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xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

x.ai

251–260 of 285 posts

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

#251

> 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 thing about “figuring out the true nature of the universe” is that you *have to do experiments*. It’s non-negotiable. There’s no amount of really hard thinking or parameters or GPU’s that will let you know the secrets of the universe. It’s astonishing to me that both the AI-maximalists and the AI-doomers are both seemingly unaware of this basic, fundamental fact of science.

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

#252
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a pretty blithe comment that assumes perfect labour mobility. Many of Twitter's remaining employees are on work visas that are tied to Twitter and can't easily be ported to another employer.

Huh, so these work visa employees can go back to their home countries. Surely they can get a great job with excellent perks. These people are not really escaping from war zones. The fact they are not leaving would just mean Twitter's crappy job is better than their other options.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unique data set. And Elon. And with Elon, comes a great set of talent. From https://x.ai/about > Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Collectively our team contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as…

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.

You really think investors like sequoia and a16z are dumb enough to fall for Elon hyping things up? They know who he is and They’ve seen him operate at levels basically no other entrepreneur can snd are betting on that

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

#254
post #95
post #55

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Thanks! That page is a good find. Very few of the names stand out to me (being adjacently familiar with the space). However I did search based on your link… (Edit: with the exception of Chris Szegedy, thanks to the reply below for pointing that out) Most of them seem to have been secondary/tertiary people on the projects listed. Definitely feels a bit like resume padding. It’s also unfortunate that searching for the…

Chris Szegedy is a big name at least

It sounds like he did published some results at pre-LLM era before 2017, and there was silence after that.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be a list of people on the about page but they changed it, apparently. Here's a snapshot that still shows it: https://web.archive.org/web/20240415120557/x.ai/about I don't know enough about the AI/ML scene to say if any of these are notable people.

Their founding team and first few after that are top top tier. Honestly some of the best engineers at DM. Unsurprising really given that he was offering ~$10M/year in comp. The rest? Who knows.

> Honestly some of the best engineers at DM.

like who?

> Unsurprising really given that he was offering ~$10M/year in com

where did you get this from?

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

#256
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

That is not the same as what you said. He made the final call (him taking ownership over decision making is literally his job, the alternative is blaming engineers for not forseeing every issue and devolving back to old space's wasteful waterfall style development), you claimed that the engineers knew it would be a disaster. That is false.

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

#257

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.

You really think investors like sequoia and a16z are dumb enough to fall for Elon hyping things up? They know who he is and They’ve seen him operate at levels basically no other entrepreneur can snd are betting on that

SBF

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

#258
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. That is not the same as what you said. He made the final call (him taking ownership over decision making is literally his job, the alternative is blaming engineers for not forseei…

Citation? Because the engineer, who worked for space-x, in the article I linked, clearly knew it would be a disaster. There were also posts on twitter throughout that engineers were VERY concerned about the decision (because they knew it would be a disaster).

Meanwhile your source is - yourself? Who also appears to think (both in this thread and your post history) that anyone who points out Elon's flaws "hates" him.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think investors like sequoia and a16z are dumb enough to fall for Elon hyping things up? They know who he is and They’ve seen him operate at levels basically no other entrepreneur can snd are betting on that

SBF

Elon’s created multiple 100B companies
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