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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

#371

Post by yoyohello13 »

awesome_dude wrote: post #366
yoyohello13 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.

>> If you are wealthy Then.. you wouldn't be working...

Why is Elon still working then?

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

#372

Post by stogot »

asddubs wrote: post #289
ladberg wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it's not working

virtue signaling is the goal and its working

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

#373

Post by tyleo »

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 interesting because for a long time people wanted to work for Elon because he held the moral high ground. “I’ll bring electric cars and space colonization online or die trying.”

It’s sad to see the shift.

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

#374

Post by estearum »

kvetching wrote: post #358
estearum wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You think he wants Grok not to sound extremely snarky, sarcastic, and full of cringelord humor?

Are we talking about the same xAI/Grok/Elon here?

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

#375

Post by echelon »

dgxyz wrote: post #353
jarrettcoggin wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I worked at one of them. I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.

Why did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws?

When did it start falling apart?

Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?)

And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.

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

#376

Post by Sl1mb0 »

tdb7893 wrote: post #364
dan-robertson wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this philosophical bent you describe?

My experience with researchers (though not in AI) is that it's a bunch of very opinionated nerds who are mostly motivated by loving a subject. My experience is that most people who think really deeply and care about what they do also care more that their work is prosocial.

> care more that their work is prosocial

These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely believe it; but let's not kid ourselves that that is actually the case. The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another.

Even funnier is that researchers (people who are supposed to be really smart) either ignore or are blissfully unaware of this fact. When you take that into consideration, the pro-social argument falls on its face, and you're left with the reality that they do this to satiate their ego.

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

#377

Post by munificent »

bdangubic wrote: post #322
saagarjha wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most evil corporations have fairly normal jobs available.

if you want to make the world a better place as OP stated perhaps you can get a normal job in maybe less evil corp?

When presented with a choice between:

1. Take a job making $$$$$$$ at a company making the world worse.

2. Take a job making $$$ at a company not making the world worse.

Very few people have a personality such that they'll pick 2.

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

#378

Post by jarrettcoggin »

dgxyz wrote: post #353
jarrettcoggin wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I worked at one of them. I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.

Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).

Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.

The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.

I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.

One of the best ways to get fired in my opinion.

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

#379

Post by kylehotchkiss »

wolvoleo wrote: post #368
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting response given the founder is always saber rattling about birthrates. I'm sure on-demand adult content is real compatible with helping young people overcome aversions to relationships

Relationships aren't all about sex. That's the incel/extreme right vision. I saw a skit on insta a few weeks ago about a girl saying she had a guy over for just cuddling and the incels piled on calling him a cuck. As is a woman is worthless if she won't put out and time spent being close is wasted without sex. It's ridiculous. These guys are so focused on what their hardliner bros want them to be that they no longer…

> Relationships aren't all about sex.

I completely agree with you! I think that sitting around generating adult content on AI stifles relationships (which are a precursor to having children, which xai founder seems to think quite highly of). My point being his own product contradicts his vision of where our country should be heading

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

#380

Post by laidoffamazon »

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.

As someone trying to monitor the situation using Twitter the last few weeks it’s awful and it used to not be!
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