Musk Unveils Tesla’s Robotaxi but Offers Few Details

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[00:00:22] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, October 14th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal.

[00:00:29] How polite are you to the AI in your life?

[00:00:33] Manners may not seem important when speaking with artificial intelligence chatbots, but they can make a difference. We'll tell you how.

[00:00:41] And then, CEO Elon Musk says the future of Tesla is in robots.

[00:00:47] That vision seemed to excite attendees at the company's event unveiling its self-driving taxi, but those watching from afar seemed underwhelmed.

[00:00:56] Our columnist Tim Higgins tells us about this divide.

[00:00:59] But first, should you be polite to AI chatbots?

[00:01:07] It's a question that's dividing some people, and also one that can have an impact on the responses you receive when using these tools.

[00:01:15] Here to tell us more is our reporter, Pritika Rana.

[00:01:19] Pritika, tell us about some of the things people have said about how they approach speaking with AI chatbots.

[00:01:24] You know, I spoke with couples, parents, software developers, people who write code for AI as well.

[00:01:33] And the answers were pretty mixed.

[00:01:36] Some of them believe that you should be polite to AI just as you're talking to any person.

[00:01:42] Researchers say that actually being polite can pay off because AI is trained to mimic human conversations and human behavior.

[00:01:49] So if you're impolite or if you're rude or derogatory, the AI might just shut down.

[00:01:56] It might not give you answers.

[00:01:58] It might give you inefficient or incorrect answers, which then again isn't solving for your final outcome.

[00:02:07] There are other people who aren't particularly rude or derogatory, but they just say, hey, I mean, drop the pleasantries.

[00:02:14] We don't want to be saying please or thank you to code.

[00:02:17] This is just a waste of time.

[00:02:19] Have the companies that create AI chatbots or the ones that have integrated these chatbots into their tools said anything about this issue of etiquette?

[00:02:27] Yeah.

[00:02:27] I spoke to Microsoft's chief scientist and she said if you speak to the model rudely, expect it to be difficult with you too.

[00:02:38] In fact, Microsoft has a blog post in which it says, just like humans, AI can't always be the bigger person.

[00:02:46] So remember to be polite to it.

[00:02:48] If you're going to be sassy with it, expect some sass back.

[00:02:52] Pratika, why does this matter?

[00:02:54] We are still at the cusp of the AI revolution.

[00:02:58] The technology is still in its infancy.

[00:03:00] We don't know what shape or form it might take.

[00:03:04] And it's really interesting if you look at how culture around this is developing.

[00:03:10] Some of the engineers I spoke to said that it actually helps if you add phrases like, take a deep breath.

[00:03:16] You know, and they joke that AI has what they call a praise kink for its apparent need for positive affirmations and potential rewards.

[00:03:25] There was one computer programmer who ran a test where it showed that every time he told Chad GPT he's going to give it a tip, it gave longer answers on average.

[00:03:38] So his results indicated that responses were 11% longer on average when he offered Chad GPT a $200 tip and 6% longer when he said he was going to offer it a $20 tip as opposed to, you know, no tip at all.

[00:03:54] Of course, no real tips were paid during the experiment, but it just shows how these models are built to really mimic human behavior.

[00:04:04] They really build to mimic even the way that we as humans feel incentivized.

[00:04:10] That was our reporter Pratika Rana.

[00:04:13] After the break, Elon Musk says Tesla robot cars are coming soon.

[00:04:18] But some investors want more details.

[00:04:21] We'll have more on that when we come back.

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[00:05:04] Last week, Elon Musk revealed Tesla's robo-taxi at a splashy event in Southern California.

[00:05:11] The small almond-shaped two-seat car has doors that swing up to open and it doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals.

[00:05:20] Musk calls it the cyber cab.

[00:05:23] Tesla also unveiled an autonomous van with a boxy frame, a little like a toaster, that can hold up to 20 passengers.

[00:05:31] The interior is meant to feel like a spaceship, according to Musk.

[00:05:35] The Tesla CEO was showing off his vision for the company's future.

[00:05:39] But not all investors seem to be buying it.

[00:05:42] Here to tell us more is our columnist, Tim Higgins.

[00:05:46] Tim, what timelines did Musk give for when these vehicles will be released?

[00:05:50] Well, when it comes to the robo-taxi, he is saying 2026, possibly.

[00:05:58] At least before 2027, Elon is notorious for having these really ambitious deadlines and then missing them.

[00:06:07] So he says it with a grain of salt.

[00:06:09] He didn't even venture to put a bogey on when the robo-van might come out.

[00:06:14] And these kind of far-out dates disappointed some investors who were hoping for something sooner.

[00:06:20] Now, they did get a little taste of something sooner.

[00:06:23] Elon said that Tesla would be putting out its fully self-driving software, and I mean fully self-driving in this case,

[00:06:33] its driverless car technology into its existing lineup in certain states, California and Texas, next year.

