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When Tesla demoed (via video) self-driving in 2016 with a claim "The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The

When Tesla demoed (via video) self-driving in 2016 with a claim "The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself" and then when they unveiled Semi in 2017 - I tweeted out and honestly thought that trucking industry is changed forever and it doesn't make sense to be starting in trucking industry. It's almost end of 2025 and either nothing out of it or just a small part of it panned out. I think we all have become hyper-optimistic on technology. We want this tech to work and we want it to change the world in some fundamental way, but either things are moving very slowly or not at all.

whatever1 1y ago
No it’s just machine learning was always awesome for the 98% of the cases. We got fooled that we can easily deal with the remaining 2%.
- jgeada 1y ago
  It is the usual complexity rule of software: solving 80% of the problem is usually pretty easy at only takes about 50% of the estimated effort, it is the remaining 20% that takes up the remaining 90% of estimated effort (thus the usual schedule overruns). The interesting thing is that there are problems for which this rule applies recursively. Of the remaining 20%, most of it is easier than the remaining 20% of what is left. Most software ships without dealing with that remaining 20%, and largely that is OK; it is not OK for safety critical systems though.
GoatInGrey 1y ago
The universe has a way with being disappointing. This isn't to say that life is terrible and we should have no optimism. Rather, that things generally work out for the better, but usually not in the way we'd prefer them to.
goatlover 1y ago
It's also like nobody learns from the previous hype cycles. Short term overly optimistic predications followed by disillusionment and then long term benefits which deliver on some of the early promises. For some reason, enthusiasts always think this time is different.
innanet-worker 1y ago
well part of the reason why you may have felt mislead by that video is because it was staged so i wouldn't feel that bad. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-sel... for me i have been riding in waymos the last year and have been very pleased with the results. i think we WANT this technology to move faster but the some of the challenges at the edges take a lot of time and resources to solve, but not fundamentally unsolvable.
- lomase 1y ago
  Waymo is a 21 year old company that only operates on a small part of the US after $10 billions of funding.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    it's also widely believed that the cars are remotely operated, not autonomous. they are likely semi autonomous, which is still cool, but I wish they'd be honest about it
    - treespace8 1y ago
      After learning that the Amazon Go store was power by hundreds of people watching video because the AI could not handle it was a real eye opener for me. Is this why Waymo is slow to expand, not enough remote drivers? Maybe that is where we need to be focused, better remote driving?
      - thewebguyd 1y ago
        > Maybe that is where we need to be focused, better remote driving? I think maybe we can and should focus on both. Better remote driving can be extended into other equipment operations as well - remote control of excavators and other construction equipment. Imagine road construction, or building projects, being able to be done remotely while we wait for better automation to develop.
christianqchung 1y ago
Look at Waymo, not Robotaxi. Waymo is essentially the self driving vision I had as a kid, and ridership is growing exponentially as they expand. It's also very safe if you believe their statistics[0]. I think there's a saying about overestimating stuff in the short term and underestimating stuff in the long term that seems to apply here, though the radiologist narrative was definitely wrong. [0] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
- pkdpic 1y ago
  I agree with both comments here. I wonder what the plausibility of fully autonomous trucking is in the next 10-30 years... Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
  - basisword 1y ago
    I remember Bill Gates said: "We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years".
    - jampekka 1y ago
      Not Musk. He promised full autonomy within 3 years about 10 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
      - nebula8804 1y ago
        Musk and Gates have very different philosophies. Gates seems more calm and collected having gone through the trauma of almost losing his empire. Musk is a loose cannon having never suffered the consequences of his actions (ie. early Gates and Jobs) and so he sometimes gets things right but will eventually crash and burn having not had the fortune of failing and maturing early on in his career(he is now past the midpoint of his career with not enough buffer to recover). They are both dangerous in their own ways.
DarkNova6 1y ago
It's not about optimism. It is well established in the industry that Tesla's hardware-stack gives them 98% accuracy at the very most. But those voices are drowned by the marketing bravado. In the case of Musk it has worked out. His lies have earned him a fortune and now he asks Tesla to pay him out with a casual 1 trillion paycheck.
- robotresearcher 1y ago
  What does ‘accuracy’ mean here?
