Comment by TaylorAlexander

As a robotics engineer (though I don’t work on AI systems) I was bullish on Tesla’s architecture for a long time. I’ve watched all their presentations. Their hydra network. Their massive custom AI chip. I really thought they had a chance at making it all work. But the long tail is killing them. They’re walking back their claims for fully autonomous operation. Andrej Karpathy (their AI lead) left. Musk is distracted and showing that he doesn’t have all the technical chops we thought he did (if reports from inside twitter are to be believed). It feels like the company is all promises and no delivery now. Many have been saying this for years, but I really thought they were going to pull it off. Now I’m beginning to feel that they’re not organized appropriately to do it. You just can’t have a single guy who is all ego running a project as complex as this and find success. I think of how they must be doing things at Waymo or Cruise and they’re going to have a team of competent people in charge who don’t make rash decisions on major architectural issues. And given the scope of this problem I’m really starting to believe that’s what’s needed to make this work. There’s just no silver bullet. I’m really questioning what led me to believe in all this in the first place.