Autonomous vehicles likely will replace fallible human drivers. But Alphabet’s refusal to let a human override the car’s “mind of its own” underscores the AI industry’s arrogance, writes Steve Cohen

Building autonomous vehicles, robots, and vision AI takes more data than any team can collect on their own. At #CVPR2026#, NVIDIA announced physical AI agent skills to help speed development: composable workflows that automate data generation, simulation, policy training and evaluation, powered by Cosmos 3. Read the blog:

.@JamesCz19 on why autonomous vehicles are ridiculously safer than humans when America averages 40,000 road casualties a year: "Autonomous vehicles are able to get in and out of situations pretty fast. They abide by whatever the existing traffic laws are." "They're ridiculously safer than humans are on the roads. Unfortunately, the United States has about 40,000 on average casualties per year on the road." "The statistics when you're looking at autonomous vehicles by comparison are significantly lower. It's not even close. So there is that massive life-saving benefit right off the bat." @ConsumerChoiceC

Tesla is taking longer than Waymo to deploy autonomous vehicles. Waymo is winning on deployment. Fact of life in 2026. But if you look under the hood and study the granular details, you see very clearly that one company ripped a bunch of things off the shelf and slapped it all together with the goal of autonomous rubber on road ASAP, while the other is creating a masterpiece in hardware & software engineering. Tesla understands that in order to change the entire transportation market, the product needs to be so good and make so much sense that it compels the consumer to completely change their behavior. Uber without a driver is superior and more desirable than Uber with a driver, but it doesn’t rewire the entire transportation market. It just replaces Uber. For AV’s to truly scale, you need to ship something with no geofence. Something that costs the user less money than Uber or Waymo. Something that is not only putting money back into the user’s pockets, but something that is more convenient and more luxurious. That is the only way to scale. Show the consumer the incentive and they will show you the outcome. Look at Tesla’s methods. Compare the power draw of their inference chip to what Waymo uses today. Look at where their vehicles can technically operate today, even if not yet autonomously. Look at their factory footprint and next-gen production line. Look at their chip pipeline. The pieces are all there. This is a massive undertaking, and only one company is foregoing present-day favor to throw everything at it. It’s painful today, but if they execute, it’ll have been worth years of being laughed at and shit on by benchwarmers and pedestrians. Tesla is behind Waymo in deployments, but if they stick the landing, they’ve painted the AV Picasso. The solution that changes automobile transportation forever. Keep going.

This month our AI reporter meets Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, to discuss the risks involved in deploying autonomous vehicles and his bet for when human drivers could become redundant

Tesla's Terafab is set to become one of the most ambitious semiconductor projects ever built. Designed to produce over 1 terawatt of AI compute capacity per year, Terafab will power the future of AI, Optimus, autonomous vehicles, and beyond.

Trial lawyers, with big liability litigation earnings, are among the most active lobbyists against autonomous vehicles, even as data shows clear safety benefits (@atabarrok / Marginal Revolution) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)