What You May Have Missed #6

Self-driving cars aren't coming anytime soon / Is scale all we need? / Personalized avatars with Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth / Image to music / OpenAI partners with Shutterstock

Anton Grabolle / Better Images of AI / Autonomous Driving / CC-BY 4.0

Self-driving cars aren’t coming anytime soon

• “It’s time to admit self-driving cars aren’t going to happen.” TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington thinks autonomous vehicles (AV) won’t happen in our lifetimes and won’t become “omnipresent”—people won’t experience them in their daily lives.

• This was right after Argo AI—a Ford- and Volkswagen-backed AV startup— announced earlier this week it’s shutting down (at least partly because of the difficulty to find new investors).

• Aarian Marshall writes for Wired that “the end of Argo is just the latest sign that the global effort to get cars to drive themselves is in trouble—or at least more complex than once thought.”

• Marshall adds that “Ford executives … don’t think self-driving makes much sense right now.” Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, says that “no one has defined a profitable business model at scale.”

• TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec explains that “the promises around commercializing AV technology have proven more difficult than expected.”

• And it seems Argo isn’t the only AV company in trouble. Earlier this week Reuters reported that “Tesla faces U.S. criminal probe over self-driving claims.” The company—CEO Elon Musk in particular—has a history of exaggerating the capabilities of the tech by claiming Tesla’s Autopilot has a “full self-driving” feature.

• Andrej Karpathy, ex-director of Tesla AI was yesterday on the Lex Fridman podcast. Here’s the transcription of a short relevant bit on AVs: