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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

rodneybrooks.com

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Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#51

Post by modeless »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #35
ivanbalepin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of abo…

Waymo's current operational area in the bay runs from Sunnyvale to fisherman's wharf. I don't know how many people that is, but I'm pretty comfortable calling it a big chunk of the bay. They don't run to SFO because SF hasn't approved them for airport service.

I wish! In Palo Alto the cars have been driving around for more than a decade and you still can't hail one. Lately I see them much less often than I used to, actually. I don't think occasional internal-only testing qualifies as "operational".

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#52

Post by Animats »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #49
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the silver bullet for battery tech?

I think there are ~3 major battery improvements to watch out for. 1. Solid state batteries. Likely to be expensive, but promise better energy density. 2. Some really good grid storage battery. Likely made with iron or molten salt or something like that. Dirt cheap, but horrible energy density. 3. Continued Lithium ion battery improvements, e.g. cheaper, more durable etc.

There are now a few large flow batteries. Here's one that's 400 megawatt-hours.[1] Round trip efficiency is poor and the installation is bulky, but storage is just tanks of liquid that are constantly recycled.

[1] https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-largest-flow-battery-grid...

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#53

Post by kqr »

> Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations

Technically true but I'm not convinced it matters that much. The reason autonomation took over in manufacturing was not that they could fire the operator entirely, but that one operator could man 8 machines simultaneously instead of just one.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#54

Post by stouset »

ivanbalepin wrote: post #31
AlotOfReading wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's covering significant areas of 3 major metros, and the core of one minor, with testing deployments in several other major metros. Considering the top 10 metros are >70% of the US ridehail market, that seems like a long way beyond "non-existent" coverage nationally.

Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of abo…

> preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates

I just want to highlight that the only mechanism by which this eventually produces cheaper rates is by removing having to pay a human driver.

I’m not one to forestall technological progress, but there are a huge number of people already living on the margins who will lose one of their few remaining options for income as this expands. AI will inevitably create jobs, but it’s hard to see how it will—in the short term at least—do anything to help the enormous numbers of people who are going to be put out of work.

I’m not saying we should stop the inevitable forward march of technology. But at the same time it’s hard for me to “very much look forward to” the flip side of being able to take robocabs everywhere.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#56

Post by zetalyrae »

> LLMs have proved amazing facile with language.

If you took a transcript of a conversation with Claude 3.6 Sonnet, and sent it back in time even five years ago (just before the GPT-3 paper was published), nobody would believe it was real. They would say that it was fake, or that it was witchcraft. And whoever believed it was real would instantly acknowledge that the Turing test had been passed. This refusal to update beliefs on new evidence is very tiresome.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#57

Post by shrubble »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #14
sashank_1509 wrote: post #6

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 10…

Waymo is the best driver I’ve ridden with. Yes it has limited coverage. Maybe humans are intervening, but unless someone can prove that humans are intervening multiple times per ride, “self driving” is here, IMO, as of 2024.

Does Wayne operate in heavy rain and any kind of snow or ice conditions?

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#58

Post by Mistletoe »

lolinder wrote: post #24
shlomo_z wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. What are some good examples? I am very skeptical of anyone losing their jobs to AI. People are getting laid off for various reasons: - Companies are replacing American tech jobs with foreigners - Many companies hired more devs than they need - companies hired many devs during the pandemic, and don't need them anymore Some companies may claim they are…

> I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount. I'm not even sold on the idea that there were any . The media likes to blame AI for the developer layoffs because it makes a much more exciting story than interest rates and arcane tax code changes. But the fact is that we don't need more than the Section 174 changes and the end of ZIRP to explain what's happened in tech. Federal economic pol…

But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs. Are people just sitting idle at their desks? I do see quite a bit of tech layoffs for sure. Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

>In 2024: At least 95,667 workers at U.S.-based tech companies have lost their jobs so far in the year, according to a Crunchbase News tally.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#59

Post by Denzel »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #38
Denzel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is self-driving “here” if the economics alone prove that it can’t get “here”? It’s not just limited coverage, it’s practically non-existent coverage, both nationally and globally, with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in.

Here in the product/research sense, which is the hardest bar to cross. Making it cheaper takes time but generally we have reduced cost of everything by orders of magnitude when manufacturing ramps up, and I don't think self driving hardware(sensors etc) would be any different.

It’s not even here in the product/research sense. First, as the author points out, it’s better characterized as operator-assisted semi-autonomous driving in limited locations. That’s great but far from autonomous driving.

Secondly, if we throw a dart on a map: 1) what are the chances Waymo can deploy there, 2) how much money would they have to invest to deploy, and 3) how long would it take?

Waymo is nowhere near a turn-key system where they can setup in any city without investing in the infrastructure underlying Waymo’s system. See [1] which details the amount of manual work and coordination with local officials that Waymo has to do per city.

And that’s just to deploy an operator-assisted semi-autonomous vehicle in the US. EU, China, and India aren’t even on the roadmap yet. These locations will take many more billions worth of investment.

Not to mention Waymo hasn’t even addressed long-haul trucking, an industry ripe for automation that makes cold, calculated, rational business decisions based on economics. Waymo had a brief foray in the industry and then gave up. Because they haven’t solved autonomous driving yet and it’s not even on the horizon.

Whereas we can drop most humans in any of these locations and they’ll mostly figure it out within the week.

Far more than lowering the cost, there are fundamental technological problems that remain unsolved.

[1]: https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#60

Post by jsnell »

Denzel wrote: post #21
laweijfmvo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is the best driver I’ve ridden with. Yes it has limited coverage. Maybe humans are intervening, but unless someone can prove that humans are intervening multiple times per ride, “self driving” is here, IMO, as of 2024.

In what sense is self-driving “here” if the economics alone prove that it can’t get “here”? It’s not just limited coverage, it’s practically non-existent coverage, both nationally and globally, with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in.

Where's the economic proof of impossibility? As far as I know Waymo has not published any official numbers, and any third party unit profitability analysis is going to be so sensitive to assumptions about e.g. exact depreciation schedules and utilization percentages that the error bars would inevitably be straddling both sides of the break-even line.

> with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in

That argument doesn't seem horribly compelling given the regular expansions to new areas.

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