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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'

#191

Post by llm_nerd »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #163
llm_nerd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI? He's just stating the obvious, so I really don't see this as contentious. xAI is irrelevant. It's so irrelevant that after being relegated hardware from Tesla, then pushed into Twitter to try to make that have value, then pushed into SpaceX because Elon Musk somehow gets away with hilarious levels of securities fraud, no…

XAI is very relevant. They have one of the best video models, they own cursor which has a good percent of the coding market. Anthropic runs thier ai on xai’s data centers. Saying they aren’t relevant is comical

>They have one of the best video models

In porn and deepfakes. Yeah, they should be regulated to obliteration.

>they own cursor which has a good percent of the coding market

They don't own cursor. They announced an acquisition immediately after the insane SPCX valuation to desperately scrabble to lock in some of that laughably nonsensical hype valuation (as the entire US equities market has become firmly detached from reality, and at some point is going to catastrophically crash to reality). It doesn't close for months. And FWIW Cursor is rapidly declining, and anyone still foolishly on it should probably find an offramp now. Before Elon Musk starts fiddling with it and you find your code focused on the genocides of whites in South Africa or something.

I mean, the fact that you had to cite that as their credibility fully demonstrates how completely worthless it is. GPUs that were originally Tesla's (before the whole robo-taxi scam fell apart), then shuffled to Twitter, then to SPCX.

>Anthropic runs thier ai on xai’s data centers

That was literally the foundation of my comment. xAI is so worthless that they get better value become another vanilla rent-a-GPU operation.

xAI is a joke. Somehow Elon's pathetic Matryoshka doll routine keeps suckering fools.

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

#192

Post by evandrofisico »

emil-lp wrote: post #156
mahoho wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to give up your silly cynicism, embrace being a professional slop shoveler and doing work with higher volume, more repetition and less creativity than ever.

I've embraced it, and I'm coding faster than all my colleagues, some days I open more PRs than the rest of my team combined.

Are you earning more money or working fewer hours? Are you eating healthier meals, with better sleeping quality? Because all I read is that you are generating more money for the shareholders.

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

#193

Post by efromvt »

sandbags wrote: post #130
jerf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI? The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has. And it doesn't help that... 'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a z…

The AI labs have somewhat the same problem that publishers have. Essentially their asset is a static piece of IP: a huge file full of numbers. They’re like a publisher only letting you read their book through some scuzzy Flash reader UI because they have to protect that file at all costs. At some point the weights get out/get reproduced and then what they have a is bunch of sunk costs.

I think the theory is that it’s not purely static - you need to keep training and tuning the model (even just for general knowledge upkeep with current architecture) and so the infra/data is a contributory moat. Exfiltrating weights would get you a depreciating asset (plus we have all the lovely legal and regulatory frameworks to further protect them, which IS more like publishing)

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

#194

Post by epistasis »

lp4v4n wrote: post #174
alpineman wrote: post #98

>> “I’ve been thinking about writing an essay on the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or otherwise dissing AI,” he said. As if speaking to all of Gen Z, he added: “You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you" Quite patronising. Maybe they really do know it a lot better than you, Reid, but not in the way…

He is just being solipsistic and talking to a small circle of wealthy and well-connected Gen Zs that he probably knows in real life or who are part of his acquaintances. Or do you really think that people with his level of wealth remotely care about real career paths for the average youth?

I don't know anybody with Hoffman's level of wealth, but I have come across a fair number of people with close to a billion dollars of wealth that now split their time between enjoying time with their own family and then trying to pursue philanthropy and non-profits meant to improve everybody's life in the community.

I run into them because of their attempts to improve the community. And there are those who do it super quietly, give big, and do everything they can to avoid getting credit for it; there's another Silicon Valley Reed that does this in my community. Steve Jobs apparently did this too, big donations but anonymously.

Do not take the blabbering idiots on the All-In podcast as representative of all of Silicon Valley, the old Valley was far different than those people and there are still plenty of people that pursue wealth not for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement and power.

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

#195

Post by ritcgab »

empath75 wrote: post #171
indoordin0saur wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that dozens of companies seem to have been able to produce great models, and the mid-tier ones are only months behind the frontier models tells me that just having a great model is not much of a moat. It may actually be having the physical stuff that makes all of this possible is the bigger revenue generator.

Data centers do not trade on 100x earnings, and if you believe that they should, then there are plenty that don't have rocket ship and social media companies attached to them.

Frontier models do not trade on 100x earnings either.

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

#196

Post by antiframe »

blenklo wrote: post #32
AJRF wrote: 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

How is he less relevant than Elon Musk? He co-founded linkedin a platform every one knows. Elon Musk invented the Cybertruck and has a weird cult following through Tesla. i mean Elon Musk called some of his kids this: X Æ A-Xii Musk, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk and Techno Mechanicus Musk What opinion should i give more value?

If you are going to include a speaker's child-naming prowess as a factor in assigning value to an opinion, you might as well just flip a coin, go with vibes, go with the one that matches your biases, or all three.

When I was a child my brother taught me to always consider the incentives, especially the monetary ones, of a speaker. 'Follow the money'. So, in this case neither Musk nor Hoffman would get much traction with me as both of them are incentivized to form a pro or con opinion of xAI.

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

#197

Post by thinkharderdev »

the__alchemist wrote: post #117
neogodless wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more than those two options, both of which are "take unnecessary risk on a hugely uncertain investment."

If you were reasonably confident the stock was overvalued and/or would go down, why would you not short it, (Or similar)? "Talk is cheap" and "Putting money where mouth is" are both trite, but applicable here. In the short term, this can misfire, but as a consistent mindset long term, it would expose whether there is value in these assessments. To help you understand my mindset here: Picture a simple game or bet. RNG…

> 55% chance for a $10 payout; 45% chance to lose $10. You would keep on rolling that die, right?

The answer is that it depends? If I have $1B then yeah I would roll the dice and keep rolling as long as they let me. If I have $100? Maybe not because you can go very easily go broke even if each bet is positive EV.

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

#198

Post by epistasis »

antiframe wrote: post #189
petilon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than co-founding one of the most successful tech companies, that is.

If you are talking about LinkedIn, I don't know how universally they are considered a tech company. Is any company that does its core business on a website a tech company now, even if their innovations aren't tech? NY Times has some fancy tech, but you'd be hard pressed to consider them a tech company.

Are you seriously trying to argue that companies like Facebook or Netflix are not tech companies?

This comment thread is bonkers. I've never seen stuff like this on HN before!

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

#199

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jcgrillo wrote: post #176
andsoitis wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ok boomer", as I understand it, basically means "I'm not going to engage seriously with that outdated perspective", often used to shut down a conversation rather than to continue it. I don't know that what Reid is expressing is an outdated perspective, but that's of course subjective.

> You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you' Yeah, it was expressly my intent to shut this kind of nonsense down. This is just a different version of "get on board right now or you'll all be left behind". Enough with the lying.

I don't think it's a different version of that at all? Presumably what he has in mind is the Internet transition. Nobody got "left behind" from the Internet, even cranky 80 year olds are often pretty familiar these days, but people like Reid Hoffman achieved "fulfilling lives and jobs" by recognizing early that it was going to be a big deal.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

RattlesnakeJake wrote: post #177
emil-lp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've embraced it, and I'm coding faster than all my colleagues, some days I open more PRs than the rest of my team combined.

Are your colleagues slower because they're spending all their time reviewing your PRs?

[deleted]
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