Qasar Younis discusses long-term consumer availability of autonomous vehicles on an a16z podcast panel in early 2018.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Younis: US is doomed if commercial software firms refuse DOD support
“If small and large commercial software companies don't support our government, and specifically the Department of Defense, we're screwed.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Younis: Future warfare will be software-defined, not driven by hardware
“I think it's not controversial to say that the conflicts of the future are going to be software defined. They're, it's not going to be very traditional conflicts where you have You know aircraft carriers lining up or you have tank columns”
Assertion Partly supported
Younis: Software engineers hold senior defense decision-making roles in China
“In China, this is, you know, this is the reality. Engineers software engineers are very senior within the party and within the defense apparatus, and they are making these decisions”
Assertion Supported
Younis: Chinese auto dealerships offer assisted parking capabilities nonexistent in the West
“You can go to the dealership and try, you know, assisted, assisted parking in a way that does not exist anywhere in the West.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Yudis: Tesla and Waymo autonomous vehicle approaches will technically converge
“And so the next kind of 10 years is, and I think what you'll ultimately see is, like, somewhat of a very technical convergence, because the Tesla system is a very sensor light system. It's basically just a camera system. And the Waymo system is very sensor hea…”
Insight
Yudis: Transformer architectures bring LLM-style data scaling laws to autonomy
“There's a similar you know, let's say paradigm shift happening in autonomy and in vision systems as well with transformers, and so what that ultimately means in autonomy is the similar dynamics in large language models, you can put lots of data in, and you get…”