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Comment by crubier | Hacker News Reader

My startup is using AI in many forms in order to build an accurate digital twin of the world cheaply, and extract valuable insights from it.

In a few years we will have an accurate digital twin of the world, almost indistinguishable from the real world. this would have been impossible or way too expensive without massive automation with AI

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> In a few years we will have an accurate digital twin of the world

No, you will not, unless you redefine what "accurate" means.

Google has 3D models of cities nowadays. 20years ago we only had 2D maps. Why do you think this trend will not continue?

Google Street View is full of artifacts, it's not even close to being accurate. The same goes for satellite imagery of rugged mountains. I'm not even mentioning the vegetation, snow cover, river levels, etc.

Accuracy is relative to the need. By accurate I mean accurate enough that we can extract actionable information from it.

For power plant critical structures we want 0.5mm, updated every 6months. For forest management we want 5m, updated every 2 years.

But this increase in spatial and temporal accuracy will keep on going. At some point in the future a small swarm of insect-sized drones will be able to capture a whole forest in a day for a super low cost. And a few people walking with basic smartphones for will be enough to map a whole city.

In 1980 you would have said that google maps 3D and google street view would never exist...

Well, you just redefined accurate to "accurate enough that we can extract actionable information from it". Your statement is true now.

BTW, I never say never.

Collecting more data scales far better than processing more data into information. That's one bottleneck right there.

While this is true about user data, this is definitely not true in the context of real physical world data.

Getting a picture from the tip of a wind turbine blade is done with a drone in the best case, or a rope access technician in the worst (legacy) case. Analyzing this picture with AI to identify anomalies takes a few seconds. That’s one of my company’s use cases.

In the same way, ask the google maps team about what scales better: flying real airplanes to capture photographic data, or just processing this data to get 3D models...

Edit: typo

> In a few years we will have an accurate digital twin of the world, almost indistinguishable from the real world. this would have been impossible or way too expensive without massive automation with AI

Is the rent cheaper there?

By helping city and infrastructure planning it should help get more resource efficient, so hopefully yes?

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