AI will speed simple builds, while safety-critical work stays hard

Transcript

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

1. 41:10

   as a new almost modality of company comes about, that information slash knowledge tends to diffuse out into a bunch of different organizations. You know, like whether it's Google Brain or OpenAI that figures out how to build transformers. Now we have like, you know, 10 companies that know how to kind of do that, if not more. And so do you think it's a reasonable bet that a few years from now, a lot of what the shape and structure of how to create a company that has like, you know, rigorous infrastructure for evals, for testing, for rolling out kind of things that operate in the real world.

2. 41:47

   Do you think we will know how to do this as an industry, like call it five years from now, in a way that, you know, perhaps entrepreneurs here can maybe take that bet that that is much more, that will become a thing that we know how to do as an industry? Because I would argue that there are not that many, I mean, you know, there's some companies doing robots kind of in the real world, but nowhere close to the scale of like a Waymo today.

3. 42:09

   And so is that a reasonable hypothesis slash bet in the coming kind of call it three to five years? Look, the way things are going with AI nowadays, I want to be careful not to predict what's going to happen in five years. As if you asked me this question five years ago, I think I would not have gotten that right. But I think you're absolutely right that the tools of today and the rate at which they're approving are so powerful that we will be able to share some of those fundamentals.

4. 42:41

   And what you can do with AI agents nowadays and how quickly you can give you that foundation is absolutely amazing and mind-blowing. So I think it will. But my intuition is that it will just kind of how we spoke about the complexity curve as a function of effort in our domain. I think you will see that some of the easier applications and some of the easier products to deploy, there's going to be an amazing proliferation of those.

5. 43:17

   I think you will see magic. I think you will see things that in the past would take a large company a year. Now you'd be able to do with a team of five people in a month. So something like that. there's some things that I would not expect to fully commoditize and I think it's the things where the bar is just excruciatingly high when we're talking about something like an R domain where the cost it's multiple components that have to come together it's the reliability of the vehicle platform it's the reliability and the performance of all the different components you have to think about your power domain about redundancy sensing, like everything. The performance of the software and that extremely high number of nines, that, you know, there's a lot of people and a lot of great companies working on this problem. So,

6. 44:09

   I'm excited about the progress we're going to make there. But I think there's naturally, there's going to be some applications and some domains that emerge where it's a combination of very multiple multidisciplinary things that have to come together where the cost, like the margin for error is so extremely slim that I don't think that will be fully commoditized.