So, 2024 has come and gone. What a year it has been for AI. Plenty of new advancements, fresh innovations, and lots and lots of hype. Boy, I seriously believe that we’ve created an AI Bubble. However, I’ve already spoken about that (including in a latest video).
What I want to talk about is the hype surrounding AI and the broken promises that seemingly are passing under the radar. Big Tech is getting away with a lot. Sam Altman is already talking about “Super Intelligence” (skipping a step to Artificial General Intelligence). Google is lying to us about their ChatGPT version called Gemini.
And good ol’ Elon Musk.
Those that know me know that I have a love/hate relationship with the guy. I love his sense of adventure, his imagination, his “let’s just try it and see how we go” attitude. But he’s a businessman of major companies and as a result a master spin doctor.
In this post I wanted to highlight his broken promises surrounding autonomous vehicles. Since 2014, every year and sometimes multiple times a year, Elon has promised significant autonomy for his Tesla cars. Even recently, he announced robo-taxis coming soon with no steering wheels or pedals, claiming a fully unsupervised version of Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Let’s see how that stands in light of his past remarks on this topic.
| Year | Quote | Broken Promise? |
| 2014 | “Autonomous cars will definitely be a reality. A Tesla car next year will probably be 90 percent capable of autopilot. Like, so 90 percent of your miles can be on auto. For sure highway travel.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2015 | “Self-driving cars are going to get here much faster than people think [two to three years]” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2016 | “Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we’ll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York… by the end of next year.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2017 | “[Coast to coast auto-pilot demo is] still on for end of year. Just software limited. Any Tesla car with HW2… will be able to do this.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2018 | “Self-driving will encompass all modes of driving by the end of next year” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2019 | “I think we will be feature-complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2020 | “I’m extremely confident that level five – or essentially complete autonomy – will happen and I think will happen very quickly… I feel like we are very close… I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year… There are no fundamental challenges remaining.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2021 | “And my personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year, yes, with data safety levels significantly greater than present.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2022 | “I will be shocked if we don’t achieve FSD safer than a human this year” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2023 | “But the trend is very clearly towards full self-driving, towards full autonomy. And I hesitate to say this, but I think we’ll do it this year. So that’s what it looks like.” (source) | Not Delivered |
| 2024 | Recently, Elon Musk held a robotaxi reveal event where he said that he will release an unsupervised version of FSD [Full Self Driving] in 2025. (source) | We’ll see! |
Perhaps this time Elon will deliver on his promises. Perhaps not. What’s important, though, is to realise that AI is being overhyped and Big Tech (along with Big People) are getting away with a lot. You can’t just keep talking like this and getting away with it. It’s not right and as I’ve said before, people are going to get hurt because we’re being fed an image of AI that doesn’t exist in reality.
Unfortunately, businesses have invested a lot of money around AI and the return on investment so far has been minimal. So, more talk like this is expected to come. Which is a shame.
Video of my article:
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