[vtail]

"HN is dying" is a cliche, I know, but I seriously want to bookmark this thread to revisit it in 10 years - I'm sure it will age even better than (in)famous Dropbox thread. So from that perspective, HN is alive and well :).

The level of cynicism of the discussion is overwhelming, frankly. I get it that some people don't like Musk because of his politics, but why should that prevent people interested in technology to at least try to present a steelman case?

Let me try it, at a risk to be down-voted to oblivion...

1. As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models. Investing more engineering time in them doesn't make any business sense; these engineering resources and capital should be clearly redeployed elsewhere.

2. People think that Waymo is supposedly better(?) than FSD, but at least some very well informed people (and NVIDIA as a company) believe that it's not. Personal anecdote: an older (HW3) version of Tesla drove me perfectly well in Yosemite last weekend, in on winding mountain roads with 0 cell phone coverage. It will take Waymo forever to map everything there properly with LIDAR, and true autonomy only in selected metro areas has limited value.

3. It's obvious that when we have autonomous, general purpose humanoid robots, they will completely transform our societies. Any such robots would require an enormous AI/vision investment. Say what you want about Elon, but xAI basically caught up with the top LLM shops in ~18 months, and now have comparable AI training capacity. You can bet against Optimus, but who else would have the skills to bring both the technology and the AI to market first? China? Good robotics, but no enough data to train their vision models comparing to Tesla, at least not yet.

4. So the bear case is that (a) driving autonomy is not possible without LIDAR, (b) Tesla can't bring another very complex product to market, and (c) autonomous robots are not possible in our lifetime. If you look at the AI progress even in the last 12 months, that's a tough sell to me.

What are the serious, tech-based counterarguments to the points above?

[abstractbg]

Okay, I'll bite. For the record, I own Tesla stock and I am generally bullish about AI.

I'll try to provide some counter-points specifically regarding the rate of progress.

3. It's much easier to catch up in capability (ex. LLMs) than it is to achieve a new capability (ex. replace humans laborers with humanoid robots). You can hire someone from a competitor, secrets eventually leak out, the search space is narrowed etc.

4(c). To me, what's most important is whether or not truly autonomous humanoid robots happens in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc. rather than in our lifetime.

These timelines will be tied to AI development timelines which largely outside the control of any one player like Tesla. I believe the world is bottlenecked on compute and that the current compute is not sufficient for physical AI.

It's extremely easy to be too early (ex. many of the self driving car companies of the past decade), and so for Tesla, there is a risk of over-investing in manufacturing robots before the core technology is ready.

[vtail]

Thanks, these are fair arguments!

Re: both 3 and 4(c) - agree that compute (or maybe even power for that compute) is likely to be a bottleneck in the next 3-5 years. However, I think Tesla/xAI are better positioned than many competitors as Tesla is a manufacturing company first and foremost; and this expertise (which is shared freely between Musk's companies) can help it to build it's own data centers, power generation (e.g., solar), or - in the most bullish case - even fab capacity.

[Mawr]

1. Your argument is that cutting off a rotting limb is good. Obviously it is, but I'd rather not have a rotting limb in the first place. I want a healthy, revenue-generating limb.

2. Waymo has been offering a driverless taxi service for some time now, and Tesla is not. That's a hard fact. Meanwhile your arguments are beliefs and personal anecdotes.

When, or rather if, Tesla starts offering their service, they will be behind Waymo by approximately however long ago Waymo started theirs, so at least a few years.

Unless you have some "serious, tech-based counterarguments"?

3. It's also obvious that when we have AGI, fusion, etc., they will completely transform our societies. I promise I will deliver you those by the end of this year. Send money now. If my timeline slips by a little—maybe a few decades—well, it was just a best-effort estimate and I did deliver in the end!

4. No, the bear case is that there's no real reason to believe Tesla would be the company that captures the market vs any other company. Their solar, tunnelling, and now car business models have failed/are failing, so they must win on self-driving/robots.

Self-driving is looking really bad, they're badly losing to Waymo.

They have shown nothing in terms of robots. If anything, dressing people up as robots and showing that is a rather negative signal. Oh, and robots are at least a 10x harder problem than self-driving.

[danny_codes]

Tesla isn’t a market leader in any of these things. It’s a decent shop, but not a leader in any of these things you’ve mentioned.

[vtail]

I would argue that it is a leader in vision-only FSD, which is useful for both self-driving and robots.

[gsharm]

Thanks for saying this. For new, impressionable minds here who read most of the comments here and think this it's all devs - it isn't. A lot of us value Musk and incredibly awesome tech like FSD and aren't consumed by political partisanship. That tells you more about the commenter than Musk.

Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.

[rossjudson]

What's with the "outdated" adjective? There's nothing in the US market even remotely close to the X. Every other EV is a slapdash pile of hoobajoobs and knobs that can't even drive itself.

Source: 45000 miles in a bit over two years, loved every minute of it. Makes our other high priced German car a disappointing machine to be avoided if possible.

[vtail]

You might be more informed that I am. We only have 3 and Y in the family. I based my statement on th fact that S/X were last refreshed 5 years ago; so they would need to be refreshed fairly soon.

[Der_Einzige]

Dropbox really was shit, the fact that we lampoon the HN anti-Dropbox guy is evidence that this place died long ago. You really could have just done it with rsync and I'm so glad Claude Code exists to kill every other shit SaaS business that doesn't deserve to exist. Dropbox first please.

[webdevver]

i think there's a danger here of underestimating how varied mankinds 'mindware' is at large.

for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".

you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)

and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.

im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).

[vtail]

Hard to tell whether you are serious or sarcastic, but assuming it's the former: my contrarian position on CC vs SaaS is that in the quest to kill shitty businesses people will discover that creating a high-value SaaS is very non-trivial. CC would kill a whole category of low effort SaaS while at the same time substantially raising the quality bar for SaaS that people are willing to pay money for.