it included flights, hotels, food and travel expenses for 9000 for multiple days, as well as the "party".
US-based travel for 1 person for 5 days is easily 4K, on top of that some people were probably international so it would be higher, and on top of that there are the "party" expenses like venue and catering which probably wasn't that significant.
Sorry but these are just not accurate as blanket statements anymore, given how good the models have gotten.
As other similar projects have pointed out, if you have a good test suite and a way for the model to validate its correctness, you can get very good results. And you can continue to iterate, optimize, code review, etc.
I can't speak for the specificity of parent's "evil maids" phrase but the concept of an "Evil maid" is used in security scenarios.
A maid tends to be an example of a person who's mostly a stranger, but is given unmonitored access to your most private spaces for prolonged periods of time. So they theoretically become a good vector for a malicious actor to say "hey I'll give you $$ if you just plug in this USB drive in his bedroom laptop next time you're cleaning his house" - it's often used in the scenario of "ok what if someone has physical access to your resource for a prolonged period of time without you noticing? what are your protections there?"
"Evil maids" (example): I put my laptop into a safe, seal the safe, seal the room, go to breakfast. On return, I see there was cleaning (not the usual time, I know the hotel), the cleaner looks strangely confused, the seal on the safe is detached (that is often done by applying ice; adhesive hardens, seal goes off). This level of paranoia was not my norm. Had to learn these tricks cause problems happened (repeatedly). In fact, I frequented that hotel, knew customs and the staff, so noticed irregularities.
Same here. I've found the "me me me" a bit off-putting over the years, but can't deny that he is a genuinely smart, interesting, and forward thinking person. I especially enjoyed his writings on measuring every aspect of his life [1].
Also Wolfram (person and company) don't seem to be stodgy and stuck in old ways. At least as an outside observer (I'm not a mathematician, nor do I use Wolfram's main tools), seem to handle new trends with their own unique contributions to augment those trends:
Wolfram Alpha was a genuinely useful and good tool, perfect for the times.
These tools will actually further supercharge LLMs in certain use cases. They've provided multiple ways to adopt them.
Looking forward to see what people will do with this stuff.
If a maintainer has chosen to open source and use a permissive license (key word chosen, this isn't a default), they are explicitly saying via their license that they are not charging for the use of the code. What's the issue here?
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Yes it was crazy when I first heard about it "wait what? they shoot it in mid-air?" and that was before I found out they did that like 30k times a second.
But now 100k times a second apparently. Humans are amazing.
You have a machine that’s basically a clean room inside and one of the parts is essentially electrosputtering tin but then throwing all the tin away and using the EM pulse from the sputter to do work.
Oh and can you build it so it can run hundreds or thousands of hours before being cleaned? Thanks byyyyyyyyeeeeee!
So then maybe ask those "idiotic" questions that people are more likely to ask on a food nutrition website. Not something 3 drunk frat boys do at 2am cuz they're bored?
As others have pointed out, this article is written in bad faith.
Just for the record though, Musk isn't blindly anti-LIDAR. He has said (and I think this is an objective fact) that all existing roads and driving are based on vision (which is what all humans do). So that should technically be sufficient. SpaceX uses LIDAR for their docking systems.
I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be why I thought cameras weren't enough.
But then look at all the work with gaussian splatting (where you can take multiple 2d samples and build a 3d world out of it). So you could probably get 80% there with just that.
The ethos of many Musk companies (you'll hear this from many engineers that work there) is simplify, simplify, simplify. If something isn't needed, take it out. Question everything that might be needed.
To me, LIDAR is just one of those things in that general pattern of "if it isn't absolutely needed, take it out" – and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required. It's probably a nice to have, but maybe not required.
Humans aren't using only fixed vision for driving. This is such a tiresome thing to see repeated in every discussion about self driving.
You're listening to the road and car sounds around you. You're feeling vibration on the road. You're feeling feedback on the steering wheel. You're using a combination of monocular and binocular depth perception - plus, your eyes are not a fixed focal length "cameras". You're moving your head to change the perspective you see the road at. Your inner ear is telling you about your acceleration and orientation.
And also, even with the suite of sensors that humans have, their vision perception is frequently inadequate and leads to crashes. If vision was good enough, "SMIDSY" wouldn't be such an infamous acronym in vehicle injury cases.
the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
Humans have both issues. There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related, e.g. misestimation of depth/speed, obscured or obstructed vision, optical focus issues, insufficient contrast or exposure, etc.
But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can’t see as well in fog, but that’s why you should slow down
Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they also get into accidents while paying attention and being careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of their senses. These accidents are also common, for example:
* someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception, bumps an object
* person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles
* person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object (the sun, bright lights at night)
* person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of approaching traffic
* people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance. It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check their instruments while driving -- but it can take the human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up, and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you will have travelled quite a long distance.