  - DarkNova6 1y ago
    To correctly assess the state of the world. Since Tesla exclusively uses visual sensors, they are massively limited in how accurate it can ever be… or safe. But hey, costs are lower that way.
    - robotresearcher 1y ago
      ‘Correctly’, like ‘accurately’ is with respect to some measure of correctness or accuracy. I’m not being merely pedantic here. A sea anemone assesses the state of the world just fine, but not with respect to driving. Humans use mainly vision to drive, and what isn’t vision is also accessible for robots; mainly accelerations and sound. So it doesn’t mean much to say that Tesla can’t be ‘accurate’ without describing what you want it to measure. What exactly to measure, and how well you need to do it is deep and key question for the technology.
CodesInChaos 1y ago
> thought that trucking industry is changed forever What I find really crazy is that most trains are still driven by humans.
- tra3 1y ago
  I think it's the matter of scale. Way more truck drivers than locomotive engineers.
- blueside 1y ago
  only 2 people (engineer and conductor) for an entire train that is over a mile long seems about right to me though
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Most work is actually in oversight and getting the train to run when parts fail. When running millions of machines 24/7 there is always a failing part. Also understanding gesticulation humans and running wildlife is not yet (fully) automatable.
  - mulmen 1y ago
    How does a human conductor stop a train from hitting a deer? Do they spot it from 3 miles away? The THSR I rode solved the wildlife problems with a big windshield wiper. Not sure what else there is to do. It’s a train.
    - dboreham 1y ago
      At least one train has crashed with fatalities due to hitting a cow.
      - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
        Can you provide a reference? That's difficult to believe. Was this a diesel locomotive pulling a freight train or was it something smaller/lighter?
philwelch 1y ago
For trucking I think self driving can be, in the short term, an opportunity for owner-operators. An owner-operator of a conventional truck can only drive one truck at a time, but you could have multiple self driving trucks in a convoy led by a truck manned by the owner-operator. And there might be an even greater opportunity for this in Europe thanks to the low capacity of European freight rail compared to North America.
- mandevil 1y ago
  I used to think this sort of thing too. Then a few years ago I worked with a SWE who had experience in the trucking industry. His take was that most trucking companies are too small scale to benefit from this. The median trucking operation is basically run by the owner's wife in a notebook or spreadsheet- and so their ability to get the benefits of leader/follower mileage like that just doesn't exist. He thought that maybe the very largest operators- Walmart and Amazon- could benefit from this, but he thought that no one else could. This was why he went into industrial robotics instead, where it was clear that the finances could work out today.
  - philwelch 1y ago
    Yeah, I guess the addressable market of “truck owners who can afford to buy another truck but not hire another driver” might be smaller than I thought.
- rcpt 1y ago
  Trucks are harder. The weight changes a lot, they are off grid for huge stretches, mistakes are more consequential.
dyauspitr 1y ago
Waymo has worked out. I’ve taken one so many times now I don’t even think about it. If Waymo can pull this off in NYC I believe it will absolutely be capable of long distance trucking not that far in the future.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  Trucks are orders of magnitude more dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is decades away from being able to operate a long haul truck on the open interstate.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Given that Aurora Innovation is running driverless semi-trucks on commercial routes between Dallas, Houston, and Texas as of right now, that would be surprising, yes, but for different reasons.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      Aurora also runs with a CDL licensed safety driver in the driver’s seat and they operate only in very carefully planned routes in restricted conditions.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"I think we all have become hyper-optimistic on technology. We want this tech to work and we want it to change the world in some fundamental way, but either things are moving very slowly or not at all." Who is "we"? The people who hype "AI"?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
moate 1y ago
This story (the demand for Radiologists) really shows a very important thing about AI: It's great when it has training data, and bad at weird edge cases. Gee, seems like about the worst fucking thing in the world for diagnostics if you ask me, but what do I know, my degree is in sandwiches and pudding.
phkahler 1y ago
I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI. I think Elon finally figured that out. So now LLMs are going to evolve into AGI any moment. Um no. Tesla (and others) have effectively been working on AGI for 10 years with no luck
- tekno45 1y ago
  So waymo has AGI?
  - gf000 1y ago
