I took a fully-autonomyous Cybercab to a coffee shop yesterday; it doesn't even have a steering wheel. It was just a short drive, but it handled various complications (a garbage truck, double-parked cars, construction, unpainted speed bumps) with aplomb. The driving felt extremely smooth and human-like (better, in my experience, than Waymo, which can still be a bit jerky).
Those operate in constrained areas of a few cities though - with a control room, that's a long way from telling your car to drive across state unattended.
Yeah that's fair, though my understanding (perhaps wrong!) is Tesla unlike Waymo doesn't need super-detailed maps; it could in theory go across the state right now (but it doesn't have legal authorization).
(In Austin it covers what looks to me like the whole city but not the surrounding smaller towns.)
Do you know how much of the drive and handling those complications was actually fully autonomous vs how much (or what key points) were handled from the remote control room by a human?
I'm not sure how you would tell, but that is a critical question for scaling and true autonomy.
Yeah that's a good point -- I'm not sure, but it definitely felt like there was no remote control going on, just based on smoothness and speed. But for sure the ability exists, so good pts re true autonmy and scaling.
Yes, your comment on smoothness and speed prompted me to also wonder at what level the remote control could be happening.
The obvious level is the monitor just takes over driving like a remote FPV driver/pilot.
But I wonder if the software can also flag alerts early when it starts to identify ambiguity, and the monitor can see the camera+lidar outputs and make a guidance-level input like [get in the left lane here] or [pause/go], and the direct driver inputs (steering/brake/accelerator) are never interrupted, but they have better "tactical" guidance from the central office?
Years and years ago I saw this story on k5 when it came out and never read it -- but from commentary I always thought was some sort of hard sci-fi exploration of what happens when we get AGI/ASI.
So all these years later AI is real, I see the story again, and I figure, hey, why not read it. And how very surprised I was to find out it's basically a horny kink story with a little bit of AI/SF window dressing!
I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different.
I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that.
In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product.
It's exactly because everyone's tone is different that I'm confident it's AI.
Granted, a bit of AI-influencing phrasing in human writing is common, but the idea that someone sat down, worked hard, and came back with an entire page of a pitch-perfect AI slop is simply incredible.
Have you tried iterating on style feedback in AGENTS.md? I've been reasonably successful using this to get it to output code in a terse, non-defensive style that matches my hand-written code.
It's just Claudeslop. It's everywhere. An epidemic. If you're familiar it stands out instantly. (Would you let someone else talk for you? In real life? Like open up your mouth and let a TTS system spit out the sounds and pick the words? No? Then you shouldn't do the same thing with writing!)
> 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.
This was false. University of Alabama said this was according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.[1] NCES said 21% of US adults had low English literacy. This meant could not participate due to a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability to be interviewed, below level 1, or level 1. Their definition of functionally illiterate in English was below level 1. This was 4.1%.[2]
Independently of literacy, I think many people desperately yearn for someone else to write or speak for them.
"Putting their name on documents" or "speaking publicly" is just an excruciating requirement to keep cashing checks, and each time it comes up the first thought bubbling up from the autonomic system is "how the fuck do I get out of this".
I took a fully-autonomyous Cybercab to a coffee shop yesterday; it doesn't even have a steering wheel. It was just a short drive, but it handled various complications (a garbage truck, double-parked cars, construction, unpainted speed bumps) with aplomb. The driving felt extremely smooth and human-like (better, in my experience, than Waymo, which can still be a bit jerky).
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