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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> It's like letting a small child drive a car.

Bad example, because FSD cars are here.

Yeah, and Tesla cross-country FSD just crashed after 60 miles, and Tesla RoboTaxi had multiple accidents within first few days.

Other companies like Wayno seem to do better, but in general I wouldn't hold up self-driving cars as an example of how great AI is, and in any case calling it all "AI" is obscuring the fact that LLMs and FSD are completely different technologies.

In fact, until last year Tesla FSD wasn't even AI - the driving component was C++ and only the vision system was a neural net (with that being object recognition - convolutional neural net, not a Transformer).

Find me an FSD that can drive in non-Californian real world situations. A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift.

Well Waymo is coming to Denver, so it's about to get tested in some more difficult conditions.

Not sure it matters. There’s plenty of economic value in selling rides in places with good weather.

I am not in California, and those are not standard road conditions here.

>A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift.

What else, a meter of lava flow? Forest fire? Tsunami? Tornado? How about pick conditions where humans actually can drive.

Snow (maybe not a foot but enough to at least cover the lane markings), black ice and sand drifts people experience every day in the normal course of driving, so it's reasonable to expect driverless cars to be able to handle them. Forest fires, tsunamis, lava flows, and tornados are weather emergencies. I think it's a little more reasonable to not have expectations for driverless cars in those situations.

Humans do drive when there's tornadoes. I can't count the hundreds of videos I've seen on TV over the decades of people driving home from work and seeing a tornado.

I notice you conveniently left off "foot of snow" from your critique. Something that is perfectly ordinary "condition where humans actually drive."

Many years, millions of Americans evacuate ahead of hurricanes. Does that not count?

I, and hundreds of thousands of other people, have lived in places where sand drifts across roads are a thing. Also, sandstorms, dense fog, snert, ice storms, dust devils, and hundreds of other conditions in which "humans actually can [and do] drive."

FSD is like AI: Picking the low-hanging fruit and calling it a "win."

he’s describing conditions that exist for every area in the world that actually experiences winter!

Most places clear the driving surface instead of leaving a foot of snow.

Eventually. I live in Minnesota and it can take until noon or later after a big snow for all the small roads to get cleared.

More like the whole world is covered with snow and they clear enough for you to drive on.

Guess who we know you've never lived in a place where it snows.

Bad counter-example, because FSD has nothing in common with LLMs.

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