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

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661–670 of 889 posts

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

#661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn’t it be possible for AI to filter out that a request is made to portray a real person? That seems almost like a trivial task for a good model. I am sure every now and then something will slip through, but I bet one could make it very close to 100% effective.

I can see how it'd be trivial to block known celebrities, but how do you handle everyone else?

> trivial to block known celebrities

see here for one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370100

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

#662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can both not like Elon and also think Wikipedia is also very captured on some things

I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.

Elon at some point threatened to have an LLM rewrite all of the training data to remove woke. I assume Grokipedia is his experiment at doing this (and perhaps hoping it will infect other training sets too?) ...

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

#663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What...? In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone you have a contract with, because you disagree with them?

Plenty of historical examples of work environments where sabotage would have been the most ethical thing to do (and often you will only know in hindsight). But yeah in most circumstances a simple disagreement doesn’t warrant the psychological cost of such sabotage.

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

#664
post #23

xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.

I'll bite. I think their conversation (voice) model is more fluid than competitors. It's also very good at hitting up twitter for realtime information, and was that way before the current tool use models got fully up and running. Anecdotally, I think it has better theory of mind than its era (gemini 2.5) - I found it a useful issue spotter for negotiations and planning in a way that oAI and claude were not near its l…

Twitter is gone. X is a facet of an aggregate technology that is ultimately self-serving. It should die. "Like a dog..."

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

#665

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.

I wonder why this is surprising. In other type of organizations when CEO demands something everyone is usually behaves like naah, screw it, i rather do what i like, isn't it? Or everyone yells yes sir and runs around? You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.

In other companies they don't make this explicit during the interview, so something is different

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

#666
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did Tesla work initially? Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics). 6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in…

Not even Tesla fans claim that Tesla is reliable. https://www.motor1.com/news/781164/tesla-used-car-reliabilit... For a year when we were doing the digital nomad thing, my wife and I didn’t own a car and we rented plenty of EVs. Tesla was by far our least favorite. Not having CarPlay alone is dealbreaker

CR notes, though, that Tesla has improved, with its latest models demonstrating "better-than-average reliability." It’s now in the top 10 of the publication’s new car predictability rankings—just avoid those older models.

That said, it's not all bad news for Tesla on the reliability front. According to Consumer Reports, Tesla ranks ninth in new-car reliability with a predicted reliability of 50. That's just behind Buick (51) and Acura (54), but ahead of Kia (49) and Ford (48), as well as luxury rivals like Audi (44), Volvo (42), and Cadillac (41).

You were so blinded by Elon Derangement Syndrome that you didn't even bother reading your own source.

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

#667
post #606

dang wrote: > You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them. But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right? The word “co…

It's nothing like that. We're just trying to have an internet forum that manages to stay slightly more interesting than internet mean. Or, if you like, that doesn't burn itself to a crisp and turn into scorched earth. It is rather a modest goal. I think there is a place for such a website, and I believe most HN readers do too.

It's something that many readers feel should be burned to a crisp.

Let it be.

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

#668
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…

The main issue is the requirement for relocation tbh.

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

#669

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.

I wonder why this is surprising. In other type of organizations when CEO demands something everyone is usually behaves like naah, screw it, i rather do what i like, isn't it? Or everyone yells yes sir and runs around? You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.

I am calling my approach to these tasks to make them rot away. If CEO/customer wants something, I will ignore it until he will start demanding it repeatedly then I will start thinking like working on it. Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.

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

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. But... that's not something you can do. It's impossible. You can imagine what real people look like naked. That's not a new thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7FCgw_GlWc

Imagining what someone looks like in your mind is far different than actively sharing fake nude images online. This cannot be a serious comparison.

Actively sharing fake nude images online has always been legal. It's not even a close question. The practice is neither harmful nor dangerous. Did you look at that link?
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