2025-02-02

2025-02-02

Back -2/2/25
1st edition of the 13th year of SmartDrivingCars eLetter

Welcome Back!!

Feb. 2, Hmmmm… It has taken me a month to start the 13th year of the SmartDrivingCar eLetter. I thought of jumping the whole year and calling it the 14th, but instead disregarded any superstition and am moving forward with reality. Elizabeth and I also took a two week vacation (I believe my first ever) and toured Vietnam & Cambodia. We had an absolutely fantastic experience with Marian Ott’76 and Craig Philip’75. The four of us “a la carted” what we mutually prepared. Happy to share/recommend details. We had a great time.

2025 has emerged with a flurry of activity. HandyRides, Inc. now exists. I’ve actually given some high-quality rides to people “who really need a ride”, instead of incessantly talking about giving some high-quality rides to people “….”.

And, with all the disruption associated with “AI” and “DeepSeek”, I’m substantially changing my approach in Orf 401 this Spring. Now, finally, on to the 13th year of the SmartDrivingCars eLetter. Alain

The Real Case for Driverless Mobility

Narrated by Fred Fishkin, Available now

Published in 2024 (but still relevant)!!! Go to Amazon.com…

SmartDrivingCars ZoomCast 386/PodCast 386– DeepSeek, HandyRides, Waymo, Tesla & more

  • 0:00 F. Fishkin, Feb. 2 “DeepSeek and AI, HandyRides Inc. arrives, women providing taxi rides on motorcycles in Kenya, Waymo expanding to more cities and Tesla bringing front bumper camera to Model Y. Welcome back to Smart Driving Cars! Join Princeton’s Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin for all of that and more on episode 386. And remember to subscribe.
  • 1:21 AI code editor, DeepSeek and more
  • 6:22 HandyRides Inc. now exists
  • 7:05 From NY Times: Women on motorcycle taxis giving rides in Kenya and a piece on driving in Vietnam
  • 14:36 Timothy Lee piece…speculating DeepSeek not responsible for crashing NVIDIA stock
  • 16:50 Waymo expanding to more cities including Las Vegas and San Diego
  • 19:58 More DeepSeek discussion
  • 25:16 new edition of The Dispatcher out from Michael Sena
  • 26:17 The work that lies ahead to provide mobility to those who need it
  • 29:15 Why are there still rear ending crashes
  • 29:35 New Tesla Model Y will have front bumper camera

SmartDrivingCars ZoomCasts

  • 0:00 open
  • 1:17 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to Princeton’s John Hopfield. Alain’s tribute.
  • 1:54 GM shutters Cruise robotaxi venture
  • 13:26 Waymo has now delivered over 5 million driverless rides
  • 26:49 NHTSA proposes new rules for self driving cars
  • 34:55 The Dispatcher Musings…back to Scranton
  • 0:00 open
  • 0:55 From The Dispatcher -a look at the presidential election and the process
  • 10:01 Princeton’s Bob Vanderbei maps out the electorate one again
  • 14:30 The involvement of Elon Musk, pre-election and post-election and Michael’s look at the Robotaxi event.
  • 42:20 Tesla’s quarterly vehicle safety report
  • 47:48 A tribute Alain’s PHD Advisor at Princeton, Paul Michel Lion III.
  • 48:28 Waymo is now valued at 45 billion dollars
  • 49:59 Aurora’s Chris Urmson says we are on the brink of a new era in mobility and logistics
  • 52:25 Michael comments further on Waymo and its role at Alphabet (Google)
  • 59:54 The Autopian report on Google/Waymo patent application for system to take over automatically if it detects a bad driver behind the wheel.
  • 0:00 open
  • 0:30 SpaceX wows with landing
  • 8:38 Tesla’s Cybercab event-Alain’s take on the ups and downs
  • 18:22 Elon uses the elevator analogy!
  • 21:12 Forbes piece- Can’t Get a Cybercab? Wave Down a Waymo.
  • 22:40 AutoEvolution: 5 Polarizing Facts from Tesla’s We Robot Cybercab Unveiling Event
  • 26:26 Presentation from Alain’s students on shared mobility at Next Generation Systems Conference
  • 27:45 More on Cybercabs and questions about insurance
  • 39:02 Princeton’s John Hopfield wins Nobel Physics Prize!
  • 0:00 open
  • 0:54 Vehicle telecommunications and data privacy battle
  • 22:40 What happened to Sweden’s Northvolt
  • 27:17 The efforts to stop the importing of inexpensive Chinese vehicles. Is the rest of the world toast?
  • 45:55 Tesla prepares for the robotaxi unveiling October 10
  • 54:35 Reuters reports Waymo discussions with Hyundai on vehicle platform and remarks from Waymo co-CEO at University of Michigan
  • 1:00:35 Two of Alain’s students deliver at the Next Generation Systems Conference
  • 0:00 open
  • 0:49 Congrats to Alain’s students who took part in the Henley Royal Regatta
  • 2:04 Launching of HandyRides continues for affordable mobility
  • 3:15 Demo of what GreenVilleMOVES would look like
  • 33:30 EU is mandating speed limiters
  • 34:15 Tesla update to give parents control over teen driver speed and more
  • 39:50 The Drive report on Mercedes engineer criticism of Tesla FSD and its impact on public attitudes toward autonomous driving tech.
  • 42:04 The Verge report on Distance Technologies windshield AR heads up display
  • 45:00 Ken Pyle’s Viodi piece on Smart Driving Car Summit
  • 0:00 July 1st marks the launch of a new mobility start-up! Join Princeton’s Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin for details. Plus..GM Cruise pays for crash report delays, Rimac robotaxis and automakers ask for reconsideration of automatic emergency braking rules.
  • 0:00 open
  • 0:30 Musk talks robotaxi business, Tesla Semis and more new vehicles
  • 15:27 Alain shows how a Brownsville MOVES mobility service could work.
  • 36:19 Waymo issues software and mapping recall following telephone pole crash in Phoenix
  • 43:10 GM investing 850 million dollars in Cruise and resuming operations in Houston
  • 0:00 Pre-earnings / Robotaxi discussion
  • 17:37 Earnings & shareholder letter
  • 45:48 Financial review
  • 1:03:11 Other thoughts and questions,
  • 0:00 Call begins
  • 0:49 CEO Elon Musk opening comments
  • 21:53 CFO Vaibhav Taneja opening comments
  • 28:56 Investor questions
  • 54:35 Analyst questions
  • 1:05:28 Rob’s review and questions

