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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

The thing about this, though - cars have been built before. We understand what's necessary to get those 9s. I'm sure there were some new problems that had to be solved along the way, but fundamentally, "build good car" is known to be achievable, so the process of "adding 9s" there makes sense.

But this method of AI is still pretty new, and we don't know it's upper limits. It may be that there are no more 9s to add, or that any more 9s cost prohibitively more. We might be effectively stuck at 91.25626726...% forever.

Not to be a doomer, but I DO think that anyone who is significantly invested in AI really has to have a plan in case that ends up being true. We can't just keep on saying "they'll get there some day" and acting as if it's true. (I mean you can, just not without consequences.)

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While you are right about the broader (and sort of ill defined) chase toward 'AGI' - another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually.And, if you work on applications using LLMs you can pretty easily see that Karpathy's sentiment is likely correct. You see it because you do it. Even simple applications are shaped like this, albeit each 9 takes less time than self driving cars for a simple app.. it still feels about right.

> another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually

Current self driving cars only work in American roads. Maybe Canada too, not sure how their roads are. Come to Europe/anywhere else and every other road would be intractable. Much tighter lanes, many turns you have a little mirror to see who's coming on the other side, single car at a time lanes that you need to "understand" who goes first, mountain roads where you sometimes need to reverse for 100m when another car is coming so it's wide enough that they can pass before you can keep going forward, etc.

Many things like this that would require another 2 or 3 "nines" as the guy put it than acceptable quality in American huge roads.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ4NWIt...

Waymo has promised to launch In London and Tokyo next year. New York, London, Tokyo probably covers the entire spectrum of difficulty for self driving cars, maybe we need to include Mumbai as the final boss but I would be happy saying self driving is solved if the above 3 cities have a working 24/7 self driving fleet

The final boss could be something like Scottland mountain roads, or some of the million beaches on a cliff in Greece where this "you have to first reverse" kinda situation happens every 30 seconds.

No no, the final boss is a dozen of them have to race around such roads, no crashes allowed, and they must all finish at exactly the same time. Blindfolded.

Give the Waymo guys some credit - San Francisco isn't the suburbs of Houston. It might not be quite the same as a 1000 year old city in Europe, but it's no snack either.

> another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually.

No they did not. Elon has been saying Tesla will get there “next year” since 2015. He is still saying that, and despite changing definitions, we still are not there.

i guess the comment you replied proves the actual point "we may never get there, but it will be enough for the market".

sigh, i guess it's time to laugh on that video compilation of elon saying "next week" for 10yrs straight and then cry seeing how much he made of doing that.

They = Waymo

Karpathy talked about Waymo, and he said they aren't there yet. They still have humans in the loop via telemetry and there are parts of cities they won't go to.

Karpathy is biased when it comes to self driving. Example: You can't both have humans teleoperating like he claimed, AND have cones disabling Waymos. Waymo's mistakes such as one where they were going around a parking lot honking at each other tells you they don't have humans in the loop except in the most extreme cases. He's likely correct that it's not self driving 100% of the time, but what if it's 99.999% and in the 0.001% the humans have to tell the Waymo how to get out of a very tricky situation?

Just go ride in one and make the decision for yourself. By any reasonable person's definition they are self driving.

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