Tesla's Road Ahead: The Bitter Lesson in Robotics

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does Rich Sutton’s "Bitter Lesson" reveal about the decisions Tesla is making in its pursuit of autonomy? In this episode, we dive into Tesla’s recent "We, Robot" event, where they unveiled bold plans for the unsupervised full-self-driving Cybercab, Robovan, and Optimus—their humanoid robot, which Elon Musk predicts could become “the biggest product ever.” Joined by a16z partners Anjney Midha and Erin Price-Wright, we explore how these announcements reflect the evolving intersection of hardware and software. We’ll unpack the layers of the autonomy stack, the sources of data powering it, and the challenges involved in making these technologies a reality. Anjney, with his experience in computer vision and multiplayer tech at Ubiquity6, and Erin, an AI expert focused on the physical world, share their unique perspectives on how these advancements could extend far beyond the consumer market.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the big race in robotics.
0:03.0	The smarter your brain, so to speak,
0:05.0	the less specialized your appendages have to be.
0:08.0	AI has pushed every single one of these kind of to its limit
0:11.0	and to a new state of the art. The way they're solving
0:14.4	precision is instead of throwing more sensors on the car is to basically throw more data at the
0:19.3	problem. Data is absolutely eating the world.
0:22.5	What is good enough?
0:23.7	We used to have the Turing test,
0:25.1	which obviously were blown past now.
0:28.0	His shorthand for it was like the AWS of AI.
0:31.0	He's got this idea of this distributed swarm of unutilized inference computers.
0:36.0	Whether that's an oil rig, whether that's a mine, whether that's a battlefield,
0:42.0	there's so many different use cases
0:44.1	for a lot of this underlying technology
0:46.5	that are really starting to see the light of day.
0:48.8	It's basically an if not a win.
0:51.4	An inevitability. not a win. An inevitability.
0:54.0	Earlier this month, Elon Musk and the team at Tesla held their Wii robot event, where they unveiled
0:59.4	their plans for the unsupervised full self-driving, cyber cab, and Robovan.
1:04.4	Plus, Optimus, their answer to consumer-grade humanoid robots,
1:08.4	and also what must himself predicted would be, quote,
	...

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