Isn’t it kinda the other way around? I feel like the clock starts the first time a CyberCab gives a paid passenger ride, and that seems like quite a ways out — potentially much more than 2 years.

And Waymo has that whole time to bring down their costs of construction, learn how to solve problems of scale, and so on.

I agree that a CyberCab would have structural advantages if the service were at parity w/ Waymo, but that is a very big hypothetical!

More than that, even -- Waymo is already transitioning to having partners that do the operations & maintenance work while they focus on the tech. I read this as a confidence in the tech timeline, strategy, and maturity. Meanwhile, Tesla's strategy is "hype, ???, deal with it."

I know which one I'd back.

So I assume you've put your money where your mouth is and own GOOG and not TSLA.

Confidence in the timeline is one read. Lack of confidence and finding partners to shoulder the financial burden at the cost of lower upside is another.

Or, identifying core competencies.

Yeah, I could be wrong and they're just looking for the lowest risk profile. But, riders seem to be pleased and accident rate has been impressively low.

I would so love to do a bet with you, easy money. I’ll even take 2 to 1 odds

"Tesla has a software problem, Waymo has a hardware problem" - Andrej Karpathi

Is it easier to ramp to 1M vehicles a year and cut BOM costs by 80%, OR, install more GPUs and collect more data?

If you have to install the GPUs in each car, then you also have a hardware problem.

Tesla has been mass producing bespoke AI hardware for four generation.

It's not a hardware problem for Tesla. They are a trillion dollar vertically integrated manufacturing powerhouse.

Not an insurmountable problem for sure. If Level 4 self driving requires more compute in the car, someone has to physically put more compute in the car, which may require redesigning something to do retrofits, etc. A "FSD" car today may not actually have Full Level 4 Self Driving when Tesla finally rolls it out.

Thus it's a hardware problem.

You pose your comment like the answer is obvious, but I don’t know that it is.

If Tesla can solve FSD with only cameras, then yes, their ability to scale is much better than Waymo’s.

But that is a stupendously large “if”!

I’ve seen the Karpathy quote before, and I think it’s kind of hilarious to compare one company which does X0,000 robotaxi rides per day, to another company which has a robotaxi maybe entering production in two years, and say, “well look, they both have problems!”

Bit of a misleading simplification, no? Tesla boosters assume they will crack FSD, it’s just a matter of time. That seems like a big leap to me.

It's "hardware is hard" versus "scaling laws".

Andrejs point is that software problems are easier to scale your way out of. I think we can both agree there's plenty of precedent for this line of thinking.

A company cannot as easily scale their way out of lowering material costs by an order of magnitude or go from 1000 cars a year to 1M cars a year.

But the implicit assumption is that Tesla’s problems can be solved by scaling laws. That seems to me like a big assumption, no?

I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think.

But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by scaling / software, and Waymo is fundamentally screwed and has no way to innovate out of its own scale problems.

Companies lower material costs by an order of magnitude all the time! Look at battery/solar over the last 15 years — in many areas we see two OOMs of cost reduction. It’s a challenge; but one that seems on par with creating software to replicate the optical capabilities of the human brain.

Waymo (and my lived experience with FSD) is proof the end goal is obtainable.

We're surrounded by AI miracles, this website is full of examples, yet people can't conceive of Tesla reaching this finish line. It's pretty odd.

I've clocked 20k miles on FSD. In the brief period I've used it I've seen step improvements. I guess in my mind it's a foregone conclusion with no breakthroughs required. All I need to believe is on the Tesla earning reports, which is Tesla data center build progress (training) and vehicles sold (data)

Its literally the opposite. The only reason Enron is so desperate to pump this vaporware Cyber Cab is because of Waymo running away with robotaxis. 14k paid journeys per day.

In the two years you're referring to, regulating a Waymoe monopoly is going to be the headline development - not the shitco currently being neglected by a drug addicted pedo.

There is no proof that tesla can make FSD work with the level of safety they would need for a robitaxi service. Especially with camera only.

If they do pull that off, or are able pivot to a fused sensor architecture then I do think their hardware potential will make them a good competitor.

I'm not up to speed on the area of autonomous driving at all. Does anyone know if Tesla is basing its next moves off just what the cameras see at the current moment that gets fed into the model? Or is there also a "mapped" component, where it looks up previously mapped information from other Teslas that have traversed this area before? That is what I understand Waymo and GM Supercruise do at least some of the time. There are only certain pre-mapped routes that Supercruise will work on.

https://electrek.co/2024/02/15/gm-nearly-doubles-map-super-c...

They have non-heuristic training. Maybe the AI model is making those connections on the hyper graph if it’s part of the training data, but it would have a decay function as roads get constructed.

you should get out more, tesla is so so far ahead.

What's your basis for saying this? Waymo actually serves rides and has a safety record. If you work in robotics you know that eval is everything -- what's Tesla's L4 driving record? It doesn't even have one, so how can you possibly compare?