    They deliberately (and smartly) set their working limits to what they can solve - known city, always decent weather conditions. And they still added a way for a remote operator to solve certain situations. So no, they don't have AGI and there is a lot to reach "working under every condition everywhere" levels of self-driving.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bsder 1y ago
  > I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI. Not even close. The vast majority of people have a small number of local routes completely memorized and do station keeping in between on the big freeways. You can see this when signage changes on some local route and absolute chaos ensues until all the locals re-memorize the route. Once Waymo has memorized all those local routes (admittedly a big task), it's done.
- zulban 1y ago
  > I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI. Yikes. I recommend you take some introductory courses on AI and theory of computation.
  - GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
    You should either elaborate on your argument, or at least provide further reading that clarifies your point of contention. This kind of low effort nerd-sniping contributes nothing.
tictacttoe 1y ago
Meanwhile, it’s my feeling that technology is moving insanely fast but people are just impatient. You move the bar and the expectations move with it. I think part of the problem is that the market rewards execs who set expectations beyond reality. If the market was better at rewarding outcomes not promises, you’d see more reasonable product pitches.
- achierius 1y ago
  How have expectations moved on self driving cars? Yes, we're finally getting there, but adoption is still tiny relative to the population and the cars that work best (Waymo) are still humongously expensive + not available for consumer purchase.
squigz 1y ago
Fundamental change does indeed happen very slowly. But it does happen.
reaperducer 1y ago
It's almost end of 2025 and either nothing out of it or just a small part of it panned out. The truck part seems closer than the car part. There are several driverless semis running between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio every day. Fully driverless. No human in the cab at all. Though, trucking is an easier to solve problem since the routes are known, the roads are wide, and in the event of a closure, someone can navigate the detour remotely.
thenaturalist 1y ago
This is such a stereotypical SF / US based perspective. Easy to forget the rest of the world does not and never has ticked this way. Don't get me wrong, optimism and thinking of the future are great qualities we direly need in this world on the one hand. On the other, you can't outsmart physics. We've conquered the purely digital realm in the past 20 years. We're already in the early years of the next phase were the digital will become ever more multi-modal and make more inroads into the physical world. So many people bring an old mindset to a new context, where maring of errors, cost of mistakes or optimizing the last 20% of a process is just so vastly different than a bit of HTML, JS and backend infra.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
80/20 rule might be 99/1 for AI.
dreamcompiler 1y ago
Where we're too optimistic is with technology that demos impressively, but which has 10,000 potentially-fatal edge cases. Self-driving cars and radiology interpretation are both in this category. When there are relatively few dangerous edge cases, technology often works better than we expect. TikTok's recommendation algorithm and Shazam are in this category.
_ea1k 1y ago
A lot of people in the industry really underestimated the difficulty in getting self driving cars be effective. It is relatively easy to get a staged demo together, but getting a trustworthy product out there is really hard. We've seen this with all of the players, with many dropping out due to the challenges. Having said that, there are several that are fielded right now, with varying degrees of autonomy. Obviously Waymo has been operating in small-ish geofences for a while, but they are managed >200% annual growth readily. Zoox just started offering fully autonomous drives in Vegas. And even Tesla is offering a service, albeit with safety monitors/drivers. Tesla Semi isn't autonomous at all, but appears ready to go into volume production next year too. Your prediction will look a lot better by 2030.
Gareth321 1y ago
Things happen slowly, then all at once. Many people think ChatGPT appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago. In reality it was steadily improving for 8 years. Before then, LLMs were being developed for Word2Vec. Before then, Yoshua Bengio and colleagues proposed the first neural probabilistic language model, and introducing distributed word representations (precursors to embeddings). Before then we had Statistical NLP took hold, with n-gram models, hidden Markov models, and later phrase-based machine translation. Before that we had work on natural language processing (NLP) which began with symbolic AI and rule-based systems (e.g., ELIZA, 1966). These are all stepping stones, and eventually the technology is mature enough to productise. You would be shocked by how good Tesla FSD is right now. It can easily take you on a cross country trip with almost zero human interactions.
ponector 1y ago
>> it doesn't make sense to be starting in trucking industry Still true as work conditions are harsh, schedule as well, responsibilities and fines are high but payment is not.

