Thomas von Tschammer: evaluation

Transcript context

…People might be surprised by how, when you talk about taking the driver out of the car, so to speak, in a very, literal way that opens up like all kinds of new form factors, right? It could be the small delivery car that doesn't have any people at all. It could be sleepers that we get to overnight in on our way to grandmother's house, whatever. I think that has felt, even though people have talked about that, imagine that for a while when they think about the self-driving car world, it has felt like that is a long way off even once the technology works because We just haven't seen much change. Like why would we expect to see all these form factors pop up from a bunch of car companies that have given us like strikingly point for point similar product lines in recent decades. But this maybe could be very different in a world where a tremendous amount of stuff becomes automated. Is there like a, is there a bootstrap there that you think is interesting? One that does strike me is like the vehicle lists passengers in a, it wouldn't take much to perhaps create some slightly different regulations for those type of devices. And next thing you could really get a crazy flywheel going, perhaps, that then again, like leaks out into the rest of the broader industry. How, like, how fast do you think that kind of stuff could happen? I think the main reason for the phenomenon you're mentioning is that today most of the autonomous driving cars are cars that you could drive, but they're not made autonomous, right? And because you need to drive them, then they look like the ones we used to. If you look at way more, right, this is what's happening, they take the chip hard, I-pace, and they make it autonomous. And if you give another cell, you need to be able to drive it by regulation if you have an issue. But there are a few companies If I take the counter example, that I've built autonomous first vehicles. If you think about Dukes, right, I guess you know about this company on the West Coast. I think the first tagline is that it's not a car, right? It's a robotaxi designed around you, if you recall correctly. Because they've built it fully autonomous minds and 1st, that's it. And it doesn't look like a car. If you think about it, it's a relation to anything we've seen. So I think the more that the technology becomes mature, the bigger the shift gonna be to new type of concepts as well. How far does this go? Is there any limit to it? You know, I kind of imagine a, everything is an RL loop as kind of the end state. You know, you can imagine putting agents into every seat in the company. And again, we've, you know, keep in mind we're going to need some oversight for this, but in terms of, thinking kind of a first principles limit paradigm first, you could have product strategies, virtual market testing. There's increasingly models that in the same, general spirit as you have models that will validate the aerodynamics of your design, you can have models or scaffolds around foundation models that can sort of act as like virtual customer panels. So you could imagine, really from even the highest level, getting into a fast loop that's fed by RL, where you have at least a sufficiently good reward model to steer it in the right direction. And then that can kind of cascade all the way back, perhaps, right, to to the designs itself where you can imagine a not too distant future where I can sort of speak a perhaps rather complicated mechanical, electromechanical product into existence in a way that I can now like speak a video into existence. Do you see like any fundamental gaps in that vision? Like what, if anything, would prevent that from happening in five years' time?…

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