Anyone here to confirm if it's significant or not ? Are we closer to lvl 5 autonomy ?

It's an interesting approach. An RNN where the time constant ("memory" or "forgetting") changes depending on input, and forcing on the network is felt differently by the network depending on input.

The benchmark gains are nice, but only modest in general (except for driving, which appeared much better).

Altogether shows promise.

It's made of worms. - System Shock 2

When is the liquid available for injection?

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Probably another evolution over what we already have or a dead end. Really significant things take off if they are useful.

Honestly, while lvl 5 autonomy would be pretty cool tech wise, it's a solution to a problem caused by cars. It's merely slightly closes the performance gap between them and mixed solution of public transportation and micromobility while not giving us never before seen efficiency. It's like making a coal steam locmotive into electric steam locomotive - it's better than before but direct electric drive beats it anyways.

Probably just clickbait

This is not an advance in self driving cars. This is an advance in Spiking Neural Network research. In my opinion it's important since it brings us closer to understanding how Biological Neural Networks work.

But any advances in neural networks is good news for AI in general, thus self-driving, no ?

In this case driving was a toy example.

In the future we might use this technology for autonomous driving or we might not due to say problems with explain-ability . Too early to tell.

This might be good or bad news for AI in general since this is supporting a technology very different than current statistics-based narrow AI. Biologically inspired NNs could take off and people could slow the narrow AI research which is also very important.

In my opinion Narrow AI will always out-compete General AI on some specific tasks.

Think of this as internal combustion vs steam... it did a lot of good for the engines but almost eliminated the research on steam engines. Whereas steam turbines are still used at the power plants and this research could be useful.

The worms?

Interesting...so without the combustion engine, we wouldn't be far from a steam-punk dystopia today ?

Who knows... we could have been using gas turbines or sterling engines or electric motors more widely.