In theory, if the approach to self-driving that Tesla is pursuing in any given year actually worked... then the release would be about two years away. In reality it hasn't been working well enough, and every year a new plan is drawn up to reach full autonomy in 2 years.
This is also coincidentally slightly longer than the average tenure for an engineer/scientist, and as such the champions of a given strategy/approach will have departed the company before someone observes the strategy not panning out.
Exploratory AI should be thought of as "potentially kills your company if it doesn't work and you gamble on it working."
The ultimate truth is that you're outsourcing your thinking to ML researchers, much of the time. And as someone on the ground floor, let me tell you that we often don't have a clue how to achieve X any more than you do. We have ideas, testable theories, plans that may or may not work, and have a higher chance of success than random people. But it's still only a chance.
I don't think a lot of companies have fully internalized that. If your company is based around the premise of exploratory AI, you are literally gambling. And it's not the type of gambling you can win in the long run with. It's closer to "put it all on black" than "let's take a principled approach to poker."
There are lots of ML algorithms that definitely work but none of involve claims of intelligence. So it's not just "exploratory AI" that you're talking about. It's "any AI", anything claiming to be "artificially intelligent" and fully replace a human in a key decision making position (but not "any ML" since ML encompasses much more boring stuff).
I try to be an optimist, mostly because of how many counterexamples you see from history. Didn't some newspaper claim that human flight "may be invented in the next several thousand years" shortly before Kitty Hawk?
But for some reason, rich people keep coming to me with what they're trying to do. My advice is the same: you're going to lose your money unless you bet on proven techniques that exist today.
Take AI dungeon as the prime example. That is what I would call a grade-A idea. It was incredibly obvious that it would become a company (now Latitude) and that it would be successful, if someone was willing to put in the effort to make it so (which Nick Walton did). Once AI dungeon worked, and it had a "minimum viable working thing," the rest was a matter of execution.
But a lot of the ideas seem to fall into the category of... Well, for example, someone came to me saying they wanted to build a "virtual universe, filled with virtual people that you can talk to."
It sounds lovely on paper. But what are you selling, really? There has to be some specific value proposition. So strike one is that it's an unproven market. You yourself want a virtual universe. But is that virtual universe going to lead to something that will solve a lot of people's problems? And we haven't even begun to discuss how you're going to get there. What do you mean exactly by "virtual person"?
It's easy to pick on some of the outliers. But unfortunately, the problem runs much deeper. There are people who genuinely believe that AGI is within reach within our lifetimes, or perhaps within one generation. But whenever I try to corner them into giving specific details on how precisely to get there, the handwaving begins.
This is now a complete tangent, but, I found myself excited and enthusiastic to pursue AGI after a long conversation with a certain someone. They had "fresh eyes" -- a new way of viewing the situation, unlike anything that people were currently trying.
Unfortunately, after throwing myself into that mindset for several weeks, I had no choice but to conclude that their chance was closer to zero than 1%. And I was really trying hard to find that 1%, with all my mental effort (such as it is).
So what choice do we have but to let people pursue impossible dreams, and return to the work that we feel we can make an impact on? Live and let live. And of course, there's the likely outcome: our predictions will be incorrect, and we'll be talking with AGI in a virtual universe sooner than we think. But I wouldn't fall in love with their dream.
(I also think you were unfairly jumped on, and that you had a fine point, for what it's worth. Thanks for the prompt.)
Not to further rain on the parade (without good reason) but I should mention...
"Recently we’ve learned that the server costs incurred for both the Griffin and Dragon models are higher than our total revenue. Nobody has ever deployed AI models this powerful before, and it requires extremely expensive hardware. If we don’t make changes to cover the costs of that hardware soon, AI Dungeon will not be financially viable."
Self-driving is absolutely the key problem, I'd say. I sympathize with you optimism. I'm optimistic about what "computers can do" but I'm pessimistic about DNNs + standard control becoming able to navigate the human-machine border.
