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

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211–220 of 889 posts

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

#211
post #134

I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies. That said, Musk's attempts…

Grok is a bot that: 1) sometimes goes mechahitler 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke). 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact. Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.

It was also producing CSAM on demand for a few months.

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

#212
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh I wouldn't give Elon a dime even if Grok was miles better than competition.

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

This is not a fully formed thought, so take it with a grain of salt:

Keeping politics off of here is a good idea.

Some things aren't really politics, but morals. Like, a discussion of different tax schemes or how much environmental regulations accomplish what they set out to do or something is 'politics'. Lamenting that there is "no homeland for white people" is... something else.

It's probably still not likely to have good outcomes as a subject of discussion here, but it's also something the tech industry needs to wrestle with somewhere, somehow.

My experience of the tech world was that it went from being a collection of oddballs, geeks, nerds and maybe kind of naive politically to mainstreaming some really evil shit.

I think this will come back to bite the industry, and depending on how angry the people with pitchforks and torches are, could end up hurting more than just the bad actors.

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

#213
post #193

Wow, bit weird that Musk, who must have known about how badly xAI was doing, spent so much of his investors money buying out xAI. What an enormous blunder.

It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore. As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.

SX investor here: the combined value of SX is well up on the private secondary market post-acquisition. It was value accretive, in very real dollar terms.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.

There’s a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-vesters. Maybe it’s true in some departments, but I also have anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI and have the appropriate amount of hustle.

It really doesn't feel like that and hasn't for years

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Antigravity gotten any better?

It has gotten worse and they tightened the limits for paying customers recently: https://x.com/antigravity/status/2031835833716625883 (only announcement on Twitter, not in the app nor via email)

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.

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

#216
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.

Twotter as a data source is interesting. I think it gets over hyped because thats elons grift. But i cant deny that the real time info aspect of it is pretty valuable. But i definitely think that its not that much more valuable than the open internet from a context source perspective. Everything worthwhile on twitter will end up elsewhere with a bit of lag. And the stuff that wont is noise anyway

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

#217

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.

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

Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet?

Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM).

Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations"

So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that.

We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.

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

#218
post #193

Wow, bit weird that Musk, who must have known about how badly xAI was doing, spent so much of his investors money buying out xAI. What an enormous blunder.

It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore. As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.

Even if Starlink had more than a few tens of millions of customers, China mobile has 900 million subs and is worth around $250 billion. ULA was recently valued at about 1 billion. SpaceX might be possibly worth 50 times as much or maybe even 100 times as much. Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable, and starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit and land both stages. Starship has a payload capacity problem that must be solved to even get to the point where launching 15 refueling missions would be sufficient to get a starship to get anywhere beyond Earth orbit.

It looks like the plan is to IPO with a small float (in relative terms) and get all of the retail investor Elon fans to lineup for the rug pull.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> "grokipedia" as idea So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?

Not all alternatives are necessarily worthy. I can understand someone not liking tomatoes. I can't understand someone liking depleted uranium.

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

#220
post #167

Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.

What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

> What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift.

The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was, well, unexpected when I ran the numbers.

(The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching the chips and solar panels isn’t the limiter, it’s launching the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)

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