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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#261
post #185
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and he actively empathised with the protestors. https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-mirroring.html

Even if so, that's still showing awareness of what his critics are critical of. Now, can you make a falsifiable prediction: what would a narcissist do that a normal person would not, such that you can tell if he's engaging in a narcissist process rather that what your own link also says is a perfectly normal and healthy behaviour?

> Even if so, that's still showing awareness of what his critics are critical of.

Mere awareness is really that meaningful.

>>> and he actively empathised with the protestors.

>> https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-mirroring.html

> Now, can you make a falsifiable prediction: what would a narcissist do that a normal person would not, such that you can tell if he's engaging in a narcissist process rather that what your own link also says is a perfectly normal and healthy behaviour?

He doesn't have to, because I think the point was to raise doubts about your interpretation.

But if you're looking for more evidence, there are all the stories (from many different people) about Altman being dishonest and manipulative and being very effective at it. That's the context that a lot of people are going use to interpret your claim that Altman "actively empathised with the protestors."

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.

The hype cycle for Segway was insane. Ginger (code name) wasn’t just going to change the world, it was going to cause us to rethink how cities were laid out and designed. No one would get around the world in the same way. The engineering behind it was really quite nice, but the hype set it up to fail. If it hasn’t been talked up so much in the media, the launch wouldn’t have felt so flat. There was no way for them to…

I guess it depends on what media you follow. As a Brit my recollection was hearing it was a novelty gadget that about a dozen American eccentrics were using, and then there was the story that a guy called Jimi Heselden bought the company and killed himself by driving one off a cliff and then that was about it. Not the same category as AI at all.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.

It reappeared as e-bikes and e-scooters - Lime, Bird, etc.

Apparently the first e-bike was invented in 1895. So I don’t think it is accurate to give Segway too much credit in their creation. Anyway the innovation of Segway was the balance system, which e-bikes don’t need.

(I’m not familiar with the site in general, but I think there’s no reason for them to lie about the date, and electric vehicles always show up surprisingly early).

https://reallygoodebikes.com/blogs/electric-bike-blog/histor...

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that owning Twitter was worth half a Mars colony to him should give you an idea of how seriously he's taking this whole thing. It's up there next to "Full Self Driving" and "$25,000 EV" in the Big Jar of Promises Used To Raise Capital and Nothing Else.

He bought Twitter for $40B. His Tesla stock was 0% ytd until the election. Post election it is up roughly 70% ytd & has paid for Twitter & the Mars colony multiple times. Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.

> Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.

Its fairly easy.

In almost every western country the incumbent administration has been punished by voters due to inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany, romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could have won without Elon buying twitter.

Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying Twitter, and been on stage and been all day on twitter saying nonsense without purchasing. So being close to Trump is possible without buying Twitter.

The market would have reacted the same way, because the market is reacting to the fact that Trump is a corrupt leader and being close to him means the market will be skewed to benefit his cronies (in this case Elon). If im not wrong Trump has already mentioned creating "self driving car initiatives" that probably means boosting Tesla dangerous self driving mode, and also they have alluded to investigating rival companies to tesla and spacex or at least "reviewing their goverment contracts". Other industries without social media owners, like private prisions, also skyrocketed after trump won and those paid trump as much as Elon but were not on social media. The market would have reacted to Trump being corrupt regardless of Elon buying Twitter.

So its easy to say that his stock would be up 70% without buying twitter, as long as he kept the 250 million investment in the Trump campaign, and then market assesed Trump admin as affecting market fairness, both of which would happen without his purchase.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#265
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define everyone. I was delighted when they fired him. I don't believe he has humanity's best interest at heart.

745 of 770 employees responded on a weekend to call for his return, threatened mass resignations if the board did not resign; among the signatories was board member Sutskever, who defected from the board and publicly apologized for his participation in the board's previous actions.

I followed the drama. The point I was (somewhat unsuccessfully) trying to make was that while, sure, there were groups who wanted him back (mainly the groups with vested financial interests and associated leverage), my sense was that the way it played out was not necessarily in line with wider humanity's best interest, i.e. as would have been hoped based on OpenAI's publicly stated goals.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#267
post #34

Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."

I will always love Kim Stanley Robinson but I dont care: please, Musk, go to Mars, you can have it.

I wonder if Elon Musk is of the Red or the Green mindset.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#268
post #128
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> ...like saying Microsoft has no moat for spreadsheets

Which would be very inaccurate as network-effects are Excel's (and Word's) moat. Excel being bundled with Office and Windows helped, but it beat Lotus-123 by being a superior product at a time the computing landscape was changing. OpenAI has no such advantage yet: a text-based API is about as commoditized as a technology can get and OpenAI is furiously launching interfaces with lower interoperability (where one can't replace GPT-4o with Claude 3.5 via a drop-down)

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#270
post #128
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk

I’m going to guess that GP does not consider random protestors to be in Sam Altman’s ‘sphere’

> The product market fit is fantastic.

This is true insomuch that you define “product market fit” as “somebody mentioning it in an Indian restaurant in Berlin”

> every definition of "very smart"

Every definition you say?

https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lclo77koj22y

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