One interesting thing about autonomous vehicles is that companies that have spent billions of dollars and decades in R&D (e.g. Tesla) are only slightly ahead of competitors. Now it's seeming like multimodal LLMs will be the way forward with self-driving vehicles, and if I just fine-tune Phi 3 I can do better than state of the art DL models from a couple years ago.
Looking at the bigger picture, then, it seems like most of the efforts that companies are pouring into AI research generally won't put them that far ahead.
Waymo is way ahead of competitors. They have a working autonomous taxi system deployed. The driving assistance systems are way behind that. Consumer Reports says the current best system is Ford's Blue Cruise, which is the only one on the market where you can take your hands off the wheel for long periods.
Looking at the bigger picture, then, it seems like most of the efforts that companies are pouring into AI research generally won't put them that far ahead.