301–310 of 889 posts
I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable. The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the st…
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.
> Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward. Really? I assumed that that whole thing was just a very direct `for each article in Wikipedia { article = LLM(systemprompt, article) }` Agree re Twitter "good" != valuable.
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…
Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this philosophical bent you describe?
> Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.”
> Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried to recruit. “Zuck had phone calls with potential hires trying to convince them to join with a $2M/yr floor.”
If you're making a minimum of $2M/year or even 50x that, you can afford to live according to your values instead of checking them at the door.
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Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this philosophical bent you describe?
You are paying the smartest people in the world to think really really hard, and turns out they might also think really really hard about not making the world a worse place
But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better place".
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…
The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they even remotely have the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them. Neither is a letter published by a few disgruntled employees of a San Francisco based company any kind of evidence or form of consensus.
“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…
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You are paying the smartest people in the world to think really really hard, and turns out they might also think really really hard about not making the world a worse place
Is this really the case though? How many smartest people do you really think are there that fit this narrative?! I want to believe there are at least some but I think they are minority in this group… otherwise I think all these pretty much evil corporations would have a awfully difficult time attracting talent? maybe some do but…
So Tesla's recent $2 billion investment in xAI was a bad deal?
It looks a lot like a public company is being used to bail out a private one.
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Ask the people at Twitter..
You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine? Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it. It does not speak so well about the workers.
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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!
From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.