Hacker News Reader

Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Alternative interpretation to inspire your ire and anger:

Self-driving is really hard and not going to be here anytime soon. A.I. is a hype bubble. Google now believe those two points and need greater fools to pare back their losses on this one and to avoid a lone P.R. disaster. "We were only starting the project and it's free to stand on it's own separate from us."

Computational Statistical Inference is amazing. Calling it Machine Learning was a mistake that led to this ridiculous A.I. nonsense because machine learning sure sounds like A.I. if you don't know any better. And it has been a tremendous hype opportunity that has been vigorously exploited. If you did, or if you intend to, consider repositioning your pitch. Doubling down may well be a reasonable option once you've thought it through.

View on HN

I love these hottakes. Like there are thousands of researchers working tirelessly to resolve the issue in the affirmative or negative, writing papers, giving talks, publishing code, but we should take your word on it harry8 that the emperor has no clothes. How about anything in the way of evidence that what you're saying is insightful? Do you have literally any data to corroborate what you're saying? Because I can go to arxiv and find plenty of papers with validated metrics that contradict diametrically what you're saying.

How many billions of dollars have been spent on self-driving ai tech? How many self-driving cars do we have? How many execs have said we would have self-driving cars in <insert past year here>?

You're acting like it's your money they've spent or tax payer money that's been spent? Why does it matter how much has been spent? Is this like some kind of weird entitlement where you get to be upset because companies made aspirational promises (to their shareholders mind you, not to you)

Your thesis seems to be

1) If billions are spent on something and it didn’t already happen, that means it won’t likely happen soon, and

2) If people predict something will happen, and it doesn’t, that means no prediction of that thing can ever be credible.

But those don’t seem like logically sound inferences to me.

"Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before."

Maybe not the emperor but one of the kings said, after talking with the other kings, that self-driving will come very late if ever, and the things that will come are electric and digitization. I don't even think they have a clear idea of what digitization would actually mean.

Machine learning is a powerful tool but it's really a force multiplier for flesh & blood humans. Filtering a lot of data, finding signals and patterns, giving you a first-pass analysis. And recently doing more interesting things like deep fakes.

But this... is not driving a car. Not even close! And it's not AGI. Not even close!

But this... is not driving a car. Not even close!

Hm, then what exactly are Waymo cars doing on public roads? Seemed pretty close to self-driving to me.

Why scale up hiring, buy 20k cars and a factory in Detroit to assemble the self driving kits? Sounds like they hit the finish line and now need capital to deploy it worldwide.

Oh yeah, if it's that big a cash cow, you can be sure that Google's not facing a cash crunch.

Why does Apple raise debt when they have the largest cash reserve? Company issuing stock or raising debt doesnt mean the product has failed. Cutting spending and reducing staff is a better indicator.

Because of loopholes inside the tax code.

Issuing debt doesn’t give up any of the upside like selling stock does. This is more like Apple selling off some portion of the iPhone business in exchange for cash. I think most people would interpret that as bad news for iPhones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com