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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

#221

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

twodave wrote: post #175

Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks…

I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).

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

#223

Post by sroussey »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #203
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the people at Twitter..

> Ask the people at Twitter The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?

Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by Twitter. :/

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

#224

Post by kybernetikos »

vessenes wrote: post #209
kybernetikos wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.

Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this: 1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand 2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!) 3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space 4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically inte…

Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected from the poors' isn't a selling point.

By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a couple of years, you'd be needing to upgrade all your machines with ASICs and the market would be flooded with very cheap graphics cards. I doubt that upgrading space data centres would be fun.

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

#225

Post by freehorse »

scottyah wrote: post #182
freehorse wrote: post #88

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?

Because not liking something does not imply liking any possible alternative.

Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here? Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit governance model, it encompasses a large, international community of authors/editors that attempt to operate democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being an openly available and public source of information. Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia" managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow" wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company would operate it for free and not try to make profit out of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia. Having a billionaire basically control something that may be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one.

I can understand somebody not liking something in how wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever has to do with getting humans work together in such a scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the stances that such a project has to take eventually (even if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than "wikipedia but different ideologically".

edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia; a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the idea of it is already flawed enough.

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

#226

Post by gwern »

paulbjensen wrote: post #135
bearjaws wrote: 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.

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful. Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who t…

It's definitely very valuable, but for what AI model? How does any of that lead to AGI, or even just a good coding agent?

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

#227

Post by tartoran »

vessenes wrote: post #209
kybernetikos wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.

Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this: 1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand 2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!) 3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space 4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically inte…

How is cooling though?

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

#228

Post by croes »

rishabhaiover wrote: post #36
dang wrote: post #46

[stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ]

These kind of HN submissions test how fair discussions can be here: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They trample science, the Paradox of tolerance in action.

Who fights can lose, who doesn't fight has already lost.

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

#229

Post by Zigurd »

vessenes wrote: post #191
zeroCalories wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.

There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

> Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him.

I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.

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

#230

Post by wat10000 »

kennywinker wrote: post #205
EGreg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc. But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to hear the substantive compar…

I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon wants. It’s poisoned information under the control of one man - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.

A concrete example: a few weeks ago, Musk was making a big deal about how most of his massive net worth was not held in cash, and by a total coincidence the phrase "primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash" showed up on his Grokipedia page in the section about net worth. I checked the pages of several other extremely wealthy people and none of them had such a comment.
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