These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor decision making, but of poor perception.
> But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving?
Most of them.
We can lump together "inattention" and "idiocy" for the purposes of this conversation, because both could be massively alleviated by a good self-driving car without lidar.
If you look at the parallel comments, you'll see that the majority of accidents and fatalities indeed come from these two factors combined (two-thirds coming from distraction, speeding, and impaired driving), and that kube-system is having to resort to ridiculous fallacies to try to dispute the empirical data that is available.
> There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related
Which are a tiny minority. The largest causes of crashes in the US are attention/cognition problems, not vision problems. Most traffic systems in western countries (probably in others, too, but I don't have personal experience), and in particular the US, are designed to limit visibility problems and do so very effectively.
> That sounds more like a personal opinion, because I don’t think that data is particularly easy to objectively collect.
That sounds like a personal opinion?
Maybe do the bare minimum of research before spouting yours.
DOT says that only 5% of crashes are caused by low visibility during weather events.[1]
In 2023, the combined causes of alcohol, speeding, and distracted driving (all cognitive/attention issues) caused 67% of highway deaths. [2]
I was able to find these in 30 seconds. You did zero research to confirm whether your belief was correct before asserting that my claim was opinion. That's pathetic.
> Regardless it is irrelevant to the point.
And your point is therefore irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because the person you were replying to did not claim that vision had no safety impact, but that it had little safety impact:
> the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
...and, as we can clearly see, the issue is attention (and some bad decision making), not vision.
None of those things you cited is “human vision or perception”
“Low visibility during weather events” is a small subset of this.
A ridiculously common example of the limitations of human vision is when people hit curbs parallel parking because of the inherent limitations of relying on depth perception to estimate the exact location of the vehicle when it cannot otherwise be directly seen. Go look in a parking lot and see how common curbed wheels are.
Also, NHTSA estimates that they don’t have any information for 60% of incidents, because they go unreported.
> None of those things you cited is “human vision or perception”
> “Low visibility during weather events” is a small subset of this.
You're still refusing to do the most basic research or even read my comment:
> In 2023, the combined causes of alcohol, speeding, and distracted driving (all cognitive/attention issues) caused 67% of highway deaths.
Do the math. 100% - 67% is 33%. Even literally not opening Google, you can already deduce that the maximum fraction of fatalities caused by vision is 33%.
Given that you aren't interested in reading or researching and instead just want to push your opinion as fact, I think your claims can be safely discarded.
Edit: Because you're editing your comment because you realize that you're making an absolute fool of yourself:
> A ridiculously common example of the limitations of human vision is when people hit curbs parallel parking
A completely irrelevant distraction - this causes virtually zero accidents and even fewer fatalities, and you know it.
> Also, NHTSA estimates that they don’t have any information for 60% of incidents, because they go unreported.
Aha, so now you actually did research, and found that all of the available data supports my claims, so you're attempting to undermine it. Nice try. "Estimates" vs. actual numbers isn't really a contest.
Come back when you have actual data - until then, you're just continuing to undermine your own point with your ridiculous fallacies and misdirections - because if you actually had a defensible claim, you'd be able to instantly pull out supporting evidence.
I'm not arguing about fatalities or relative percentages of contributing factors, nor am I arguing that alcohol/speeding/attention are not all also issues. They are, you're right.
The only thing I argued is that "lapses in human visual perception are responsible for some crashes", which is a fact.
Attention is perhaps the limiting factor, but being able to look in two directions at once would help, and would help greatly if we had more attention capacity. E.g. anytime you change lanes you have to alternate between looking behind, beside, and in front and that greatly reduces reaction time should something unexpected happen in the direction you aren't currently looking...
In theory, a computer should be able to do the same. It could do sensor fusion with even more sense modalities than we have. It could have an array of cameras and potentially out-do our stereo vision, or perhaps even use some lightfield magic to (virtually) analyze the same scene with multiple optical paths.
However, there is also a lot of interaction between our perceptual system and cognition. Just for depth perception, we're doing a lot of temporal analysis. We track moving objects and infer distance from assumptions about scale and object permanence. We don't just repeatedly make depth maps from 2D imagery.
The brute-force approach is something like training visual language models (VLMs). E.g. you could train on lots of movies and be able to predict "what happens next" in the imaging world.
But, compared to LLMs, there is a bigger gap between the model and the application domain with VLMs. It may seem like LLMs are being applied to lots of domains, but most are just tiny variations on the same task of "writing what comes next", which is exactly what they were trained on. Unfortunately, driving is not "painting what comes next" in the same way as all these LLM writing hacks. There is still a big gap between that predictive layer, planning, and executing. Our giant corpus of movies does not really provide the ready-made training data to go after those bigger problems.
