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Tesla launched ride-hailing in San Francisco’s Bay Area on Thursday but did not mention using self-driving robotaxis for the service. California has not permitted Tesla to offer robotaxi service, and the limited rollout highlights the regulatory hurdles the company faces as it looks to pivot to robotaxis amid cooling electric vehicle sales. The state’s rules could potentially delay Musk’s target of deploying robotaxis across half the U.S. by year-end. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) said last week that Tesla was not allowed to “test or transport the public” with or without a driver in a self-driving vehicle. Tesla had notified the CPUC of its intent to include friends and family of employees, plus select public participants in the Bay Area service, but only in human-operated vehicles. But the regulator reiterated that Tesla must first complete a pilot phase without charging customers before pursuing full-autonomous permits, a process that has taken competitors such as Alphabet’s Waymo years to navigate. “You can now ride-hail a Tesla in the SF Bay Area, in addition to Austin,” Musk said in a post on X, without adding other details. Tesla, in a post on X, showed the service area would include the San Francisco area, San Jose and Berkeley. Tesla only has a permit from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving vehicles with a safety driver on public roads. It does not have the permits needed to collect fares in robotaxis. For the Bay Area service, Tesla may be able to use its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) feature, which can perform many driving tasks but requires a human driver to pay attention and be ready to take over at all times. A CPUC spokesperson last week did not respond to a question on whether Tesla could use that feature, but such technology does not require an autonomous vehicle permit in California because the human driver is expected to be in control at all times. Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for additional details. The EV maker will require permits from the CPUC and California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to launch a ride-hailing service competing with Waymo, Uber and Lyft, though the regulatory approval process is lengthy and can stretch for years. Tesla’s launch pits the company against Waymo on its home turf. The Alphabet unit surpassed Lyft’s market share in San Francisco this year, making it the city’s second-largest ride-hailing provider behind Uber, according to data from analytics firm YipitData. Musk said last week that Tesla was aiming to get the regulatory permission to launch robotaxis in several states, including California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida, but did not provide details on the approvals it was receiving. Gnaneshwar Rajan, Akash Sriram and Gursimran Kaur, Reuters
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Whats your elephant? Maybe youve heard that old saying: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The idea is that the best way for tackling large, overwhelming tasks or projects is to break them down into smaller, more manageable steps. But that doesnt address the obvious problem: Nobody wants to actually “eat the elephant. So, how do you motivate yourself to actually get started? I learned a great trick some years ago from fellow Inc. columnist Jeff Haden, author of The Motivation Myth. Its a technique founded on principles of emotional intelligence, the ability to identify, understand, and manage emotions effectively. Best of all, its far simpler than you might expectas you can tell from its name: The Two-Week Rule. Whats the Two-Week Rule, and how can it help you beat procrastination, find motivation, and reach your biggest goals? It all comes down to the psychology of how motivation works, and how that knowledge can help you manage your emotions. (Sign up here for my free email emotional intelligence course.) How to use the Two-Week Rule to reach your biggest goals Over the years, Hadens had the chance to interview successful people like Shark Tank investor and billionaire Mark Cuban, NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal, and professional tennis great Venus Williams. Through those interviews, Haden learned some interesting things about the psychology of motivation. Motivation isnt something you get from the outside, nor is it something you find within, Haden told me in a recent interview. Motivation is something you create through a cycle of a little bit of effort, a little bit of success that feels goodbecause it always feels good to get better at somethingand that gives you enough motivation to get you to the next day. That cycle just continues to repeat, and it can take you a really long way,” says Haden. In other words, while motivation is part of the cycle, its not the beginning of the cycle. And heres where the two-week rule comes in. The two-week rule is about as simple as it sounds: Commit yourself to a project for two weeks. Then, evaluate your progress and decide whether you want to move forward. To illustrate, Haden uses the following example: Let’s say you want to run a marathon. At the beginning, you may only be able to run a mile; still, you commit to training for two weeks. After day one, you’re thinking there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to run the full race. This thing is hard, much harder than you anticipated. That fact alone is so overwhelming, you’re tempted to give up. But you’ve committed to a full two weeks, so you force yourself to keep going. After a week, you still haven’t seen much improvement. Im sore,” you think to yourself. “Im tired. My knees hurt. I dont really enjoy this.” But you also think: “Thank God I only have another week to go.” At the end of two weeks, though, things look different. You’re a little faster. A little fitter. You’ve developed a new routine and you’ve found your flow. Now you say to yourself: Hey, Ive actually gotten somewhere. Im not at 26 miles yet, but Im much better than when I started. And that progress may be all you need to keep going. Why the Two-Week Rule works The beauty of this rule is you can commit to almost anything for two weeks. At the end of that time, you’ll have data you can actually use to make a decision about moving forwardand many times, the motivation you need, too. But what if you cant even get yourself to commit for two weeks? Or, what