Great to see you on Substack, Animesh. I have been following your work, and your perspective here will be interesting. Your comparison with AV is spot on, though I am less optimistic. Tesla has been marketing full autonomy for its drivers and charging them an arm and a leg for years. While they could get away with this 5 years ago, the EV market now is competitive and the edge cases make Tesla FSD still unusable for anyone outside the Bay Area (regulatory restrictions also do not help). I don't see this changing anytime soon. With this track record, my expectation for the Robot - with a market date of 2027 - is modest. Not for their stock prices, though. And in the end that may be the whole point. Still, open sourcing the "brains" of this humanoid may lead to far more progress in the community than a product 5 years away.
Just because a batter strikes out on a 100mph fastball doesnt mean you cut him before the next at bat. Andrew Carnegie was in the poor house after creating that bridge that crosses the Mississippi with steel. At the time the railroads ended up being overbuilt and couldn't even afford to redo their tracks with his steel much less pay enough toll to cross the bridge so he can pay his debtors. A little miscalculation.. no matter. Turns out his steel platform started powering the creation of skyscrapers in the cities. Musk hasn't failed at all. He used the EV money and Autonomous Automobile investors to get to this point and now game board says to move that technology into humanoid robots. At 20k hes going to be doing that at a loss but ultimately this could be the platform that swallows up all the great work already done on the market. This is how innovation flows.
Thank you for writing this. You hit it when u asked "what's going to be different this time?" Everyone still hunting for that answer.
Great to see you on Substack, Animesh. I have been following your work, and your perspective here will be interesting. Your comparison with AV is spot on, though I am less optimistic. Tesla has been marketing full autonomy for its drivers and charging them an arm and a leg for years. While they could get away with this 5 years ago, the EV market now is competitive and the edge cases make Tesla FSD still unusable for anyone outside the Bay Area (regulatory restrictions also do not help). I don't see this changing anytime soon. With this track record, my expectation for the Robot - with a market date of 2027 - is modest. Not for their stock prices, though. And in the end that may be the whole point. Still, open sourcing the "brains" of this humanoid may lead to far more progress in the community than a product 5 years away.
Just because a batter strikes out on a 100mph fastball doesnt mean you cut him before the next at bat. Andrew Carnegie was in the poor house after creating that bridge that crosses the Mississippi with steel. At the time the railroads ended up being overbuilt and couldn't even afford to redo their tracks with his steel much less pay enough toll to cross the bridge so he can pay his debtors. A little miscalculation.. no matter. Turns out his steel platform started powering the creation of skyscrapers in the cities. Musk hasn't failed at all. He used the EV money and Autonomous Automobile investors to get to this point and now game board says to move that technology into humanoid robots. At 20k hes going to be doing that at a loss but ultimately this could be the platform that swallows up all the great work already done on the market. This is how innovation flows.