Yes, of course there has been progress since the '80s and '90s. Things would be really bad otherwise.
>> Modern autonomous vehicles are much more impressive.
It really depends on what you consider impressive. The DARPA Grand Challenge involved one road loop with stunt drivers instead of real traffic. These are still strictly controlled, laboratory conditions that tell us nothing about the ability of robot cars to operate in the real world.
Waymo's disengagement rates don't really say anything, either. Perhaps Waymo is now driving its cars in easier conditions after noticing that they tended to disengage too often. What we know for sure is that Waymo doesn't have autonomous cars -as noone else does. If they did, they'd be out on the streets without safety drivers and counting autonomous miles, not miles without disengagement.
According to the post you link, reporting rate of disengagement is required, but the fact that Waymo chooses to advertise theirs as a measure of improvement of their cars tells me that they have no real results to show and instead choose to tout a meaningless proxy just to make people believe that they are further ahead on the road to autonomy than they really are.
> the fact that Waymo chooses to advertise theirs as a measure of improvement of their cars tells me that they have no real results to show
It tells me that's the weakest number they can possibly report. If I were Google and I knew I had the strongest ML teams in the world by miles, the strongest internal results by miles, I would say as little as possible for as long as possible. Get as far ahead as possible.
I think the Alphabet board learned their lesson on announcing early. They still shut down products, of course, so does Intel, Facebook, and every other company. And I think they're learning their lessons about sales (Cloud's hiring 10k sales people) and customer support (I'm sure they're painfully aware of the issues).
>> Modern autonomous vehicles are much more impressive.
It really depends on what you consider impressive. The DARPA Grand Challenge involved one road loop with stunt drivers instead of real traffic. These are still strictly controlled, laboratory conditions that tell us nothing about the ability of robot cars to operate in the real world.
Waymo's disengagement rates don't really say anything, either. Perhaps Waymo is now driving its cars in easier conditions after noticing that they tended to disengage too often. What we know for sure is that Waymo doesn't have autonomous cars -as noone else does. If they did, they'd be out on the streets without safety drivers and counting autonomous miles, not miles without disengagement.
According to the post you link, reporting rate of disengagement is required, but the fact that Waymo chooses to advertise theirs as a measure of improvement of their cars tells me that they have no real results to show and instead choose to tout a meaningless proxy just to make people believe that they are further ahead on the road to autonomy than they really are.