Hacker News Reader

Well, trying to build AI using failed papers from the 1980s have near zero value today.

What Tesla is doing is like building a modern app but refusing to do A/B tests or code review or version control, generally universally accepted methods in the current industry, and going back to re-try software development patterns of the 1980s that failed.

>>Well, trying to build AI using failed papers from the 1980s have near zero value today.

I think if you had picked any other example you'd have been correct, but many current-day AI advances are based on decades old techniques. One caption from an article about Geoff Hinton states: "This publication from the mid-1980s showed how to train a neural network with many layers. It set the stage for this decade’s progress in AI."[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one...

Cheers for the correction!

The issue is not one of carefully acknowledging the past and noting that some of its lessons don't apply.

The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture. This is why the n-gate summaries love to describe Hacker News reinventing everything from first principles -- there's this ingrained assumption that it's literally impossible for anyone outside of SV to have ever had any kind of relevant experience or possessed any kind of relevant knowledge, and so there's no point in studying the history at all.

Tesla is now learning, in a very painful way, why hubris is traditionally considered a major flaw, and that maybe this stuff is harder than they thought and they could have benefited from standing on the shoulders of some giants.

> The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture.

Is that the same arrogance of the opposite party saying "I told you so, son"?

I have never been in the Silicon Valley, so I won't talk about that. Yet, I think that this mentality creates at least 1 good thing after trying 99 times.

I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path, that you need to always follow what your "parents" have been telling you, etc - and this is due to the environment I live in, unfortunately.

If Musk had been able to achieve what he had envisioned, now we would be talking about something totally different - OMG, what a genius, how come we didn't come up with that earlier? How come this young man made something we thought impossible, despite all the studies, etc.? And so forth. That's the same cowardice that doesn't allow us to think further, to think bigger. He does, he fails, he tries, he fails again, and who knows, maybe he makes it. If he doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. Without that way of thinking, we wouldn't have put our foot on the Moon.

I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path

Who said it has to? I didn't.

What I said was that Silicon-Valley-type people often display a certain amount of hubris in believing that nobody else has ever done what they're trying to do, and therefore disregard free knowledge that others obtained at great expense.

Musk is attempting the revolutionary, never-before-heard-of, herculean task of... building a factory to make cars. Strip away all the PR-speak from Musk's and Tesla's public announcements and statements, and that's what you find underneath. "Build a car factory" is not a new problem. We have over a century of prior art on things people have tried, what succeeded and what failed. It's the willful ignoring of this prior art that I'm complaining about; other companies have learned about the advantages and disadvantages of automation, for example, but the whole enterprise of Tesla is wrapped up in so much mythology around breaking new ground and being completely new that they were constitutionally incapable of admitting "yeah, this is a thing other people have done, too, maybe we should study how it went for them and learn from that".

Most things Tesla seem to come down to SpaceX and Mars. When I have a conversation about a car company and it ends up veering off to Mars, I realize that it was never really a conversation about cars to begin with. Having said that, I don’t know how to cut through the mythology, some of which seems deserved. I was one of the people who thought that SpaceX was probably going to fail years ago, and I was quite wrong. Some of what you’re saying was part of my reasoning too, insofar as building and launching rockets wasn’t a new thing, but really quite an old one.

Even still, I find it hard to see the future for Tesla that real fans seem to perceive. SpaceX has literally and figuratively taken off, but Tesla just seems stuck. I’m especially leery of how willing they seem to be to beta test software that can cause loss of life and limb. I also don’t see how existing Titans in the automotive space can’t just eat Tesla’s lunch, given that they can crank out a couple orders of magnitude more cars per year than Tesla. What is Tesla doing that they can’t copy, given that Tesla is still trying to figure out the assembly line?

SpaceX I think has a better chance of succeeding simply because it's Musk doing the thing that's historically worked for him: moving into a space where somebody else already shelled out for the fundamental R&D, then delivering iterative improvements slathered in tons of marketing sheen.

This is about punching pieces of metal into a car, not about inventing a sentient AI for 4D chess.

Sorry, but this comment is really diminishing the entire purpose of years and years of studies in AI.

I think I misunderstood the parent comment. I can't delete the answer, though :) sorry about that!

> I think with this way of thinking there will never be progress.

This position is completely fair.

But the company taking these risks should never, ever have been Tesla.

>It's thanks to this try-and-fail that this man was able to build things that nobody thought to be feasible.

Can you list a couple of things that this man built, that everyone thought not possible?