Many bus routes are designed with stopping/break points, including limiting route lengths so that operators aren't stuck in these conditions.
Yes, at 5pm in a major city, a bus driver might pull up next to a convenience stop, stop the bus, go pee, and come back. Does it happen often? Not that often, because of the aforementioned "we design routes so people aren't trapped for multiple hours" concept.
Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.
Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?
The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car.
It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails.
So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for.
Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.
At a systems level, transportation is something we have to be very, very careful about, because if you get it wrong, you start excluding entire groups of people from being a functional part of your society just because they are different from you in where and how they live.
"When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now." Really? I drive on logging roads a few times a month to get to some property. This is pretty sketchy even in good conditions and there's always the chance of getting stuck and having to hike a mile or two the rest of the way up to go get the tractor and sort it out. I'm probably not buying a self-driving car any time soon, if ever.
Now, is having self driving taxis a fantastic idea in a very dense city? Of course. There's huge benefits in keeping the average car as safe, efficient in both energy and pollution, and highly utilized as possible. Are these also a good retrofit to dense-ish suburbs where a bus/rail network isn't quite enough (and the costs to build it in already-developed land are unpalatable)? Also yes. But that's not ubiquitous, that's just part of a larger system that needs to be able to serve all users.
And if your point is that "move out of the mountains and into a city because that's the less-selfish option"... that's a certain kind of political statement, I guess.
The way this is typically handled is through compartmentalization, where no one working has enough of a global view to be able to claim that the behaviour is problematic.
There's a lot that's problematic that we suspect that is going on but don't have firm proof, because the organization actually is pretty good at keeping it secret enough. There's some exceptions where things do get leaked/revealed, but how would you know if this was 99% of wrongdoing, or 0.99% of it?
There's no requirement that the mesh be IP-based or function as a layer-3 router...
Even if it were IP-bsaed, it would be extremely straightforward for one box to send a UDP message to another, and receive and retransmit at the application layer. No TTL nonsense, No multiple IPs showing up communicating upstream.
Imagine you walk up to a shelf and all the prices reconfigure based on a model of the most you would be willing to spend for each item, including putting fake "normal" prices so that the "sale" price you are shown is whatever percentage markdown makes you likely enough to buy.
There's no advertising here, there's just aggressively trying to drain each person's wallet as much as possible and seeing how far you can get before they change behaviour.
One example: my friend and I both requested rides using the same app, standing next to each other to the same street in the same neighborhood 3-4 miles away. He owns a car and rarely uses car services, I do not and it's my primary transportation. The quoted cost of his ride was half mine. It was shocking.
That's pretty unrealistic, but I'd visit occasionally just to browse and not buy anything, making the algorithm lower the prices for me. Could build an app where people could register their prices for stuff so everyone could see what the price floor is for a given product. Good luck making a system people won't abuse the shit out of.
And I'm sure there would be competitors simply not doing this where I could shop instead.
If Uber does this and you don't like it then don't use Uber. Regular taxis still exist and I'm sure they'd love to have your business back. Or you could get a car, low-end used EVs are quite affordable and fuel is almost literally free. They seem to hold good resale value too.
Keep in mind that what previous work has done on a single chip with weights baked in was on a 8b parameter model. Sol is likely something in the 5T parameter range, perhaps higher. Serving the whole thing at BF16 is on the order of $3m in hardware just to serve it at all, and closer to $1-1.5m of hardware if it was being served as NVFP4. And power draw starting at high tens to low hundreds of kilowatts.
Let's say a magic set of chips comes along to host this. Maybe it's 2-3x more efficient in size and power. You're still talking a form factor that's a good chunk of a rack, draws tens of kilowatts, and could actually be sold at a similar if not higher price point because the OPEX is so much lower.
It may be useful but it's certainly uneconomic to spend >$1m to self host the model, plus ongoing power and maintenance costs, plus the cost to adapt whatever building you're in to be able to power it.
ill give you that the way we talk about this ppl seem to think wed do this tomorrow, but in the 70s a kb of ram took an entire rack and tons of power also. Its seems equally plausible that we could go into a cycle of iterative refinement of baked model hardware that would end up in "personal ai" just like we got to personal computing.
Baked model hardware is not the next step in the chain here, in the next 2-3 years we might hopefully see some HBF (high bandwidth flash) hardware to try and get at same memory bandwidth today at a somewhat lower price point and much lower power dissipation.
Something like the next iteration of Cerebras hardware paired with HBM for KV cache + HBF for weights could be incredibly strong here and much more likely to see away to make into a product with some lifetime compared to "let's bake a old model into a very, very large number of custom chips, design all the interconnects from scratch, and pray". Maybe in 10-15 years once this all matures.
Now if that works out that means in '29/'30 we could easily see a run on NAND that's even worse than the current DRAM price issues, on top of the current increases. Fun times if that happens.
The five year project likely represents a bunch of engineers that are stuck in meetings and coordination for 75% of their time, then you staff the project with more people (because you need four times as many) then they all need more meetings to coordinate too. And then they need to write a lot more documentation in the process because in that five years the people working on the project will all turn over at least once if not 2-3 times. Never mind critical people getting pulled off the project to work on other more important things on a monthly basis as is common at large firms.
It's entirely possible for a 2-3 month project if one senior person was left the hell alone to do it to take a dozen people five years.
This is starting to be done for very high value plants (think chip fabs, large datacenters, that kind of thing. When the infrastructure is a $10b expense it's worth it).
Small plants in the middle of nowhere, especially municipal ones? You're lucky if it was designed this century and not 50-100 years ago. Everyone's just trying to keep old stuff running at absolute minimum cost.
I've seen similar things in this decade. Lots of stuff still running where the last change in design was 20+ years ago, the current team knows how to keep the lights on and replace parts, and calls a vendor if something goes end of life and asks for a replacement part, then configures it the same way that the older one was.
It's quite reliable, and does not require paying for a team of people who wants to try new things. Once this happens for a long while there's no one in the building left who's going to advocate for change, since the only thing all that fancy new technology brings is the next 5 years of nobody getting a bonus because operational metrics weren't being met anymore.
You have to try really hard to convince these people that the thing that they have seen on a daily basis to work just fine for the past twenty years is no longer good enough, because all their evidence says that it is. And you should also listen to them much more than people who just want to use the latest thing typically do, because they do have the decades of experience seeing how things actually fail.
Yes, at 5pm in a major city, a bus driver might pull up next to a convenience stop, stop the bus, go pee, and come back. Does it happen often? Not that often, because of the aforementioned "we design routes so people aren't trapped for multiple hours" concept.
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