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> That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. What Musk understands is that technology is a moving target. You shoot for where

> That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. What Musk understands is that technology is a moving target. You shoot for where it will be, not where it is now. Sometimes he's overoptimistic, however a robotaxi seems well timed. Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. It takes years to manufacture a new vehicle type. When the Cybertruck was announced the SOTA in language models was GPT 2. Now we have multimodal conversational models with vision. By the time the robotaxi rolls off the production line, the software will be ready. And if the software is ready, then the model of owning cars will be disrupted for many people living in dense urban environments. The real risk is in not preparing for that eventuality, which is the same type of unpreparedness risk that the legacy launch industry is facing with Starship.

tivert 2y ago
> Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. Because chatting and driving a car are two entirely different problems?
- glimshe 2y ago
  I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". I think people got desensitized, as they usually do, of how incredible GPT-4o looks like compared to what we had recently. We were going through a rough patch in technology where we hadn't come up with anything terribly exciting since the mobile revolution. AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". > ...AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem. But that's sloppy and fallacious reasoning, and there are literally thousands of examples of it failing in many different areas (including AI!) in recent and no-so-recent history. One example is SHRDLU, which led to similar excessive optimism back in the late 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences. It's like someone with the fuzzy category "technology" interpreting the amazing advances in computer graphics over the 90s and 2000s to conclude we will be colonizing Mars soon.

tivert 2y ago

> Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. Because chatting and driving a car are two entirely different problems?

glimshe 2y ago
I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". I think people got desensitized, as they usually do, of how incredible GPT-4o looks like compared to what we had recently. We were going through a rough patch in technology where we hadn't come up with anything terribly exciting since the mobile revolution. AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem.
- tivert 2y ago
  > I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". > ...AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem. But that's sloppy and fallacious reasoning, and there are literally thousands of examples of it failing in many different areas (including AI!) in recent and no-so-recent history. One example is SHRDLU, which led to similar excessive optimism back in the late 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences. It's like someone with the fuzzy category "technology" interpreting the amazing advances in computer graphics over the 90s and 2000s to conclude we will be colonizing Mars soon.