There are some pretty major differences between what Waymo does and what a remote driving service (like the Vegas deployment by Vay mentioned upthread). Imagine that the car has a remote connection to a human while driving and the human misses that another vehicle is about to hit T-bone the taxi. Whose responsibility is it to stop?

With Waymo vehicles, it's the car's responsibility to sense the issue and brake, so we say that the car is driving and the human is a "remote assistant". With Vay, it's the human's responsibility because they are the driver.

This ends up having a lot of meaningful distinctions across the stack, even if it seems like a superficial distinction at first.

It is a public company, so someone could be investing on the basis of that technology

Not even just someone. Analysts posting about it. Press picking it up. Jim Cramer sharing his 'thoughts' lol.

i continuously asked for an optimized database schema several times and all i keep getting is these damn shakespeare sonnets. starting to wonder if they are on to something...

You're getting sonnets? For some reason, I've been getting "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times".

> Alphabet's Waymo was also having humans take over for some of the driving as well.

Not sure if this used to be the case but today Waymos can’t be controlled remotely by humans, only ‘guided’: https://www.govtech.com/transportation/waymo-robotaxis-getti... (ctrl+f “cannot be controlled”)