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They should teach Tesla’s “autopilot” (and its FSD upgrade) in business schools. Turns out you can sustainably push up company valuation on vapourware. You have

They should teach Tesla’s “autopilot” (and its FSD upgrade) in business schools. Turns out you can sustainably push up company valuation on vapourware. You have to wonder if Tesla’s autonomous driving technology was actually ever meant to turn into a product. Or whether it is mostly a tool to justify the lofty Tesla stock price. I very much doubt that it is technologically ahead of its competitors.

ClassyJacket 2y ago
But it's... out right now. You can literally use it today.
- rvnx 2y ago
  And it sort of works in limited cases. FSD is like ChatGPT, it works in many cases, it does some mistakes, but it is certainly not “useless”. It won’t replace full time humans yet (the same way that ChatGPT does not replace a developer) but can still work in some scenarios. To the investor, ChatGPT is sold as “AGI is just round the corner”.
  - tlonny 2y ago
    If ChatGPT emits a fragment of code that doesn’t compile, a developer can simply undo and try again. No such luxury is granted to the driver using FSD who has just collided with another vehicle.
    - vachina 2y ago
      Very low bar to have code that just compiles.
    - pipes 2y ago
      Or produces code that compiles but is subtly wrong it probably won't kill someone, well until we start developing safety critical systems with it. One day we might have only developers that can't actually write code fluently and we'll expect them massage what ever LLMs produce into something workable. Oh well.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - joeldo 2y ago
    I guess the difference is ChatGPT is less likely to cause death if it makes a mistake. Users generally have time to decide if the output ChatGPT provides is accurate and worth actioning.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      At this point, I'd be surprised if ChatGPT has not yet given someone a response which caused them to make a mistake that resulted in a death. We found out about the lawyers citing ChatGPT because they were called out by a judge. We find out about Google Maps errors when someone drives off a broken bridge. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gps-drive-off-bridge-lawsuit-north-carolina/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gp... For other LLMs we see mistakes bold enough that everyone can recognise them — the headlines about Google's LLM suggesting eating rocks and putting glue on your pizza (at least it said "non-toxic glue"). All it takes is some subtle mistake. The strength and the weakness of the best LLMs is their domain knowledge is part way between a normal person and a domain expert — good enough to receive trust, not enough to deserve it.
  - grumbelbart 2y ago
    But "works in limited cases" is absolutely not enough, given what it promises. It drove into static objects a couple of times, killing people. Recent videos still show behavior like speeding through stop signs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGOo06xzCeU&t=990s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGOo06xzCeU&t=990s Meaning that it's really not reliable enough to take your hands off the wheel. Waymo shows that it is possible, with today's technology, to do much much better.
    - steelbrain 2y ago
      > Meaning that it's really not reliable enough to take your hands off the wheel. Soooo just like ChatGPT then? As the parent comment said.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - DennisP 2y ago
      It's not enough for robotaxis yet, and Tesla doesn't claim that it is. They just think they'll get there. What they do claim is that with human supervision, it lowers the accident rate to one per 5.5 million miles, which is a lot better than the overall accident rate for all cars on the road. And unlike Waymo, it works everywhere. That's worthwhile even if it never improves from here. Fwiw you can take your hands off the wheel now, you just have to watch the road. They got rid of the "steering wheel nag" with the latest version.
      - pas 2y ago
