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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

#201

Post by vessenes »

xnx wrote: post #23

xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.

I'll bite. I think their conversation (voice) model is more fluid than competitors. It's also very good at hitting up twitter for realtime information, and was that way before the current tool use models got fully up and running. Anecdotally, I think it has better theory of mind than its era (gemini 2.5) - I found it a useful issue spotter for negotiations and planning in a way that oAI and claude were not near its launch date. It led the vending bench for some time after launch.

Taken together, I infer that RL training toward a slightly less homogenous cultural standard than the other frontier AI labs adds some capabilities, or can at times.

It's quite long in the tooth right now, though. But I'll definitely talk to the next version; I like heterogeneity in the model space, and Grok is very different than the other big three.

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

#202

Post by galleywest200 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #192
enaaem wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. One kid took his life after an ai sextortian scam [1]. Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do? [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-scam-e...

> The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. But... that's not something you can do. It's impossible. You can imagine what real people look like naked. That's not a new thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7FCgw_GlWc

Imagining what someone looks like in your mind is far different than actively sharing fake nude images online. This cannot be a serious comparison.

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

#203

Post by JumpCrisscross »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #200
vessenes wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

Ask the people at Twitter..

> Ask the people at Twitter

The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?

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

#204

Post by debugnik »

scottyah wrote: post #182
freehorse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They meant the idea of Wikipedia rewritten by Grok (or another controversial LLM) specifically, not just any alternative.

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

#205

Post by kennywinker »

EGreg wrote: post #140
bearjaws wrote: post #8

Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward. I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.

I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc. But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to hear the substantive compar…

I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon wants. It’s poisoned information under the control of one man - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.

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

#206

Post by Animats »

“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk

Right.

The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it?

It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X and X/AI tanked, nobody would care.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TSLA

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

#207

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

enaaem wrote: post #89
wolvoleo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it. American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc) xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn. Personally I pr…

The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. One kid took his life after an ai sextortian scam [1]. Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do? [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-scam-e...

This has been fixed months ago. From reading Reddit, Grok is now really conservative about what it will let you do with uploaded images. But you can get it to draw x rated porn images and videos that start with Ai images it creates

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

#208

Post by NeutralCrane »

vessenes wrote: post #191
zeroCalories wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.

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

#209

Post by vessenes »

kybernetikos wrote: post #195
Marazan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.

Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this:

1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand

2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!)

3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space

4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically integrated production facility to turn raw materials into space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips.

As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching, then these will be actively utilized at scale.

Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth, ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship outlook, and silicon access.

I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head start, both due to years of experience, and due to the cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a nearly insurmountable moat.

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

#210

Post by Freedom2 »

vessenes wrote: post #191
zeroCalories wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

Many ex-employees have said to me that working for Elon did not enrich them at all, either financially or professionally.
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