whatever1 1y ago

No it’s just machine learning was always awesome for the 98% of the cases. We got fooled that we can easily deal with the remaining 2%.

jgeada 1y ago
It is the usual complexity rule of software: solving 80% of the problem is usually pretty easy at only takes about 50% of the estimated effort, it is the remaining 20% that takes up the remaining 90% of estimated effort (thus the usual schedule overruns). The interesting thing is that there are problems for which this rule applies recursively. Of the remaining 20%, most of it is easier than the remaining 20% of what is left. Most software ships without dealing with that remaining 20%, and largely that is OK; it is not OK for safety critical systems though.

GoatInGrey 1y ago

The universe has a way with being disappointing. This isn't to say that life is terrible and we should have no optimism. Rather, that things generally work out for the better, but usually not in the way we'd prefer them to.

goatlover 1y ago

It's also like nobody learns from the previous hype cycles. Short term overly optimistic predications followed by disillusionment and then long term benefits which deliver on some of the early promises. For some reason, enthusiasts always think this time is different.

innanet-worker 1y ago

well part of the reason why you may have felt mislead by that video is because it was staged so i wouldn't feel that bad. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-sel... for me i have been riding in waymos the last year and have been very pleased with the results. i think we WANT this technology to move faster but the some of the challenges at the edges take a lot of time and resources to solve, but not fundamentally unsolvable.

lomase 1y ago
Waymo is a 21 year old company that only operates on a small part of the US after $10 billions of funding.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  it's also widely believed that the cars are remotely operated, not autonomous. they are likely semi autonomous, which is still cool, but I wish they'd be honest about it
  - treespace8 1y ago
    After learning that the Amazon Go store was power by hundreds of people watching video because the AI could not handle it was a real eye opener for me. Is this why Waymo is slow to expand, not enough remote drivers? Maybe that is where we need to be focused, better remote driving?
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      > Maybe that is where we need to be focused, better remote driving? I think maybe we can and should focus on both. Better remote driving can be extended into other equipment operations as well - remote control of excavators and other construction equipment. Imagine road construction, or building projects, being able to be done remotely while we wait for better automation to develop.

christianqchung 1y ago

Look at Waymo, not Robotaxi. Waymo is essentially the self driving vision I had as a kid, and ridership is growing exponentially as they expand. It's also very safe if you believe their statistics[0]. I think there's a saying about overestimating stuff in the short term and underestimating stuff in the long term that seems to apply here, though the radiologist narrative was definitely wrong. [0] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

pkdpic 1y ago
I agree with both comments here. I wonder what the plausibility of fully autonomous trucking is in the next 10-30 years... Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
- basisword 1y ago
  I remember Bill Gates said: "We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years".
  - jampekka 1y ago
    Not Musk. He promised full autonomy within 3 years about 10 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
    - nebula8804 1y ago
      Musk and Gates have very different philosophies. Gates seems more calm and collected having gone through the trauma of almost losing his empire. Musk is a loose cannon having never suffered the consequences of his actions (ie. early Gates and Jobs) and so he sometimes gets things right but will eventually crash and burn having not had the fortune of failing and maturing early on in his career(he is now past the midpoint of his career with not enough buffer to recover). They are both dangerous in their own ways.

DarkNova6 1y ago

It's not about optimism. It is well established in the industry that Tesla's hardware-stack gives them 98% accuracy at the very most. But those voices are drowned by the marketing bravado. In the case of Musk it has worked out. His lies have earned him a fortune and now he asks Tesla to pay him out with a casual 1 trillion paycheck.

robotresearcher 1y ago
What does ‘accuracy’ mean here?
- DarkNova6 1y ago
  To correctly assess the state of the world. Since Tesla exclusively uses visual sensors, they are massively limited in how accurate it can ever be… or safe. But hey, costs are lower that way.
  - robotresearcher 1y ago
    ‘Correctly’, like ‘accurately’ is with respect to some measure of correctness or accuracy. I’m not being merely pedantic here. A sea anemone assesses the state of the world just fine, but not with respect to driving. Humans use mainly vision to drive, and what isn’t vision is also accessible for robots; mainly accelerations and sound. So it doesn’t mean much to say that Tesla can’t be ‘accurate’ without describing what you want it to measure. What exactly to measure, and how well you need to do it is deep and key question for the technology.

