4 ms·

Except that AI has not shown itself to be useful, at least not considering the staggering costs, anyway. Tens of billions of dollars to... fix people's grammar

Except that AI has not shown itself to be useful, at least not considering the staggering costs, anyway. Tens of billions of dollars to... fix people's grammar and generate tons of SEO spam? What PROBLEM are they solving here?

bunderbunder 2y ago
I think the parent poster stated it pretty clearly: the problem they're trying to solve is how to keep the stock price floating at a multiple of what the business's actual fundamentals suggest it should be. The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.
93po 2y ago
FSD is currently using neural-network style AI, and it's frankly amazing to use and watch and is massively useful.
- stetrain 2y ago
  In what way is it useful? What value is being provided? In my experience it requires constant supervision and readiness to intervene at any moment. There are plenty of reports and photos of it running wheels into curbs with little time for the driver to react. Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful. I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.
- mplewis 2y ago
  Is that the thing that keeps crashing people into highway barriers?
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    That, and inadequate sensor diversity and coverage.
- cbeach 2y ago
  Any recent version of FSD (i.e. 12.3.x) is technology close to magic. There was a time when HN would recognise technological acheievement on its own merit, without allowing personal politics to cloud our judgement. But sadly, we're in a perverse era of political tribalism where FSD is bad because https://elonbad.com/ https://elonbad.com/
  - nojvek 2y ago
    FSD is cool as a great demo. But the optics and facts are that it’s got people killed. Multiple people over the years. Silly mistakes causing crashes. It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic. Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead. I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!
    - mbrumlow 2y ago
      I don’t think we will ever have any self driving tech that inter mingles with non self driving cars that will result in zero deaths. While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.
      - Mawr 2y ago
        FSD only drives in a subset of conditions humans drive in so the comparison is invalid.
      - acdha 2y ago
        > While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans. For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.
- everforward 2y ago
  I don't think they lead the pack on that, though. Everybody in the self-driving space is using AI to some degree. E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something. I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).
boringg 2y ago
You have to remember a lot of those expenses are actually goosing the companies revenues side with low qual revenue. A good portion of investment dollars into OpenAI are with Microsoft credits -- which OpenAI then uses as opposed to real money. Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.
demondemidi 2y ago
It's good at wake word detection and industrial anomaly autocorrelation. That's about it.

bunderbunder 2y ago

I think the parent poster stated it pretty clearly: the problem they're trying to solve is how to keep the stock price floating at a multiple of what the business's actual fundamentals suggest it should be. The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.

93po 2y ago

FSD is currently using neural-network style AI, and it's frankly amazing to use and watch and is massively useful.

stetrain 2y ago
In what way is it useful? What value is being provided? In my experience it requires constant supervision and readiness to intervene at any moment. There are plenty of reports and photos of it running wheels into curbs with little time for the driver to react. Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful. I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.
mplewis 2y ago
Is that the thing that keeps crashing people into highway barriers?
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  That, and inadequate sensor diversity and coverage.
cbeach 2y ago
Any recent version of FSD (i.e. 12.3.x) is technology close to magic. There was a time when HN would recognise technological acheievement on its own merit, without allowing personal politics to cloud our judgement. But sadly, we're in a perverse era of political tribalism where FSD is bad because https://elonbad.com/ https://elonbad.com/
- nojvek 2y ago
  FSD is cool as a great demo. But the optics and facts are that it’s got people killed. Multiple people over the years. Silly mistakes causing crashes. It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic. Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead. I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!
  - mbrumlow 2y ago
    I don’t think we will ever have any self driving tech that inter mingles with non self driving cars that will result in zero deaths. While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.
    - Mawr 2y ago
      FSD only drives in a subset of conditions humans drive in so the comparison is invalid.
    - acdha 2y ago
      > While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans. For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.
everforward 2y ago
I don't think they lead the pack on that, though. Everybody in the self-driving space is using AI to some degree. E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something. I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).

boringg 2y ago

You have to remember a lot of those expenses are actually goosing the companies revenues side with low qual revenue. A good portion of investment dollars into OpenAI are with Microsoft credits -- which OpenAI then uses as opposed to real money. Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.

demondemidi 2y ago

It's good at wake word detection and industrial anomaly autocorrelation. That's about it.