[00:06:42] Unclear when or to whom or what kind of qualifiers there might be.

[00:06:48] Now, this isn't the first time that Elon has suggested that this technology was on the near-term precipice of occurring.

[00:06:56] I remember back in 2016 when I was writing about this, he promised that Tesla would be demonstrating a fully self-driving car going from Los Angeles to New York City,

[00:07:06] a vehicle that you could sleep in, that sort of thing.

[00:07:10] That didn't happen years later, 2019, again, talking about how Tesla was going to launch its robo-taxi in at least one state in 2020.

[00:07:20] Again, that did not happen, in part because this technology is just more complicated than a lot of people believed a decade ago.

[00:07:30] Perhaps they have picked a strategy that hasn't been as easy for deploying.

[00:07:35] And I say that because there are other companies that have deployed robo-taxis.

[00:07:40] Here in San Francisco, where I'm based, I routinely see Waymo's fully self-driving cars go down the street.

[00:07:48] So this technology is out there.

[00:07:50] It's just that Tesla hasn't yet deployed fully self-driving cars on the roadways that we know about.

[00:07:56] How do these robo-taxi plans fit into Tesla's future?

[00:08:01] Critical.

[00:08:01] Remember, Tesla is a company that most people would think about in the electric car space.

[00:08:08] But Elon sees a pivot.

[00:08:10] Elon sees the future being cracking the self-driving technology.

[00:08:16] He has said as much that the company would be essentially worth zero if they are unable to do that.

[00:08:23] So with the, you know, out any kind of exaggeration, Tesla and Elon Musk are making the bet that the future is all about autonomous.

[00:08:33] Is there a sense of how Tesla plans to compete with rivals in the self-driving space like Waymo or Cruise or even Uber, which doesn't have a self-driving unit but is a ride-hail company?

[00:08:44] One of the things that Elon kind of suggested at this event is that the cost of these robo-taxis through Tesla will be cheaper.

[00:08:54] And I say that because he's talking about a vehicle that might cost less than $30,000.

[00:09:00] And the Waymo vehicle, we don't have exact prices on that.

[00:09:05] They don't sell them.

[00:09:06] But we know that the sensor software suite that they have has traditionally been very expensive.

[00:09:12] They've been working to bring down the cost.

[00:09:14] They're using sensors such as LiDAR, which is essentially laser radar.

[00:09:20] It's integral to the way they see the world.

[00:09:23] Elon has not adopted such technology.

[00:09:26] He would argue that humans don't see the world with LiDAR.

[00:09:30] They see it with just their two eyes.

[00:09:31] So why can't a car see the world with cameras?

[00:09:35] If this fleet of autonomous cabs is owned by individuals or small companies, do we have a sense of who would be liable if something went wrong?

[00:09:46] You hit on a very important question.

[00:09:49] And there is a school of thought that as we think about and as we evaluate Elon's projections for Tesla and its ambitions for autonomous cars,

[00:09:59] that it starts to get serious, that it starts to get real when Tesla starts talking about the liability for those vehicles.

[00:10:07] Currently, Tesla doesn't have fully self-driving cars.

[00:10:11] It has driver assist systems, essentially glorified cruise control, if you will,

[00:10:17] that the person behind the wheel is still responsible for the car, still held liable if there is a crash.

[00:10:24] Experts that I've talked to over the years believe that Tesla should be liable in a crash.

[00:10:31] And that's a big difference in the current situation.

[00:10:34] We haven't gotten to that point.

[00:10:35] We don't know the details of how Tesla plans to roll this technology out.

[00:10:41] We're still kind of at the point where we've been for many years, where it's just going to happen next year or the year after, that sort of thing.

[00:10:47] Did Musk talk about how the company plans to make this transition from being an electric car company to a robotics and AI company?

[00:10:58] Because that seems to be so essential to his future plans.

[00:11:01] The details of the future are thin from Elon Musk, and that's part of the frustration among some investors.

[00:11:09] They were hoping to learn more about some of the nuts and bolts of kind of the business going forward.

[00:11:17] And that is just not really what occurred.

[00:11:20] How it's going to be made, the volumes, how the program operate, these sorts of things are yet to be determined.

[00:11:28] And also, all of this is being released or talked about with this kind of baggage that Elon has of having missed a lot of deadlines when it comes to deploying autonomous technology.

[00:11:41] You know, at the end of the day, it's kind of a classic Tesla event in the recent years where there was enough there for some people to be super excited about and enough there for people to complain about after the fact.

[00:11:54] That was our columnist, Tim Higgins.

[00:11:56] And that's it for Tech News Briefing.

[00:11:58] Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Catherine Millsop.

[00:12:03] I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal.

[00:12:05] We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute.

[00:12:08] Thanks for listening.