A flawless self-driving demo did not mean autonomy was near

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:17

   And maybe the story that I wanted to tell very briefly is actually the first time I drove a self-driving vehicle was in 2013, and I had a friend who worked at Waymo, and he offered to give me a drive around Palo Alto. I took this picture using Google Glass at the time, and many of you are so young that you might not even know what that is, but, yeah, this was like all the rage at the time. And we got into this car, and we went for about a 30-minute drive around Palo Alto. Highways, streets, and so on. And this drive was perfect. There was zero interventions. And this was 2013, which is now 12 years ago. And it kind of struck me because at the time when I had this perfect drive, this perfect demo, I felt like, wow, self-driving is imminent because this just worked. This is incredible. But here we are

2. 27:02

   12 years later, and we are still working on autonomy. We are still working on driving agents. And even now, we haven't actually fully solved the problem. Like, you may see Waymos going around and they look driverless, but, you know, there's still a lot of teleoperation and a lot of human in the loop of a lot of this driving. So we still haven't even, like, declared success, but I think it's definitely, like, going to succeed at this point. But it just took a long time. And so I think, like, this is, software is really tricky, I think, in the same way that driving is tricky. And so when I see things like, oh, 2025 is the year of agents I get very concerned and I kind of feel like you know this is the decade of agents and this is going to be quite some time we need humans in the loop we need to do this carefully this is software let's be serious here

3. 27:50

   one more kind of analogy that I always think through is the Iron Man suit I think this is I always love Iron Man I think it's like so Correct in a bunch of ways with respect to technology and how it will play out. And what I love about the Iron Man suit is that it's both an augmentation and Tony Stark can drive it, and it's also an agent, and in some of the movies the Iron Man suit is quite autonomous and can fly around and find Tony and all this kind of stuff.

4. 28:14

   And so this is the autonomy slider, is we can build augmentations or we can build agents, and we kind of want to do a bit of both, but at this stage I would say working with fallible LLMs and so on, I would say, you know, it's less Iron Man robots and more Iron Man suits that you want to build. It's less, like, building flashy demos of autonomous agents and more building partial autonomy products. And these products have custom GUIs and UI UX, and we're trying to, and this is done so that the generation verification loop of the human is very, very fast.

5. 28:47

   But we are not losing the sight of the fact that it is, in principle, possible to automate this work. And there should be an autonomy slider in your product, and you should be thinking about how you can slide that autonomy slider and make your product sort of more autonomous over time. But this is kind of how I think there's lots of opportunities in these kinds of products. I want to now switch gears a little bit and talk about one other dimension that I think is very unique. Not only is there a new type of programming language that allows