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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

#241

Post by [deleted] »

atonse wrote: post #217
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.

> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation. Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet? Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research…

[deleted]

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

#242

Post by hooch »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #190
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.

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

Was doge ever anything more than a "get root, grab the data, and run" operation?

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

#243

Post by KaiserPro »

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".

I don't really think thats true.

The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.

The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.

We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.

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

#244

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #221
twodave wrote: post #175

Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks…

I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).

It'll get there. Initial implementation was just talk to Grok. Now it has improved to allow adjustments to navigation routes.

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

#245

Post by darkwater »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #143
Auracle wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It seems like the root of your statement is with the existence of "race" as a purely biological classification. Wikipedia correctly notes the consensus position that race is a social construct [0] that's difficult to use accurately when discussing IQ. Grok makes the implicit and incorrect assumption that genetic factors = race, among other issues. [0] https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Race

I wonder how much longer that link will stay up with the current administration...

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

#246

Post by BLKNSLVR »

paulbjensen wrote: post #135
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.

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful. Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who t…

That entire description sounds worthless to any positive direction of humanity. Therefore probably rapaciously profitable

Very sad face.

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

#247

Post by testaccount28 »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #92
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…

> Someone's gonna do it. People will want it. You can say the same for meth and leaded gasoline.

those have clear antisocial externalities, so aren't really a fair comparison.

(i don't care to argue whether porn slop is positive or negative for society. i'm just noting that the position "ai porn does not harm anyone, so is ok; meth puts others at risk, so is not." is coherent.)

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

#248

Post by servo_sausage »

ryandrake wrote: post #97
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

Are there actual good examples showing errors of fact on Wikipedia that are verifiably incorrect, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?

I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".

As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.

For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.

And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.

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

#249

Post by jazzpush2 »

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…

In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!

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

#250

Post by KaiserPro »

gwern wrote: post #226
paulbjensen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful. Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who t…

It's definitely very valuable, but for what AI model? How does any of that lead to AGI, or even just a good coding agent?

> but for what AI model?

Sentiment analysis. Working out what words lead to what outcomes, and then being able to predict on new data is super useful.

For coding or "AGI" no, its not useful. For building a text based (possibly image based) recategorisation system top class.

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