        > it works everywhere. where there's enough bandwidth > you just have to watch the road ... and then react in a split second, or what? it's simpler to say goodbyes before the trip. > They just think they'll get there. of course. I think too. eventually they'll hire the receptionist from Waymo and he/she will tell them to build a fucking world model that has some object permanence.
        2y ago
  - ProxCoques 2y ago
    I think this is one of my fave FSD predictions: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tesla-driverless-cars_n_5990136 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tesla-driverless-cars... Oct 2014: "Five or six years from now we will be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination."
    - hardlianotion 2y ago
      That’s metaphysics.
    - ddalex 2y ago
      And waymo got there, in limited conditions
      - ProxCoques 2y ago
        Indeed. "Limited conditions" being the issue here (and as per the article).
- NicoJuicy 2y ago
  Not much better than assisted driving, which actually says what it does.
hbarka 2y ago
Ford’s Blue Cruise is hands-off in mapped highways. Waymo is driverless. Musk is really getting away with all the hype for what Tesla cruise control delivers.
- vasco 2y ago
  One interesting bit is that recently Nvidia's CEO said Tesla is ahead of the other companies in the space. My opinion is also that Tesla isn't but then we have a connundrum. Is Nvidia's CEO just saying this because Waymo doesn't buy GPUs from them? > “Tesla is far ahead in self-driving cars,” Huang said in an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-says-tesla-far-ahead-in-self-driving-tech-as-autonomous-driving-efforts-boost-chip-demand-181126677.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-says-tesla-far-ahe...
  - tjoff 2y ago
    > Is Nvidia's CEO just saying this because Waymo doesn't buy GPUs from them? Yes.
    - kevincox 2y ago
      It's amazing how little you can trust these people even though you would expect that the CEO of NVIDIA has a reputation to maintain.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - ffsm8 2y ago
        Did you forget the crypto and nft hype train presentations that Jensen did ~2 years ago?
        tim333 2y ago
        Bear in mind he was selling shovels to the miners, not shilling coins, I think?
lagadu 2y ago
While I agree that Tesla is nowhere close to having an actually autonomous driving system, I think that Tesla did invest more into research and probably collected more data than anyone else on the market. This amount of research has to have some results, even if they don't have a product yet.
- lll-o-lll 2y ago
  Yep, because if you want something bad enough, and if it’s clearly possible, enough research will get us there! Except: commercially viable fusion, quantum computers, hyper loops, AGI, interstellar space travel. Hmmm. That’s the problem with research; much of it turns out to be a dead-end, or exponentially more difficult as you approach the goal. FSD looked extremely likely there for a time, but I think the problem was actually AGI in disguise.
  - henrikschroder 2y ago
    Machine-learning of any kind has this uncanny ability to get you really far with very little work, which gives this illusion of rapid progress. I remember watching George Hotz' first demo of his self-driving thing, it's absolutely nuts how much he was able to do himself with so little. Sure, it drove like a drunk toddler, but it drove! And that tricks you into thinking that the hard parts are done, and you just need to polish the thing, fill in the last few cases, and you're done! Except, the work needed to go from 90% there to 91% there is astronomically higher than the work needed to go from 0% to 90%. And the work needed from 91% to 92% is even higher. Partly because the complexity of the corner cases increase exponentially, and partly because everyone involved doesn't actually know how the model works. It's been hilarious watching Tesla flail at this, because every new release that promises the moon always has these weird regressions in unrelated areas. My favourite example of complexity is that drivers need to follow not only road signs and traffic lights, they also need to follow hand signals from certain people. Police officers, for example, can use hand signals to direct traffic, and it's illegal not to follow those. I can see a self-driving system recognizing hand signals and steering the car accordingly, but suddenly you get a much harder problem: How can the car know the difference between lawful hand signals, and some dude in a Halloween police uniform waving his hands? You want to drive autonomously coast to coast? Cool, now the car needs to know how to correctly identify local police officers, highway patrol officers, state police officers, and county sheriffs, depending on the car's location. Good luck little toaster!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
