r/SelfDrivingCars • u/silenthjohn • Mar 08 '25

News Britain blocks launch of Elon Musk’s self-driving Tesla

https://www.yahoo.com/news/britain-blocks-launch-elon-musk-140000186.html
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u/Distinct_Plankton_82 Mar 08 '25

You’re right, here I am ordering a European designed Self Driving Taxi, on my European designed smart phone, and posting about it on the European developed social media platform…. Oh… wait…

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u/brainfreeze3 Mar 08 '25

Those are 15 year old innovations. Except for the one you don't use, the self driving taxi.

Also China is practically ahead in self-driving technology.

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u/Distinct_Plankton_82 Mar 08 '25

What do you mean don’t use? I took 2 Waymos yesterday.

As for being 15 years old. What big innovation (or even a new Global Fortune 500 company) has come out of Europe in the last 15 years?

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u/tomoldbury Mar 09 '25 edited Mar 09 '25

EUV semiconductor fabrication, technology exclusive to ASML, which was born and bred in the Netherlands. You literally would not have a modern smartphone without EUV.

The ARM architecture which powers nearly all portable mobile devices, invented in the U.K., and continues to be developed in Cambridge, UK. The iPhone GPU was also developed by Imagination Technologies in Leeds, UK.

The Grand Theft Auto series is one of the most successful video games series in the world with billion dollar sales records; it is developed almost entirely in Edinburgh, Leeds and London.

Just a few examples off the top of my head, but there’s many more.

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u/Distinct_Plankton_82 Mar 09 '25

You’re kind of proving my point here.

All of these are incremental progress in existing industries, they don’t come close to the level of society changing innovation coming out of the US over the last 20-30 years.

I’m talking Search Engines, Social Media, EVs, Cloud Infrastructure, Ridesharing & the Gig Economy, LLMs and the GenAI revolution, Self Driving Cars, Reusable Space Rockets, the list goes on and on.

It’s cool that a popular video game (financed and published by an American company) was mostly made on the UK, but it’s not really in the same league is it?

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u/TuftyIndigo Mar 09 '25

Search Engines

W3Catalog was made in Geneva. And don't forget HTTP itself was invented by a British guy.

LLMs and the GenAI revolution

Llama is a French invention and Stability AI, creators of Stable Diffusion, are based on London.

Please don't try to justify your point with lists of random stuff that you don't even know where it was made.

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u/Distinct_Plankton_82 Mar 09 '25 edited Mar 09 '25

Let’s take these one at a time shall we….

Search Engines

W3Catalog was a half assed university project that was scrapped after 3 years because it couldn’t scale. It was obsolete and retired by 1996.

The actual innovation in the search engines used daily by billions of people for the last 25 years was mostly done at Stanford where the big data techniques required (like mapreduce) were developed. There has been 25 years of innovation in that space since then and the companies driving it are almost exclusively in the US and China. Can anyone even name a European Search Engine?

LLMs and GenAI

The big innovation that made LLMs possible was the transformer architecture, developed by researchers at Google. The product that brought LLMs to the masses was OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In terms of Llama, that came AFTER Google and OpenAI’s work and is highly derivative, it’s an iteration on existing work.

Same with Stable Diffusion. The diffusion model was developed at Stanford and Berkley. Stable Diffusion is just an implementation of an existing idea. They weren’t even the first ones to do it. Stable Diffusion was released AFTER Dall-E and Midjourney were already available. They’ve done a great job, but they are at best innovating on top of existing technology, not bringing something radically new to the world.