Comment by omgwtfbyobbq

Elon is not Tesla.

I think his decisions have been helpful in the past, especially compared to half-hearted attempts at EVs by most of most other large manufacturers, but only time will tell if his current positions will pay off. At least the new compensation is performance based. If he can't deliver, he doesn't get paid.

V3/V4 have significantly improved in the past few months. I use one, the other, or both, daily, more V3 than V4. They are well ahead of where they were in 2023.

I'm sure Nvidia and others will eventually catch up, but they have to catch up in terms of auto manufacturing/use, inference/training/sensor hardware manufacturing/use, fleet training data, etc... simulataneously.

Xpeng driving autonomously is great, and shows they are catching up at least in a specific situation. They may be catching up in the aggregate, they may not be. I agree that a Chinese manufacturer has the best chance to catch up overall.

In general, I think it's about whether a distributed, lower-compute/sensor with higher-data/training approach like Tesla/etc have will beat a more singular, higher-compute/sensor with lower-data/training like Waymo/etc have.

Distributed has been able to offer better ADAS at a lower cost, but singular is winning at fully autonomous driving. If distributed can catch up in terms of autonomous diving while continuing to improve ADAS, distributed is done. I have a hunch that's a part of why there's so much demand for DRAM/etc...