Cutting edge AI techniques - from Vision Language Action (VLA) and embodied models to end-to-end training approaches - are showing immense promise for the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). The tools offer an innovative path to instill more common-sense intuition into driving policies. At the same time, many of us in the AV industry have increasingly focused on solving long-tail (or edge case) scenarios as we expand deployments and commercialization. We believe these two trends need to co