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All-In · 3 min · Jan 31, 2025
Grid capacity could bottleneck autonomous ride-hailing
Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick argues that cheaper AI could make autonomy easier, but scaling electric ride-hailing would put major pressure on power infrastructure.
The episode’s best minutes
Full episode- 18:59DeepSeek’s headline training cost leaves out its compute investment7 min
- 51:04China copied Uber quickly, then began innovatingPro pick 4 min
- 1:26:50Grid capacity could bottleneck autonomous ride-hailing3 min
- 4 more moments in the full episode
“If all of the miles in California went EV ride sharing. You would need to double the energy capacity of California.”
Travis Kalanickat 1:28:19 · All-In
Takeaways
- Cheaper AI could make autonomous driving cheaper and more widespread.
- Kalanick estimates California would need twice its energy capacity for all-EV ride-sharing.
- Power infrastructure may limit rollout more than autonomy software.
About this segment
Travis Kalanick argues that cheaper AI could make autonomy easier, but scaling electric ride-hailing would put major pressure on power infrastructure. He points to combustion-engine autonomous vehicles as an overlooked alternative.
CEO, Atoms
Built Uber and now leads Atoms, applying industrial AI and specialized robotics to automate food, mining and transport.
Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital
Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.
Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH
Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.
David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo
Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
From “DeepSeek Panic, US vs China, OpenAI $40B?, and Doge Delivers with Travis Kalanick and David Sacks”, Jan 31, 2025. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 1:26:56
First is cheap AI makes cheap autonomy. So as cheap AI gets out there and proliferates and gets broadly distributed, we should expect autonomy gets easier and easier and easier. And you see some of the stuff that's happening with Tesla and FSD, their new models are like, I think in a three-month period, they went up like 10x in terms of performance, meaning a number of miles per human intervention. That's the thing that Elon's seeing right now because cheap AI, cheap, good AI makes cheap, good autonomy. And that's a thing we need to connect the dots on. I think the thing then you go one level past that, you're like, okay, there's the possibility literally that autonomy just gets easy and commoditized similar to what's happening to AI. The next part is, okay, you get the hardware. You're like, okay, manufacturing's hard. That's
- 1:27:52
interesting. That could be a long pull in the tent. I think that could be a place where Tesla, of course, has huge advantage. look at who are Waymo's partners. Are they getting set up to do the right kind of manufacturing and get scale of cars out there? But then there's like this dark horse that nobody's talking about, which is, it's called electricity. It's called power. And all these vehicles are electric vehicles. And if you said, I just did some quick back of the envelope calcs. If all of the miles in California went EV ride sharing. You would need to double the energy capacity of California.
- 1:28:36
Let's not even talk about what it would take to double the energy capacity in the grid and things like that in California. Let's not even go there. Even getting 20% more, 10% more is going to be a gargantuan five to 10 year exercise. Look, I live in LA. It's a nice area in LA and we have power outages all the freaking time because the grid is effed up and they're sort of upgrading it as things break. That's literally where we're at in LA, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in LA. That's just where we are. So I think the sort of the dark horse kind of hot take is combustion engine avs because i i don't know how you can go fast getting av out there really really really massive with the electric grid as it is what do you think about regulation