[spamalot159]

To be fair to Elon, there were a lot of naysayers coming at him about Tesla and SpaceX but he has accomplished more than they ever thought he would. Most of the time, however he has exaggerated the timeline in order to keep the hype around him and his companies. I think he would do better to under-promise and over-deliver. Especially with a technology that could potentially cost lives if delivered too early.

[bhupy]

The way I like to think about it, Elon Musk over over over over promises, and "just" over delivers. Most CEOs could never dream of producing the kinds of real results that Elon Musk has, but also most CEOs aren't as comically obnoxious as he is.

[andyxor]

with rockets and electric vehicles however science & engineering had an "angle of attack" based on fundamental discoveries in physics, and centuries of continuous progress , that's not the case with AI.

Deep learning is great for a few narrow cases but there is no path to general human-like intelligence required for a complex human-like activity like self-driving which has an infinitely long tail of edge cases you can't train for with these large and "dumb" ML models equivalent to curve fitting.

The mistake of Tesla is betting on covering more and more of these edge cases incrementally but what's needed is qualitative change rather than incremental improvement.

By qualitative change I mean actual model of human-like intelligence, including reasoning and "common sense", which is a prerequisite for self-driving. The solution to this problem requires more than the sum of its parts.

It's kind of like planning to build an airplane before figuring out Newton' basic laws of physics.

[bluGill]

I don't want human like AI to drive cars. I want a deterministic system that we can prove always does the right thing.

I'm not sure that is possible on roads.

[kingsuper20]

I tend to give him a break since he is one of the few modern entrepreneurs that I think actually produces things of real value.

The fact that it tends to be in businesses that are among the most mature and hardest to get into is really amazing.

[ProAm]

> Most of the time, however he has exaggerated the timeline in order to keep the hype around him and his companies

All of Elon's companies are heavily subsidized by US tax payers (energy credits for Tesla and solar, rockets are paid for by NASA, military, etc...) So to use tax payer money you need to have the goodwill of the tax payers behind you. Its worth every penny to lie and bolster your image of doing cool shit so people don't mind their tax dollars continuing to go towards your cause. It's 100% PR. Without US tax payers none of these companies would still exist.

[snapetom]

True, I am unfairly singling Elon out, but he's put himself at the front of this hype train. There are plenty of other "visionaries" that are in the engine with him.