Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.
Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024.
Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.
Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.
Waymo is a great example, actually. They serve Phoenix, SF and LA. Those locations aren’t chosen at random, they present a small subset of all the weather and road conditions that humans can handle easily.
So yes: handling 100,000 passengers is a milestone. The growth from 10,000 to 100,000 implies it’s going to keep growing exponentially. But eventually they’re going to encounter stuff like Midwest winters that can easily stop progress in its tracks.
About driverless cars, new tech adoptions often start slow, until the iceberg tips and then it's very quick change. Like mobile phones today.
I remember thinking before smartphones that had entire-day battery and good touchscreens: These people really think population will use phones more than desktop computers? Here we are.
I wouldn't say so, because the cars are not at all autonomous in our understanding of autonomous.
The cars aren't making all their decisions in real-time like a human driver. They, Waymo, meticulously mapped and continue to map every inch of the traversable city. They don't know how to drive, they know how to drive THERE.
It would be like if I went to the DMV to take a driving test. I would fail immediately, because the parking lot is not one I've seen and analyzed before.
"true" self driving is not possible with our current implementation of automobiles. You cannot safely mix automobiles that self-drive with human drivers. And the best solution is to converge towards known routes. We don't even necessarily how to program the routes - we can instead encode them in the road itself.
It might occur to you that I'm speaking about rail. The reality is it's trivial to automate rail systems, but the variables of free-form driving can't be automated.
In the first case there are inherent safety constraints preventing it and thus its not available to public to freely use. It's highly regulated. With GPT to writing code, it is already generally available and in heavy use. There are no such life-and-death concerns in the main.
In the second case there are inherent technical challenges to using non-fiat currency and the fx volatility with fiat is wild. There are also barriers and inconveniences to conversion. With GPT writing code, the user can review for quality and still be many x more productive and there is far fewer fees and risk of loss.
It's risky to take two failed or slow innovations and assume that all innovations will be failed or slow.
On a small subsection of US roads, British roads for example don’t make any sense.
However, generally I think being a software developer might be not a career in 10 years which is terrible to think about. Designer too. And all of this is through stealing peoples work as their own.
These models are not repositories or archives of others work that they simply stitch together to create output. It's more accurate to say that they view work and then create an algorithm that can output the essence of that work.
For image models, people are often pretty surprised to learn that they are only a few gigabytes in size, despite training on petabytes of images.
Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.
Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.