Tesla Robotaxis & AI: What Dr. Know-it-all Revealed

Dear Friends,

If you ever want to feel like you’re living in the future, try letting a robot drive you across a city you've never been to. That’s what Dr. John Kundert-Gibbs, known to most of us as Dr. Know-it-all on YouTube, did recently in Austin, Texas. I sat down with him alongside Wes Roth to dive deep into this surreal experience, and I promise you: it changed how I think about AI, transportation, and even consciousness itself.

John was among the first civilians to test Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi in the wild. And it didn’t disappoint. He rode 10 trips in less than 24 hours inside a fully self-driving Model Y, no one touching the wheel, no near-death experiences, no “oops” moments. The car was flawless. And yet, that wasn’t even the craziest part.

We talked about the tech inside these robotaxis. Tesla has ditched radar and LiDAR completely. They rely on vision-only AI powered by eight cameras, exactly like us humans. I’ll admit, this shocked me. Traditional players like Waymo cram sensors onto their $150,000 cars, but Tesla’s stripped-down $45,000 machines are driving on dirt roads, reacting to sirens, and navigating fields using a neural network trained on Dojo supercomputers.

Speaking of training, John explained how Tesla’s AI stack was rebuilt from scratch. They literally scrapped hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-coded rules and replaced it with a single massive end-to-end model. No if-this-then-that logic. Instead, it’s neural nets all the way down, powered by transformers and techniques borrowed from language models. Imagine a self-driving car that "reads" roadways like a language. That’s what Tesla’s AI is doing now.

Then we got philosophical. Because at some point, if a car can perceive its environment, project multiple future outcomes, and learn from trillions of miles driven, how different is that from consciousness? John opened my mind to something wild: these systems aren’t conscious in a mystical sense, but they do perceive, reason, predict, and react. If that’s not a basic blueprint of cognition, I don’t know what is.

We even zoomed out beyond Tesla, into AI’s reach into biology. AlphaFold, for example, has solved millions of protein structures, something that used to take a PhD years of work. This blew my mind. Life itself, it turns out, is a pattern recognition game. And now, machines are playing it better than humans can.

This conversation is one of the most illuminating I’ve had. If you're curious about how Tesla’s robotaxi revolution links to intelligence, biology, and the edges of machine awareness, you don’t want to miss either part.

Warmly,

Dylan Curious

Watch the Two-Part Podcast

Part 1: TESLA Robotaxi Just DESTROYED the Entire Industry! https://youtu.be/cKDEl8BD6hc?si=BEqqhXGZYTGlnwi0

Part 2: My Car Just Taught Me About Consciousness https://youtu.be/VPRoEBIkWOA?feature=shared