By Olga Megorskaya Waymo, a unit of Google’s Alphabet Inc., and Yandex Self-Driving Group, a division of the Russian-based Yandex corporation, are among more than a dozen leading names in automated vehicle software and hardware. The former recently launched a pilot self-driving taxi program in San Francisco, the latter has been testing its automated cars worldwide for the past several years and has self-driving rovers on several college campuses in the U.S. Not to be outdone, the Chinese tech company Baidu Inc., along with the Toyota-backed Chinese self-driving startup, Pony.ai, is set to debut a 100-car fleet of paid driverless taxis in Beijing in 2022, and has preliminary plans to launch a similar program in California in the same year (see link below). The main challenge to such vehicles’ broader applicability, however, is training the AI that powers self-driving to the point of flawlessness. It’s All About Data Software and …