This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.
They say it’s not a DEI initiative; they just want to get this talent onboard for their business.
Ironically, that’s exactly what DEI initiatives were all about: recognizing that if we let white bros excluded all others from the workplace, like they have in prior decades, we will shut out the majority of the world’s talent, and we should do whatever it takes to make sure everyone can join, work, and truly focus without watching their back all the time.
There’s another possibility I don’t see anyone talking about. It could just be the higher ups at Mozilla doing the old performative “we’re doing AI” dance for their shareholders and the investment community. Everyone assumes they are 100% sincere about embracing AI but this could simply be them paying the AI tax that all companies seem required to pay right now.
If this is plausible, then we should just wait for it to manifest as actual feature changes and then judge. Right now this is just high level messaging and PR.