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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

#691

Post by cedws »

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…

I suspect the xAI merge was a manoeuvre to pump SpaceX whilst actually quietly beginning to scale down xAI. It’s a money losing venture.

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

#692

Post by scared_together »

annexrichmond wrote: post #544
comicjk wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.

[flagged]

Not sure if this is an example of something Musk hates, but here’s a paragraph from the “2016 presidential campaign” section of the Donald Trump article on Wikipedia.

> Trump's FEC-required reports listed assets above $1.4 billion and outstanding debts of at least $265 million.[140][141] He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976 and to promises he made in 2014 and 2015 to release them if he ran for office.[142][143]

I could not find any mention of tax returns on the Donald Trump page of Grokipedia.

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump

Grokipedia:

https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump

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

#693

Post by pavlov »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #398
jazzpush2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This kind of conditioning has to be damaging to the model’s reasoning.

Consider how research worked in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Scientists had to be mindful of topics where they needed to either avoid it completely or explicitly adapt it to the leader’s ideology.

Grok is a digital version of the same thing.

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

#694

Post by mort96 »

ekianjo wrote: post #676
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.

This is not specific to Tesla. If the CEO wants something done in most companies you follow the CEO's order first and drop everything else.

Yes, but in most well functioning large organizations, that happens very rarely.

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

#695

Post by scared_together »

arjie wrote: post #484
klausa wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you feel this passage was worth deleting?

Anyone familiar with Wikipedia etiquette knows how to find the answer to this question. Rather than getting into an argument here about a subject there, I'd prefer you familiarize yourself with the norms of that community, and if you already have or are experienced with them, then you know where to discuss the subject guided by those norms.

But you’re responding to a comment here, not there. So why not abide by the norms that prevail here?

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

#696

Post by swiftcoder »

jstummbillig wrote: post #659
hananova wrote: post #451

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?

> In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone

Ethics is more complicated than that. Is it unethical to sabotage your employer if your employed is themselves acting unethically?

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

#697

Post by rhubarbtree »

etchalon wrote: post #367
johnisgood wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's marketing. That's how marketing works.

And it’s far more important in capitalism than your products.

With the advent of AI, startups become solely about marketing, sales, and defensibility.

So most of the capitalist system will become of this nature. Doesn’t seem like such a good system, and inevitably unsustainable.

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

#698

Post by rhubarbtree »

cedws wrote: post #691
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…

I suspect the xAI merge was a manoeuvre to pump SpaceX whilst actually quietly beginning to scale down xAI. It’s a money losing venture.

SpaceX is an incredible business and too important to fail. By rolling his other businesses into it, Elon protected them from failure.

Something to admire is his ability to always find the chess move. Like, you could see Twitter is a disaster of a business that should have dragged Elon down, but he manoeuvred his way out of it.

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

#699

Post by Gud »

paulbjensen wrote: post #135
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.

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…

Ok, in that case I am glad that Elon fucked it up.

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

#700

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

throwawaypath wrote: post #666
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Bu…

When we were comparing EVs it was well before Musk went full DOGE.

And you did see the part about the lack of CarPlay being an automatic disqualifier for me didn’t you? What does that have do do with Musk?

Oh and another citation

https://boingboing.net/2026/01/05/new-study-ranks-tesla-as-t...

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