TheAlchemist 2y ago
Give it some time ! When the dust settles, it will certainly be taught in business schools. And Musk will be in prison (not for FSD specifically). I watched the shareholders meeting yesterday - it was amazing. Elon repeated all the same things, he kept telling for the past 5 years at least, none of which is close to become a reality. And none was described in any tangible detail - all very vague promises. As for FSD, autonomy and Robotaxis, one has to remember when it was announced and promoted - when Tesla was close to bankruptcy (per Elon himself).
- lukan 2y ago
  "And Musk will be in prison" Or closer to formal political power.
  - TheAlchemist 2y ago
    Yep, agree ! Sad as it is.
  - dabinat 2y ago
    I sleep easy at night knowing that Elon Musk was born in South Africa and is therefore ineligible to be US president.
    - lukan 2y ago
      That is a law. Laws can be changed. (even though it is very unlikely, but give it some years and there might be the next iteration of someone leading a state like a company trope)
- pas 2y ago
  as GME, that trump social thing, et al. already showed it a couple of times fundamentals don't matter. Tesla is held by folks who either don't care (ETFs, institutions, hedge funds, blablabla) or Elondong lovers.
  - svara 2y ago
mlindner 2y ago
It's weird how people keep calling this vaporware when it actually works, is active on roads, and is used by tens of thousands of people. That's the strangest usage of the term I've ever seen. Vaporware is the term used to describe products announced that never make it to market in any form.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > when it actually works* *: The definition of "work" includes veering incl. but not limited to other vehicles, road shoulders or road divisions, sometimes self stabbing the car incl., but not limited to its driver with road railings or other roadside objects. The car might catch fire as a result or independent of the event if its feelings are hurt, or just feels like it, and burns for days, releasing its densely packed magic smoke, sweat, blood vapor and condensed tears of its designers and builders. The fumes might be toxic. Please don't inhale them.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    Did someone give you the impression that cars without FSD have ever been safe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... Most dangerous way to travel, full stop. FSD or not. I don't think a perfect safety record is possible. Only better than what people currently accomplish given the inherent unsafety of the whole system. If safety were a top priority, the cars would be on rails.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      > Did someone give you the impression that cars without FSD have ever been safe? Did I say anything resembling or implying that? I don't think so. > Most dangerous way to travel, full stop. I love a quote from a famous driver, paraphrasing: "Racing is some people knowing what they're doing driving in a closed circuit. Traffic is the same, but with people who don't know what they're doing". On top of that, I had enough incidents to know that what humans can do in traffic. They make good stories though. > I don't think a perfect safety record is possible. Me, too. > Only better than what people currently accomplish given the inherent unsafety of the whole system. I think cars with driver monitoring is more secure than cars with FSD or hands-free driving. I love to drive cars with lane hold, adaptive cruise and driver monitoring, because these systems improve safety and augment humans at the same time. I don't believe that AI and/or computer vision is close to matching human perception and reasoning to handle a 2ton steel box like humans. Augmenting humans' capabilities is a far safer and reliable (if not unsexier) way. > the cars would be on rails. I love trains to death, but they're not perfect either.
