angusb

I don't think there's an official divergence in terminology other than the version numbers (which have mostly stopped incrementing for FSD vehicle owners, meanwhile there is a lot of work going into new iterations for the version running on tesla's robotaxi fleet)

Do you really want to trust...

No, but the regulator helps here - they do their own independent evaluation

What happens when Tesla decides...

the regulator should pressure them for improvements and suspend licenses for self driving services that don't improve

agreed - I said FSD team to distinguish from "the crowds" but this was the wrong wording, should be the regulator too.

I agree it's a major mistake + should get a lot of focus from the FSD team. I'm just unsure whether that directly translates to prohibiting a robotaxi rollout (I'm open to the possibility it should though).

I guess the thing I'm trying to reconcile is that even very safe drivers make critical mistakes extremely rarely, so the threshold at which FSD is safer than even the top 10% of human drivers likely includes some nonzero level of critical mistakes. Right now Tesla has several people mining FSD for any place it makes critical mistakes and these are well publicised so I think we get an inflated sense of their commonality. This is speculation, but if true it leaves some possibility of it being significantly safer than the median driver while still allowing for videos like this to proliferate.

I do wish Tesla released all stats for interventions/near misses/crashes so we could have a better and non-speculative discussion about this!

Your argument that a newer version is better

I actually didn't say that and am not arguing it formally - I said what I said because I think that the version difference is something that should be acknowledged when doing a test like this.

I do privately assume the new version will be better in some ways, but have no idea if this problem would be solved in it - so I agree with your last sentence.

that should have been in my list, you're right

re. extrapolation: I agree with that, but remember there's sampling error. The crashes/failures go viral but the lives saved get zero exposure or headlines. I don't think that means you can just ignore issues like this but I think it does mean it's sensible to try to augment the data point of this video with imagining the scenarios where the self driving car performs more safely than the average human driver

This has done the rounds on other platforms. A couple of important points:

- the failure here is that the car didn't stop for the bus on the other side of the road with the extended stop sign. (Obviously a kid running out from behind a car this late is fairly difficult for any human or self driving system to avoid)

- the FSD version for the robotaxi service is private and wasn't the one used for this test. The testers here only have access to the older public version, which is supposed to be used with human supervision

- the dawn project is a long-time Tesla FSD opponent that acts in bad faith - they are probably relying on false equivalence of FSD beta vs robotaxi FSD

Nevertheless this is a very important test result for FSD supervised! But I don't like that the dawn project are framing this as evidence for why FSD robotaxi (a different version) should not be allowed without noting that they have tested a different version.

BTW - I see you have a LLM answering questions based on your docs on the help pages (which is great). So really I mean for customer support issues that are raised outside this channel

Congrats, this is a great story! One small thing:

Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.

Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?

Over 50% of Tesla's sales are model Y which is going through a version upgrade at the moment. The new version is widely publicised, much better than the old one, and will be available in the next few months. Why would you buy a model Y now?

A big dip was also observed during the model 3 upgrade in Q1 2024.

Everybody is obsessing so much over Elon's behaviour right now that they are glossing over important other factors.

Did anyone else read this as "Firing programmers for (AI will destroy everything)" or have I been reading too much Yudkowsky

I've been finding The Prize surprisingly light on technical details - I'm 1/3 of the way through the book and half way through the chronology of the oil industry and it hasn't even mentioned a distillation column. Does it get more technical?

I would guess that this is correct. My dreams are very much like half way between waking consciousness and a surreal movie - my consciousness doesn't seem to play a part in generating the surroundings and scenery and most of the plot, that seems to be the result of GenBrain.

I think daytime thoughts are also GenBrain btw. Only that waking brain has access to higher mental function - namely longer term memory, higher propensity to notice/surface inconsistencies etc.

Just like being in a dream. Trying to run towards "that hill over there" only for it to get further away as you take each step, or it disappear when you take your eyes off it for a second. It's astonishing to have that very private experience (that I've never really put into words or shared with another person) be rendered in front of me by a neural net.

Watching this era of AI advancement play out is like stepping through a museum of the inner workings of your mind.

I'm a software engineer and musician. My music is an art project and is currently loss making. For a while I was able to negotiate part time by using contacts I got going through a tech accelerator in London, and finding the companies where the founders were having a harder time hiring. These companies usually wanted some in-person time, but mostly were ok with remote.

At some point I switched to becoming a full time contractor but taking 3-5 month contracts and taking a break of several months between each one. Some of the clients are startups, some are dev shop consultancies that hire extra contractors into their teams for certain projects (there are several of these in London). These are full remote.

