Thea Vales

Alexandr Wang explains the number robotaxi companies don't publish: one human for every 3 to 5 driverless cars. Wang, who built Scale AI, was asked on Y Combinator's Lightcone podcast what humans will still do once AI agents do the work. "Most of a manager's job, speaking as a manager, is just putting out fires, dealing with problems, dealing with issues that come up." "I think people often jump to this extreme reality... you're just going to manage the agents and you're going to live this kind of Victorian life where all your problems are solved. But no, I think it's still going to be pretty complicated, getting agents to coordinate well with one another and coordinating the workflows and debugging the issues that come up." "Having seen what happened in self-driving, which was more or less that it's easy to get to 90%, very very hard to get to 99%... I think that something similar will happen as with large scale agent deployments, and that final 10% of accuracy... will require a lot of work." The host pointed out that robotaxis still have remote assist for the edge cases. Wang went further: "And the ratio, by the way, the companies don't publish them, but I think the ratio is something like five cars to one tele-operator, or maybe even less than maybe three cars per tele-operator. So the ratio is much lower than people think. I think humans are much more involved even in self-driving cars than I think most people appreciate." "For an optimistic version of the future where unemployment is still low, you just have to believe that humans are almost insatiable in their desire and their demand, and that prices will go down... the economy will become more efficient and we'll just want more." Interested in the latest with ai/tech and business? Follow @irisneural never fall behind. I track ChatGPT, Claude, and how every new agent is changing how we work and think, then hand you the pure signals.