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🏠 Get In Loser, It's Robotaxi Time

🏠 Get In Loser, It's Robotaxi Time

Driving yourself is so 2022

Stephen Flanders
August 14, 2023

Gm. The Premier League season started over the weekend, and my favorite team Arsenal got things started with a dub. Is this the year we finally topple Man City? Probably not, but I’m praying for it.

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 FUTURISTIC

The Robotaxi Takeover Is Here

If the future is truly one of self-driving cars, then we took a big step toward that future last week.

After a six-hour hearing on Thursday, robotaxis won approval to operate 24/7 in San Fransisco.

Prove The Haters Wrong

The hearing was so brutally long because many people in SF don’t want robotaxis for a variety of reasons (this is their words, not mine):

They block roads.
They cause traffic jams.
They impede emergency vehicles.
They take the jobs of drivers.
They are run by big-tech companies that don’t care about SF.
They advance the causes of the surveillance state.

None of these concerns are new, and neither are people’s discontent. But, obviously, the mob of angry folks was not enough to stop the robotaxi expansion.

And that’s a huge win for the industry.

A Much Needed Win

It costs about $2B to keep the lights on at robotaxi company Cruise. Competitor Waymo has spent at least $3.5B on developing its technology.

Neither of these companies has come close to sniffing a profit.

This development likely isn’t enough to get them into the green, but it sure as hell gets them closer.

And if that means robotaxi development continues, then we all won on Thursday.

An Unexpected Winner: Robotaxi companies and futurists aren’t the only people who won on Thursday. People who like getting down and dirty on their ride home are also quite pleased with the ruling.

🏠 AI

OpenAI Is Expensive To Run

The pioneers behind the chatbot movement might be undone by their own success.

ChatGPT is wildly popular. It has over 100 million active users, and the site logs billions of visits per month. However, this popularity makes ChatGPT exorbitantly expensive to run.

But how expensive?

Try $700,000…PER DAY.

That’s a lot of cheddar.

Now, let’s be clear: OpenAI isn’t at risk of imminently going under. They have the $10B investment from Microsoft, and they do pull in a bit of revenue. But the point of ChatGPT being expensive still stands, and it is something that CEO Sam Altman even called “eye-watering”.

At this point, it looks like OpenAI’s options amount to:

Find a way to better monetize ChatGPT and its other products.
Hope that Nvidia pumps out a better AI chip (check)
Pivot to open-source, a la Meta (check)

Building the future isn’t cheap. But if OpenAI can weather this early storm and find the formula for profitability, then untold riches lie ahead.

The Bottom Line: ChatGPT is dummy expensive to run daily, but we’re betting on Altman and co to figure things out.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

What else is going on?

Tesla is now pumping out Cybertrucks.
The Apple Watch is about to get a major redesign.
Juul is working on a vape that verifies your age.
Twitter X is lowering the requirements for ad-revenue sharing.

Stat: 205 MPH: How fast Texas’s new bullet train between Houston and Dallas will go. Can we please please PLEASE get one of these between NYC and DC?

Rabbit hole: The Great Inflection? (Asterik Mag)