Tesla / Waymo is a perfect illustration of the point, but the Bitter Lesson doesn’t allow us to pick a winner here. The Bitter Lesson tells us that the Tesla approach (fully end to end, minimizing hand coded features / logic) will _ultimately_ win out. The Bitter Lesson does not tell us that this approach has to economically justify itself 1 year in, 5 years in, or that the approach when the technology is immature will allow a company to avoid bankrupting itself in the meantime while they wait for the data and compute to scale.

In other words, just because we know that ultimately (possibly in 20+ years) the Tesla compute-only approach will be simpler and more effective, Tesla might not survive to see this happen. Instead, manual feature engineering and hacking can always give temporary gains over data and compute driven approaches. The bitter lesson was clear about this. I suspect Waymo will win, and at some point in the future once they are out of their growth at all costs stage, they will transition into their maximum value extraction stage, in which vision will make significantly more economic sense than LiDAR. But once they win, they’ll have plenty of time to see the bitter lesson through its ultimate consequences. Elon is right, but he’s probably too early.