Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

xAI

x.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 271 posts

Re: xAI

#141

Post by cma »

bearjaws wrote: post #48
paxys wrote: post #21

> The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. Who wants to bet it's going to end up launching a "me too" generative AI product. Maybe Musk should first take these skills to Tesla's self driving division then worry about the rest of the universe.

If it follows the path of Twitter it will be a "free speech AI" that will censor anything negative about Elon.

As a large language model, I can't tell you anything about Threads as my training date only extends through September 2023.

Re: xAI

#142

Post by wyager »

erlend_sh wrote: post #25

I count a dozen dudes. I don’t think we’re gonna figure out the true nature of the universe via that kind of monocultural uniformity.

What makes you say that? The history of physics (our most successful endeavor in this direction) is very monocultural (by the standard of granularity you are using).

Re: xAI

#143

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

erlend_sh wrote: post #25

I count a dozen dudes. I don’t think we’re gonna figure out the true nature of the universe via that kind of monocultural uniformity.

I'm all for diversity for diversity's sake, but I find this to be a very strange position. What difference between men and women are you proposing that allows one or both to have unique insights into the nature of the universe?

It seems like everything I know about the fundamental universe does come from a dozen or so dudes (for historical reasons rather than competency, of course), like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Turing, and von Neumann. I fully believe that women could have solved the same problems, it just doesn't make sense to me to say that men can't, considering that they already have.

Re: xAI

#144

Post by Veedrac »

satvikpendem wrote: post #32
option wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also a man who built monopoly on launches to space

How is it a monopoly? He made it cheap but others are also trying to compete, they're just not as good as SpaceX yet.

Since SpaceX entered the market, ULA has stopped selling both its flight ready rockets with no replacement ready, Ariane has finished flying with no replacement ready, the Space Shuttle has stopped flying and its role has been replaced by SpaceX, Soyuz is no longer available for US and many other markets, China's rockets are similarly unavailable in the US, and a great many new competitors continue not to have vehicles that exist. Electron and some small number of less robust small launch players fly but compete in a market segment SpaceX abandoned in 2009. SLS exists but has zero commercial customers and will never have more. India and Japan's rockets exist but have near-zero market presence.

The strongest sense in which SpaceX is not a monopoly is that other companies let you order flights on vehicles that don't exist yet, but hopefully may soon.

Re: xAI

#145

Post by sterlind »

andreygrehov wrote: post #138
sterlind wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are the researchers allowed to disagree with Musk? if the supposedly-objective AI they produce contradicts Musk's views, will he accept that he's wrong? or will he call it a bug, or pressure his researchers into training it to support his ideologies? in short: do you really believe this is Musk producing an objective truth-aligned AI and not just a Musk-aligned AI?

What makes you believe that one cannot disagree with Musk?

his conduct at Twitter, primarily, as he rapidly abandoned his promises of free-speech absolutism and started to micromanage its moderation to benefit himself.

Re: xAI

#146

Post by wyager »

numbers_guy wrote: post #140
stillsut wrote: post #128

> The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. People are misinterpreting this as the research goal. No, it's an implicit negation of an ethos - AI Ethics, Trust & Safety, ESG, Politically Correct - that have dominated decision making in product and hiring in tech for the past decade. Whether or not you agree with him, it's hard to deny that Musk is the only one offering researchers an escape fro…

There is literally nothing wrong with ethics in AI, or any other field of science. What is wrong is this woke supremacist nonsense, that some imbecile in Silicon Valley can dictate the truth about the world according to the woke bible, that's where the problem lies. Americans have gotten really intolerant of other cultures and ways of life. There's 8 billion people on this planet, ffs. We don't need the heavy handed…

> There is literally nothing wrong with ethics in... any other field of science.

When you start putting "ethics" in fields like biology (not medicine or bioengineering, just inductive biology) you end up with nonsense like Lamarckism.

Reality has an underlying structure independently of how this structure interacts with our constructed ethical systems.

Re: xAI

#147

Post by stillsut »

sterlind wrote: post #135
stillsut wrote: post #128

> The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. People are misinterpreting this as the research goal. No, it's an implicit negation of an ethos - AI Ethics, Trust & Safety, ESG, Politically Correct - that have dominated decision making in product and hiring in tech for the past decade. Whether or not you agree with him, it's hard to deny that Musk is the only one offering researchers an escape fro…

are the researchers allowed to disagree with Musk? if the supposedly-objective AI they produce contradicts Musk's views, will he accept that he's wrong? or will he call it a bug, or pressure his researchers into training it to support his ideologies? in short: do you really believe this is Musk producing an objective truth-aligned AI and not just a Musk-aligned AI?

Me sense is its more permissible to publicly disagree with Musk on ideology than any other CEO of a large company in the world. I can't imagine that working at Google, Disney, ESPN, OpenAI, even Y-combinator!

What ideological belief does Musk hold that would create friction with his employees?

Re: xAI

#148

Post by janalsncm »

numbers_guy wrote: post #109
erlend_sh wrote: post #25

I count a dozen dudes. I don’t think we’re gonna figure out the true nature of the universe via that kind of monocultural uniformity.

What do you want Musk to do? Visit every university in the US and Europe to poach off the top women in AI, so that he could have a mixed team? Would that actually be good for the world? Those poor uni AI departments worked really hard to find a woman to hire and then Musk comes along and poaches her off. And then somehow that would be better, because?

Musk is pretty toxic at this point I’m guessing the appeal of working for him as a woman is somewhere between challenge trials for cholera and becoming a live crash test dummy.

Re: xAI

#149

Post by vippy »

inemesitaffia wrote: post #126
vippy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 10 kids while repping on his $44 billion dollar Titanic transphobes, homophobes, etc. I'm not talking about fascism as in "kill all of the people of a certain ethnic group," but there are, if you're in the study of ideology, politics, moral epistemology, etc., smaller, lower-case fascisms before people start calling you "Fuhrer." There is something in Elon's behavior and signaled preferences that very much comes…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

That is, indeed, an observed phenomenon. I work in human behavior in Washington, D.C., in a position where I am paid to think about the causes of harassment, discrimination, and violence, and how we, if we believe it is valuable or necessary to reduce these behaviors, how they come into existence, arrange human affairs such that their costs are minimized. I am not some random left-wing hack for whom fascism is anything to the right of Stalin. Musk is definitely on the fascist spectrum.

Re: xAI

#150

Post by satvikpendem »

Veedrac wrote: post #144
satvikpendem wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a monopoly? He made it cheap but others are also trying to compete, they're just not as good as SpaceX yet.

Since SpaceX entered the market, ULA has stopped selling both its flight ready rockets with no replacement ready, Ariane has finished flying with no replacement ready, the Space Shuttle has stopped flying and its role has been replaced by SpaceX, Soyuz is no longer available for US and many other markets, China's rockets are similarly unavailable in the US, and a great many new competitors continue not to have vehicl…

None of those are the fault of SpaceX. Perhaps they simply couldn't compete with the lower prices being offered.
Post reply on HN