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Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

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Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#71
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant. He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he? Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.

>>He is connected and gives money to people

this is also known as influence so..

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#72
post #4

This shows how out of touch people like Reid Hoffman is. He thinks it's a daming accusation that SpaceX is "not AI" but in reality "not AI" means rockets and satellite internet. The parts of the business his class cares about is the garbage, not the substance Agree that X.ai is a tire fire.

The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output. Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make s…

If this happened it would make Elon emperor of the known universe. Can’t imagine the level of influence this would buy.

It also seems impossible. What are people seeing that I don’t?

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#73
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant. He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he? Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.

Sam Altman is not an AI researcher, I don't think he ever worked directly with tech as an engineer either. Pure MBA-with-engineering-degree type.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#74
post #51

Compared to what? All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok. I rotate between major models frequently. Grok has been up there in accuracy and research for some time, trading places with Gemini IMO. Latest 4.3 release has been solid. Composer is pretty good and now they own Cursor. Don’t count them out yet. So.. it’s bad, compared to what? Claude from 2 months ago?

Gemini has been atrocious, in my experience. Not sure if it's the harness or the model, but it hallucinates much, much more than GPT (via ChatGPT) or Claude, and weirdly assumes it can just answer complex, knowledge-heavy domain questions without doing a web search.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#75
post #20

How is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

It means his opinions about xAI are worth less than a random HNer's, since he has a very strong incentive to talk bad about it.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#76

Seems very relevant that SpaceX’s primary AI offerings are: - Cursor - Lots of data centre capacity being rented to Anthropic and Google and others That seems very much like being an AI company.

Renting GPUs doesn't make you an Ai company imo, colocation data center is more accurate. One might expect that line of business to commodify within five years.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#77
post #20

How is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

That Microsoft who added LARGE BLUE copilot buttons on the dialogs you get in Visual Studio when it stops on a breakpoint or exception?

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#78
post #20

How is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

I'm not interested in people's take on SpaceX this early after their IPO, they have an ambitious vision and Elon Musk gets a lot of blind hatred. You don't invest into SpaceX to see returns in a month, you're in it for the next five or more years or you're better off finding a different stock to invest in. To date SpaceX is the top leader in getting things into space for the lowest cost, everyone else pales in compar…

In that case you'd be better off waiting 6 to 12 months before buying into SPCX.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#79
post #62
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to know why you shouldn't choose Windows it makes sense to get Steve Jobs' opinion and then evaluate the opinion.

It’s like Bill Gates criticizing Apple… if you really want to split hairs about the analogy used.

This is not a very good comparison because Jobs was well known for very pointed and accurate critique of software, which was one of his super powers at Apple. Bill Gates was known for figuring out how to manage software engineering, but nobody would listen to Gates about that, and in fact the only time I ever saw him critique software, talking about the complete usability failure of Windows and Microsoft's supporting websites, it did not require any sort of deep insight.

Hoffmans critique about which businesses have good promise should be taken seriously, if with a grain of salt.

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