Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

hananova wrote: post #451

pm90 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.

Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job. I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks. In hindsight I'd p…

Even ethically, this is only true if you think the ethics of the place are so bad that sabotage is warranted. That's not every place that you have ethical problems with.

To do that (and hide it), you have to become a dishonest person yourself. That is ethically destructive to you. So the threshold for doing this should be pretty high.

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

#472

Post by numpad0 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #375

dgxyz wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They must have outcompeted Musk at intelligence and/or insanity with their dedication into maximizing production volume of liquid fueled rocket engines.

Tom Mueller was a VP of propulsion at TRW Inc., which, among numerous other things you know from textbooks, made the Apollo LM descent engine, as well as early Space Shuttle TDRS data relay system sats. Calling Mueller a guy interested with engines having issues with his bosses is like referring to Craig Federighi as a guy interested in designing his own laptop.

I guess now that everyone knows about Elon, and Elon himself probably becoming more paranoid from both age and after SpaceX years and exposure to Twitter infoflood without adequate mental immunity, on top of most people who'd be in position to meet him not being as smart and quietly lunatic as literal Old Space trained rocket scientists, the scheme of temporarily impinging ideas upon Musk so to securely attaching the funding for your own thing do not work so well anymore.

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

#473

Post by calqacon » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:04 AM UTC

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"?

How about Gabrowski et al.: "Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", about the outsize influence of certain coordinated Polish editors on the Wikipedia articles about Poland and the Holocaust?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

Quote from the conclusion:

> This essay has shown that in the last decade, a handful of editors have been steering Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events touted by right-wing Polish groups. Wikipedia’s articles on Jewish topics, especially on Polish–Jewish history before, during, and after World War II, contain and bolster harmful stereotypes and fallacies. Our study provides numerous examples, but many more exist. We have shown how the distortionist editors add false content and use unreliable sources or misrepresent legitimate ones.

For a more recent paper, "Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy" by Car et al. says that:

> The Hr.WP [Croatian Wikipedia] case exemplifies disinformation not only as content manipulation, but also as process manipulation weaponising neutrality and verifiability policies to suppress dissent and enforce a single ideological position.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2025-0020

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

#474

Post by tombert » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:05 AM UTC

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #244

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, even Google Home and Alexa could handle playing a song on Spotify by me asking for it a decade ago. It's baffling that wasn't one of the first things implemented in Grok for Tesla.

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

#475

Post by MegaDeKay » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #403

Rover222 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Tesla falling apart? Cybertruck was a flop, but Model Y is still one of the best selling cars in the world, and very well reviewed.

Deliveries have been falling for the past two years.

To make matters worse, falling while the deliveries of their competitors are rising.

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

#476

Post by codemog » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #206

“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…

Greatest hype man of all time and shows how whacked out reality and economics are.

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

#477

Post by numpad0 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

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

US isn't randomly launching nukes yet

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

#478

Post by klausa » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

arjie wrote: post #436

ryandrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’d say Wikipedia definitely has a strong “woke” bent to it. Either in the language or the choice of what facts to show. Here’s an example I deleted that had been there for quite a while https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c... I really like Wikipedia, though, and I think over time we will get around to fixing it up.

Why did you feel this passage was worth deleting?

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

#479

Post by tombert » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

breve wrote: post #308

> "AI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up" 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.

I'm pretty sure that all these acquisitions have been glorified accounting tricks in order to undo the damage that Musk did when he bought Twitter at an obscenely overvalued price in 2022. Clearly he didn't actually want Twitter at that price, because he tried to back out almost immediately after making the offer, so now he has his accountants do all this glorified money-shifting to effectively "sanitize" his purchase and recover his funds.

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

#480

Post by yongjik » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #470

ryandrake wrote: post #326

Earlier 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?

Wiki's Gamergate opening paragraph: > Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and…

Well, I'm naively assuming Grokipedia is being sympathetic to the cause(?) of Gamergate, but if the best thing they could lead the article was essentially "It all started when someone got mad at his ex-girlfriend and her many other boyfriends and wrote something that went viral" ...

... it does sound like an online harassment campaign.