Thanks for continuing to try on this! Without having spent a lot of labor myself on looking into self-driving cars, I think my sheer impression would be that we’ll get $1B/yr waifutech before we get AI freedom-of-the-road; though I do note again that current self-driving tech would be more than sufficient for $10B/yr revenue if people built new cities around the AI tech level, so I worry a bit about some restricted use-case of self-driving tech that is basically possible with current tech finding some less regulated niche worth a trivial $10B/yr. I also remark that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that waifutech is already past $1B/yr in China, but I haven’t looked into things there. I don’t expect the waifutech to transcend my own standards for mediocrity, but something has to be pretty good before I call it more than mediocre; do you think there’s particular things that waifutech won’t be able to do?
My model permits large jumps in ML translation adoption; it is much less clear about whether anyone will be able to build a market moat and charge big prices for it. Do you have a similar intuition about # of users increasing gradually, not just revenue increasing gradually?
I think we’re still at the level of just drawing images about the future, so that anybody who came back in 5 years could try to figure out who sounded right, at all, rather than assembling a decent portfolio of bets; but I also think that just having images versus no images is a lot of progress.
Yes, I think that value added by automated translation will follow a similar pattern. Number of words translated is more sensitive to how you count and random nonsense, as is number of “users” which has even more definitional issues.
You can state a prediction about self-driving cars in any way you want. The obvious thing is to talk about programs similar to the existing self-driving taxi pilots (e.g. Waymo One) and ask when they do $X of revenue per year, or when $X of self-driving trucking is done per year. (I don’t know what AI freedom-of-the-road means, do you mean something significantly more ambitious than self-driving trucks or taxis?)
Thanks for continuing to try on this! Without having spent a lot of labor myself on looking into self-driving cars, I think my sheer impression would be that we’ll get $1B/yr waifutech before we get AI freedom-of-the-road; though I do note again that current self-driving tech would be more than sufficient for $10B/yr revenue if people built new cities around the AI tech level, so I worry a bit about some restricted use-case of self-driving tech that is basically possible with current tech finding some less regulated niche worth a trivial $10B/yr. I also remark that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that waifutech is already past $1B/yr in China, but I haven’t looked into things there. I don’t expect the waifutech to transcend my own standards for mediocrity, but something has to be pretty good before I call it more than mediocre; do you think there’s particular things that waifutech won’t be able to do?
My model permits large jumps in ML translation adoption; it is much less clear about whether anyone will be able to build a market moat and charge big prices for it. Do you have a similar intuition about # of users increasing gradually, not just revenue increasing gradually?
I think we’re still at the level of just drawing images about the future, so that anybody who came back in 5 years could try to figure out who sounded right, at all, rather than assembling a decent portfolio of bets; but I also think that just having images versus no images is a lot of progress.
Yes, I think that value added by automated translation will follow a similar pattern. Number of words translated is more sensitive to how you count and random nonsense, as is number of “users” which has even more definitional issues.
You can state a prediction about self-driving cars in any way you want. The obvious thing is to talk about programs similar to the existing self-driving taxi pilots (e.g. Waymo One) and ask when they do $X of revenue per year, or when $X of self-driving trucking is done per year. (I don’t know what AI freedom-of-the-road means, do you mean something significantly more ambitious than self-driving trucks or taxis?)