Single engine. Single pilot. Somewhere over Botswana, my brain asked: if the pilot passes out, could I land this thing?
That night, from a tent, I built a flight simulator to find out.
This summer my family and I went on the trip of a lifetime: our first-ever safari in Africa. What an awesome experience: the vastness of nature, the beauty and intensity of the animals, the kindness of the people. It was also our first flight in a tiny single-engine bush plane, which breaks my pilot friends' golden rule: double engine, double pilot.
We landed safely, but with my brain trained to think through backup plans B, C, D… I was a bit nervous about the return flight, wondering what I would do if the pilot were suddenly incapacitated. (Feel free to comment that this is statistically unlikely and a waste of mental tokens!)
So that night in our tent I got to work (thanks, Starlink!). I fired up Google Antigravity
@_mohansolo, fed it pictures I'd taken of the cockpit, and built a working flight simulator.
It wasn't one-shot: I used an older 3.x Flash model and didn't let it use tools like Blender, Three.js or Unreal. But after a few rounds of adjustments, the results were amazing. Overall it took me an hour to build, and far too many crashes to finally land. Could I have landed a real plane? Who knows. See the fun warning message on the attached screenshot.
Why am I telling this story? 3 learnings:
1. Get your hands dirty. With every new generation of models, tools and harnesses, you have to push the boundaries yourself. You'll learn so much.
2. Start where nothing's (really) at stake. Tinkering privately is often easier and more fun, and what you learn transfers to your work more than you'd think.
3. This is the slowest AI will ever be. A custom simulator, from a few photos, in a tent in Botswana, in an hour. Imagine what people will build for the things that really matter.
I just rebuilt the same simulator with our latest internal model, and it's incredible. Stay tuned
@koraykv 😀
What's the coolest way you've privately pushed the boundaries of AI (and learned something for your work)? Let me know in the comments!