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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

rodneybrooks.com

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Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#101

Post by RamblingCTO »

rcpt wrote: post #70
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…

It's pretty much impossible to get work as a copywriter now

I was thinking about this. I think we have an overcorrection right now. People get laid off because of expected performance of AI, not real performance. With copywriting and software development we have three options:

1. leaders notice they were wrong, start to increase human headcount again 2. human work is seen as boutique and premium, used for marketing and market placement 3. we just accept the sub-par quality of AI and go with it (quite likely with copywriting I guess)

I'd like to compare it with cinema and Netflix. There was a time where lost of stuff was mindless shit, but there was still place for A24 and it took the world by storm. What's gonna happen? No one knows.

But anyway, I figure that 90% of "laid off because of AI" is just regular lay-offs with a nice sounding reason. You don't loose anything by saying that and only gain in stakeholder trust.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#102

Post by RamblingCTO »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #68

>>> [self driving cars are rmeote controlled] in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars. Wait, What now? I have never heard this, but from the founder of CSAIL I am going to take it as a statement of fact and proof that basically every AI company is flat out lying. I mean the difference between remote piloting a drone that ha…

Nitpick: he's not the founder, not by far. He's just a past director of CSAIL

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#103

Post by rrr_oh_man »

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

You haven’t paid attention to how VC companies work.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#104

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

It seems to me that the redefined flying cars for extremely wealthy people did happen? eVTOLs are being sold/delivered to the general public. Certainly still pretty rare, as I've never seen one in real life. I'd love to have one but would probably hate a world where everyone has them. Not really wanting to have this argument a second time in a week (seriously- just look at my past comments instead of replying here as…

Yeah, as an NLP researcher I was reading the post with interest until I found that gross oversimplification about LLMs, which has been repeatedly proved wrong. Now I don't trust the comments and predictions on the other fields I know much less about.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#106

Post by davedx »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #86
Denzel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analyzing Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions gives you all the evidence necessary. It’s safe to assume that a company’s ownership takes the decisions that they believe will maximize the value of their company. Therefore, we can look at Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions, with respect to Waymo, to see what they think about Waymo’s opportunity. In the past five years, Alphabet has spent >$100B to buyback thei…

>believes their money is better spent buying back their stock, Alphabet has to buy back their stock because of the massive amount of stock comp they award.

> Alphabet has to buy back their stock because of the massive amount of stock comp they award.

Wait, really? They're a publically traded company; don't they just need to issue new stock (the opposite of buying it back) to employees, who can then choose to sell it in the public market?

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#107

Post by davedx »

jsnell wrote: post #60
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.

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, outs…

That's a very hand wavy argument. How about starting here:

> Mario Herger: Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of $10,000 per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements. The five lidars, 29 cameras, 4 radars – adds another $40,000 - $50,000. This would put the cost of a current Waymo robotaxi at around $150,000

There are definitely some numbers out there that allow us to estimate within some standard deviations how unprofitable Waymo is

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#108

Post by davedx »

gwern wrote: post #9
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…

The Waymo criticisms are absurd to the point of dishonesty. He criticizes a Waymo for... not pulling out fast enough around a truck, or for human criminals vandalizing them? Oh no, once some Waymos did a weird thing where they honked for a while! And a couple times they got stuck over a few million miles! This is an amazingly lame waste of space, and the fact that he does his best to only talk about Tesla instead of…

Interesting, that wasn't my takeaway from the article at all!

Direct quote from the article:

> Then I will weave them together to explain how it is still pretty much business as usual, and I mean that in a good way, with steady progress on both the science and engineering of AI.

There are some extremely emotional defences of Waymo on this comment thread. I don't quite understand why? Are they somehow inviolable to constructive criticism in the SV crowd?

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#109

Post by davedx »

Animats wrote: post #10

> That being said, we are not on the verge of replacing and eliminating humans in either white collar jobs or blue collar jobs. Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. > Waymo not autonomous enough It's not clear how often Waymo cars need remote attention, but it's not every 1-2 miles. Customers would notice the vehicle being stopped and stuck during the wait for customer service. There are m…

I think what Waymo's achieved is really impressive, and I like the way they've rolled out (carefully), but there's a lot of non evidence based defense of them in this comment thread. YouTube videos of people driving for hours are textbook survivorship bias. (What about all the videos people made but didn't upload because their drive didn't go perfectly?)

Nobody knows how many times operators intervene, because Waymo hasn't said. It's literally impossible to deduce.

Which means I also agree his estimate could also be wildly wrong too.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#110

Post by davedx »

shlomo_z wrote: post #13
Animats wrote: post #10

> That being said, we are not on the verge of replacing and eliminating humans in either white collar jobs or blue collar jobs. Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. > Waymo not autonomous enough It's not clear how often Waymo cars need remote attention, but it's not every 1-2 miles. Customers would notice the vehicle being stopped and stuck during the wait for customer service. There are m…

> 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…

Yeah, the AgentForce thing is a classic example. Internal leaks say Salesforce is using it as cover for more regular (cost cutting based) layoffs. People who've actually evaluated AgentForce don't think it's ready for prime time. It's more smoke and mirrors (and lots of marketing).
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