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Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

fortune.com

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Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#161

Post by jacobolus »

goosejuice wrote: post #149
arnaudsm wrote: post #131

[flagged]

Well your father can't buy a Waymo. Even if he could it wouldn't go very far, wouldn't work everywhere and would cost at least 2x a model 3 or Y. So there are at least several leads Tesla has. It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it? This isn't Lyft vs Uber. A better comparison to Tesla FSD would be blue cruise, super cruise, drive pilot, god's eye, and every other consumer level 2 ADAS.

The premise of Tesla's current market value is that they will capture a majority share of a dramatically expanded global taxi market. Waymo being dramatically ahead at producing workable robotaxis entirely undercuts that premise.

If you instead think Tesla's promise is consumer cars, Tesla's valuation is roughly equal to the entire rest of the global auto industry, despite being only a tiny and declining fraction of global sales. The relevant competitors then are Toyota, VW, Ford, BYD, etc. etc. Objectively, as a consumer auto company Tesla seems to be stagnant and falling behind.

I guess they're also hyping vaporware humanoid robots; if you ask me a future where a significant proportion of all families on earth purchase a humanoid robot seems completely implausible. It's very Jetsons though. Maybe they'll start building flying cars too.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#162

Post by atleastoptimal »

arnaudsm wrote: post #131

[flagged]

Doesn't matter. That hype will draw attention, which will draw investors, which will draw in money to pay for the best researchers until they become SOTA.

If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up.

Distribution is part of innovation. Brain computer interfaces exist but those who would be willing to undergo the procedure to get them don't have that option, then an inefficiency exists in the market that can be filled by a competitor. Musk's companies play on the same field as everyone else, but they continue to win because operating efficiency, mind-share and tactics are all part of the game, and he is the best at winning it in many domains.

Edit: I understand the ethical considerations of such a nascent technology. I just feel that we live in a world where miracles exist that could help thousands of lives, but they move too slowly to help those lives. How long are paralyzed people waiting for a cheap way to have some more agency in the world? Is the only way to reach it being available sooner doing unscrupulous things that buck safety requirements?

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#163

Post by umbra07 »

jacobolus wrote: post #161
goosejuice wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well your father can't buy a Waymo. Even if he could it wouldn't go very far, wouldn't work everywhere and would cost at least 2x a model 3 or Y. So there are at least several leads Tesla has. It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it? This isn't Lyft vs Uber. A better comparison to Tesla FSD would be blue cruise, super cruise, drive pilot, god's eye, and every other consumer level 2 ADAS.

The premise of Tesla's current market value is that they will capture a majority share of a dramatically expanded global taxi market. Waymo being dramatically ahead at producing workable robotaxis entirely undercuts that premise. If you instead think Tesla's promise is consumer cars, Tesla's valuation is roughly equal to the entire rest of the global auto industry, despite being only a tiny and declining fraction of…

Okay that's not what ordinary people like GP's dad are envisioning. Normal people are envisioning either: "wow I can buy a Tesla and it can drive me around!!" or a macroview "wow in the future Elon Musk is going to make self-driving cars so good that nobody will have to drive!".

We are discussing "normal people thoughts", not market sentiment.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#164

Post by Arainach »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #162
arnaudsm wrote: post #131

[flagged]

Doesn't matter. That hype will draw attention, which will draw investors, which will draw in money to pay for the best researchers until they become SOTA. If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up. Distribution is part of innovation. Brain computer interfaces exist but those who would be willing to undergo the procedure to get th…

>If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up.

Because other companies have ethics and follow the rules and best practices. They register their clinical trials with the NIH and they stop and ask questions if half the monkeys they test on end up dead.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#165

Post by qayxc »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #132
fracus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, if you are blind from birth, but visual signals were suddenly restored, your brain wouldn't know how to process them. Blind from birth = blind forever. I'm not certain though.

I think the brain would adapt. It may take a while but the brain is very flexible and adaptable.

According to research impaired structural brain development due to visual deprivation from birth is not fully reversible and limits functional recovery. So even if eye sight is fully restored, cortical function will not be able to fully take advantage of that.