CodesInChaos 1y ago

> thought that trucking industry is changed forever What I find really crazy is that most trains are still driven by humans.

tra3 1y ago
I think it's the matter of scale. Way more truck drivers than locomotive engineers.
blueside 1y ago
only 2 people (engineer and conductor) for an entire train that is over a mile long seems about right to me though
1718627440 1y ago
Most work is actually in oversight and getting the train to run when parts fail. When running millions of machines 24/7 there is always a failing part. Also understanding gesticulation humans and running wildlife is not yet (fully) automatable.
- mulmen 1y ago
  How does a human conductor stop a train from hitting a deer? Do they spot it from 3 miles away? The THSR I rode solved the wildlife problems with a big windshield wiper. Not sure what else there is to do. It’s a train.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    At least one train has crashed with fatalities due to hitting a cow.
    - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
      Can you provide a reference? That's difficult to believe. Was this a diesel locomotive pulling a freight train or was it something smaller/lighter?

philwelch 1y ago

For trucking I think self driving can be, in the short term, an opportunity for owner-operators. An owner-operator of a conventional truck can only drive one truck at a time, but you could have multiple self driving trucks in a convoy led by a truck manned by the owner-operator. And there might be an even greater opportunity for this in Europe thanks to the low capacity of European freight rail compared to North America.

mandevil 1y ago
I used to think this sort of thing too. Then a few years ago I worked with a SWE who had experience in the trucking industry. His take was that most trucking companies are too small scale to benefit from this. The median trucking operation is basically run by the owner's wife in a notebook or spreadsheet- and so their ability to get the benefits of leader/follower mileage like that just doesn't exist. He thought that maybe the very largest operators- Walmart and Amazon- could benefit from this, but he thought that no one else could. This was why he went into industrial robotics instead, where it was clear that the finances could work out today.
- philwelch 1y ago
  Yeah, I guess the addressable market of “truck owners who can afford to buy another truck but not hire another driver” might be smaller than I thought.
rcpt 1y ago
Trucks are harder. The weight changes a lot, they are off grid for huge stretches, mistakes are more consequential.

dyauspitr 1y ago

Waymo has worked out. I’ve taken one so many times now I don’t even think about it. If Waymo can pull this off in NYC I believe it will absolutely be capable of long distance trucking not that far in the future.

sarchertech 1y ago
Trucks are orders of magnitude more dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is decades away from being able to operate a long haul truck on the open interstate.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Given that Aurora Innovation is running driverless semi-trucks on commercial routes between Dallas, Houston, and Texas as of right now, that would be surprising, yes, but for different reasons.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    Aurora also runs with a CDL licensed safety driver in the driver’s seat and they operate only in very carefully planned routes in restricted conditions.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"I think we all have become hyper-optimistic on technology. We want this tech to work and we want it to change the world in some fundamental way, but either things are moving very slowly or not at all." Who is "we"? The people who hype "AI"?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

moate 1y ago

This story (the demand for Radiologists) really shows a very important thing about AI: It's great when it has training data, and bad at weird edge cases. Gee, seems like about the worst fucking thing in the world for diagnostics if you ask me, but what do I know, my degree is in sandwiches and pudding.

