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Tesla's Robotaxi Service In San Francisco Is Actually Just Going To Be A Regular Old Taxi Service
Main Post: Tesla's Robotaxi Service In San Francisco Is Actually Just Going To Be A Regular Old Taxi Service
Top Comment: It's not even that because they can't charge and can't offer it to the public.
The AI future right now: I took a self driving taxi home tonight in San Francisco, like many other nights, and passed by 22 other self driving cars. What this means for YOU is extremely complicated.
Main Post:
This post isn't about bootcamps but rather it's about why technology is so exciting and if you are passionate about technology, I hope this motivates you to keep trying to figure it out.
Ask me questions and share your thoughts!
I'm lucky that I can zoom around San Francisco in Waymo self driving cars. They sure make the newspaper headlines, but the day-to-day ride is a lot more nuanced than any article or headline would make you believe.
It's not a secret how the underlying machine learning works:
- Add dozens of sensors to a car
- Have humans drive for millions of miles in the cars, record data on those sensors, and send that data to common machine learning algorithms to learn how to steer and accelerate the car based on that data
- Test the models with human drivers ready to take the wheel and make adjustments until the algorithm is perfect, whenever a human intervenes.
This is the "easy" part because it's just a matter of money. Can you afford to make the cars and can you afford to have humans drive millions and millions of miles to train the algorithms. And can you do this without making a single penny of revenue. (... and can you hire the best ML engineers to do all this the most economically efficiently)
Waymo (Google) can. Zoox (Amazon) can. Cruise (GM) can!
Self driving cars intimidate me. I've been an engineer for a long time, I was the #1 code contributer at Meta and one of the fastest people to be promoted from intern to the principal level engineer ever at the company.
If I had to make a self driving car from scratch, it would take me a long time to figure out what to do.
The reason why AI is so exciting and will create so many jobs, is because all of the above create so may opportunities for full stack generalist engineers who have no idea how the underlying machine learning works. For Waymo alone:
- Build the iOS and Android apps
- Build the payment systems
- Build the fraud systems
- Build the in-car meta experience (sound, lighting, copy, colors, displays)
- Build the in-car navigation experience
- Build the in-car control (air conditioning, displays)
- Build the fault detection systems (seatbelts, malfunctions, internal sensors, people touching the steering wheel)
- Build the emergency handling situations (accidents, police, etc...)
- Build the customer support within the car (if a passenger needs help)
- Build the customer support outside the car (billing issues)
- Build the feedback processing system during before and after (collecting user feedback and sending to the right people)
- Data warehousing of all meta data collected in rides
- Car diagnostics and status (tire pressure, battery levels, when the car needs maintenance)
- Regulatory compliance (data and interfaces to work with governments on self driving cars)
- Insurance compliance (data to insurance companies to help figure out how to insure self driving cars)
- Ride scheduling infra (booking cars, assigning cars, routing, etc...)
- Car updates and releases (how do you update the software in a car over the air and when)
- Security (making sure all aspects are secure)
- Emergency response (tools and features for first responders to interact with the car)
I'm sure DOZENS MORE.
Doing a 12 week bootcamp does NOT make you qualified to manage something like this or lead anything like this. It takes years of experience and failure and success and failure and success and failure....
But all of this stuff is going to create so many jobs we can't even imagine.
My advice: If this is exciting to you, get a job in tech as soon as possible and sponge up as much as you can.
How do you get a job as fast as you can? This is the hard question. Bootcamps aren't working right now. "Get rich quick - 3 weeks of AI/ML" are not they answer either, they are absolute scams. The machine learning jobs are boring and for PhDs. The Gen-AI jobs are throwaway jobs prompt engineering and training AI systems. Generalist engineers with strong engineering skills are the way to go.
I don't have the one and only answer for you, other than for most of you, you won't be able to quickly get into this industry. It's going to take a long time. If you build every day, and don't give up, you'll get there. If anyone promises you a timeframe, double check that....
DMs are open, comments are open, what do you think?
Top Comment:
I think you’re right that working on these projects is going to be way more complex than building a SaaS CRUD app. People will need to be solid problem solvers who know their tools beyond just setting up a web app.
This will create a big need for design too. As we get more tools, it’s not just about being a full-stack generalist anymore; we need FULL stack generalists (full-stack product designers)—people who understand the whole design process.
I believe we’ll reach a point where we can outline rules, user journeys, goals, and top-tasks declaratively, allowing a lot of this to be created and iterated on without anyone having to write explicit code.
And a tool like that (whether it’s a calculator or AI) is only helpful if you know how to use it. You can have all the fancy tech in the world, but if you don’t know what you’re making, you won’t be able to contribute much.
So, I think there's going to be a huge world of opportunity. But I'm also worried about how many people are behaving like robots.
Pony.ai CEO doubts if Tesla can launch its robo-taxi service soon
Main Post: Pony.ai CEO doubts if Tesla can launch its robo-taxi service soon
Top Comment: I don't understand why there would be doubt. Tesla cannot launch the robotaxi service soon