From Gus Wilson (the fabled best auto mechanic ever) to GUS (our best AI mechanic)
Raise a Hood has gathered several pioneers in the fields of artificial intelligence and vehicle repair to build GUS™AI (Generative Uniform Syntactics Artificial Intelligence) .
Gus Wilson was the main character and master mechanic of Model Garage, a Popular Science magazine series that began in 1925 and ran for 44 years. Gus was presented as a thoughtful, honest man, respected in his town and who was never without his common sense. He was then, and remains now, a fantastic character representing integrity, fair dealing, tolerance, and respect while upholding his devotion to the standards and the dignity of the mechanic’s profession. The character, Gus Wilson, didn’t have any superpowers. He was remarkable simply because he understood the nature of cars in his small town and could use his sound judgment and honesty to benefit his neighbors.
Real mechanics, as good as they are, can’t live up to Gus’s idealistic standards simply because vehicles today are incredibly diverse and are used across America in different ways by different people in wildly different environments. Gus’s insights worked because he dealt directly with a few cars in a small area of use and worked with those same vehicles over their serviceable lifetime. Expecting a mechanic to have that knowledge in today’s highly complex environment of more vehicle makes, models, subsystems, and vehicle complexity is unrealistic. An ideal mechanic must have direct experience with every vehicle type throughout their entire service life, so the perfect mechanic must be superhuman.
While Gus will always remain a charming character from the past, his lessons remain critically important, especially in what it takes to be an ideal mechanic. An ideal machinic would need to have a superhuman experience with every vehicle through time and would be able to consider the nature as well as limitations of each. An ideal mechanic must have direct experience with every vehicle type throughout their entire service life, so the perfect mechanic must be superhuman.
With Gus Wilson as an ideal and recognizing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Raise a Hood has gathered several pioneers in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning to build GUS™AI (Generative Uniform Syntactics Artificial Intelligence) or just “GUS” for short, a new class of generative artificial intelligence capable of unifying our understanding of mechanical systems. The GUS system harvests and learns from the vast information we generate daily across the country, learning about each and applying that knowledge to individual repairs.