermore, in video game design, AI or algorithmic technology has been refined for decades to be adversarial. In self-contained video games, and PvE scenarios, the best games would feature A.I. opponents that could adequately match or challenge the human players. The A.I. difficulty could often be cranked up to crush the player, such as in arcade games or "Civilization" type simulators.
So every time I put a few quarters into a Waymo, I think about those days when I played Joust and Spy Hunter at the shopping mall.
I don't know about Waymo specifically, but I worked for a competitor for a while and the AI driving the car is not a large language model. It isn't trained on stories or even words. It's whole flow is: given this sensor (camera, lidar, map, etc.) input, generate the "best" control (steering, brakes, acceleration, etc.) output. Capture input and generate output at a rate of say, 30 times per second (or whatever rate they have gotten to now).
The training data for this comes from trained, careful human drivers. And the whole AI control loop is run in conjunction with a more deterministic system with safeguards for cases where the AI perhaps decides to steer towards a tree. There's also provisions for uncertainty. If the system isn't confident enough in what to do based on the given inputs it will switch to a safe stop mode and call a human up for help.