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Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Is Already an Enormous Mess

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As Tesla prepares the slated June launch of its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, there's a pretty big elephant in the room.

Failure to Launch

As Tesla prepares for the slated June launch of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, there's a pretty big elephant in the room: that its autonomous driving services leave a lot to be desired.

As Forbes reports, the serious safety concerns surrounding Tesla's so-called "Full Self-Driving" may result in CEO Elon Musk's robotaxi service being dead on arrival.

"It's going to fail for sure," billionaire and longtime Tesla critic Dan O'Dowd told Forbes.

Along with founding defense and aerospace contractor Green Hills Software, O'Dowd established a nonprofit, The Dawn Project, whose main purpose is warning the public about the dangers of unproven self-driving tech, particularly Tesla's FSD, and lobbying against its legality.

Still, he's done some of his own research to reach his Tesla-negative stance.

"We drove it around Santa Barbara for 80 minutes, and there were seven failures," he told Forbes. "If there had not been a driver sitting in the driver's seat, it would’ve hit something."

Highway To Hell

It's not just O'Dowd questioning Musk's plans to launch a driverless ride-hailing service in Austin.

As Electrek reports, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) tapped Tesla earlier this week to release its FSD data ahead of the robotaxi launch next month. The agency — which is investigating Tesla for several safety defects — became concerned that the robotaxi launch may use FSD, which has proven to be quite dangerous.

"The agency would like to gather additional information about Tesla’s development of technologies for use in 'robotaxi' vehicles," wrote Tanya Topka, the NHTSA's defect investigation investigator,  in an email obtained by Electrek, "to understand how Tesla plans to evaluate its vehicles and driving automation technologies for use on public roads."

Around the time that the NHTSA letter was revealed, The Information reported that as of April, Tesla had not yet started testing its autonomous cabs without safety drivers.

Outstanding Questions

As Forbes notes, there's still a lot we don't know about the Robotaxi launch, including when exactly it will happen and how it will operate.

Neither Tesla nor the city of Austin has been very open about those plans with the media, and the only thing anyone has gleaned so far about it is that it will be much more limited than expected, with a maximum of 20 self-driving Model Ys trawling specific areas of the Texas capital.

With all that uncertainty, one would not blame Musk for pushing back the robotaxi launch — but if history is to once again repeat itself, he won't give up the ghost until the very last second.

More on Robotaxis: Elon Musk's "Robotaxis" Have a Dirty Secret

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Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Is Already an Enormous Mess

Ex-Google CEO Says It’s Fine If AI Companies "Stole All the Content"

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According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, AI companies should

Move Fast and Steal Things

Worried your AI startup might be illegally swallowing up boatloads of copyright-protected content? According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, you can worry about that later — once you have oodles of cash and a platoon of lawyers, that is.

As caught by The Verge, during a recent talk at Stanford's School of Engineering, Schmidt displayed what can only be described as Silicon Valley CEO Final Boss Energy as he laid out a theoretical scenario in which the students in the room might use a large language model (LLM) to build a TikTok competitor, in the case that the platform was to be banned.

Schmidt acknowledged that his imagined scenario might be riddled with legal and ethical questions — but that, he says, should be something to deal with later.

"Here's what I propose each and every one of you do. Say to your LLM the following: 'Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines," Schmidt told the room. "That's the command."

And "what you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur," he continued, "is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?" He then added that "if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content" anyway.

"Do not quote me," the billionaire continued. (Oops!)

Lawyers With Mops

Schmidt did at one point try to point out that he "was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody's music," despite advising the students moments earlier to essentially do exactly that.

In many ways, the ex-Google CEO's statement perfectly encapsulates much of the AI industry's overarching attitude toward other people's stuff.

Companies have been scraping up human-produced content for years now to train their ever-hungry AI models. And while some entities, like The New York Times, are calling copyright foul, Schmidt apparently sees alleged IP theft as a "mess" for lawyers to clean up later.

"Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess," Schmidt told the Stanford students, according to a transcript of the event. "And that's typically how those things are done."

The video has since been taken down after plenty of negative press coverage.

More on AI and copyright: Microsoft CEO of AI Says It's Fine to Steal Anything on the Open Web

The post Ex-Google CEO Says It's Fine If AI Companies "Stole All the Content" appeared first on Futurism.

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Ex-Google CEO Says It's Fine If AI Companies "Stole All the Content"