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Comment by wds | Hacker News Reader

> I think we’re close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery.

The new "Full Self-Driving next year"?

"AI" already contributes "substantially" to "scientific discovery". It's a very safe statement to make, whereas "full self-driving" has some concrete implications.

Well I also think full self-driving contribute substantially to navigating the car on the street..

"AI" here means language models. Machine learning has been contributing to scientific discovery for ages, but this new wave of hype that marketing departments are calling "AI" are language models.

I know it’s a meme but there actually are fully self driving cars, they make thousands of trips every day in a couple US cities.

> in a couple US cities

FWIW, when you get this reductive with your criterion there were technically self-driving cars in 2008 too.

To be a bit more specific: no, they were not routinely making thousands of taxi rides with paying customers every day in 2008.

We can go further. Automated trains have cars. Streetcars are automatable since the track is fixed.

And both of these reduce traffic

I thought FSD has to be at least level 4 to be called that.

The capitalization makes it a Tesla reference, which has notoriously been promising that as an un-managed consumer capability for years, while it is not yet launched even now.

As an aside, that is happening in China right now in commercial vehicles. I rode a robotaxi last month in Beijing, and those services are expanding throughout China. Really impressive.

We have Waymo and AlphaFold.

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