"Any fool could have seen this coming in 2012 if they were paying attention to vision model improvements"
Hindsight is 20/20.
Give me reliable and safe self driving for Interstate highways in moderate to good weather conditions and I would be very happy. Get better incrementally from there.
I live solidly in the snow belt.
Autopilot for planes works in this manner too. Theoretically a modern airliner could autofly takeoff to landing entirely autonomously at this point, but they do not. They decrease pilot workload.
If you want the full robotaxi panacea everywhere at all times in all conditions? Sure. None of us are likely to see that in our lifetime.
(That said, I disagree with them saying "In our lifetimes, neither you nor I", that's much too strong a claim)
Any fool could have anticipated the eventual result of transformer architecture if pursued to its maximum viable form.
What is impressive is the massive scale of data collection and compute resources rolled out, and the amount of money pouring into all this.
But 10 years ago, spammers were building simple little bots with markov chains to evade filters because their outputs sounded plausibly human enough. Not hard to see how a more advanced version of that could produce more useful outputs.