In 2016, optimistic founders thought that general self-driving cars were 2-3 years away. In 2024, we don’t have general self-driving cars. What happened? General self-driving cars are bottlenecked by the intelligence of the autonomy system. Founders thought that they just needed intelligence level x, but they actually needed (a) a scalable algorithm to get intelligence from compute, and (b) an intelligence level 5x. (number made up) Both were not possible at the time. In order to make a general self-driving car, one needs to achieve this intelligence from the autonomy system cheaply enough that you make money.
The lesson is this: an accurate order of magnitude estimation of future technological capabilities and costs is a very predictive input on the probability of success of frontier tech products.
There are a few examples:
- VR - light, fast compute
- AI agents - intelligence for planning
- Chatbots - GPT 3.5 level intelligence