Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> If you are wealthy Then.. you wouldn't be working...
Why is Elon still working then?
At the risk of drawing moderation ire..
When does Elon work?
Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
391–400 of 889 posts
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#392Feel 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!
It’s flawed, but still the obvious place to monitor a situation.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#393I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies. That said, Musk's attempts…
I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.
Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, is there a specific example on either the Biden or Gamergate page that is factually incorrect? Or are you saying the entire pages are false?
Which facts are represented is equally important as being factual though. Brian hit Jim can be a fact. But if you emit "Jim murdered Brians whole family", its a disortation of truth
specific examples other than ficticious Jim&Brian?
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
> What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"? I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift. The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/…
The capacity of a single datacenter would require thousands of launches to get the equipment into space. I don’t believe for a second that this would be easier in any way. Cooling and bandwidth are also completely unsolved for compute on a useful scale.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#396Earlier 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…
This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them. When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too. And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation. In any case, it is not…
The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.
The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.
On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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?
Not all alternatives are necessarily worthy. I can understand someone not liking tomatoes. I can't understand someone liking depleted uranium.
what do you have against depleted uranium? you know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure :)
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#398I 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!
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#399Feel 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 don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
>>But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#400Earlier 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".
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.
I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.