Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It is now more than a decade since I took my first ride in a self-driving car. As a Google prototype zipped me around Mountain View in Silicon Valley, what promised to be an exhilarating taste of the future quickly became quite boring \u2014 the robot car was just such a smooth driver. A 2017 deadline for bringing autonomous vehicles to market, which was set in 2012 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, seemed aggressive but not implausible.\u00a0Of course, Google failed that deadline, just as Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla has done over the years on autonomous vehicles.\u00a0I was reminded of these shaky timelines when reading Sam Altman\u2019s new year\u2019s \u201creflections\u201d. The OpenAI chief is \u201cnow confident we know how to build\u201d artificial general intelligence \u2014 the point at which AI\u2019s capabilities surpass those of most humans \u2014 and predicts that \u201cin 2025, we may see the first AI agents join the workforce\u201d.\u00a0AI agents that can plan and carry out a series of tasks on behalf of a user \u2014 such as buying items or booking trips \u2014 are the industry\u2019s latest holy grail. Many see general-purpose agents as a necessary component to reaching AGI [artificial general intelligence], though they will start out focused on specific tasks. But as the autonomous driving industry has found over the past decade, there is a big difference between AI that works well in a constrained environment, like a chatbot window, and a \u201cfree range\u201d agent let loose in the real world.\u00a0There is no doubt that 2024 was an inflection point for Waymo, as the Google self-driving car project was renamed in 2016. Before last year, Waymo had ferried public passengers for 1mn miles since the initiative began in 2009. In 2024, that total rose by a further 4mn as Waymo extended its service to the public from Phoenix to San Francisco and Los Angeles.\u00a0Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo\u2019s co-chief executive, said at the Consumer Electronics Show this month that Waymo\u2019s robotaxis were now doing 1mn miles a week \u2014 \u201cmore than a human drives in a lifetime\u201d. According to Waymo\u2019s own studies on more than 25mn miles of autonomous testing, its system is also safer than humans, with vehicles involved in far fewer serious collisions than when a person is behind the wheel.\u00a0Waymo\u2019s acceleration was all the more striking in a year that saw General Motors shut its Cruise robotaxi unit after pouring $10bn into the venture since 2016, as well as Apple abandoning its Project Titan car project.\u00a0The autonomous vehicle optimism of the mid-2010s has returned. \u201cThe AV revolution has arrived \u2014 after so many years,\u201d said Nvidia chief Jensen Huang in his own CES keynote, predicting that autonomous vehicles would be \u201cthe first multi-trillion-dollar robotics industry\u201d.\u00a0Waymo is winning by resisting, not riding, the hype. Cognisant of the backlash that forced Uber out of AVs after one of its vehicles killed a pedestrian, Waymo has prioritised safety over growth. Even after Waymo moved its vehicles out of the \u201clab\u201d and into public use, it still spent more than three years testing its robotaxis in Phoenix \u2014 a less complex environment than a city like San Francisco.Cracking the big city still required ironing out some very weird bugs, such as the bizarre 2am outbreaks of honking that woke up San Francisco residents near a Waymo parking lot last summer.\u00a0It is still figuring out other complications that arise when AI meets humans, such as how messy its cars can get when there\u2019s no driver to keep an eye on passengers.The company\u2019s long robotaxi journey stands in contrast to ChatGPT\u2019s breakneck growth, with the chatbot attracting more than 300mn users in just two years. Scaling an app and deploying a fleet of taxis are very different propositions. Nonetheless, even if generative AI agents operate in a purely digital world, there is a huge gulf between co-pilots that work alongside people and fully autonomous bots that can reliably roam the open web. The safety issues may not be life and death with online agents but the risks are no less real. Will AI developers or credit card companies, for example, shoulder the cost when a hallucinating agent goes on an unauthorised spending spree? And even with current AI tools, many businesses are finding that uncooperative employees and mismatched organisational structures present greater barriers than shortcomings in the technology itself.\u00a0Altman might not be a whole decade out in his prediction that AI agents will reach their potential. But making a free-range AI that is as reliable as a human may yet prove just as challenging as Waymo\u2019s long road to robotaxis.\u00a0tim.bradshaw@ft.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It is now more than a decade since I took my first ride in a self-driving car. As a Google prototype zipped me around Mountain View<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-168546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}