Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars
The fact that Waymo revealed their "secret" tools for advancing this crucial technology implies that either:1) They believe no one can quite catch up before they can launch the technology. Since they know several competitors have huge resources and brilliant people, it means they are quite close to launch.2) These tools have become open secret within the industry, so no harm is done to their competitive position by revealing it to the public, only good PR to be gained perhaps to attract more bright engineers.I suspect 2) is more likely since several key players have moved around so much in the past couple of years. Relatively high-level knowledge about how autonomous vehicles are being developed at Waymo might have become well-known within the industry by now.