The Ledger
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Ludwig: Tesla R&D vehicles still use LiDAR in the Bay Area
“If you see, for example, a Tesla R&D vehicle, it actually has LiDAR on it to this day, right? In, in the Bay Area, we see these you'll see like Model Ys or CyberCab that have LiDARs on them just driving around.”
Ludwig: AI tooling creates an enormous bimodal productivity gap among engineers
“And I think in that you start to see more of a bimodal distribution of engineers, right? You start to see like, wow, there's this subset of people that they really get it. Like they're all in and they've clearly invested the hours needed to learn these tools a…”
Ludwig: LiDAR is hands down useful for AV R&D and data collection
“And the state of the industry right now is LiDAR is hands down a useful sensor specifically for data collection and the R&D phase of autonomy development.”
Ludwig: Autonomous systems will not cause worse accidents than human drivers
“I don't think we honestly have to worry about there ever being accidents from these systems that are much, like, much worse than what humans would cause, because humans do do terrible things. People fall asleep at the wheel all the time.”
Ludwig: Relying purely on world models will bankrupt companies before deployment
“I think if you're hoping to do real world deploys and you're purely relying on a world model approach, you probably won't get to something that works before you go bankrupt.”
Ludwig: Probably everything in the world reduces to next-token prediction
“So the interesting thing is, I think probably everything in the world can actually be boiled down to like a next token prediction problem. And In any workflow, anything can be thought of almost as like there's this, the sequence of steps or the sequence of tra…”
Ludwig: Physical AI companies cannot afford software engineers who ignore hardware
“Definitely in the vibe coding era, there are a crop of engineers that they don't think about hardware at all, and we don't have that luxury.”
Ludwig: Most automakers cannot update safety-critical systems over the air
“Are basically never doing updates and they're, and even if they are doing updates, they're usually only updating maybe one module. Maybe they're updating the HMI module, but they're not able to update, let's say the seafood critical parts of the system. You ha…”
Ludwig: Physical machines mirror pre-Android smartphone fragmentation
“So physical machines today are more akin to the state of the phone market before Android and iOS existed.”
Ludwig: Claude Code Has Overtaken Cursor Internally at Applied Intuition
“Cursor was, I think the hottest tool in the company for a good while. Now, Claude Code, I think, has taken the reign on that.”
Ludwig: Frontier AI Models Now Excel at Low-Level Code and GPU Shaders
“Six months ago, I would have said the same thing, but it's becoming super useful for every domain.
I'm sure.
Right.
Like there was
I think six months ago, or maybe, maybe a year ago, if you tried to use, let's say the latest Claude model for writing shaders G…”
Ludwig: Model evaluation gets harder as AI models improve
“I think this is probably the hardest problem right now because the, as the models get better, it can be harder, harder to find the faults on the system. And so like the problem of doing proper eval to find those faults like that problem also keeps getting hard…”
Ludwig: RL on end-to-end models requires full sensor data simulation
“And so to do reinforcement learning on an end to end model, you now need to actually simulate all the sensor data, right?”
Ludwig: Physical AI reliability is now high enough to deploy cost-effectively
“The big unlock honestly for physical AI as an industry is that these models are just
Becoming much more reliable, right? Things like things actually work a lot better. It's like the number of nines you can get out of these systems are now good enough that it a…”
Ludwig: Autonomous systems must substantially exceed regulatory safety standards
“As I say, as a whole across the world, regularly oftentimes it's like a almost lowest common denominator, but like you really have to Substantially exceed what the regulators are expecting to make good products.”
Ludwig: Initial simulations never represent reality without sim-to-real feedback loops
“So at first go, no simulation is, is going to represent the real world. There's always a process of this sim to real matching where you actually, you need the real world feedback to basically feed into the parameters that are being used in the simulator.”
Ludwig: Actuator overheating is a major physical failure point in humanoid robotics
“In these humanoid robotics systems, overheating actuators is a real problem, right? So obviously phenomenal demos. The most amazing I can get. I love watching robots do acrobatics like everybody, but The systems actually overheat, right?”
Ludwig: 2B parameter LLMs can run on embedded vehicle hardware
“You can run that model on embedded system.
Definitely.”
Ludwig: Deep curiosity in software inevitably leads down to hardware
“If, and if you get, Curious enough about software, you ultimately end up in hardware, right?”
Ludwig: Autonomy systems map to human operator licensing categories
“The way to think about it, honestly, is a little bit like any system that you as an, as a human would need special training to operate. You can think of a little bit differently. So like the license to operate a truck is different from the license to operate a…”
Ludwig: Applied Intuition enables AI agents to configure sensor suites
“Nowadays though we expose all of the underlying APIs for that. And now using AI agents, you can actually configure a sensor suite with just text and likely reach a better result than you could have through the GUI in the past. And we're taking that thinking no…”