Basically, I think a lot of problem are "AGI-complete", especially problem around human-computer interaction, more problems than people like to admit. And Remember, for things just in the NP-complete class, an "average" problem can be easy, it's the few examples that prove troublesome. It seems to me that AGI-complete problems are similar (and yes, I realize the term is a neolism, defined by only extension etc but I'd still say it's valid).
I also think you were unfairly jumped on, and that you had a fine point, for what it's worth. Thanks for the prompt.
Theoretically having lots of "karma" should make me not care about it. Theoretically...
Having recently become a parent, I have a newfound appreciation for how complex spatial navigation tasks are. Children learn to recognize faces and objects within the first 6 weeks to 4 months of their lives. They learn to navigate environments over the next 1-5 years language is fully understood for non-gibberish use cases over the next 5-20 years. It's not a fair comparison, but it provides for roughly the only yard stick we know of.
I don't think there are companies with products based on AI where the AI has to work for the company. Google uses AI for search but search can screw up and search returns a lot of just indexed results. There's no "real world application" where AI works reliably (ie, gives a result that you can count on). That doesn't stop deep networks from an improvement on applications that were previous a combination of database queries. But this same only-relative-usefulness can be problematic when companies and institutions delegate AI to make decisions where it doesn't hurt them being wrong but it can mightly screw some random person (from credit to parole to whatever).
When confronted with these uncertainties internal stakeholder will often swing from "we just need more scientists working on this problem" to "it works fine, why would we spend time on this?" attitudes. The former almost always leads to over-investment where 3 teams of people are working on what should be one individuals project. The latter can sometimes be right, but I've also seen Fortune 500 Search rankings that have never been tuned let alone leverage an ML model.
I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision.
What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.
When it comes to automated driving though you're really requiring solving entirely novel never-before-solved problems. If there is a spectrum between "found a company on doing some existing engineering twice as good" and "found a company on solving the Goldbach conjecture" then driverless cars are a bit more towards the latter than hoverslamming rockets is.
NASA didn't stop innovating per se. In the 1980s and 1990s they worked out their own version of vertical take-off and landing and actually test flew it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o
Linear aerospike engines are pretty neat too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcW9kUUTfxY
Problem is absolutely none of this stuff ever got close to operational. It kept getting cancelled in the prototype stage.
If the DC-X had been developed into a fully reusable first stage, we'd have had something like Falcon 9 by the year 2000 and might be on Mars by now.
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is mainly that SpaceX cares about cost.
Or we can say that NASA has incentives to absurdly increase cost, like any bureaucracy.
There is no way the DC-X could have been developed without increasing enormously the budget (and taxes from Americans). That was the reason it was not done.
And innovation when you have many, many billions is one thing, if you have to operate in a commercial market but still find a way to innovate at that level its quite amazing.
I have issues with how Musk communicates, but fundamentally I think Tesla is innovating as much as SpaceX. Many here and me have lots of issues in how Self-Driving is developed, but fundamentally its the right concept.
What Tesla is doing with batteries is quite amazing. I have over the last 2 years spent a lot of time understanding the battery industry and what Tesla is doing is actually incredibly impressive. People mostly don't understand that because battery and battery production is far more obscure as topic.
However whatever else you can say about Elon, he is committed to the projects that he is committed too.
SpaceX will not give up on Starship, or at most replace it with a changed design that tries to solve the same problem. Tesla will not stop trying to push down the price of battery, they are comited to it and are willing to go all the way to vertically integrate mining if that what it takes. Tesla will not stop developing Self-Driving, they will push forward and invest as much as they need to invest.
I do wish the Communication around the Self-Driving technology would change. They should have just called it 'Co-Pilot' and sold a 'Advanced Co-Pilot' and say they are working on 'Self-Driving' but it not a product (yet). Stop promising it will come so soon, and I not sure about how I feel about letting Beta testers put up videos.
In which way did he lead the program technically?
Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment.
Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.
It does seem like his is heavily involved in the engineering, and he does say he's the chief engineer of SpaceX.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
The issue isn't the predictions. It's the time frames he makes the predictions about. We will have everything he's said one day, but in the mean time we need to call him out for what he's done: lying, and why he's done it: to get money.
