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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#311

Post by tim333 »

swatcoder wrote: post #306
tim333 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people will move on to the next fad AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.

My favorite comparison right now is to the microwave oven. It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.

AI probably has more capacity to be incorporated into many things than microwaves.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#312

Post by manquer »

eastbound wrote: post #278
manquer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…

Common, VR, NFTs and blockchain were always abysses of void looking for a usecase. Driving cars maybe, but development has been stalling for 15 years.

Not to their proponents particularly at the time.

For the rest of us in HN it was easier to judge on much mileage will get, but a long time in each cycle we were in the minority, just like the AI skeptics including me and many here are today on how much we will value get.

Don’t get are wrong, AI is more real and more useful than the things before it, but everything is on a spectrum of success - some more and some less, but none of it has been or will be world changing or truly global.

The true breakthroughs rarely get public or even tech community attention until late in the cycle although their progress is public and can be tracked, like with EUV or mRNA or GLP-1 etc . Others which are incremental changes like 5G or cheaper smartphones do not get as much attention as their impact should warrant especially compared to the fads

Hype cycles don’t correlate well with real tech cycles

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#313

Post by mlindner »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #134
AlanYx wrote: 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."

This made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it? That's all it takes?"

With a reusable launch vehicle yeah that's ballpark. Depends how you define "city" though.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#314

Post by result2vino »

manquer wrote: post #179
ben_w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…

> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything

Are you so deep in the SV tech echo chamber that you can’t distinguish between tech bro / snake oil salesman hype and something that actual normal people are engaged by?

The only people talking about NFTs in a non-disparaging way were delusional in large part because they themselves bought into it wanted to egg others on. NFTs were just a stupid faddish speculative ‘commodity’ market. It’s a completely different thing.

Ditto with “blockchain”. That well was positioned by people trying to make money from cryptocurrencies. The mechanics allowed for that. Again, it’s a completely different thing. Civilians with no vested interest weren’t sitting in restaurants singing the praises of decentralised ledgers or monkey pictures on someone’s Google Drive. I assure you. I also assure you that this IS however happening with ChatGPT. Out here in the real world, we see it.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues with LLMs, both philosophically and in therms of their actual output. This doesn’t mean there aren’t the same old SV snake oil salespeople and YouTube wannabes trying to push some BS products and courses. But let’s not pretend for a second like this is usefully comparable to “blockchain” and “NFTs”.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#315

Post by sangnoir »

boringg wrote: post #162
freedomben wrote: post #24

> You can’t sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for Elon’s accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom. Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that? IIRC Elon has the biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now, and is currently training the next major version of his "competing in the mar…

It's rich coming from Sam Altman -- the guy who famously tried to use regulatory capture to block everyone else.

Game recognizes game.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#316

Post by talldayo »

ben_w wrote: post #232
samvher wrote: post #200

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'd do that too if I held stock, and I think the guy is a borderline-vampire.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#317

Post by conception »

kingofheroes wrote: post #96
adabyron wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This. In hindsight, buying Twitter at a loss was well worth the long (though, more like medium) term results. As much as it disgusts me, I'm impressed.

Note he didn’t just buy Twitter. He was forced to buy twitter after trying to pump and dump the stock.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#318

Post by ben_w »

samvher wrote: post #265
ben_w wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, in that case sure.

The statements in the whole popcorn drama still don't add up in my mind, so from the point of view of "humanity's best interest", I'd say it's still bad.

I thought you meant at the time, not with the benefit of hindsight.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#319

Post by mlindner »

VectorLock wrote: post #249
linotype wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing what exactly? What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?

Yeah and Mars is a shitty place to live. And will always be a shitty place to live. No amount of fantastical "terraforming" is going to create a magnetosphere.

Well actually... you can create a magnetic shield in front of the planet by putting a large nuclear reactor powered superconducting magnet at the Sun-Mars L1 point that would fully shield Mars from charged particles from the sun. No new technology is required besides making the thing relatively maintenance free. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#320

Post by ben_w »

fwip wrote: post #256
ben_w wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

745 of 700?

Whoops, typo for 770, edited to correct. Thanks!
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