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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

#231

Post by croes »

wolvoleo wrote: post #31
xnx wrote: post #23

xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.

To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it. American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc) xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn. Personally I pr…

> of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc

Of course xAI ignores that on purpose

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

#232

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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?

Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.

Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?

Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO

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

#233

Post by vibeprofessor »

zeroCalories wrote: post #153
Imnimo wrote: post #125

I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical ni…

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.

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

#234

Post by moogly »

I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable.

The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the stars (heh))?

Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their orbital data centers (remember those?).

Might be time to start a new Musk company soon.

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

#235

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #190
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.

After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.

Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?

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

#236

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by vibeprofessor »

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.

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by applfanboysbgon »

gwern wrote: post #226
paulbjensen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't need to lead to AGI or a good coding agent. Some of the only people who are actually profitable in the LLM industry are the people making actual chatbots. There are several bootstrapped startups that run open-weight models with a $10 or $20 monthly sub and make millions in profit off of inference from people just talking to the things, usually for character roleplay / "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" stuff etc. Some of them even took those profits and invested it into training their own bespoke models from scratch, usually on the smaller side although finetunes/retrains of Llama 70b, GLM, and Deepseek 670b have also been done. Grok could probably be profitable if it targeted this space, as the most "intelligent" conversational/uncensored model.

This is already presupposing that profit even matters, though. Musk already burned some $50 billion dollars to control messaging on political discourse with his acquisition of Twitter. It was not about money, but power. After you already have infinite money, the only thing left to spend it on is acquiring more power, which is achieved through influencing politics. LLMs represent a potentially even better propaganda tool than social media platforms. They give you unprecedented access to people's thoughts that they would probably not share online otherwise, and they allow you to more subtly influence people with deeply-personalised narratives.

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

#240

Post by freehorse »

atonse wrote: post #217
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.

> 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…

No, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI. Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable.

edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of information that their usefulness is largely based on is also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the importance that intentionality in human-written text plays in being in the training sets/context windows of LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.

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