It's an unfortunate flipside to their willingness to work so hard-- they almost need to believe in the impossible to keep up the pace. Ideally there is someone between them and the public face of the company, but all too often they can't help spouting off stuff they should be keeping under wraps in front of TV cameras or in tweets.
It's like there is this enormous gulf that most others can see, but to Elon it's invisible.
So don't let anyone tell you that philosophy and theology don't matter. We are witnesses a multi-billion dollar bet being made on the basis of some extreme views about the nature of man, and because this appears to be a core belief of Elon, I doubt he will ever update his priors to make more effective investment decisions based on feedback from real-world tests. He will always view this as a project that is almost-ready with just a few technical glitches to overcome.
The reason why he's so motivated is because his compensation package is so ridiculous.
If he is so uninterested by money he can of course show that by giving it to charity.
18 hour days are the "walking barefoot in the snow for three days" of our time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
Amazing how neither sleep deprivation psychosis nor frost bite are a thing if you're rich enough and talking about how virtuous you are.
That assumes the same objectives would have been pursued without Musk, which I find unlikely, given the skepticism and criticism Musk had to endure, and dispel, in order to keep his companies on-target, without a scale-back of ambitions, all those years.
The folks at Waymo/Google, some of the smartest people in the industry, admit to how hard of a problem this is and set realistic expectations. For instance, Waymo (and every SDC company except Tesla) say Level 5 autonomy is impossible and they are strictly targeting Level 4. But here is Musk who says "Level 5 will be coming next year" every year. I feel like there is a serious lack of humility at Tesla (or maybe it's just Musk).
Part of Tesla's business model is selling $10k FSD packages based on a promise that they will eventually deliver full self-driving. If, at any point in the future, any evidence surfaces showing Musk or other senior leadership at Tesla did not have confidence in their ability to actually deliver FSD, this would amount to large-scale fraud and may result in a class-action lawsuit.
On the other hand, if in all communication, internal and external, Tesla leadership projects confidence in their ability to deliver FSD, but then "unforeseeable circumstances" prevent them from actually delivering it, then it's not a scam, but just an unlucky turn of events. At the very worst, Telsa might have to partly reimburse their customers, but most likely they can keep the money.
So it does not really matter what Musk believes deep down. It's probably easier to do his job if he consciously makes himself believe that he can deliver.
Tesla recently said that "Full Self Driving" is not capable of autonomous driving. They tell the regulator one thing and tell their customers another:
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo...
just to write it all out for clarity (not because I think you misunderstood): the might makes right that I was pointing at is an attitude of "winning is everything. winners are superior, no matter how arbitrary or unfair the game."
the might makes right that you're pointing at is the fact that in the struggle to define laws and norms, there are winners and losers.
I think it's just a question of values. there is no "neutrality" - there is always a fight between competing values, and everyone picks a side. the value that says "winning is everything, winners deserve everything, losers can die in a ditch" is a bad value to me.
Not sure what this phrase means to you exactly, but it may not be the worst idea-- the only way I see a mass rollout of automated vehicles any time soon at this point is on dedicated roads/lanes with roadside sensors to assist. Anything else is gambling with human lives.
Ed Niedermeyer’s “Ludicrous” chronicles the story without the breathless media coverage that usually follows Musk. It’s incredible what the Musk empire has become, but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. https://www.amazon.com/Ludicrous-Unvarnished-Story-Tesla-Mot...
I do agree though that there’s so much that can be done right now without waiting for some magical future tech. Inner cities without cars can be solved with public transportation. De-urbanisation can be achieved with a combination of remote work, cashier-less shops and a well-run postal system. We don’t need to wait to do these things, they’re achievable now.
Loads of people called Elon a charlatan, but for them criticism came at virtually no cost, unless you account for the cost of not betting on him.
So maybe they’re developing an “ASI.” But because there are already plenty of those and we call them “AI,” we might just say Elon’s trying for a harder, higher scale, and more commercialized version of a set of technologies that already exist. Kind of like all the other “impossible” things people mocked him for missing deadlines on in the past. And now, we’ve arrived at the point.