blueboo 2y ago
Fake it til you make it is a fundamental principle of startups. We just don’t usually see it at such a vast scale. There’s a timeline where Theranos was acquired for 9b by UnitedHealth if they could keep the grift alive juuust a bit longer and Elizabeth Holmes ascends to the tech firmament permanently while her enablers congratulate each other. Tesla has even more and deeper financial and branding defense mechanisms. That said, the clock is ticking, now, I think
- rchaud 2y ago
  Wouldn't United Health have been in the same position as HP when they acquired Autonomy for $10b in 2011 on the basis of their cooked books?
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  > Elizabeth Holmes ascends to the tech firmament permanently while her enablers congratulate each other. Holmes and at least some of her supporters still ardently insist, to this day, now that everything is out of the bag, the "pulling filing cabinets in front of doors to specific labs on FDA inspection days so they only see the labs we want them to" crap, all of it, that she, and humanity, have been robbed of the truly magnificent biomedical advances that Theranos was just about to solve.
Workaccount2 2y ago
Cathy Wood of Ark investments just gave Tesla a $2000 price target on the back of FSD taxi service... That's around a $5T valuation. You have to wonder if she is dumb, or just knows Tesla investors are totally delusional. Or perhaps, when you come upon an OG delusional musk worshipper, and call them out, they can point at their money pile and call you the idiot...
- tim333 2y ago
  >... the 65-year-old divorced mother of three is a devout Christian who starts every day by reading the Bible while her coffee brews, and who relies on her faith during testing moments, such as the many market upheavals... God will make it go to $2000.
- Grazester 2y ago
  I really think she is a hack
belter 2y ago
> I very much doubt that it is technologically ahead of its competitors. This is where they are as of April 2024: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCLA-EA22002-14498.pdf https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCLA-EA22002-14498.pd... "ODI completed an extensive body of work via PE21020 and EA22002, which showed evidence that Tesla’s weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities. This mismatch resulted in a critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of the L2 system’s operating capabilities and the system’s true capabilities. This gap led to foreseeable misuse and avoidable crashes. During EA220002, ODI identified at least 13 crashes involving one or more fatalities and many more involving serious injuries, in which foreseeable driver misuse of the system played an apparent role. ODI’s analysis conducted during this investigation, which aligns with Tesla’s conclusion in its Defect Information Report, indicated that in certain circumstances, Autopilot’s system controls and warnings were insufficient for a driver assistance system that requires constant supervision by a human driver."
- disqard 2y ago
  > "...a critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of the [...] system’s operating capabilities and the system’s true capabilities" Just s/driver/user/g and it sounds like a lot of contemporary LLM hype. IMO, Tesla's not an outlier -- in today's stock-price-is-king world, it's common to see such overselling in various domains.
- belter 2y ago
  And...one more yesterday "Tesla driver using self-driving mode slammed into police cruiser in Orange County" - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-13/self-driving-tesla-narrowly-misses-police-officer-before-slamming-into-patrol-car-in-orange-county https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-13/self-dri... "Tesla in self-drive mode slams into police car responding to fatal crash": https://youtu.be/ukq6h55GnvE https://youtu.be/ukq6h55GnvE
sneak 2y ago
> Turns out you can sustainably push up company valuation on vapourware. It is very nearly standard practice in startupland to describe a yet-to-be-developed product in the present tense prior to/during development. Strictly speaking, it’s lying/fraud, but it is so pervasive and widespread as to be expected and could rightly be called standard industry practice. This is in no way a Tesla-specific thing.

