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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

#741

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.

To be considered successful, most companies need to sell more of their existing products and/or introduce new products. Tesla is doing neither – they have reduced the number of models they sell and are also selling their existing models in lower numbers.

I mean it's really TBD on what happens with Cybercab. The X and S models were always low-volume, and it makes perfect sense to move on from those models.

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

#742
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can’t put a gun to someone’s head, order them to be creative, and also expect good results.

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

#743

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.

If you're in the market for a new X, S or Cybertruck, you're one of dozen(s)!

Yes now compare those numbers to all othere EVs sold in the US.

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

#744
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The counter to this are the open weight models that come from China at the moment. All are great at reasoning but also ideologically aligned.

Their alignment is probably more strategically built in during the training phase.

At least I assume Xi Jinping doesn’t just call up DeepSeek on a whim and dictate what they should have in model context (like Musk apparently does at xAI).

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

#745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean...? Plenty to do what? Your opinion of the situation is not enough to justify this course of action in 99.99% of cases and the residual 0.01% should not be enough to fuel your ego to do anything other than quit decently, and look for an employer that is more aligned with whatever your ideals are. I repeat the insane statement that we are arguing over here: "Ethically, if you do not agree with the com…

A specific example will help.

Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.

I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.

Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.

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

#746
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…

I don't think sabotaging a company just because you don't want to work with a certain framework and deploy it on k8s is a good idea.

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

#747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the claim is that the demand side did not change, the supply side did, as in sales != demand.

Just quoting the above “An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy” So people spent 60k on a cybertruck that they didn’t want? Is that the claim?

the claim is that it moved sales forward in time, but it'll have a corresponding dip in sales later, whereas a good sales campaign increases total volume (virtually no dip, brings in new customers, etc)

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

#748

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?

Assume you work for e.g., a cigarette company. A company responsible for many deaths by unethically adding highly addictive substances. By sabotaging the company you are making this world a better place. Ethically it's the right thing to do.

Or, assume you're hired by the Nazi to work in concentration camps. Ethically it's the right thing to do to sabotage their gas chambers.

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

#749
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limits are so low that I cancelled after about two weeks on my initial $0 trial. I tried making a change to a tiny code base with Claude Sonnet (which they offer in Antigravity). It couldn't even finish the change before my weekly limit was used up, reset in 7 days.

to be fair you shouldn't expect them to subsidize Anthropic models. what about limits for gemini?

I tried the Anthropic models because gemini-pro had already been rate limited with a 5 day wait. I got some actual usage out of the Google model, but laughably little compared to what I got with ChatGPT Plus. This is definitely not an imagined thing from my side, you just have to look at the Antigravity forums:

https://discuss.ai.google.dev/new

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

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales are artificial boosts yes. The difference is in the connotation. A sale is given for something that people generally would buy anyway, but now more people will. An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy. Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.

> artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy. People do want it, clearly, but it's too expensive for them. Sales don't make people want things they otherwise don't.

literally almost everything I have bought on sale is something I wasn't looking to buy at that moment in time.
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