Supervision and truth

May 31, 2024

A diagram I found online about distinguishing facts and value judgments. Seems easy enough! For more than a decade the dominant training methodology in...

What Waymo's NHTSA investigation says about how far along autonomous cars are

May 15, 2024

Computer vision’s bête noire, believe it or not NHTSA is investigating Waymo. They're investigating Zoox, too, and have reopened an investigation into Tesla...

Why those "training data poisoning" gimmicks don't really work

February 9, 2024

The human visual cortex uses an optimal representation of the world One of my favorite science papers is Olshausen and Field (1996). It's about receptive...

Destructive investing and the siren song of software

January 19, 2024

Auto manufacturing is a strikingly tough business. Your upfront costs are incredibly high: you need huge factories, massive amounts of raw materials. Design...

How LLMs are and are not like the brain

January 5, 2024

Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...

The emptiness at the heart of emotion recognition

December 8, 2023

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash Every few months a new company flashes into the news doing emotion recognition with machine learning. This time it's...

How the field of "AI" got like this

November 2, 2023

Photo by Nick Wessaert on Unsplash The AI world can a deeply hostile place for people who are not white men. This is inarguable, and is a huge problem for...

I knew this was coming

October 27, 2023

3rd gen Cruise vehicle in happier times. Pic by Dillu, via wikimedia commons In 2016, when we originally raised money for our self-driving car company, we...

The cost we bear

September 22, 2023

Photo by Jim Wilson on Unsplash A cyclist got killed here a few weeks back. He was 57, I assume a commuter, riding in a wealthy suburb. He was hit by a truck...

Understanding (and) psychology

August 9, 2023

Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash I've talked in the past about the difficulty of knowing what you're measuring, and how important that is to machine...

The value-destroying potential of AI

July 31, 2023

Photo by Nick Jio on Unsplash When my company was trying to sell our solution for theory of mind to autonomous vehicle companies, the biggest problem we had...

Helpful and unhelpful anthropomorphism

July 26, 2023

Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash I've said before that the reason "AI" is so powerful (and difficult to get right) is that it deploys the single most...

Is artificial intelligence as a term per se racist?

May 5, 2023

Photo by Ag PIC on Unsplash Artificial intelligence is an old term. It came into common usage, famously, in 1956, at the Dartmouth Summer Conference on...

Knowing how to measure

April 14, 2023

Photo by William Warby on Unsplash One of my regular hobbyhorses is that computer science/machine learning as a field failed to learn the correct lessons...

Self-serving thought experiments

March 15, 2023

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash A few years ago my collaborator Julian de Freitas and I published the first of what became a series of papers about the...

AI as UX

March 2, 2023

Photo by Daniel Perunov on Unsplash I was talking to my friend Kieran about the argument I made in my last newsletter, about AI being UX. That is to say,...

LLMs, anthropocentric thinking, accuracy, and self-driving

February 16, 2023

I asked Dall-E to draw me a diagram of how a LLM answers a question factually. It, uh, went about how I expected it would. If you’ve been comfortably...

The story Waze tells about problems with autonomous cars

October 7, 2022

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash I’m not alone in complaining about ubiquitous GPS navigation. Google Maps and Waze (in particular) are causing changes in...

It's not clear anybody wants autonomous cars

September 23, 2022

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash Nobody actually knows if people want autonomous cars. I don't mean the imaginary version of autonomous cars, sleekly...

What is it all for

September 9, 2022

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash I started this newsletter because, after the sudden evaporation of the company I'd spent seven years building, I had more...

What if we were actually trying to use technology to make cars safe?

August 8, 2022

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think that the primary of even secondary goal of autonomous car companies is road...

Computer vision is badly defined

August 4, 2022

DALL-E 2 trying to express the puzzlement of a computer looking at a human The perception systems in autonomous cars have been struggling with providing the...

The urbanist case for autonomous cars

August 1, 2022

Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash Around the corner from where I live, they're building a new subway station. It's part of the first major expansion of...

What autonomous cars see

July 27, 2022

Photo by nik radzi on Unsplash Autonomous cars are operating based on a set of information about the world completely different from the information on which...

The Nightmare Scenario

July 25, 2022

This is something I've believed for decades. I grew up in one of the last true streetcar suburbs in the country, a bucolic (and now unaffordable) place which...

Driving is a social process

July 20, 2022

Photo by Sangga Rima Roman Selia on Unsplash There is something very strange about automobiles. They are much faster and more dangerous than our brains are...

On harm reduction

July 18, 2022

Photo by Jordan Bebek on Unsplash I spent the last seven years of my life trying to convince the autonomous vehicle industry of two things: first, that...