But the implicit assumption is that Tesla’s problems can be solved by scaling laws. That seems to me like a big assumption, no?

I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think.

But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by scaling / software, and Waymo is fundamentally screwed and has no way to innovate out of its own scale problems.

Companies lower material costs by an order of magnitude all the time! Look at battery/solar over the last 15 years — in many areas we see two OOMs of cost reduction. It’s a challenge; but one that seems on par with creating software to replicate the optical capabilities of the human brain.