Sam's push to commercialize and lockdown infrastructure is not in any way incompatible with the mission of OpenAI.
Just as no one is ready for marriage or kids until it happens, we aren't ready for AGI until it happens. It will never be safe enough.
Sam's strategy is to get it out as widely as possible, with incremental progress acclimating us to it. In exchange, OpenAI gets real data on safety over time.
The board is naive and idealistic. Ilya is a genius and his heart's in the right place, but unfortunately his brain isn't.
We know that transformers can generalize within the training set. We know that transformers can make connections between wildly different domains (at least when prompted).
Of course it can't generalize beyond training - why would it? But at the same time, there is probably huge amounts of value lurking INSIDE the training data that humans haven't unlocked yet.
remote operation of vehicles often makes a lot of sense economically, since you can effectively decouple drivers from vehicles/riders. As you pointed out, this means you can shift to deal with peak loads and all of that - great.
Given everything you know now, was it wise to push for expansion over improvements to safety and reliability of the vehicles? On one hand, there is certainly value in expanding a bit to uncover edge-cases sooner. On the other hand, I'm not convinced it was worth expanding before getting the business sorted out.
My guess is that given the relatively large fixed costs involve in operating an AV fleet, that it makes some sense to expand at least up to that sort of 'break even' point. Do we know what that point is? Put differently, is there some natural "stopping point" of expansion where Cruise could hit break-even on its fixed costs and then shift focus towards reliability?
I'm not saying they can't - I'm saying they are running out of time to do so, and with the DMV shutting them down they've been hamstrung further.
They are burning 100s of millions every quarter. They needed to show either growth/expansion or some sort of positive cash flow. They now have neither.
Cruise is leveraging human-in-the-loop to expand faster than they otherwise would, with the hope that they will solve autonomy later to bring this down.
I don't think this is a viable strategy though given the enormous costs and challenges involved.
There doesn't exist a short-term timeline where Cruise makes money, and the window is rapidly closing. They needed to expand to show big revenues, even if they had to throw 1.5 bodies per car at the problem.
Prediction: GM will offload cruise, a buyer will replace leadership and layoff 40% of the company. The tech may live to see another day, but given the challenges that GM has generally (strikes, EVs, etc), they can no longer endlessly subsidize Cruise.