Read more Hmmmm…Again, interesting and informative to watch Rob report it live. Alain

Why Are These Motorcycle Taxi Drivers Wearing Pink?

T. Todras-Whitehill, Jan 31, “When her three children didn’t have enough to eat, Monica Atieno decided to apply for a job through a new program that was recruiting women to become motorcycle taxi drivers — a profession long dominated by men.

At first, she kept her plan a secret from her husband, who was himself a motorcycle taxi driver in their town of Ukwala in western Kenya. When he found out, he was furious and threatened to leave. But Ms. Atieno, who is 29, says she told him: “I’m going to do it, because I know what I’m going to achieve.”

Last year, after hundreds of hours of training, she became a motorcycle taxi driver — a “Boda Girl,” as they’re called. She’s now one of only about 1,000 women among the estimated 2.5 million motorcycle taxi drivers in the east African nation of Kenya, according to the Boda Boda Safety Association, an advocacy group….” Read more

Hmmmm… Fantastic in every dimension: innovation, vehicle technology, creativity, societal value, business case, … ! Fantastic!! Alain

THE FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE

M. L. Sena, Feb. 1, “THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY is arguably today’s most important subject of international trade discussions and negotiations. It is more important than oil, steel, semiconductors, energy, rare earth minerals, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence individually because an automobile encompasses all of these components. The importance of the automotive industry could be seen by anyone watching the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States on the 20th of January, where the major owner and CEO of an American automobile manufacturer, TESLA, who is also the richest person on the Planet (if individuals who control the wealth of entire countries are disregarded), in most part due to the value of the shares he owns in his automobile company, shared the limelight with other very important people gathered behind the incoming president as he spoke. Musk donated hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to his preferred candidate, and he will be managing the running of a special department aimed at finding trillions of dollars in savings for the government….” Read more

Hmmmm… As always, a lot to digest here. Enjoy! Alain

DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

DeepSeek, Jan 2025, “Abstract

We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities. Through RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerges with numerous powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviors. However, it encounters challenges such as poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates multi-stage training and cold-start data before RL. DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1-1217 on reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we open-source DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models (1.5B, 7B, 8B, 14B, 32B, 70B) distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Qwen and Llama…” Read more

Hmmmm… Read the paper! For background read:

Timothy Lee “How computers got shockingly good at recognizing images”

Timothy Lee “Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon”

Ethan Mollick “One Useful Thing” A current blog on AI. See especially “15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to” & “Prophecies of the Flood”

Alain

I don’t believe DeepSeek crashed Nvidia’s stock

T. Lee, Jan. 28, “Shares of Nvidia fell by nearly 17 percent on Monday, cutting nearly $600 billion from the chipmaker’s market capitalization. Shares of Nvidia rival AMD fell 6 percent, while TSMC—the Taiwanese company that manufactures Nvidia’s chips—fell 12 percent.

