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• shiftpgdn 1y ago
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  • tines 1y ago
    Can people not disagree without saying the other person has a derangement syndrome any more?
  • protocolture 1y ago
    >Elon derangement syndrome. Named after patient zero I am sure.
• tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  > I'm impressed by Musk's PR team. They hype tech years behind competitors with puff pieces like this with gullible journalists that don't contextualize. Ok where is a paraplegic who's life has been fundamentally improved more then the Neuralink patient one by some of these other technologies that are "years" ahead?
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • gpm 1y ago
    Note that the first paper you were linked is about a patient in a clinical trial... the paraplegic's life which has been fundamentally improved is the participant in that clinical trial.
    • aeternum 1y ago
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      • Just_Harry 1y ago
        It's freely available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10826467/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10826467/
      • gtirloni 1y ago
        As opposed to verified by armchair scientists? It's public, btw.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• dataangel 1y ago
  > median word error rate of 25% So 1 out of every 4 words is wrong? How does Neuralink compare?
  • arnaudsm 1y ago
    I agree significant bits per minute are a better metric, I vulgarized a bit too much.
• sgustard 1y ago
  He's the most famous rich person on the planet, he was in an Iron Man movie, the president picked him to destroy the government, the list goes on. Of course he gets press coverage. Tesla doesn't even have a PR department.
  • stephen_g 1y ago
    I mean, let's be real - Telsa almost definitely has at least a whole PR department's worth of people who do PR kind of things, I'd bet they just don't call them PR or have a dedicated department for that PR so he can keep saying that... Or who knows, maybe they actually just do have a PR department - plenty of stuff Musk has said has just been plain untrue, like when he promised that like his money was first in to Telsa, it would be "the last out" [1] (he has since sold billions in shares now). 1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/342107352041922560 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/342107352041922560
    • skybrian 1y ago
      PR means "public relations." Such as talking to the press. Are they still sending journalists poop emojis or did they start talking to them again?
      • gpm 1y ago
        Literally everything here is public relations by Tesla, as a bunch of examples: https://www.youtube.com/@tesla/videos https://www.youtube.com/@tesla/videos I don't know if they're still sending poop emojis, but "public relations" is a term that encompasses more than "press relations", and "press relations" itself encompasses more than answering questions in email.
• goosejuice 1y ago
  Well your father can't buy a Waymo. Even if he could it wouldn't go very far, wouldn't work everywhere and would cost at least 2x a model 3 or Y. So there are at least several leads Tesla has. It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it? This isn't Lyft vs Uber. A better comparison to Tesla FSD would be blue cruise, super cruise, drive pilot, god's eye, and every other consumer level 2 ADAS.
  • arnaudsm 1y ago
    I was comparing Robotaxis with Waymo in Texas. If you want to compare Teslas with consumer cars, the best metric we have is the fatality rate per mile. Tesla is #1.
    • tass 1y ago
      This metric says nothing about self driving capabilities. In fact, I'd argue that FSD supervising the driver (and doing things like limiting speed before corners) would make their cars safer. To me this metric shows that their cars are very high performing, and for most drivers they're probably the fastest accelerating cars they've ever driven. Tesla should probably default them to 'chill' mode and provide a warning about how fast the car is when you switch out of that mode.
      • michaelmrose 1y ago
        It is fantastically optimistic to attribute Teslas horrific stats to the cars being speedy For instance the model y had a fatality rate of 10.6 per billion vehicle miles 4x the average. Its also seems unreasonable to suppose that they are poorly suited to survive a crash as this doesn't seem to be indicated. A more logical conclusion is that a box with a giant flashing distracting tablet in the center which lies and says it can drive itself gets crashed more because people are functionally incapable of going from passenger to driver at random intervals with no notice.
        • riehwvfbk 1y ago
          Teslas also tend to attract people who hate driving and are bad at it. Yes, this is anecdotal, but - several friends and acquaintances said something along the lines of "my Tesla is the best, self-driving helps so much, I hate driving and I can't wait for them to fully automate it". I wonder if segregating bad drivers into a separate population affects those fatality statistics.
