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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

rodneybrooks.com

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Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#171

Post by vessenes »

benreesman wrote: post #42
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 cars can drive. Everything from the (limited) public literature to riding them personally has me totally persuaded that they can drive. DeepMind RL/MCTS can succeed in fairly open-ended settings like StarCraft and shit. Brain/DeepMind still knocks hard. They under-invested in LLMs and remain kind of half-hearted around it because they think it’s a dumbass sideshow because it is a dumbass sideshow. They train on…

Agreed Waymo cars can drive. Also I don't believe that, say, when a city bus stops on a narrow street near a school crosswalk, that the decision to edge out and around it is made on board the car, as I saw recently. The "car" made the right decision, drove it perfectly, and was safe at all times, but I just don't think anyone but a human in a call center said yes to that.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#172

Post by bhelkey »

It is valuable to make predictions about the world, evaluate those predictions, and reflect on the quality of the predictions and what biases skewed those predictions. The key is to refine how one looks at the world.

I don't see that in this article. Largely, I see the author trying to argue that he was right in 2018 rather than trying to take a step back to accurately evaluate their predictions.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#173

Post by throw-qqqqq »

bhelkey wrote: post #151
4ndrewl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. If you spoke about self-driving cars a few decades ago you would have understood it to have meant that you could go to a dealer and buy a car that would drive itself, wherever you might be, without your input as a driver. No-one would have equated the phrase "we'll have self-driving cars" with "some taxis in a few of US cities"

The prediction is: > First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day. Their 2025 analysis is: "This is unlikely to happen in the first half of this century." The prediction is clear. The evaluation is dishonest.

I agree.. Waymo sells +150k rides every week according to Alphabet’s Q3 2024 earnings announcement. Yes they need human assistance once in a while. I know of plenty other automation that needs to be tickled or rebooted periodically to work, that most would still say works automatically.

Maybe he has a very narrow or strict definition of ‘driverless’. That would explain the “not in this half of the century”-sentiment. I mean, it’s 25 years!

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#174

Post by brcmthrowaway »

Animats wrote: post #22
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the silver bullet for battery tech?

Solid state batteries. Prototypes work, but high-volume manufacturing doesn't work yet. The major battery manufacturers are all trying to get this to production. Early versions will probably be expensive. Maybe a 2x improvement in kwh/kg. Much less risk of fire or thermal runaway. Charging in < 10 mins.

What about LK-99? Twitter influencers were talking about that.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#175

Post by littlestymaar »

Mistletoe wrote: post #58
lolinder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, accordi…

> 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

Same can be said for github, and open-source deoendency management tools like npm, and I'd argue that it had an even a much bigger impact then, and did you see what happen afterwards? Where were the mass layoffs back then? The number of software developers is actually much higher than before that era.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#176

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

> 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

Honestly, back in 2012 or something I was convinced that we would have autonomous driving by now, and by autonomous driving I definitely didn't mean “one company is able to offer autonomous taxi rides is a very limited amount of places with remote operator supervision”, the marketing pitch has always been something along “the car you'll buy will be autonomously driving you to whatever destination you ask for, and you'll be just a passenger in you own car”, and we definitely aren't there at all when all we have is Waymo.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#177

Post by littlestymaar »

coderintherye wrote: post #61

Good example of everything that can wrong with a prediction market if left unchecked. Don't like that Waymo broke your prediction? Fine just move your goalposts. Like that prediction came true but on the wrong timeframe? Just move the goal posts. Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so they can put actual goal posts in place with mechanisms that require certain outcomes in order to finalize on a predicti…

> Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so

Polymarket is a great way to incentive people into making their predictions happen, with all clandestine tools at their disposal, which is definitely not what you want for your society generally.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#178

Post by HDThoreaun »

coderintherye wrote: post #61

Good example of everything that can wrong with a prediction market if left unchecked. Don't like that Waymo broke your prediction? Fine just move your goalposts. Like that prediction came true but on the wrong timeframe? Just move the goal posts. Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so they can put actual goal posts in place with mechanisms that require certain outcomes in order to finalize on a predicti…

Polymarket suffers from the same problem. This market https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31... was resolved in an extremely contentious way.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#179

Post by mrguyorama »

metalliqaz wrote: post #167
skizm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t that already happen in Phoenix? They paused the program there, but unsure if there was actually a lawsuit or settlement.

Wasn't there a human "monitor" in the car?

There was, but the reality is that the modern US regulatory environment demonstrably doesn't care whether cars labled as self driving are actually capable of that safely, and have not demonstrated any interest in regulating such, and that was BEFORE we popularly elected a group of charlatans, hacks, and grifters that have all made "The courts will bend over backwards for us and our wealth" a huge part of America.

Like, Reagan's instructions to the regulatory agencies to basically stand down was only just beginning to be undone after 40 years, and we immediately elected the people promising to slam hard in the other direction.

America will be a regulatory free for all for business for decades.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#180

Post by sashank_1509 »

Denzel wrote: post #73
jsnell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

This is just a quirk of the modern stock market capitalist system. Yes, stock buybacks are more lucrative than almost anything other than a blitz-scaling B2B SAAS. But for good of society, I would prefer if Alphabet spent their money developing new technologies and not on stock buybacks / dividends. If they think every tech is a waste of money, then give it to charity, not stock buybacks. That said, Alohabet does develop new technologies regularly. Their track record before 2012 is stellar, their track record now is good (Alphafold, Waymo, Tensorflow, TPU etc), and it is nowhere close to being the worst offender of stock buybacks (I’m looking at you Apple), but we should move away from stock price over everything as a mentality and force companies to use their profits for the common good.
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