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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

#241

Post by ben_w »

darksaints wrote: post #204
naveen99 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil’s advocate, he lists “truthful” as a goal, which is emphatically missing from openai, google, microsoft, facebook. Google even removed don’t be evil. Elon is greedy and truthful (although obviously with plenty of self deceipt when conflict of interest…). But how far can you really go with truth, when no one wants the truth: not the west, not the east, and not the Middle East. And your allies and investo…

There is nothing truthful that comes out of Elon’s or Trump’s mouth.

One has sent his car to a trans-Martian orbit, the other was unable to admit which inauguration had the most people present or how large his apartment is.

Don't get me wrong: Musk has and will continue to get into serious trouble for things he insists are true but nobody else believes (420 etc.), I'm just saying there's a huge gap between them.

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

#242

Post by ben_w »

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,…

> 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.

This is both true and irrelevant. When Musk took over, the Tesla Death Watch was running strong because it had made 100-and-something individual vehicles in total and relied entirely on finding more investors to not go bankrupt.

What Tesla needed is exactly what Musk is: a salesman who can sell a dream to both investors and customers.

> Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars

Humans on Mars shouldn't be on that list, even if he's wrong about every specific — it's the point of everything else he does.

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

#243

Post by tw04 »

dotnet00 wrote: post #110
tw04 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s been mostly too distracted with Twitter. His last one was the launch pad all his engineers told him would be a disaster that he insisted on doing anyway. That legitimately had the possibility to put them out of commission for years had the concrete seriously damaged any nearby residential properties.

Imagine hating someone so much you resort to making stuff up. The engineers did not think it would be a disaster, they thought it would erode as it had in previous testing (which would've been fine since the water plate system was already being designed), but hadn't expected the concrete to shatter the way it did. Nearby residential properties have already either been bought by SpaceX or are otherwise required to be…

Imagine being so emotionally invested in a billionaire who doesn't know who you are, that you think other people are as well.

I don't hate Elon because I don't think about Elon beyond commenting on the occasional article he happens to be referenced in and shaking my head when I see him do something stupid. I'm glad he put money towards both projects (Tesla/Space-X) and got them off the ground, and now I wish he would just leave them both alone and let adults run the show.

Yes, he literally took ownership of making the call for a concrete pad despite the engineers telling him it was going to fail.

https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition

>Elon was clear that the decision to fly in that configuration with no water or diverter was his call, and in this case it almost destroyed the pad, accelerated the rocket’s failure, and led to the program being grounded pending FAA review.

Just like he was the one who insisted on a yoke without progressive steering in the Model S that is absolute garbage and quite frankly dangerous, and any real engineer would have told him if he had cared to ask.

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

#244

Post by riku_iki »

breck wrote: post #172
keyle wrote: post #92

What could have they possibly shown to the investors to get that kind of cash thrown at them? Asking for a friend... Did x.ai just become worth more than x.com? We must be nearing the bubble popping...

> 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

Tesla and SpaceX are undeniable successes of peak Mask at his core expertise.

Boring and Neiralink are just valuations with unknown revenue base and future which may be not justified, and weak proof to justify another valuation.

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

#245

Post by aydyn »

Kina wrote: post #138
aydyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what people said about AI art, yet here we are.

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…

> 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.

Yes, state of the art models like midjourney, sd3 are _really_ good. You are bounded only by your imagination.

The idea that generative AI is only derivative was never an empirical claim, its always been a cope.

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

#246

Post by ben_w »

dagmx wrote: post #140
klunger wrote: post #120

> xAI will continue on this steep trajectory of progress over the coming months, with multiple exciting technology updates and products soon to be announced. There is a lot of potential for using AI in drug discovery and development, biotech more broadly and chemistry/material science. Pharma is investing heavily in this right now. If useful, the output here could potentially also support Neuralink and even SpaceX. C…

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.

I agree this appears to be Musk's opinion of LLMs in particular.

However, as Musk has already got AI in his cars and was interested in the topic well before LLMs (founding investor in OpenAI when they were doing reinforcement learning), I'd be extremely disappointed if he had forgotten all of that in the current LLM-gold-rush.

(That's not a "no"; he's disappointed before).

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

#247

Post by Jensson »

ben_w wrote: post #236
Jensson wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't tell whether the two weirdnesses are different or similar Because you focus on how they are similar and not how they are different, to me it is extremely obvious they are very different. Students make mistakes and learn and then stop doing them soon after, when I taught students at college I saw that over and over. LLM however still does the same weird mistakes they did 4 years ago, they just hide it a bit be…

> because they are still completely unable to learn or understand their mistakes like almost every human can So far as I know, all current AI need far more examples than we do. But, that's not why LLMs are "unable" to learn: the part which does that is simply not included in when it's deployed for inference .

Training an AI model is comparable to natural selection of DNA, not comparable to human learning. We have no clue how to replicate human learning.

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

#248

Post by ben_w »

Jensson wrote: post #247
ben_w wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they are still completely unable to learn or understand their mistakes like almost every human can So far as I know, all current AI need far more examples than we do. But, that's not why LLMs are "unable" to learn: the part which does that is simply not included in when it's deployed for inference .

Training an AI model is comparable to natural selection of DNA, not comparable to human learning. We have no clue how to replicate human learning.

Ah, the ambiguity of "like".

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

#250

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

defrost wrote: post #136
throwup238 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, an investigation later revealed that the fire was started accidentally by a diesel vehicle. https://cardealermagazine.co.uk/publish/fire-service-has-rea... Oops.

To be clear that wasn't the dealership fire this month in the Uk that was "possibly" started by an EV .. it was an "and also" story tacked on the end: Last October, it was claimed that an electric or hybrid vehicle had started a huge blaze at Luton Airport’s car park, which destroyed 1,400 cars and much of the building structure. However, an investigation later revealed that the fire was started accidentally by a die…

> I heard on social media that a witch turned someone into a newt.

This type of snark isn’t in the spirit of HN. If you’re actually intellectually curious, go search social media for yourself. But spare us the mocking replies and false equivalence.

And perhaps try to read about the role of government censorship on this and similar issues.

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