Agreed 100%. I think its actually quite telling that Ford, GM, Toyota, VW are not really making any genuine large scale multi-billion dollar investments in autonomy at all. Cruise is basically a side project that I suspect only still exists because cancelling it is bad PR.
This looks to me suspicously like the charging network, version 2. The same companies absolutely fumbled the need to build out a charging network, and gave up that entire huge industry entirely to Tesla, even begging Tesla to supplu adaptors so their cars could use Tesla's superior network. They are now doing the same thing with FSD. Why bother investing $5billion when you KNOW you can never catch up, and will have to write it off?
I suspect Ford will be the first to license it, and the rest, [predictably will fall like dominos.