• modeless 1y ago
  Classic HN middlebrow dismissal, only upvoted because people dislike Musk. Word error rate of 25% is unusable. Also it needs extensive retraining every few days. They used four fixed electrode arrays, like pushing a miniature bed of nails into your brain, which is far more invasive and less advanced than Neuralink's one device with threads individually implanted by robot. Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities. As for FSD, it leads by far for systems you can own, and while it is not as good as Waymo it is much cheaper and still rapidly improving. It is too early to say which approach will ultimately win.
  • arnaudsm 1y ago
    The 25% error rate is for 100k+ vocabulary, it drops under 10% for smaller vocab. Meaningful bits per minute would be a better metric indeed. I appreciate comments like yours that actually contribute to the debate. We need critical thinking and data. Not one-sided puff pieces out of context.
    • modeless 1y ago
      9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary is not that great either.
  • cramsession 1y ago
    I have never seen stats showing that FSD is "rapidly improving". Quite the contrary, it seems hobbled by its backward hardware and plateaued in terms of progress.
    • rogerrogerr 1y ago
      The backward hardware in my 2020 car has plateaued at driving me driveway-to-parking-lot on 100% of my drives in recent history. It’s a pretty nice plateau, really. (I admit I’m mocking your wording; in fact it has not plateaued. Just every update makes things slightly smoother in non-safety-critical ways.)
• atleastoptimal 1y ago
  Doesn't matter. That hype will draw attention, which will draw investors, which will draw in money to pay for the best researchers until they become SOTA. If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up. Distribution is part of innovation. Brain computer interfaces exist but those who would be willing to undergo the procedure to get them don't have that option, then an inefficiency exists in the market that can be filled by a competitor. Musk's companies play on the same field as everyone else, but they continue to win because operating efficiency, mind-share and tactics are all part of the game, and he is the best at winning it in many domains. Edit: I understand the ethical considerations of such a nascent technology. I just feel that we live in a world where miracles exist that could help thousands of lives, but they move too slowly to help those lives. How long are paralyzed people waiting for a cheap way to have some more agency in the world? Is the only way to reach it being available sooner doing unscrupulous things that buck safety requirements?
  • Arainach 1y ago
    >If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up. Because other companies have ethics and follow the rules and best practices. They register their clinical trials with the NIH and they stop and ask questions if half the monkeys they test on end up dead.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • xvector 1y ago
      It's entirely possible to spend so long trying to remove the rough edges and be perfectly safe that you kill the people you were trying to save via the sheer passage of time.
    • wombatpm 1y ago
      Because the FDA slowed down his chimp studies and wouldn’t let him combine Neurallink, FSD testing and NHSA crash testing into the same experiment for faster iterations.
• pizzathyme 1y ago
  There's a lot of parallels here to the history of Nikola Tesla vs. Marconi. Tesla's inventions were superior, more reliable, more versatile in almost every way. But Marconi is the one remembered as the father of the radio, despite stealing Tesla's ideas and implementing them in less reliable fashion. He got to market fast, iterated on horrible versions, built broken products, but he shipped shipped shipped. And in the market, Tesla faded away, and Marconi won. I say this as a big Elon skeptic. Technical superiority is only a small piece of the puzzle. But 10 years from now, I would be very surprised if the SOTA tech you mention has a fraction as many users as Neuralink.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • a-dub 1y ago
    i don't see it like a typical technological race for dominance. user count seems silly beyond bragging rights. i think it's more like a multiparty multipath expedition where the results of each team reaching the top is yet another option with different properties and/or a step forward for clinicians to improve the lives of people with horrible conditions and diseases.
  • ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I wouldn't be surprise if Musk is bankrupt in a few years. He acts in many ways like someone trying to keep a fraud going and running out of options for how to spin it.
