The real technical challenge is rappresented by edge cases: a software that is excellent 99.9% of the time can still be unacceptable if the remaining 0.1% contains rare but catastrophic scenarios. And that's why we still don't see many self-driving vehicles on the roads today.
However, NVIDIA has a credible shot because it controls much of the loop - hardware, training infrastructure and simulation environment. If it works they will impose a huge vendor lock-in, difficult to replicate for other competitors.
Meta Horizons World probably puts up similar numbers if you sum up the hardware/software tech stack to get this number.
> 18,600+ Engineering years invested in vehicle safety to date
What does this even mean?
> 7,000,000 Lines of safety-assessed code
Are we seriously using LoC as a measure of productivity again?
Not to mention the em-dashes
If it means what I think it means, you take every engineer working on it (and maybe the years of research involved) and add it all up. Say you have a room with about 10 engineers with 10 years of experience per developer, you can claim there's 100 years of developer experience between all of them (maybe the overlaps not unique enough and its more like 30 to 50 years? but in this case I think they're rounding up, and I assume it means thousands of engineers involved in the project) that's how I took it.
My first interview in tech I was asked what the heck I was even doing with the D programming language, followed by the remark that in the next room (where all the devs were) there was at least 100 years of experience between everybody there, and not a single one knew what D was, my manager clearly did, which cracked me up.
It means over 18,600 engineering hours have been spent working on vehicle safety. This is a pretty common metric.
For example, my team and I have owned a complex internal microservice for 6 years. My team is 8 engineers and myself, all been on since the beginning. We could claim it's the result of 54 engineering years of effort.
Which would be a misleading and meaningless thing to say.
I don't even know what that was supposed to mean. Hopefully all the safety transistors in the safety graphics card of my safety-PC were safety-assessed, too /s
Yes, sadly. Because its how everyone justifies LLMs. "Look at how much code it writes!" is the only measure they can come up with to sell its usefulness, completely forgetting that it'll be more useful if we started talking about how much code they remove.