The problem is that of an infinitely long tail — no one is close.
The long tail can't be truly infinite. It is some very large quantity driven by the combination of many, many factors. Just that amount of analysis gives us some actionable insight.
It would be very easy to miss out on some of the factors, and be off by many orders of magnitude in either direction. The actionable insight, is that the analysis needs to be pinned down and made concrete. You'd better be damned right about it, or you're very likely going to be very, very wrong.
With regards to Elon Musk, the question is, how good do you think the analysis is. They got it spot on with rockets at SpaceX. They got batteries and motors in EVs right at Tesla. What about Tesla scaling production, automation, and AI? I'm less sure about that last one.
The long tail is exactly where Tesla's strength is btw.
Things that are improving exponentially seem far off when you look at them with intuitions developed on linear growth. Autonomy may be far off... or it may be closer than we think.
I don't trust my own judgement to know the answer, but I suspect the people at Tesla have a better handle on it than you or I.
I'm sure they see things in their long tail data that we would probably never think of. Even top experts at other self driving tech companies don't know all of what Tesla is seeing in its long tail data... so I think Tesla has a few more clues than the rest of us.
The long tail can't be truly infinite. It is some very large quantity driven by the combination of many, many factors. Just that amount of analysis gives us some actionable insight.
It would be very easy to miss out on some of the factors, and be off by many orders of magnitude in either direction. The actionable insight, is that the analysis needs to be pinned down and made concrete. You'd better be damned right about it, or you're very likely going to be very, very wrong.
With regards to Elon Musk, the question is, how good do you think the analysis is. They got it spot on with rockets at SpaceX. They got batteries and motors in EVs right at Tesla. What about Tesla scaling production, automation, and AI? I'm less sure about that last one.