ClassyJacket 2y ago

But it's... out right now. You can literally use it today.

rvnx 2y ago
And it sort of works in limited cases. FSD is like ChatGPT, it works in many cases, it does some mistakes, but it is certainly not “useless”. It won’t replace full time humans yet (the same way that ChatGPT does not replace a developer) but can still work in some scenarios. To the investor, ChatGPT is sold as “AGI is just round the corner”.
- tlonny 2y ago
  If ChatGPT emits a fragment of code that doesn’t compile, a developer can simply undo and try again. No such luxury is granted to the driver using FSD who has just collided with another vehicle.
  - vachina 2y ago
    Very low bar to have code that just compiles.
  - pipes 2y ago
    Or produces code that compiles but is subtly wrong it probably won't kill someone, well until we start developing safety critical systems with it. One day we might have only developers that can't actually write code fluently and we'll expect them massage what ever LLMs produce into something workable. Oh well.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- joeldo 2y ago
  I guess the difference is ChatGPT is less likely to cause death if it makes a mistake. Users generally have time to decide if the output ChatGPT provides is accurate and worth actioning.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    At this point, I'd be surprised if ChatGPT has not yet given someone a response which caused them to make a mistake that resulted in a death. We found out about the lawyers citing ChatGPT because they were called out by a judge. We find out about Google Maps errors when someone drives off a broken bridge. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gps-drive-off-bridge-lawsuit-north-carolina/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gp... For other LLMs we see mistakes bold enough that everyone can recognise them — the headlines about Google's LLM suggesting eating rocks and putting glue on your pizza (at least it said "non-toxic glue"). All it takes is some subtle mistake. The strength and the weakness of the best LLMs is their domain knowledge is part way between a normal person and a domain expert — good enough to receive trust, not enough to deserve it.
- grumbelbart 2y ago
  But "works in limited cases" is absolutely not enough, given what it promises. It drove into static objects a couple of times, killing people. Recent videos still show behavior like speeding through stop signs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGOo06xzCeU&t=990s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGOo06xzCeU&t=990s Meaning that it's really not reliable enough to take your hands off the wheel. Waymo shows that it is possible, with today's technology, to do much much better.
  - steelbrain 2y ago
    > Meaning that it's really not reliable enough to take your hands off the wheel. Soooo just like ChatGPT then? As the parent comment said.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - DennisP 2y ago
    It's not enough for robotaxis yet, and Tesla doesn't claim that it is. They just think they'll get there. What they do claim is that with human supervision, it lowers the accident rate to one per 5.5 million miles, which is a lot better than the overall accident rate for all cars on the road. And unlike Waymo, it works everywhere. That's worthwhile even if it never improves from here. Fwiw you can take your hands off the wheel now, you just have to watch the road. They got rid of the "steering wheel nag" with the latest version.
    - pas 2y ago
      > it works everywhere. where there's enough bandwidth > you just have to watch the road ... and then react in a split second, or what? it's simpler to say goodbyes before the trip. > They just think they'll get there. of course. I think too. eventually they'll hire the receptionist from Waymo and he/she will tell them to build a fucking world model that has some object permanence.
      - 2y ago
- ProxCoques 2y ago
  I think this is one of my fave FSD predictions: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tesla-driverless-cars_n_5990136 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tesla-driverless-cars... Oct 2014: "Five or six years from now we will be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination."
  - hardlianotion 2y ago
    That’s metaphysics.
  - ddalex 2y ago
    And waymo got there, in limited conditions
    - ProxCoques 2y ago
      Indeed. "Limited conditions" being the issue here (and as per the article).
NicoJuicy 2y ago
Not much better than assisted driving, which actually says what it does.

hbarka 2y ago

Ford’s Blue Cruise is hands-off in mapped highways. Waymo is driverless. Musk is really getting away with all the hype for what Tesla cruise control delivers.

vasco 2y ago
One interesting bit is that recently Nvidia's CEO said Tesla is ahead of the other companies in the space. My opinion is also that Tesla isn't but then we have a connundrum. Is Nvidia's CEO just saying this because Waymo doesn't buy GPUs from them? > “Tesla is far ahead in self-driving cars,” Huang said in an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-says-tesla-far-ahead-in-self-driving-tech-as-autonomous-driving-efforts-boost-chip-demand-181126677.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-says-tesla-far-ahe...
- tjoff 2y ago
  > Is Nvidia's CEO just saying this because Waymo doesn't buy GPUs from them? Yes.
  - kevincox 2y ago
    It's amazing how little you can trust these people even though you would expect that the CEO of NVIDIA has a reputation to maintain.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      Did you forget the crypto and nft hype train presentations that Jensen did ~2 years ago?
      - tim333 2y ago
        Bear in mind he was selling shovels to the miners, not shilling coins, I think?

lagadu 2y ago

While I agree that Tesla is nowhere close to having an actually autonomous driving system, I think that Tesla did invest more into research and probably collected more data than anyone else on the market. This amount of research has to have some results, even if they don't have a product yet.

