A few minutes after this email, I got a notice from Nvidia. They are offering an “enthusiast’s” level computer for AI. Basic specs: 1 petaflop FP. That means one trillion 32-bit floating operations per second, and 128 GB RAM. It fits in a small-size box. $4K.
What is impressive is that this is FLOPS, not TOPS. The computer is suitable for training new models, not just running pre-trained models.
Also, they just released about 300,000 video/Lidar/radar clips of street scenes taken from cars all over the world and in different weather. The data is free, even for commercial use. More importantly, they have a new kind of model that is trained with this data. Unlike others, this one tells you in English what it sees. (A bike cycle to the left…)
They are trying to solve the problem that Tesla and others have where even if the model gets it right, you can never know why. It appears they have taken a step back to the 1980s and have a reasoning language that it can follow rules that you can input and read. So rather than just not hitting the bike, the car “thinks” "I see a bike, I don’t want to hit it.” and you can ask why the car moved to the right. This seems to all be just a few days old (or I just found out years after everyone else already knew…)