The selloff was widely attributed to the growing popularity of AI models from the Chinese company DeepSeek—especially R1, an open-weight competitor to OpenAI’s “reasoning” model o1.

But this explanation doesn’t make sense to me. DeepSeek’s models were trained using Nvidia chips, so it’s not obvious why DeepSeek’s success would be bad news for Nvidia. And it’s even harder to explain why it took a week for Wall Street to react to the January 20 release of R1.

A more plausible explanation is that someone tipped traders off to Donald Trump’s plans to slap tariffs on chips made in Taiwan—which Trump announced later in the day. I can’t prove this theory, but I think it fits the facts better than the DeepSeek theory. Interestingly, we didn’t see a second selloff in Nvidia or TSMC shares after Trump’s announcement, suggesting that markets had already “priced in” the news….” Read more

Hmmmm… Ouch! Alain

Caution Ahead! Vietnam’s Drivers Are Suddenly Following the Rules.

D. Cave, Jan 28, “Vietnam’s motorbike drivers have always tended to treat red lights as suggestions, more slow down than stop. At rush hour, they’ve brought the same indifference to other rules, like: Yield to pedestrians; or, stay off sidewalks; or, do not drive against the flow of traffic.

Some found it charming, the ballet of many wheels dancing around pedestrians. But Vietnam’s road fatality rates have long been among the highest in Asia. And after cracking down on drunken driving, the country’s leaders are now going after everything else.

Under a new law, traffic fines have risen tenfold, with the biggest tickets exceeding $1,500. The average citation tops a month’s salary for many, and that’s more than enough to change behavior. Intersections have become both calmer and more congested by an outbreak of caution. Faulty green lights have even led scared drivers to walk motorbikes across streets the police might be watching.

“It’s safer, it’s better,” said Pham Van Lam, 57, as he pruned trees outside a Buddhist pagoda by a busy road on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City this week. “But it’s cruel for poor people.”… . “ Read more

Hmmmm… Really impressive. Really efficient. However, as with here one can’t be drinking and one can’t be distracted by a phone. Hopefully, our new administration will address these fundamental misbehaviors to really improve safety by directly addressing these human misbehaviors with technology that has existed for years (ignition interlocks and your phone knows if you are seated behind the wheel and moving. Why does it allow you to lie? C’mon man!). It is going to be many years before SDC tech is going to be good enough and affordable enough in new cars such that it can move the safety needle any noticeable amount. Please stop burdening it with the safety mission. Let “just as safe” be the hurdle to enable the technology to have a chance in delivering the societal value of affordable high-quality mobility to the many who really need a ride. Alain

The AI Code Editor
Jan. 2025, Staff, “Built to make you extraordinarily productive,

Cursor is the best way to code with AI…” Read more

Hmmmm… Take a look. Not bad! Alain

Waymo to Expand Self-Driving Testing Across More U.S. Cities

S. Ojea, Jan 29, “Waymo is preparing to test its self-driving taxis in more than 10 new cities across the U.S.

The self-driving-technology company owned by Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday said that Las Vegas and San Diego will be the first additional cities where it will be testing its services in 2025. The company is currently conducting tests in Truckee, Calif.; the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; upstate New York as well as Tokyo.

During these training trips, the company sends a limited fleet of vehicles to each city, with trained human autonomous specialists behind the wheel. “Our testing will begin with manual driving through the densest and most complex parts of each city, including city centers, and freeways,” the company said in a statement….” Read more

Hmmmm… Love it!! Maybe they’ll come to Jersey instead of Tokyo? However, why do they remain so focused on “… the most complex..” and Tokyo??? Instead of the easiest places where they could deliver the most societal value the earliest??? What is it with Silicon Valley objective functions? Unless you are a “Moon Shot” right out of the gate, you’re not worthy??? After 15 years of not moving the value needle, they remain intent on solving the most challenging before they roll up their sleeves and harvest the low hanging fruit. I guess that’s what one does when one is handed $5.6B and not asked to account for the previous $20B. Must be nice. But maybe they aren’t even in the low-hanging fruit business of giving high-quality affordable rides to the folks who really need them. Alain

Draft… Orf467F24: Investigation of MOVES-Style Mobility Deployments…
Draft

Alain Kornhauser, Dec. 19, “An updated note to the readers of the SDC eLetter: Read more

Hmmmm… We had an excellent class this Fall. This is a compilation of their investigations of MOVES-stye mobility opportunities in their “hometowns”. This is a compilation of drafts submitted in lieu of a final exam. The class will make the document more suitable for publication during the January intersession. Alain

Closing out the year with long time friends and kudos to Alain’s students

27, 2024

26, 2024