Don't get me wrong: Trawling the floodhose of AI publications, taking them together, and synthesizing them into a coherent and useful tool is serious, difficult, and creative work. This is R&D, and the people at Tesla working on autopilot are smart. The rift between "publication ready" work and "commercial ready" work is a vast one.

R&D for commercialization is a very difficult and very profitable task! But one would not expect this to advance the field of autonomous vehicles, nor would it require participating in the research.

(Also, I thought Waymo had partnerships, but I'm not close to Google. I don't know a lot about Waymo as a business, only as a research entity.)