For USA absolutely, for Germany and EU that and supporting AfD, for China no.
The biggest sales declines are in EU and China.

Absolutely, if Elon had been a normal CEO, Tesla would probably still be riding on the reputation they had few years ago.
What I’m saying is that it will be hard for Tesla to make a comeback, even if they somehow manage to restore the name.
They are no longer a technology leader, and they aren’t leading on value either, which makes Tesla just one among many options.
And it seems they can’t keep up with the competition anymore, now that the traditional auto makers have learned the basics of making a good EV. And China is so far ahead on batteries and Fast Charging it isn’t even funny.
Both BYD and CATL have batteries that can charge 3 times faster than the fastest Tesla!

In USA Tesla is protected by tariffs, So USA has lower competition, but in Europe and China, I don’t think Tesla has much of a future, (EU has 3 times as many BEV models to choose from than USA!) and even USA will be a a huge uphill struggle, because they have such poor brand recognition.
I don’t think Musk can turn Tesla around, the claimed options to do that are RoboTaxi, and AI and robots. But Tesla is not even close to be leading in any of those fields. So Tesla will be a company with huge R&D costs, but little money coming in. Unless Musk can keep conning new investors of course.

much less right now.

I think you mean “even more”.
But I agree.

The article says it is paid…

Yes but in USA words don’t mean what they say, they are merely spin on something worse.
It actually means UNPAID time off, in normal human speak, but you can take some of your holiday and get paid for that.

This would of course be illegal in EU and many other places, so an easy mistake to make unless you are brought up with the craziness of USA.

Absolutely, but you could also say that beginning was a year ago, where Tesla sales began to slump.
Remember when we hear about poor sales this year compared to 2024, that 2024 was already a bad year for Tesla!

I’ve been arguing the Q1 result was cooked already from day 1 they came out. The actual result is probably way worse. One of the reasons is that Tesla has been producing way to many cars, and the cars on stock are overvalued to push the deficit into the future. Where they probably hope to camouflage the loss in other ways.
But competition is intensifying, and Tesla is already at a very low margin on each car sold. Increased competition is at a point where Tesla will have to sell cars at a deficit. While at the same time write off value on stock. Or alternatively lose even more marketshare.
The glory days where Tesla had the highest margin per car sold in the industry are long gone.

Oh boy, USA sure is an interesting country.

That’s all very spot on. 👍 😀
And the fact that our imagination isn’t limited by real physics, but we can imagine alternatives, hence we have fantasy stories. This is I think a very good example of how our minds do not depend entirely on reality.

I can’t spare the “CPU cycles”, so to say.

Absolutely there are limitations, but when you have solved the abstract puzzle and learned it by heart, then you can! But we can only really focus on one thing at a time. I actually tried way back in the 80’s to train myself to focus on 2 things at a time. But pressuring myself too hard was such a disturbing experience I stopped. I think it may be possible, but there is also risk of going insane.

I don’t think self-awareness is a necessary component of this “virtual environment”.

Well that’s a tough one I admit, because trying to understand the limits, I have also observed our cat, to try to determine how it thinks and what the limits are.
It seems to me that cats are not capable of manipulating their environment mentally. For instance if the cat is hunting a mouse that hides behind a small obstacle, the cat cannot figure out to move the obstacle to get at the mouse. This is also an example of different degrees of awareness. It seems like this thing we take for granted, most animals aren’t capable of. So I think this virtual environment is necessary at least for the level of consciousness we have. But I agree that it may not be a necessity for more basic self awareness, because I think our cat is self aware. He can clearly distinguish between me an my wife, this is obvious because his behavior is very different towards us. If he can distinguish between us, it seems logical that he is also able to tell himself as being different from us. AFAIK that’s a pretty big part of what self awareness is.
But I also think that we don’t have to be aware of our consciousness all the time, only when it’s relevant.

at least, quite some diversity in the nature of this virtual environment.
Absolutely yes, HUGE differences. I’m personally a bit of a fan of the multi talent Piet Hein, a multi talent who was a theoretical physicist. He could hold complex geometrical shapes in his head and see if they fit together, in a way no one else at the university could, and he played mental ping-pong" with Niels Bohr, and just like he was very good at it, there are people who are similarly bad at it. I find it hard to understand how their thought process works, because curiously this is also a thing among smart people AFAIK.
I admit I’m not really aware of any results from the study of it, but it is an interesting subject.

I am reminded of the concept of latent representations in AI.

From your link:

we argue that language space may not always be optimal for reasoning.

I absolutely agree. It’s like discerning between the abstract and the concrete, and if you can visualize it as a person, you can probably also understand it. So I wonder if people with aphantasia think in a way that is similar to abstract thinking for everything? Maybe each way has it’s own strength?

