Pouring Sources Into AI — Does It Finish Effectively? Will Diminishing Returns On FSD Sink Tesla?

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I wrote an article the opposite day titled “Tesla Proved Many Folks Flawed For Years — Is This Time The Similar, Or Totally different?” The core factors of the article have been these:

1. Many individuals stated Tesla couldn’t do what it ended up doing at many levels of the corporate’s growth.
2. I believed Tesla may do these issues.
3. Now, I’m having a tough time believing in Tesla’s strategy to robotaxis and its plan to roll them out inside just a few years (though I argued the alternative a decade in the past, and even as much as 5 years in the past).
4. So, I’m questioning, have I change into the skeptic who will likely be confirmed unsuitable, or am I proper to suppose it’s totally different this time and Tesla received’t obtain its robotaxi targets (once more)?

Down within the feedback, a reader, Doug Sanden, wrote the next:

“FSD coaching — log linear?

• • growing quantity of information wanted for linear progress, or lowering progress for linear increses in information:
    video ‘Has Generative AI Already Peaked?’ – Computerphile
  • diminishing returns?
  • he’s describing the outcomes from this paper:
  • ‘No “Zero-Shot” With out Exponential Information: Pretraining Idea Frequency Determines Multimodal Mannequin Efficiency’, Udandarao et al, 2024
  • inefficient log-linear scaling development
  • exponential want for coaching information”

I appeared up that video and watched it. Right here it’s, and I extremely suggest giving it a watch:

Once more, don’t skip the video, however I’ll attempt to summarize the important thing factors once more right here:

• Generative AI is superb and doing nice issues.
• Due to what it will probably do, it looks like magic to many and likewise provides individuals the assumption that including increasingly more information, or constructing greater and greater fashions — or doing each — will make determining nearly something attainable and can allow increasingly more superb technological options.
• Nevertheless, in easy phrases, there are diminishing returns when the specified output or desired product will get extra difficult, extra nuanced.
• Additionally, as you try to attain these way more troublesome targets, you find yourself pouring an unlimited amount of cash into information assortment and mannequin processing, and you’ll find yourself down a deep cash pit primarily chasing unicorns and butterfly farts.

Because it pertains to Tesla as an organization and Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) as a product, that is principally only a higher clarification of one thing I’ve been involved about for some time. I do suppose Tesla dangers chasing unicorns diminishing returns with its strategy to FSD, which I believe may burn an unlimited amount of money with out Tesla having the ability to roll out robotaxis. I additionally suppose this pertains to the “seesaw drawback” I’ve mentioned just a few occasions — that’s simply the impact of making an attempt to unravel very nuanced, difficult issues with the {hardware} and software program strategy Tesla is utilizing.

Perhaps I’m unsuitable, as I famous in that article linked on the high. However I find yourself similar to this man on the finish of his video, the place he signifies that he expects generative AI to observe the crimson line on the graph reasonably than the yellow one — however that it might be thrilling if it did find yourself following the yellow one:

We’ll see. We’re nonetheless distant from Tesla robotaxis, however let’s see how the tech progresses.