Elon Musk announced that Grok AI would be included in Tesla’s about a week ago and unlike most of his announcements an initial release of the tool to Tesla happened earlier this week. This is extremely scary because what we are calling AI is nowhere close to being intelligent and putting it in control of a 2000 KG metal vehicle is what I would call a ‘bad idea’.
A lot of us grew up watching Knight Rider and KITT from the series is the golden standard for AI Cars. The extremely talented Design Thinking Comic created a comic where they imagined how Knight Rider 2025 would work with the current generation of LLM’s instead of the fictional KITT AI.
Knight Rider 2025, with a current generation LLM
Till recently my knowledge of the Tesla cars was based on information I read online and videos that I had watched, but I got to see the car in person during my recent trip to the US and my experience as a passenger was that the car looks really cool but there are a lot of usability issues. Like the weird way to open the door and loads of other issues folks have been posting about which have caused serious enough issues that Tesla had to issue multiple recalls in the past year for its cars. The Cybertruck, on the other hand was even uglier than I had imagined it to be.
The “Move fast and break things” philosophy is not something that should be applied to a car as it has serious real world impact potentially endangering lives. (It is a bad idea in general even for regular software development but that is a separate topic for another day)
– Suramya