if you try, and discover its not really something you want to do? Then its probably not a goal you wanted to achieve anyway, Haden says. And thats a good thingbecause if you try it and find out you dont really want it, it comes off your list of things you want to do. You get rid of the guilt associated with not doing it.” “And now, you can focus on some of the things you really want to do instead. So, whatever major project you’re trying to tackle, try the two-week rule: Commit to doing it for just two weeks. Once you do, you’ll finally have gotten started eating the elephant. And at the end of those two weeks, theres a good chance youll have improved your efforts, you’re starting to see progress, and most importantly, you’ve found the motivation to keep going. By Justin Bariso This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. In filmmaking circles, AI is an everpresent topic of conversation. While AI will change filmmaking economics and could greenlight more experimental projects by reducing production costs, it also threatens jobs, intellectual property, and creative integritypotentially cheapening the art form. Google, having developed cutting-edge AI tools spanning script development to text-to-video generation, is positioned as a key player in AI-assisted filmmaking. At the center of Googles cinema ambitions is Mira Lane, the companys vice president of tech and society and its point person on Hollywood studio partnerships. I spoke with Lane about Googles role as a creative partner to the film industry, current Hollywood collaborations, and how artists are embracing tools like Googles generative video editing suite Flow for preproduction, previsualization, and prototyping. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you tell me about the team youre running and your approach to AI in film? I run a team called the Envisioning Studio. It sits within this group called Technology and Society. The whole ambition around the team is to showcase possibilities. . . . We take the latest technologies, latest models, latest products and we co-create with society because theres an ethos here that if youre going to disrupt society, you need to co-create with them, collaborate with them, and have them have a real say in the shape of the way that technology unfolds. I think too often a lot of technology companies will make something in isolation and then toss it over the fence, and then various parts of society are the recipients of it and theyre reacting to it. I think we saw that with language models that came out three years ago or so where things just kind of went into the industry and into society and people struggled with engaging with them in a meaningful way. My team is very multidisciplinary. There are philosophers on the team, researchers, developers, product thinkers, designers, and strategists. What weve been doing with the creative industry, mostly film this yearlast year we worked on music as wellis weve been doing fairly large collaborations. We bring filmmakers in, we show them whats possible, we make things with them, we embed with them sometimes, we hear their feedback. Then they get to shape things like Flow and Veo that have been launched. I think that were learning a tremendous amount in that space because anything in the creative and art space right now has a lot of tension, and we want to be active collaborators there. Have you been able to engage directly with the writers and actors unions? We kind of work through the filmmakers on some of those. Darren Aronofsky, when we brought him in, actually engaged with the writers unions and the actors unions to talk about how he was going to approach filmmaking with Googlethe number of staff and actors and the way they were going to have those folks embedded in the teams, the types of projects that the AI tools would be focused on. We do that through the filmmakers, and we think its important to do it actually in partnership with the filmmakers because its in context of what were doing versus in some abstract way. Thats a very important relationship to nurture. Tell me about one of the films youve helped create. Four weeks ago at Tribeca we launched a short film called Ancestra, created in partnership with Darrens production company, Primordial Soup. Its a hybrid type of model where there were live-action shots and AI shots. Its a story about a mother and a baby whos about to be born and the baby has a hole in its heart. Its a short about the universe coming together to help birth that baby and to make sure that it survives. It was based on a true story of the director being born with a hole in her heart. There are some scenes that are just really hard to shoot, and babiesyou cant have infants younger than 6 months on set. So how do you show an accurate depiction of a baby? We took photos from when she was born and constructed an AI version of that baby, and then generated it being held within the arms of a live actress as well. When you watch that film, youll see these things where its an AI-generated baby. You cant tell that its AI-generated, but the scene is actually composed of half of it being live action, the other half being AI-generated. We had 150 people, maybe close to 200 working on that short filmthe same number of people you would typically have working on a [feature-length] film. We saw some shifts in roles and new types of roles being created. There may even be an AI unit thats part of these films. Theres usually a CGI unit, and we think theres probably going to be an AI unit thats created as well. It sounds like youre trying to play a responsible role in how this impacts creators. What are the fruits of that approach? We want to listen and learn. Its very rare for a technology company to develop the right thing from the very beginning. We want to co-create these tools. because if theyre co-created theyre useful and theyre additive and theyre an extension and augmentation, especially in the creative space. We dont want people to have to contort around the technology. We want the technology to be situated relative to what they need and what people are trying to do. Theres a huge aspect of advancing the science, advancing the latest and greatest model development, advancing tooling. We learn a lot from engaging with . . . filmmakers. For example, we launched Flow [a generative video editing suite] and as we were launching it and developing it, a lot of the feedback from our filmmakers was, Hey, this tool