lll-o-lll 2y ago
Yep, because if you want something bad enough, and if it’s clearly possible, enough research will get us there! Except: commercially viable fusion, quantum computers, hyper loops, AGI, interstellar space travel. Hmmm. That’s the problem with research; much of it turns out to be a dead-end, or exponentially more difficult as you approach the goal. FSD looked extremely likely there for a time, but I think the problem was actually AGI in disguise.
- henrikschroder 2y ago
  Machine-learning of any kind has this uncanny ability to get you really far with very little work, which gives this illusion of rapid progress. I remember watching George Hotz' first demo of his self-driving thing, it's absolutely nuts how much he was able to do himself with so little. Sure, it drove like a drunk toddler, but it drove! And that tricks you into thinking that the hard parts are done, and you just need to polish the thing, fill in the last few cases, and you're done! Except, the work needed to go from 90% there to 91% there is astronomically higher than the work needed to go from 0% to 90%. And the work needed from 91% to 92% is even higher. Partly because the complexity of the corner cases increase exponentially, and partly because everyone involved doesn't actually know how the model works. It's been hilarious watching Tesla flail at this, because every new release that promises the moon always has these weird regressions in unrelated areas. My favourite example of complexity is that drivers need to follow not only road signs and traffic lights, they also need to follow hand signals from certain people. Police officers, for example, can use hand signals to direct traffic, and it's illegal not to follow those. I can see a self-driving system recognizing hand signals and steering the car accordingly, but suddenly you get a much harder problem: How can the car know the difference between lawful hand signals, and some dude in a Halloween police uniform waving his hands? You want to drive autonomously coast to coast? Cool, now the car needs to know how to correctly identify local police officers, highway patrol officers, state police officers, and county sheriffs, depending on the car's location. Good luck little toaster!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

TheAlchemist 2y ago

Give it some time ! When the dust settles, it will certainly be taught in business schools. And Musk will be in prison (not for FSD specifically). I watched the shareholders meeting yesterday - it was amazing. Elon repeated all the same things, he kept telling for the past 5 years at least, none of which is close to become a reality. And none was described in any tangible detail - all very vague promises. As for FSD, autonomy and Robotaxis, one has to remember when it was announced and promoted - when Tesla was close to bankruptcy (per Elon himself).

lukan 2y ago
"And Musk will be in prison" Or closer to formal political power.
- TheAlchemist 2y ago
  Yep, agree ! Sad as it is.
- dabinat 2y ago
  I sleep easy at night knowing that Elon Musk was born in South Africa and is therefore ineligible to be US president.
  - lukan 2y ago
    That is a law. Laws can be changed. (even though it is very unlikely, but give it some years and there might be the next iteration of someone leading a state like a company trope)
pas 2y ago
as GME, that trump social thing, et al. already showed it a couple of times fundamentals don't matter. Tesla is held by folks who either don't care (ETFs, institutions, hedge funds, blablabla) or Elondong lovers.
- svara 2y ago

mlindner 2y ago

It's weird how people keep calling this vaporware when it actually works, is active on roads, and is used by tens of thousands of people. That's the strangest usage of the term I've ever seen. Vaporware is the term used to describe products announced that never make it to market in any form.

bayindirh 2y ago
> when it actually works* *: The definition of "work" includes veering incl. but not limited to other vehicles, road shoulders or road divisions, sometimes self stabbing the car incl., but not limited to its driver with road railings or other roadside objects. The car might catch fire as a result or independent of the event if its feelings are hurt, or just feels like it, and burns for days, releasing its densely packed magic smoke, sweat, blood vapor and condensed tears of its designers and builders. The fumes might be toxic. Please don't inhale them.
- timschmidt 2y ago
  Did someone give you the impression that cars without FSD have ever been safe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... Most dangerous way to travel, full stop. FSD or not. I don't think a perfect safety record is possible. Only better than what people currently accomplish given the inherent unsafety of the whole system. If safety were a top priority, the cars would be on rails.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > Did someone give you the impression that cars without FSD have ever been safe? Did I say anything resembling or implying that? I don't think so. > Most dangerous way to travel, full stop. I love a quote from a famous driver, paraphrasing: "Racing is some people knowing what they're doing driving in a closed circuit. Traffic is the same, but with people who don't know what they're doing". On top of that, I had enough incidents to know that what humans can do in traffic. They make good stories though. > I don't think a perfect safety record is possible. Me, too. > Only better than what people currently accomplish given the inherent unsafety of the whole system. I think cars with driver monitoring is more secure than cars with FSD or hands-free driving. I love to drive cars with lane hold, adaptive cruise and driver monitoring, because these systems improve safety and augment humans at the same time. I don't believe that AI and/or computer vision is close to matching human perception and reasoning to handle a 2ton steel box like humans. Augmenting humans' capabilities is a far safer and reliable (if not unsexier) way. > the cars would be on rails. I love trains to death, but they're not perfect either.

