sam (tabone) rector

The godmother of AI just delivered the reality check Silicon Valley refuses to hear. She has the standing to say it. Li: “Silicon Valley as a whole tends to mistake clear vision with short distance.” Seeing the destination clearly has nothing to do with how hard it is to reach. Self-driving cars were first demonstrated in 2006. Twenty years later Waymo is barely on the road. The vision was never the problem. The distance was. Clarity of destination gets mistaken for proximity to arrival. That’s the mistake the industry keeps making. And keeps making. Li: “I consider myself a scientist in my heart and I actually really don’t like hyping.” In an industry running at maximum temperature, Fei-Fei Li is one of the few people at the top willing to say that publicly. Not because the technology isn’t real. Because the gap between what’s visible and what’s required is being systematically underestimated. Large Language Models dominate the conversation. Text to text. Comparatively contained. The harder problem is spatial intelligence. AI that reasons about and acts within the physical three-dimensional world. Hardware. Physics. Data that doesn’t exist yet. Real-time adaptation to chaos. A robot that can clean a bathroom requires understanding every surface, every object, every force, every exception. That’s not a software update. That’s a civilizational research problem. Li: “I don’t call it hype. I call it a misleading sentiment. We don’t want to replace human creators.” The second place the industry gets it wrong is creativity. The narrative has hardened around replacement. AI takes the jobs. AI tells the stories. AI makes the art. Li considers that not just wrong but destructive. Wrong because AI doesn’t replicate creativity. Destructive because believing it can devalues the humans creating culture. Human creativity isn’t a process to be automated. It’s fundamental to what we are as a species. The goal is augmentation. Tools that make human creators faster and more capable. Not systems that generate output in the style of human work and call it creation. That distinction matters more than most people in the industry are willing to sit with. Precision of imagination is not proximity to reality. Li has spent her career in the gap between those two things. The map isn’t the territory. The journey is long. The hurdles are deep. And the scientist who built the foundation this era stands on is telling you the timeline everyone is selling is wrong. We’ve been almost there with self-driving for twenty years. The pattern doesn’t change just because the destination looks different.

Here’s an utterly insane Adidas ad, directed by David Lynch in 1993

Reminder, will be going for another JPM bio run in GGP. Tomorrow, all humans and canines are welcome.