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Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

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Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#181

Post by XorNot »

Retr0id wrote: post #121
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn’t it be possible for AI to filter out that a request is made to portray a real person? That seems almost like a trivial task for a good model. I am sure every now and then something will slip through, but I bet one could make it very close to 100% effective.

I can see how it'd be trivial to block known celebrities, but how do you handle everyone else?

I mean a realistic take is to simply not use source images containing people at all.

AIs have been able to invent fictional people longer then they've been able to modify existing images.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#182

Post by scottyah »

freehorse wrote: post #88
alex1138 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can both not like Elon and also think Wikipedia is also very captured on some things

I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.

> "grokipedia" as idea

So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#184

Post by throwaway5752 »

natch wrote: post #138
Herring wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Musk

* gave a Nazi Sigg Heil salute (twice) at a political even, on video. Famously.

* has consistently supported a German political party that re-uses Nazi slogans, minimizes or outright denies the Holocaust, minimizes the criminality of the SS

* frequently and consistently upvotes posts on X echoing white supremacist and Nazi ideology on his social media site

* owns the most popular site for neo-Nazis

To say "is not backed up by any kind of connection to reality" is actually verifiably false. I can't say anything about the other words, but there is evidence for miles that he is sympathetic to Nazi ideology.

And this is directly relevant here. It can't be ignored when you are talking about his business, or you have an elephant in the room. His personal flaws and meglomaniacal executive style are a package deal.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#185

Post by Analemma_ »

charlierguo wrote: post #164
nemothekid wrote: post #161

While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run. xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with ha…

> I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.

There’s a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-vesters. Maybe it’s true in some departments, but I also have anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI and have the appropriate amount of hustle.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#186

Post by basisword »

nemothekid wrote: post #161

While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run. xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with ha…

It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but when your boss has more money than God and is working you like a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of those people probably have much better opportunities available to them at the drop of a hat).

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#187

Post by NewJazz »

dmarcos wrote: post #139
freehorse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.

FWIW it looks there’s now a demand surge with the introduction of the new cheap cybertruck variant. delivery dates pushed out to the fall of 2026.

Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#188

Post by daveguy »

Sol- wrote: post #171
daveguy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grok is a bot that: 1) sometimes goes mechahitler 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke). 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact. Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.

I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online arguments. Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people ge…

He doesn't have to fiddle with the model because he gets to inject his own opinion into the context MitM style.

But I get what you're saying now, a fact checker available to query during an online discussion would be helpful. Assuming the checkerbot was actually independent/neutral and backed responses with sources. Definitely not assumptions you can make with grok.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#189

Post by throwaway5752 »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #124
BoredPositron wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is not wrong here dang and you are keen to scold one side of the bar more than the other in the last few months. This thread is a good example there wasn't even anything in the comments and it got a sticky real quick.

I come to HN because I don't want to read reddit-tier comments like the above.

The grandparent comment is from someone that has been on this site almost since the beginning. Far longer than you. They might have insights about the community that you do not.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#190

Post by LZ_Khan »

zeroCalories wrote: post #153
Imnimo wrote: post #125

I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical ni…

It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.

After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.
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