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Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

This really captures the essence of his naïveté, to me:

> There are no fundamental challenges remaining. There are many small problems. And then there's the challenge of solving all those small problems and putting the whole system together.

That is the fundamental problem, of all AI research. How many edge cases are there, and how many does it have to handle gracefully before it’s “good enough”? I think the tail is longer than people expect, and the changes that have to be made to address it are very fundamental.

At the same time, I really want them to succeed, and I think FSD could be one of the most transformative tech advancements of the century, like the original invention of the automobile.

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That's not the fundamental problem of all AI research. That's the fundamental problem of all software engineering!

Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product. And you can't cheat yourself around it. We managed to cheat ourselves around growing complexity in subsystems by isolating them more and more, which allowed us to tackle the complexity with more people working in parallel. But that just further increases the integration complexity, where we don't know a way to effectively scale our approaches to deal with it.

The only way we know is "cutting corners": creating a system that's just working well in 99% of cases - leave the small problems of the remaining 1% unsolved, hence there's nothing to integrate for those. Works well enough for production use in a lot of situations. Doesn't work at all when it comes to Level 5 autonomous driving. And that's what Elon either doesn't understand or actively ignores.

>Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product.

100% This, which should be very obvious to anyone working at a FAANG tier company.

There are no shortage of ideas, technical documents, prototypes working locally. However to get a product to production that integrates (even in a paved path) is most often the most complex task.

Schrödinger’s Charlatan: he’s both a genius and the most naïve when it comes to FSD, at the same time.

No sir, he’s been making fraudulent claims about present capabilities not just future: convoy tech 10 times safer than humans, NOW.

I'm not sure it is down to edge cases. It's more like they are a fundamental AI breakthrough away until it can understand say that that thing must be a fire truck although it doesn't look the same as the previous ones seen.

I mean alternatively you can take the Waymo approach with loads of sensors and pre mapped routes but Musk seems to be banking on almost human level AI and we aren't there yet.

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