"I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year.
"There are no fundamental challenges remaining.
"There are many small problems.
"And then there's the challenge of solving all those small problems and putting the whole system together."
Real-world testing was needed to uncover what would be a "long tail" of problems, he added."
This is so ridiculous. Of course the basic functionality is easy. The whole point of having intelligent drivers is dealing with the edge cases.
I think there's a missing financial product here. Something like an anti-index, where you buy "everything except X". Or better phrased, a way to get your bank to model you a dynamic index, where you can manually specify what is in and what is out.
Counterpoint: Elon Musk is the only (publicly visible) CEO who is seriously talking about going to Mars and direct interfacing between machines and humans and making tangible steps toward these futuristic goals.
His rockets are [mostly] not exploding, his cars are selling to [mostly] good reviews, and neuralink seems to be doing something too.
Perhaps his cult of personality is deserved because although he (along with basically the entire industry) overpromised on self driving timelines, nonetheless he does seem to be one of the few people with the practical vision to take us into a techno future.
Consider that this guy went from a payment processing app to a bonafide private rocket company and is democratizing space flight (and satellite internet!) in what, about a decade?
People love to hate the guy, I believe because he has brash and harbors some unpopular (callous but rational) opinions. Regardless, the respect that he gets from his fanboys is arguably in deserved, if you're the type to find inspiration in great people.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that Musk hasn't done big things. The problem is, he's about 50/50 on how often the big things he does are actually good. This is completely ignored by his fanboys, who ignore the bad, and laud the good to an extent that's entirely untethered from reality.
Take your post for example: You soften the word "lied" to "overpromised" and then slowly build to more and more absurd lavishing praise. "Practical vision" is a bit of a stretch, but "democratizing" is just not reality. And "if you're the type to find inspiration in great people"--just about everyone finds inspiration in great people, so that's not even saying anything, it's just trying to indirectly say Elon Musk is a great person.
SpaceX watchers call it "Elon Time". When Gwynne Shotwell gives you a time estimate, you can take it seriously (subject to regular engineering uncertainty). When Elon Musk gives you a time estimate, laugh it off and say "that's adorable" and recognize that it's mostly intended to keep investors happy and to put pressure on his engineers.
Yes and I would already have won before posting this reply. He said it would be here by now and then moved the timeline when it wasn't and he's done so more than once.
> "SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s"
I seriously cannot understand how it is he gets away with all of his gimmicks. I mean, insulting federal government agencies is not a crime, but so many of things he does seem to be awfully close to a crime these agencies are supposed to prosecute for.
P.S.
Hmm... How comes his brilliant TSLA price evaluation of 2 months ago isn't cited? If anything, this should have been captured for future generations.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313