blueboo 2y ago

Fake it til you make it is a fundamental principle of startups. We just don’t usually see it at such a vast scale. There’s a timeline where Theranos was acquired for 9b by UnitedHealth if they could keep the grift alive juuust a bit longer and Elizabeth Holmes ascends to the tech firmament permanently while her enablers congratulate each other. Tesla has even more and deeper financial and branding defense mechanisms. That said, the clock is ticking, now, I think

rchaud 2y ago
Wouldn't United Health have been in the same position as HP when they acquired Autonomy for $10b in 2011 on the basis of their cooked books?
FireBeyond 2y ago
> Elizabeth Holmes ascends to the tech firmament permanently while her enablers congratulate each other. Holmes and at least some of her supporters still ardently insist, to this day, now that everything is out of the bag, the "pulling filing cabinets in front of doors to specific labs on FDA inspection days so they only see the labs we want them to" crap, all of it, that she, and humanity, have been robbed of the truly magnificent biomedical advances that Theranos was just about to solve.

Workaccount2 2y ago

Cathy Wood of Ark investments just gave Tesla a $2000 price target on the back of FSD taxi service... That's around a $5T valuation. You have to wonder if she is dumb, or just knows Tesla investors are totally delusional. Or perhaps, when you come upon an OG delusional musk worshipper, and call them out, they can point at their money pile and call you the idiot...

tim333 2y ago
>... the 65-year-old divorced mother of three is a devout Christian who starts every day by reading the Bible while her coffee brews, and who relies on her faith during testing moments, such as the many market upheavals... God will make it go to $2000.
Grazester 2y ago
I really think she is a hack

belter 2y ago

> I very much doubt that it is technologically ahead of its competitors. This is where they are as of April 2024: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCLA-EA22002-14498.pdf https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCLA-EA22002-14498.pd... "ODI completed an extensive body of work via PE21020 and EA22002, which showed evidence that Tesla’s weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities. This mismatch resulted in a critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of the L2 system’s operating capabilities and the system’s true capabilities. This gap led to foreseeable misuse and avoidable crashes. During EA220002, ODI identified at least 13 crashes involving one or more fatalities and many more involving serious injuries, in which foreseeable driver misuse of the system played an apparent role. ODI’s analysis conducted during this investigation, which aligns with Tesla’s conclusion in its Defect Information Report, indicated that in certain circumstances, Autopilot’s system controls and warnings were insufficient for a driver assistance system that requires constant supervision by a human driver."

disqard 2y ago
> "...a critical safety gap between drivers’ expectations of the [...] system’s operating capabilities and the system’s true capabilities" Just s/driver/user/g and it sounds like a lot of contemporary LLM hype. IMO, Tesla's not an outlier -- in today's stock-price-is-king world, it's common to see such overselling in various domains.
belter 2y ago
And...one more yesterday "Tesla driver using self-driving mode slammed into police cruiser in Orange County" - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-13/self-driving-tesla-narrowly-misses-police-officer-before-slamming-into-patrol-car-in-orange-county https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-13/self-dri... "Tesla in self-drive mode slams into police car responding to fatal crash": https://youtu.be/ukq6h55GnvE https://youtu.be/ukq6h55GnvE

sneak 2y ago

> Turns out you can sustainably push up company valuation on vapourware. It is very nearly standard practice in startupland to describe a yet-to-be-developed product in the present tense prior to/during development. Strictly speaking, it’s lying/fraud, but it is so pervasive and widespread as to be expected and could rightly be called standard industry practice. This is in no way a Tesla-specific thing.