Putting your point another way, in order to replicate an average human driver’s competence you would need to make several strong advancements in the state of the art in computer vision _and_ digital optics.
In India (among others), honking is essential to reducing crashes
We often greatly underestimate / undervalue the role of our ears relative to vision. As my film director friend says, 80% of the impact in a movie is in the sound
I'm positive that Teslas have gyroscopes and accelerometers in them. Our eyes actually have a fairly small focal length range due to the fixed nature of our cornea and only being able to change focal length by flexing the crystalline lens.
What I said has to do with "vision only systems" (what Musk has claimed will be enough to do FSD) with sensor fusion systems (what everybody else having success in this space does)
Mentioning gaussian splatting for why we don't need lidar depth is a great example of Musk-esque technobabble; surface level seemingly correct, but nonsense to any practitioner. Because one of the biggest problems of all SfM techniques is that the results are scale ambiguous, so they do not in fact recover that crucial real-world depth measurement you get from lidar.
Now you might say "use a depth model to estimate metric depth" and I think if you spend 5 minutes thinking about why a magic math box that pretends to recover real depth from a single 2D image is a very very sketchy proposition when you need it to be correct for emergency braking versus some TikTok bokeh filter you will see that also doesn't get you far.
This is not really true if you have multiple cameras with a known baseline, or well known motion characteristics like you get with an accelerometer+ wheel speed.
Sufficient to build something close to human performance. But self driving cars will be held to a much higher standard by society. A standard only achievable by having sensors like LiDAR.
if a self driving car had the exact vision of humans it would still be better because it has better reaction times. never mind the fact that humans cant actually process all the visual information in our field of view because we dont have the broad attention to be able to do that. its very obvious that you can get super human performance with just cameras.
Whether thats worth completely throwing away LiDAR is a different question, but your argument is just obviously false.
This reminds me of the time I was distantly following a Waymo car at speed on 101 in Mountain View during rush hour. The Waymo brake lights came on first followed a second or two later by the rest of the traffic.
Even if they weren’t going to be held to a higher standard for widespread acceptance, tens of thousands of people a year in the us die due to humans driving badly. Why would we not try to do better than that?
Sufficient if all else were equal. But the human brain and artificial neural networks are clearly not equal. This is setting aside the whole question of whether we hope to equal human performance or exceed it.
That doesn't matter. It's not like we use 100% of our brain capacity for driving.
In fact, that's why radio/music/podcasts thrive. Because we're bored when we drive. We have conversations, etc. We daydream.
As long as the skills relevant to actually driving are on parity with humans, the rest doesn't matter.
In fact, in a recent podcast, Musk mused that you actually may have a limit of how smart you want a vehicle model to be, because what if IT starts to get bored? What will it do? I found that to be an interesting (and amusing) thought exercise.
To do gaussian splatting anywhere near in real time, you need good depth data to initialize the gaussian positions. This can of course come from monocular depth but then you are back to monocular depth vs lidar.
> and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required
The reports that Tesla submits on Austin Robotaxis include several of them hitting fixed objects. This is the same behavior that has been reported on for prior versions of their software of Teslas not seeing objects, including for the incident for which they had a $250M verdict against them reaffirmed this past week. That this is occurring in an extensively mapped environment and with a safety driver on board leads me to the opposite conclusion that you have reached.
No, I see no reason to give AI-generated articles a second of my time. Wikipedia's best feature is the human-provided citations; you can very easily validate a claim with a hardlink to a book, article or video archive.
AI does not have the skillset or the tools required to match Wikipedia's quality. It can definitely create it's own edit process, but it's a useless one for people like me that don't treat the internet as a ground-truth.
"As of February 19, 2026, Musk’s net worth is estimated at $844.9 billion per Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List, primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash..."
That "rather than cash" bit is bizarre, since no wealthy person holds primarily cash. I checked the pages of several other ultra-wealthy people and none of them have that comment. I'm sure this has nothing to do with Grokipedia's owner recently making an issue of how little cash he holds.
Back in the day, these companies stayed in their lane, so to speak.
When you bought a computer, that’s all it was. It had much more of a toy or appliance like appeal rather than this deeply integrated life augmenter. The idea that a company like Apple or even a bigger (at the time) company like Microsoft would own a movie/TV studio and broadcast major league sports was an insane idea.
I will say regarding keynotes, it wasn’t limited to the genuine nature of the companies. The 90s and 2000s were just on different levels of the pace of technology development. I am sure that even Microsoft had an exciting keynote or two and they were the evil empire in those days.
"ok.. but was it a party for all 9,000 people?"
"maybe they had great caterers"
... then I did the math. It's $7.5k per employee.
Clearly I'm just not creative enough to know how to waste money like an SV company.
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