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xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

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Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#221

Post by andsoitis »

floppiplopp wrote: post #9

Anything Musk is now too many inferior products and broken promises for any sensible investor. Might as well just burn the money.

> Anything Musk is now too many inferior products

Tesla: "Tesla maintains an 87% brand retention rate, with Lexus (68%) and Toyota (54%) trailing, according to a new Bloomberg Intelligence survey. Moreover, 81% of prospective US Tesla drivers are new customers switching from competing EV brands." -- https://electrek.co/2024/04/09/87-percent-us-tesla-drivers-s...

I think you would be hard pressed to find any serious thinker exclaiming that SpaceX and Starling are inferior products.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#222

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

tarsinge wrote: post #195
breck wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What could have they possibly shown to the investors to get that kind of cash thrown at them? Their founder has a track record of making his investors a lot of money while solving really hard, important problems. Current valuations: - Tesla $570B - SpaceX $180B - Neuralink $5B - Boring $5.6B

The capacity of continuing the real world problem solving is very blurry. Boring is a joke. For Tesla he is not a founder, and they are mostly relying on a 10 year old product (new product is a joke) that'll only maybe saved with tariffs. It's mostly a meme stock company by now. SpaceX is a great success but his job was only providing money through government contracts and having the luck of finding Gwynne Shotwell,…

I wouldn't be surprised if they have insider information on upcoming government contract.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#224

Post by travoc »

darksaints wrote: post #206
dagmx wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “true nature of the universe” bit is that Elon believes that competing LLMs are too neutered because they disallow certain terms etc. (his words are much more politically charged and I do not agree with his take on this and many other things) Therefore he believes that Grok can be an LLM trained on the voices of the people using his alleged free speech platform:X.

Elon’s vision of free speech is a world where you can say anything you want as long as it isn’t mean towards Elon or Alt-right ideology. Which is actually pretty hilarious to think about in the context of a training dataset for a generative model…it’s literally gonna be a bullshit generator.

Are you not able to find mean things about Elon or alt-right people on Twitter? How hard did you look?

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#225

Post by whamlastxmas »

Aeolun wrote: post #197

How is it that some people get 6B to understand the true nature of the universe? It’s not like they have a track record of doing anything other than absolutely devastating a previously successful company… If I ask someone to give me 6B to understand the true nature of the universe they’d laugh in my face, but I sort of assume I’d have an even chance of doing better.

Agreed, Elon has failed at everything he’s attempted and is basically broke these days, along with his companies teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. People need to stop giving him money because all he does is lose it

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#226

Post by pfannkuchen »

melodyogonna wrote: post #184
dgellow wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t he known to not pay well his employees?

Isn't there an industry standard pay-range? If he isn't paying as well as his competition then I would expect employees to seek better opportunities.

I think SpaceX and Tesla do actually have a reputation for low pay compared to other major tech companies.

I think it might be similar to game companies where people are attracted to the work itself (whether it’s because they’re True Believers in Musk or because electric cars and space are cool, not sure, probably mostly the latter). This lets the company pay less for the same level of talent, since the work is in itself a form of compensation (as perceived by the people who accept the jobs for lower pay).

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#227

Post by dagmx »

belter wrote: post #156
dagmx wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is a megalomaniac who fancies himself an engineer (yes he used to be one, but his with then is oft disparaged) Even if he had the best names in the industry attached, he would always put himself first. I don’t think it’s wrong he’d do so either , because he has a cult of personality that would make him the biggest feature (positive/negative) of any company he is involved with. Hence why I specifically only ask f…

When was he an Engineer?

Back in the original X days, he apparently did code to get X off the ground before PayPal bought them.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#228

Post by sundalia »

nomel wrote: post #125
sundalia wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unique? You mean tweets? Yeah sure It's 6B down the drain. Saying grok 1.5 is competitive is a joke, if it was any good it would be ranked well in chatbot arena ( https://chat.lmsys.org/ ). Elon is a master in hyping underperforming things and this is no exception.

No, there is no ranking for Grok. It’s not participating. It would be hard to judge rate of improvement at this point, since the company has only been around for 1.25 years, and grok 1.5 is yet to be released for general access.

>> It’s not participating.

I wonder why

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#229

Post by ben_w »

uargos wrote: post #99
gizajob wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe” - There’s no way an LLM is going to get anywhere near understanding this. The true nature of the universe is unlikely to be captured in language.

Very little people seem to understand that. And actually there is no need to go as far as “universe” to get to something that can’t be captured by language. Human existence is such an example. For this reason I don’t think llms are going to be good film makers for instance. Sure an llm will be able to spit the scenario of the next action movie, those already seem to be automatically generated anyway. But making a fil…

> And actually there is no need to go as far as “universe” to get to something that can’t be captured by language. Human existence is such an example.

I don't know what you mean by that.

If you mean qualia, then sure. Unsolved and undescribed. But other than that, I think everything has a linguistic form; perhaps inefficient, but it is possible.

Separately, transformers don't have to use what humans recognise as a langue, this means they can use things such as DNA sequences and pictures. They're definitely not the final answer to how to do AI, because they need so many more examples than us, but I don't have confidence that they can't do these things, only that they won't.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#230

Post by ben_w »

cma wrote: post #220
Kina wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is where we are any good? I think one of the more germane issues with generative AI art is that it is distinctly not creative. It can only regurgitate variations of what it has seen. This is both extremely powerful and limiting. An LLM is never going to give you some of the most famous films like "Star Wars" which bounced around before 20th Century Fox finally took a chance on it because they thought Lucas had talent…

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

And on the same theme, but a totally different example in a different media: https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I
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