We utilize the last hidden state of the LLM as a representation of the reasoning state (termed “continuous thought”)

So it’s not like a virtual reality, but wow that sounds awesome. 😎
It sure is impressive how fast things are developing now.

It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.

Without the regulatory credits, and capital gains Tesla would be $500 million in the red.
And sales continue to drop in all markets. Tesla is no longer competitive in China and EU, only in USA due to tariffs on cars.
A couple of years ago Tesla boasted the highest margins in the industry on their cars, now they are so low, that if prices continue to drop, Tesla will soon be at s deficit on every car sold if they try to follow, or if they don’t reduce prices, their cars will simply be too expensive. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

OK that sounds like a somewhat weird decision. Considering we Have things like Microsoft “Windows”, and “Exastore” which are both 100% generic words.

Also “X” is generic, and so is SpaceX and XAI.
Of all of these it seems both Robotaxi and Cybercap are less generic???

Still why didn’t they apply for trademark years ago, since Tesla has been planning on this for years?

It’s probably the actual issue. How can they only now discover right before launch, that there are trademark issues?

I’m not particularly fond of Gates, but despite he was the worlds richest man for many years, he has managed to maintain some humanity.

Can you lay out what abilities are connected to consciousness?

I probably can’t say much new, but it’s a combination of memory, learning, abstract thinking, and self awareness.
I can also say that the consciousness resides in a form of virtual reality in the brain, allowing us to manipulate reality in our minds to predict outcomes of our actions.
At a more basic level it is memory, pattern recognition, prediction and manipulation.
The fact that our consciousness is a virtual construct, also acts as a shim, distancing the mind from direct dependency of the underlying physical layer. Although it still depend on it to work of course.
So to make an artificial consciousness, you don’t need to create a brain, you can do it by recreating the functionality of the abstraction layer on other forms of hardware too. Which means a conscious AI is indeed possible.
It is also this feature that allows us to have free will, although that depends on definition, I believe we do have free will in an absolutely meaningful sense. Something that took me decades to realize was actually possible.

I don’t know if this makes any sense to you? But maybe you find it interesting?

You are saying that there are different levels of consciousness. So, it must be something that is measurable and quantifiable.

Yes there are different levels, actually in 2 ways. there are different levels between the consciousness of a dolphin and a human. A dolphin is also self aware and conscious. But it does not have the same level of consciousness we do. Simply because it doesn’t posses the same level of intelligence.

But even within the human brain there are different levels of consciousness. It’s a common term to use “sub conscious” and that is with good reason. Because there are things that are hard to learn, and we need to concentrate hard and practice hard to learn them. But with enough practice we build routine, and at some point they become so much routine we can do them without thinking about it, but instead think about something else.
At that point you have trained a subconscious routine, that is able to work independently almost without guidance of you main consciousness. There are also functions that are “automatic”, like when you listen to sounds, you can distinguish many separate sounds without problem. We can somewhat mimic that in software today, separating different sounds. It’s extremely complex to do, and the mathematics involved is more than most can handle. Except in our hearing we do it effortlessly. But there is obviously an intelligence at work in the brain that isn’t directly tied to our consciousness.
IDK if I’m explaining myself well here, but the subconscious is a very significant part of our consciousness.

So, it must be something that is measurable and quantifiable.

That is absolutely not a certainty. At least I don’t think we can at this point in time, but in the future there may exist better knowledge and better tools. But as it is, we have been hampered by wrongful thinking in these areas for centuries, quite opposite to physics and mathematics that has helped computing every step of the way.
The study of the mind has been hampered by prejudice, thinking that humans are not animals, thinking free will is from god, with nonsense terms like id. And thinking we have a soul that is something separate from the body. Psychology basically started out as pseudo science, and despite that it was a huge step forward!

I’ll stop here, these issues are very complex, and some of the above issues have taken me decades to figure out. There is much dogma and even superstition surrounding these issues, so it used to be rare to finally find someone to read or listen to that made some sense based on reality. It’s seems to me basically only for the past 15 years, that it seems that science of the mind is beginning to catch up to reality.

IDK what the fuck kind of settings people have on their phones to allow anyone with access to it to do that?
Any action that requires a payment or money transfer on my phone also requires authentication, and I’m not even sure I can disable that.
But maybe that’s because I’m in EU?

FWIW, I asked GPT-4o mini via DDG.

You do it wrong, you provided the “answer” to the logic proposition, and got a parroted the proof for it. Completely different situation.
The AI must be able to figure this out in responses that require this very basic understanding. I don’t recall the exact example, but here is a similar example, where the AI fails to simply count the number of R’s in strawberry, claiming there are only 2, and refusing to accept there is 3, then when explained there is 1 in straw and 2 in berry, it made some very puzzling argument, that counting the R in Straw is some sort of clever trick.
This is fixed now, and had to do with tokenizing info incorrectly. So you can’t “prove” this wrong by showing an example of a current AI that doesn’t make the mistake.
Unfortunately I can’t find a link to the original story, because I’m flooded with later results. But you can easily find the 2 R’s in strawberry problem.