When Spacex formed in '02 and Tesla in '03 many observers would have estimated that privately funded moon rockets, luxury electric cars, and mass produced solar panels would have been a bigger challenge.
I have news for you, the most common operations in AlphaGo, GPT-3 or any state of the art AI are: multiplication, addition, max, log, exp, sin, cos and random - all functions known for centuries.
It's the architecture, data and the compute that are making the difference, not the math, and all three are recent accomplishments.
Marketers are usually overly happy, especially when in the act of estimating. This makes it hard for them to resist being overly generous with their predictions.
This kind of marketing is a standard release of information in the form of opinion of the future, which shareholders can decide for themselves whether to believe it or not.
When the SEC slapped him down previously it was because he conducted a release of information about "facts" - not opinion - that were supposedly true now (that he had a private buyer at $x price). This was deemed a market manipulation because it was presented as 100% true. Whereas self-driving cars in 2 years might be true and it's up to individual shareholders to do their own analysis.
Elon operates by setting impossible goals and under delivering on them but still going faster than all the other players. Most FSD buyers are reasonably aware of the gamble they are taking.
If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. Meanwhile they are trying hard to build the damn thing and my kudos for that.
The reality distortion field in action. "Hey no big deal they're straight up lying to consumers and putting their lives in danger!"
They are nowhere near Waymo, who is doing actually driverless rides for the public. Tesla's confidence level is still at "you need to keep your hands on the wheel at all times".
For example, you come up to a 4-way intersection and a traffic cop there signals you to stop and says you can't go through because all the man-hole covers are off, but since you want to turn left you can go through the parking lot of the corner gas station to get onto the other road.
For another example, right after the st-patrick's day parade is over or right after the college town's team has just won the NCAA championship, the street is full of people and the car has to inch forward at a rate of half of a mile per hour and the pedestrians don't get out of the way until the car is about to touch them.
The examples you gave sound like scenarios where remote operator would instruct "don't go there, go here" and the car does it by itself. But specifically about the traffic cop, it can actually detect hand signals from them (can't find the video though).
In my state this is explicitly illegal. You may not use a parking lot as a thoroughfare, regardless of convenience.
Waymo also has the sum total of CAPTCHA learning for them.
Tesla is trying to solve a much more difficult problem. It’s unclear if they will.
Having multiple orthogonal subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum at your disposal provides redundancy and diversity - two features that simply CANNOT be accommodated with a single class of sensor, not matter how advanced it may be.
Of all the self-driving companies it is likely that Tesla is dead last, behind Waymo, Cruise, Aurora, and Zoox.
Meanwhile, Tesla autopilot accelerates towards the walls or parked vehicles. Tell me again how Tesla is "at the forefront in the field".
January 2016: "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"
June 2016: "I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year," Musk said.
March 2017: "I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a tesla] is about two years"
March 2018: "I think probably by end of next year [end of 2019] self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person."
Nov 15, 2018: "Probably technically be able to [self deliver Teslas to customers doors] in about a year then its up to the regulators"
Feb 19 2019: "We will be feature complete full self driving this year. The car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I'm certain of that. That is not a question mark. It will be essentially safe to fall asleep and wake up at their destination towards the end of next year"
April 12th 2019: "I'd be shocked if not next year, at the latest that having the person, having human intervene will decrease safety. DECREASE! (in response to human supervision and adding driver monitoring system)"
April 22nd 2019: "We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year."
April 22nd 2019: “We will have more than one million robotaxis on the road,” Musk said. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software... everything."
May 9th 2019: "We could have gamed an LA/NY Autopilot journey last year, but when we do it this year, everyone with Tesla Full Self-Driving will be able to do it too"
Dec 1, 2020: “I am extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. But I think at least some jurisdictions are going to allow full self-driving next year.”
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Elon’s just been repeating the same promise for the over half a decade now. Oldest trick in the book.
Disclaimer: I drive a Model 3