I get a good amount of music done this way.

I feel like better transparency about policy holders’ attitude to home maintenance leads to better pricing of risk and that’s a good thing - the problem is really the lack of warning from the insurer that they are about to be dropped. Not even giving the policy holder the chance to take corrective action sucks, and hints at a future where you need to be on best behaviour even in private spaces

Plastics in landfill also break down to make methane. The carbon source in this case is fossil fuel.

Also, if the food gains the carbon as CO2 but releases it on decomposition as CH4, that’s a big increase in GHG potential, we want to avoid that.

Moreover it shouldn’t matter the original carbon source - if we have the opportunity to capture some methane from concentrated point source like a landfill we should be jumping at it. One of the easiest marginal tons of CO2e saved

I get that regulatory capture is a bad thing if done for the reason of creating a moat, but where is the evidence that creating a moat is the primary motivation here?

AI researchers aren’t close to a consensus on the potential for bad alignment outcomes, so isn’t it possible Altman is warning of something real?

Hmm, still not sure I agree. Reducing emissions to close to 0 is definitely very important but it seems probable that we'll reach a steady state where some niche sources of carbon still persist, and are accompanied by corresponding capture. Some niche sources are just unbelievably hard to decarbonise

If in 20 years 1% of our emissions remain but they are accompanied by capture (with a multiplier to account for inefficiencies in capture) then that would be ok by me.

(You'd still want the extra carbon removal to reverse the warming caused by past emissions ofc)

this isn't quite right - if you use zero carbon sources (e.g. solar) to power carbon removal the operation would be net carbon negative.

"but why wouldn't you just use that solar capacity to displace coal plants on the electricity grid??????"

there's already a rapid switch of installed electrical capacity from fossil fuels to solar/wind, but electricity typically accounts for 20% of a developed economy's emissions, so after that we need to look to decarbonise other parts of the economy.

removing carbon from the wider economy involves some low hanging fruits (e.g. better insulation in houses) followed by a succession of increasingly difficult and expensive removal processes, with a very long tail.

at the far end you have things like removing carbon emissions from long haul flights, which is extremely difficult - once it gets this hard, it's much more practical to use solar to power carbon removal.

we can't wait for emissions to go to zero before investing in carbon capture because we'd be waiting decades for battery energy density to increase by orders of magnitude before they are good enough to support long haul flights. We don't have that long

what does all-stock mean when it's an IPO'd company?

I've always thought that a liquid asset like Uber stock is basically as good as cash, so why do they even bother mentioning that it?

the skin in the game here is incredible

thanks for the link edit!

Yep, 10 years here and never seen it either. Maybe these people target more touristy areas. Author is a she btw :)

This banner is crazily insufficient. It disappears forever after you visit any other page, without you having to acknowledge its existence.

I just checked fb, and went quickly to my first notification. I didn't really register what the banner was until maybe a second after it loaded - at which point I had already clicked on my first notification. By that point, the banner is gone forever. I can't find any way to get it back.

It's so, so easy to miss this message.

Update: sorry to say that after some research internally we've come by some new information that means we are actually unable to support remote work for now, contrary to the ad above.

PolyAI | London/Singapore | Onsite/Remote

PolyAI is building the backend machinery to allow computers to have two-way conversations with people. If you've used Siri, you'll probably know that it's okay at handling single-sentence commands like "remind me to call Jane in 2 hours", but anything significantly more complicated - anything that requires a 2-way conversation to establish what you want - is much much more flakey and inconvenient. At PolyAI, we're building the first developer platform for making scalable, maintainable voice apps that rely on conversations, rather than just single-commands. This opens up the possibility of Alexa/Google Home skills for Deliveroo, Uber, Postmates etc that are actually convenient to use and "just work".

We think this is the first step towards a future where voice interfaces are the de facto way of carrying out small to medium sized tasks.

We're a small but fast growing team of 8 people, comprised of (really good!) NLP researchers, and software engineers with a bunch of startup experience behind us. We're healthily funded by Passion and Amadeus and pay competitively.

We're looking for:

* backend engineers * machine learning/NLP engineers

I just want to point out that while we are currently a team of all men, we are super keen to move away from that, and regularly introspect about whether there's anything about our culture that may in any way exclude non male candidates. Additionally, we are always open to feedback about anything we might be getting wrong here.

Get in contact at angus@poly-ai.com

Kudos to you for fact-checking!

Ah interesting! Blind spot in my knowledge right there, thanks for pointing it out