phkahler 1y ago

I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI. I think Elon finally figured that out. So now LLMs are going to evolve into AGI any moment. Um no. Tesla (and others) have effectively been working on AGI for 10 years with no luck

tekno45 1y ago
So waymo has AGI?
- gf000 1y ago
  They deliberately (and smartly) set their working limits to what they can solve - known city, always decent weather conditions. And they still added a way for a remote operator to solve certain situations. So no, they don't have AGI and there is a lot to reach "working under every condition everywhere" levels of self-driving.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bsder 1y ago
> I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI. Not even close. The vast majority of people have a small number of local routes completely memorized and do station keeping in between on the big freeways. You can see this when signage changes on some local route and absolute chaos ensues until all the locals re-memorize the route. Once Waymo has memorized all those local routes (admittedly a big task), it's done.
zulban 1y ago
> I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI. Yikes. I recommend you take some introductory courses on AI and theory of computation.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
  You should either elaborate on your argument, or at least provide further reading that clarifies your point of contention. This kind of low effort nerd-sniping contributes nothing.

tictacttoe 1y ago

Meanwhile, it’s my feeling that technology is moving insanely fast but people are just impatient. You move the bar and the expectations move with it. I think part of the problem is that the market rewards execs who set expectations beyond reality. If the market was better at rewarding outcomes not promises, you’d see more reasonable product pitches.

achierius 1y ago
How have expectations moved on self driving cars? Yes, we're finally getting there, but adoption is still tiny relative to the population and the cars that work best (Waymo) are still humongously expensive + not available for consumer purchase.

squigz 1y ago

Fundamental change does indeed happen very slowly. But it does happen.

reaperducer 1y ago

It's almost end of 2025 and either nothing out of it or just a small part of it panned out. The truck part seems closer than the car part. There are several driverless semis running between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio every day. Fully driverless. No human in the cab at all. Though, trucking is an easier to solve problem since the routes are known, the roads are wide, and in the event of a closure, someone can navigate the detour remotely.

thenaturalist 1y ago

This is such a stereotypical SF / US based perspective. Easy to forget the rest of the world does not and never has ticked this way. Don't get me wrong, optimism and thinking of the future are great qualities we direly need in this world on the one hand. On the other, you can't outsmart physics. We've conquered the purely digital realm in the past 20 years. We're already in the early years of the next phase were the digital will become ever more multi-modal and make more inroads into the physical world. So many people bring an old mindset to a new context, where maring of errors, cost of mistakes or optimizing the last 20% of a process is just so vastly different than a bit of HTML, JS and backend infra.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

80/20 rule might be 99/1 for AI.

dreamcompiler 1y ago

Where we're too optimistic is with technology that demos impressively, but which has 10,000 potentially-fatal edge cases. Self-driving cars and radiology interpretation are both in this category. When there are relatively few dangerous edge cases, technology often works better than we expect. TikTok's recommendation algorithm and Shazam are in this category.

_ea1k 1y ago

A lot of people in the industry really underestimated the difficulty in getting self driving cars be effective. It is relatively easy to get a staged demo together, but getting a trustworthy product out there is really hard. We've seen this with all of the players, with many dropping out due to the challenges. Having said that, there are several that are fielded right now, with varying degrees of autonomy. Obviously Waymo has been operating in small-ish geofences for a while, but they are managed >200% annual growth readily. Zoox just started offering fully autonomous drives in Vegas. And even Tesla is offering a service, albeit with safety monitors/drivers. Tesla Semi isn't autonomous at all, but appears ready to go into volume production next year too. Your prediction will look a lot better by 2030.

Gareth321 1y ago

Things happen slowly, then all at once. Many people think ChatGPT appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago. In reality it was steadily improving for 8 years. Before then, LLMs were being developed for Word2Vec. Before then, Yoshua Bengio and colleagues proposed the first neural probabilistic language model, and introducing distributed word representations (precursors to embeddings). Before then we had Statistical NLP took hold, with n-gram models, hidden Markov models, and later phrase-based machine translation. Before that we had work on natural language processing (NLP) which began with symbolic AI and rule-based systems (e.g., ELIZA, 1966). These are all stepping stones, and eventually the technology is mature enough to productise. You would be shocked by how good Tesla FSD is right now. It can easily take you on a cross country trip with almost zero human interactions.

ponector 1y ago

>> it doesn't make sense to be starting in trucking industry Still true as work conditions are harsh, schedule as well, responsibilities and fines are high but payment is not.