is really helpful, but we work in teams. So how can you extend this to be a team-based tool instead of a tool thats for a single individual? We get a lot of really great feedback in terms of just core research and development, and then it becomes something thats actually useful. Thats what we want to do. We want something that is helpful and useful and additive. Were having the conversations around roles and jobs at the same time. How is this technology empowering filmmakers to tell stories they couldnt before? In the film industry, theyre struggling right now to get really innovative films out because a lot of the production studios want things that are guaranteed hits, and so youre starting to see certain patterns of movies coming out. But filmmakers want to tell richer stories. With the one that we launched at Tribeca, the director was like, I would never have been able to tell this story. No one would have funded it and it would have been incredibl hard to do. But now with these tools I can get that story out there. Were seeing a lot of thatpeople generating and developing things that they would not have been funded for in the past, but now that gets great storytelling out the door as well. Its incredibly empowering. These tools are incredibly powerful because they reduce the costs of some of the things that are really hard to do. Certain scenes are very expensive. You want to do a car chase, for examplethats a really expensive scene. Weve seen some people take these tools and create pitches that they can then take to a studio and say, Hey, would you fund this? Heres my concept. Theyre really good at the previsualization stage, and they can kind of get you in the door. Whereas in the past, maybe you brought storyboards in or it was more expensive to create that pitch, now you can do that pretty quickly. Are we at the point where you can write a prompt and generate an entire film? I dont think the technology is there where you can write a prompt and generate an entire film and have it land in the right way. There is so much involved in filmmaking that is beyond writing a prompt. Theres character development and the right cinematography. . . . Theres a lot of nuance in filmmaking. Were pretty far from that. If somebodys selling that I think I would be really skeptical. What I would say is you can generate segments of that film that are really helpful and [AI] is great for certain things. For short films its really good. For feature films, theres still a lot of work in the process. I dont think were in the stage where youre going to automate out the artist in any way. Nobody wants that necessarily. Filmmaking and storytelling is actually pretty complex. You need good taste as well; theres an art to storytelling that you cant really automate. Is there a disconnect between what Silicon Valley thinks is possible and what Hollywood actually wants? I think everybody thinks the technology is further along than it is. Theres a perception that the technology is much more capable. I think thats where some of the fear is actually, because theyre imagining what this can do because of the stories that have been told about these technologies. We just put it in the hands of people and they see the contours of it and the edges and what its good and bad at, and then theyre a little less worried. Theyre like, Oh, I understand this now. That said, I look at where the technology was two years ago for film and where it is now. The improvements have been remarkable. Two years ago every [generated] film had six fingers and everything was morphed and really not therethere was no photorealism. You couldnt do live-action shots. And in two years weve made incredible progress. I think in another two years, were going to have another big step change. We have to recognize were not as advanced as we think we are, but also that the technology is moving really fast. These partnerships are important because if were going to have this sort of accelerated technology development, we need these parts of our society that are affected to be deeply involved and actively shaping it so that the thing we have in two years is what is actually useful and valuable in that industry. What kinds of scenes or elements are becoming easier to create with AI? Anything that is complex that you tend to see a lot of, those types of things start to get easier because we have a lot of training data around that. If youve seen lots of movies with car chases in them. There are scenes of the universeweve got amazing photography from the Hubble telescope. Weve got great microscopic photography. All of those types of things that are complicated and hard to do in real life, those you can generate a lot easier because we have lots of examples of those and its been done in the past. The ones that are hard are ones where you want really strong eye contact between characters, and where the characters are showing a more complex range of emotions. How would you describe where were at with the uptake of these tools in the industry? I think that were in a state where theres a lot of experimentation. Its kind of that stage where theres something new thats been developed and what you tend to do when there’s something new is you tend to try to re-create the pastwhat you used to do with [older] tools. Were in that stage where I think people are trying to use these new tools to re-create the same kinds of stories that they used to tell, but the real gem is when you jump past that and you do new types of things and new types of stories. Ill give you one example. Brian Eno did a set of generative films; every time you went to the theater you saw a different version of that film. It was generated, it was different, it was unique. It still had the same backbone but it was a different story every time you saw it. Thats a new type of storytelling. I think were going to see more types of things like that. But first we have to get through this phase of experimentation and understanding the tools, and then well get to all the new things we can do with it. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Google is indexing ChatGPT conversations, potentially exposing sensitive user data How Cloudflare declared war on AI scrapers The Vogue AI model backlash isnt dying down anytime soon This AI startup lets you ask data questions in plain Englishand gets you answers in seconds Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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