AI Reading for Friday October 11

Lovingly curated by man and machine

Oct 11, 2024

Tesla had their big robotaxi event. Sounds like Tesla maybe looking to test the Cybercab sometime in 2025. Not sure why no rear window. Tesla stock is down. - The Verge

Musk has been talking about this forever and is obviously years behind the competition, despite the blusterous hype, puffery, and gaslighting.

Tesla announces a Robovan which was the big surprise . - The Verge

In NYC in there are a lot of unlicensed 'dollar vans' running on underserved routes in outer boroughs. Robovans running in protected lanes on the busy routes would have good economics and be a win. (Except maybe for unions) . The Via ridesharing service was going after this paradigm but got killed off in NYC by the pandemic.

Robotaxis don't really work in NYC and Delhi without protected infrastructure. If they drive pretty safe, people will just bully them, taxis will cut them off and pedestrians will cross in front of them without regard. Doesn't really work from a game theory standpoint without protected lanes.

Anyway it’s got doors that open like this, not like this, which is nice.

Optimus robots danced, served drinks, and gave out gift bags at Tesla event - Supercar Blondie

During the extended livestream delay (par for the course for Musk), apparently there was a scam stream with AN AI-GENERATED ELON MUSK telling people to scan a QR code for some crypto hustle or malware, and it got 270,000 viewers. Everything is going just great. - X (formerly Twitter)

Cruise guy has thoughts, knows a thing or two about autonomous driving projects going off the rails. - X (formerly Twitter)

Baidu ramps up self-driving program offering in China, with rides not far behind Waymo volume in US (and way ahead of Tesla). - Yahoo Finance

AMD announces updated data center GPU, stock market appears unimpressed. - CNBC

State of AI Report 2024 from investor Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital.

Marines to get Anduril's new autonomous kamikaze drone - DefenseScoop

Why agentic AI is the new electricity, and business leaders are afraid of the dark - ZDNET

AI agent startups secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months - The Verge

16 months of building agents - - YouTube

See also - applied-llms.org - Applied LLMs

GPT Store hasn't lived up to its promise. Needs multi-turn workflows, better tools that don't interrupt workflow for permission, o1-preview, better policing since a lot of GPTs wrap other people's unlicensed IP, and proper subs/micropayments/revenue sharing. - WIRED

OpenAI introduces MLE-bench to test models on data science tasks, finds o1-preview achieves Kaggle bronze about 17% of the time.

DeepMind’s introduces Michelangelo benchmark to test limits of long-context LLMs - VentureBeat

Deepfakes defeat crypto and fintech KYC checks - Cointelegraph

None of the proposed deepfake countermeasures seem particularly effective. Unfortunately something like WorldCoin universal biometric ID might be needed. But you may have to regulate who can require it, since it has bad privacy and surveillance externalities. - Business Insider

Automated AI eligibility determinations for safety net programs may create barriers to accessing them, sometimes intentionally. - The American Prospect

Nvidia's AI chip production for the next year is sold out. - IBD

At current prices, it's not economical to buy H100s and rent them out.

When the book is written on the big AI bust, this chart from Nvidia’s Jensen keynote will have a special place. (Obv FP4 TFLOPS are going to be more than FP16 TFLOPs on same hardware. Why mislead with chart crimes when you are doing unbelievably well. I am now training infinite-sized models at infinity FLOPS at fp0 btw)