• rsanek 1y ago
  Great study, thanks for the reference. Surprised that it's actually still quite far from natural conversation, both in speed and error rate. Created an infographic that summarize the full study: https://studyvisuals.com/medicine-health/a-highperformance-speech-neuroprosthesis.html https://studyvisuals.com/medicine-health/a-highperformance-s...
• deleted 1y ago
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• TheAlchemist 1y ago
  I always thought only tech people were interested in it. But 2 years ago, I've talked to an old school, rather wealthy guy, and he was explaining to me that he always invested conservatively but he wants to buy Tesla stock, because Musk said they started producing Optimus robots and next year they will have thousands of those in the factory and all Tesla factory workers could be fired. Yep, Musk knows exactly what he's doing overhyping his companies. The stock is the product.
• aaron695 1y ago
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• drfawkes 1y ago
  I would consider getting a Neuralink, because I think better doctors would be available to help make it successful, and I’m getting to the age where I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute much more; maybe having a prosthesis would make more opportunities available, especially given that AI will probably take my job before I could retrain to another occupation that could make similar money. Maybe I’d get the opportunity to go to Mars one day. I think you can support the technologies behind these companies and respect that someone on the spectrum may be struggling with trying to do what’s right for themselves and the people of Earth as a whole, but has just made a shitload of bad decisions. Many of us struggling with mental health of us can empathize, even if we fully and wholeheartedly disagree on many things.
• m00x 1y ago
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  • 01100011 1y ago
    You had a great comment until that last sentence. Let's not do that here.
  • tomhow 1y ago
    > Maybe spend more time researching than hating and you'll end up with a more factual state of the world. The comment you were replying to was the kind of dismissal we want to avoid on HN, but we need you to avoid swipes like this on HN. The comment would been fine without that last line. Please try to observe the guidelines, especially these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • AbrahamParangi 1y ago
      The first comment quite clearly started the incivility
      • tomhow 1y ago
        Sure, I've penalized that comment and will reply.
    • porridgeraisin 1y ago
      To be fair, the entirety of GP felt snarky to me, although I may be reading it wrong.
      • tomhow 1y ago
        I agree, and I've penalized that comment.
• sidcool 1y ago
  I am equally impressed by naysayers and anti Musk brigadiers in media and here on HN.
• deleted 1y ago
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• porridgeraisin 1y ago
  > 4000x worse You cannot compare using a technical metric a geofenced pre-mapped self driving technology and a general self driving technology. You can hate on their dishonest marketing all you like, but this is disingenuous.
• tomhow 1y ago
  This counts as a "shallow dismissal" and is just what we're trying to avoid on HN. It started a flamewar, and we need all commenters to take more care to avoid that. Please take care to observe the guidelines, especially these ones: Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• maxlin 1y ago
  It's impressive someone would be pissed enough for some reason to put effort to spread such a false image as you are. Robotaxi has been in service a fraction of the time as Waymo has. And the "4000x" figure is absolutely ridiculous, I'd maybe believe 2x at best given I've seen LONG drives with Robotaxi and common FSD while Waymos get stuck / park badly around them. For both, the interventions are done remotely and I bet a lot of Waymo's ones especially are made "secretly". This while Waymo easier decides to do things like parking in middle of road instead of invoking an intervention, and has basically zero scaling prospects compared to Tesla, for which, every Tesla on the road becoming a robotaxi on the owner's command is not actually inconvincible for hw4+ cars in some years. Neuralink "being 5x slower" sounds hardly believable in real life too, as I've seen their webgrid demo, ran it myself, and seen other people only get fractionally better scores than the person using neuralink with no limbic activity. And "5x faster" means little if the device is not practical, something Neuralink has seemingly put more effort to than others combined. Impracticability especially questions the quality of the data as its probably more "lab-like" while Neuralink patients can just navigate to benchmarks themselves on their own time and run them for fun, obivously with the utility of Neuralink. Elon truly does lead Tesla and SpaceX, while being in a key role at Neuralink too. If you ever look at some of their demonstrations, he defers a lot to his employees for specific features/demonstrations. It is media's own issue that they hyperfocus on Elon, probably for keyword clicks.