Self-awareness means the ability to distinguish self from other, which implies computing from sensory data what is oneself and what is not.

Yes, but if you instruct a parrot or LLM to say yes when asked if it is separate from it’s surroundings, it doesn’t mean it is just because it says so.
So need to figure out if it actually understands what it means. Self awareness on the human level requires a high level of logical thought and abstract understanding. My example shows this level of understanding clearly isn’t there.

As I wrote earlier, we really can’t prove consciousness, the way to go around it is to figure out some of the mental abilities required for it, if those can be shown not to be present, we can conclude it’s probably not there.

When we have Strong AI, it may take a decade to be widely acknowledged. And this will stem from failure to disprove it, rather than actually proof.

You never asked how I define intelligence, self awareness or consciousness, you asked how I operationally define it, that a very different question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_definition

An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct.

I was a bit confused by that question, because consciousness is not a construct, the brain is, of which consciousness is an emerging property.

Also:

An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept. For example, an operational definition of “fear” (the construct) often includes measurable physiologic responses that occur in response to a perceived threat.

Seem to me to be able to define that for consciousness, would essentially mean to posses the knowledge necessary to replicate it.
Nobody on planet earth has that knowledge yet AFAIK.

Then how will you know the difference between strong AI and not-strong AI?

I’ve already stated that that is a problem:

From a previous answer to you:

Obviously the Turing test doesn’t cut it, which I suspected already back then. And I’m sure when we finally have a self aware conscious AI, it will be debated violently.

Because I don’t think we have a sure methodology.

I think therefore I am, is only good for the conscious mind itself.
I can’t prove that other people are conscious, although I’m 100% confident they are.
In exactly the same way we can’t prove when we have a conscious AI.

But we may be able to prove that it is NOT conscious, which I think is clearly the case with current level AI. Although you don’t accept the example I provided, I believe it is clear evidence of lack of a consciousness behind the high level of intelligence it clearly has.

No that’s not what I mean, their base probably doesn’t give a shit. But if they lose the case, it validates the report more than the agency can ever do themselves, and it can be used against AfD in other situations too. It may also justify it for parliament to ban the party.

Just because you can’t make a mathematical proof doesn’t mean you don’t understand the very simple truth of the statement.

What might an operational definition look like?

I think if I could describe that, I might actually have solved the problem of strong AI.
You are asking unreasonable questions.

I know about the Turing test, it’s what we were taught about and debated in philosophy class at University of Copenhagen, when I made my prediction that strong AI would probably be possible about year 2035.

to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human

Here equivalent actually means indistinguishable from a human.

But as a test of consciousness that is not a fair test, because obviously a consciousness can be different from a human, and our understanding of how a simulation can fake something without it being real is also a factor.
But the original question remains, how do we decide it’s not conscious if it responds as if it is?

This connects consciousness to reasoning ability in some unclear way.

Maybe it’s unclear because you haven’t pondered the connection? Our consciousness is a very big part of our reasoning, consciousness is definitely guiding our reasoning. And our consciousness improve the level of reasoning we are capable of.
I don’t see why the example requiring training for humans to understand is unfortunate. A leading AI has way more training than would ever be possible for any human, still they don’t grasp basic concepts, while their knowledge is way bigger than for any human.

It’s hard to explain, but intuitively it seems to me the missing factor is consciousness. It has learned tons of information by heart, but it doesn’t really understand any of it, because it isn’t conscious.

Being conscious is not just to know what the words mean, but to understand what they mean.
I think therefore I am.

Good question.
Obviously the Turing test doesn’t cut it, which I suspected already back then. And I’m sure when we finally have a self aware conscious AI, it will be debated violently.
We may think we have it before it’s actually real, some claim they believe some of the current systems display traits of consciousness already. I don’t believe that it’s even close yet though.
As wrong as Descartes was about animals, he still nailed it with “I think therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) https://www.britannica.com/topic/cogito-ergo-sum.
Unfortunately that’s about as far as we can get, before all sorts of problems arise regarding actual evidence. So philosophically in principle it is only the AI itself that can know for sure if it is truly conscious.

All I can say is that with the level of intelligence current leading AI have, they make silly mistakes that seems obvious if it was really conscious.
For instance as strong as they seem analyzing logic problems, they fail to realize that 1+1=2 <=> 2=1+1.
Such things will of course be ironed out, and maybe this on is already. But it shows the current model, isn’t good enough for the basic comprehension I would think would follow from consciousness.

Luckily there are people that know much more about this, and it will be interesting to hear what they have to say, when the time arrives. 😀