L2 driving record vs L4 driving record are insanely different. You can't fall asleep in an L2 car without risking death. You can fall asleep in an L4 car.

I see, that's exactly the kind of "proof" parent comment is looking for

the proof is out there on the road

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYlQjINzO_o&pp=ygUJdGVzbGEgZ...

There is a driver behind steering wheel all the time. It is not a self driving vehicle.

I agree completely with everything you've said, but it's worth keeping in mind that if legal/compliance requirements were to be loosened, a company could expand their offerings with a less robust safety record. And someone close to the incoming presidential administration would be in a position to influence what those requirements are.

Why would this help Tesla more than Waymo?

Even supposing slanted regulatory rule making, Tesla’s autonomous capabilities are vastly inferior to Waymo. The rules can’t be that complicated, either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not.

FWIW I’m a Tesla owner who rides Waymos whenever they are available for a cab ride, and won’t turn on FSD despite a number of free trials

>either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not

This doesn't seem obvious to me. My impression is that the rate of improvement on autonomous systems is at least somewhat gradual. You've seen this in Waymo's slow roll out, moving from offering the service in initially less complicated settings (suburbs of Phoenix) and progressing to more challenging terrain (San Francisco). If that's the case, then a competitor could provide a worse product but, due to the fact that accidents are somewhat rare in general, have this go undetected for a while. In the intervening time, the worse performing company would benefit from collecting additional training data that they couldn't have been able to collect under a more strict regulatory regime.

Definitely possible that Waymo would benefit even more though! They definitely seem well prepared (except for the unfortunate hiccup of working with a Chinese OEM right before a bunch of EV tariffs got put in place)

My impression is that we’re regulations to soften, Waymo would quickly expand to freeways - the lack of their ability to do so now constrains their usefulness

If you won't turn on FSD how do you know Waymo is vastly superior?

What I mean is that I’ve used it and don’t like how it drives / had bad experiences, so I won’t use it now even when it’s free

Tesla has data from 5 million vehicles in real world conditions.

What does Waymo have, a few hundred cars in San Francisco and Phoenix? In a field where data matters more than anything else, Tesla has an insane advantage.

And yet waymo appears to be ahead commercially?

Because Tesla is yet to start commercial operations in this area.

Waymo (and every other AV company) mostly use simulated data. The real world stuff is very repetitive and not that important; they also don't collect nearly as much as you think they do.

And it doesn't help with the main issue, which is Tesla uses cameras and cameras don't work reliably at night, in glare, when they're dirty, etc.

> a company could expand their offerings with a less robust safety record

But would people take it?

I mean, if one service is 25% cheaper but there are a bunch of horror stories of their vehicles crashing into highway barriers (like this past October), I'm not sure people are going to get in.

Driving is 100% cheaper, and there are a bunch of horror stories of people crashing their vehicles into highway barriers. We’re not starting at zero here.

Is driving really 100% cheaper? Owning a car has pretty high fixed costs.

Also, it's different when you crash a car yourself vs a robot doing it. If you are driving, there is clearer accountability than a robot, so the bar must be much higher for the robot.

Self driving cars don't have to be on par with human drivers, they have to be WAY WAY safer else public backlash is likely to ban them.

It's not like Waymo couldn't be rolling out faster, but it's obvious they're doing everything they can to maintain the public's trust in them because once that's lost it'll be incredibly hard to get it back again.

And ultimately the law is one thing, but if people legitimately see Cybercabs as dangerous to them personally they'll take things into their own hands. Someone assassinated a CEO in New York a few days ago, you think pissed off people won't molotov a cybertaxi?

What is this based on? Some made up target numbers? Tesla isn’t going any of this stuff yet so they have no idea what it really costs.

Er, CyberCab is MAGA. I'd rather walk uphill both ways.

Oh ye of little faith, why wait for cybercab when the model 3 was driving NY to LA driveway to driveway in 2018. Waymo died years ago

possible context... summoning from NY to LA around January 2018 was a real promise by Musk.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920

edit: removed talk of downvotes, just providing the tweet.

thanks for the context, shitposting is hard to detect!

It was circa the same period that humans were supposed to be back on the moon (now delayed to end of 2027) :’(

Very possible, but first you've got to ship.

Am I living in a bubble or is much of the excitement behind autonomous cabs just hype? Like, sure, it will be popular, but the way some folks(and not just Tesla zealots) talk about it, it will be 25% of global GDP.

Beyond, idk, saving my relatives the task of driving me to the airport, I don't see my family using an autonomous taxi at all. I think I'm like many Americans in that I like my personal vehicle because it's mine. I'm comfy in it, it's filled with only my stank, and I have tailored it to my liking.

if you understand why Uber, Lyft and taxis are such a big industry than you understand why driverless rides will be such a big industry. It's the same industry. But driverless requires a fraction of the labor cost, hence the potential for cheaper rides that will only grow the industry even larger. And I don't have to tip a robot.