Experiments and studies have shown that this might be due to the fact that the visual cortex will take over a similar role in blind people as it does for people with intact eye sight. The brain uses different sensory inputs in that case and the visual brain structure is not restored after eye sight recovery.

This is still an ongoing field of research of course, but so far congenital blindless seems to be incurable, regardless of whether the sensory apparatus could be restored or replaced. Note that this only means seeing like a non-blind person. Some limited visual perception is still possible, just not "normal" sight.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#166

Post by pizzathyme »

arnaudsm wrote: post #131

[flagged]

There's a lot of parallels here to the history of Nikola Tesla vs. Marconi. Tesla's inventions were superior, more reliable, more versatile in almost every way. But Marconi is the one remembered as the father of the radio, despite stealing Tesla's ideas and implementing them in less reliable fashion. He got to market fast, iterated on horrible versions, built broken products, but he shipped shipped shipped. And in the market, Tesla faded away, and Marconi won.

I say this as a big Elon skeptic. Technical superiority is only a small piece of the puzzle. But 10 years from now, I would be very surprised if the SOTA tech you mention has a fraction as many users as Neuralink.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#167

Post by mlinhares »

umbra07 wrote: post #163
jacobolus wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of Tesla's current market value is that they will capture a majority share of a dramatically expanded global taxi market. Waymo being dramatically ahead at producing workable robotaxis entirely undercuts that premise. If you instead think Tesla's promise is consumer cars, Tesla's valuation is roughly equal to the entire rest of the global auto industry, despite being only a tiny and declining fraction of…

Okay that's not what ordinary people like GP's dad are envisioning. Normal people are envisioning either: "wow I can buy a Tesla and it can drive me around!!" or a macroview "wow in the future Elon Musk is going to make self-driving cars so good that nobody will have to drive!". We are discussing "normal people thoughts", not market sentiment.

It’s the usual “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", as much as the fundamentals do not work he has captured the average investor and general narrative that something really huge would have to happen to take him down.

I really don’t see anything that will cut through the narrative now.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#168

Post by michaelmrose »

tass wrote: post #159
arnaudsm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was comparing Robotaxis with Waymo in Texas. If you want to compare Teslas with consumer cars, the best metric we have is the fatality rate per mile. Tesla is #1.

This metric says nothing about self driving capabilities. In fact, I'd argue that FSD supervising the driver (and doing things like limiting speed before corners) would make their cars safer. To me this metric shows that their cars are very high performing, and for most drivers they're probably the fastest accelerating cars they've ever driven. Tesla should probably default them to 'chill' mode and provide a warning…

It is fantastically optimistic to attribute Teslas horrific stats to the cars being speedy

For instance the model y had a fatality rate of 10.6 per billion vehicle miles 4x the average.

Its also seems unreasonable to suppose that they are poorly suited to survive a crash as this doesn't seem to be indicated.

A more logical conclusion is that a box with a giant flashing distracting tablet in the center which lies and says it can drive itself gets crashed more because people are functionally incapable of going from passenger to driver at random intervals with no notice.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#169

Post by cramsession »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #162
arnaudsm wrote: post #131

[flagged]

Doesn't matter. That hype will draw attention, which will draw investors, which will draw in money to pay for the best researchers until they become SOTA. If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up. Distribution is part of innovation. Brain computer interfaces exist but those who would be willing to undergo the procedure to get th…

That's not how things have played out with Tesla. They have all the investment in the world and the most irrational valuation to have ever graced the public markets, yet their tech is years behind competitors.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#170

Post by cramsession »

modeless wrote: post #156
arnaudsm wrote: post #131

[flagged]

Classic HN middlebrow dismissal, only upvoted because people dislike Musk. Word error rate of 25% is unusable. Also it needs extensive retraining every few days. They used four fixed electrode arrays, like pushing a miniature bed of nails into your brain, which is far more invasive and less advanced than Neuralink's one device with threads individually implanted by robot. Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focu…

I have never seen stats showing that FSD is "rapidly improving". Quite the contrary, it seems hobbled by its backward hardware and plateaued in terms of progress.
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