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Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

fortune.com

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Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#291

Post by mschuster91 »

andsoitis wrote: post #286
mschuster91 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with a gerontocracy is you have masses in cognitive and physical decline at the peaks of power. Well... that's exactly what we have been able to observe in the US. Trump and Biden are horribly old, both have shown serious cognitive and physical decline with Trump definitely being the more serious issue (I never heard rumors about Biden crapping in a diaper, with Trump the rumors are so consistent they'r…

your line of thinking isn't going to age well when your future self re-read this.

Oh, I'll go into retirement as soon as that will be legally allowed for me. I have zero desire of working myself to death.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#292

Post by pydry »

epistasis wrote: post #268
joquarky wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, I would question the motive of people who defend billionaires.

Who do you believe is doing this? The implication, I guess, would be me, but I wasn't talking about strictly "billionaires". What is the wealth cutoff here, and how?

zdragnar, not you.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#293

Post by perarneng »

" And it should be an opportunity, not a threat.”

This pisses me off actually. How detached from reality can you be. AI makes the job market place very unpredictable and smart people predict it won't be so good. Then you expect young people to be super excited about AI.

I like AI and im an AI Engineer but I hate the fact that AI is used to destroy jobs. It would be fine if jobs disappeared if there were alternatives but it's not. It's straight to unemployment. The worst hasn't happened yet but its coming.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#294

Post by blooalien »

evandrofisico wrote: post #192
emil-lp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've embraced it, and I'm coding faster than all my colleagues, some days I open more PRs than the rest of my team combined.

Are you earning more money or working fewer hours? Are you eating healthier meals, with better sleeping quality? Because all I read is that you are generating more money for the shareholders.

Even more importantly, generating even more wealth for the already beyond ultra-wealthy, to whom those "shareholders" are simply a necessary annoyance in their quest to be the last to die with all the wealth. :sigh: :sadface:

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#295

Post by blooalien »

epistasis wrote: post #194
lp4v4n wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is just being solipsistic and talking to a small circle of wealthy and well-connected Gen Zs that he probably knows in real life or who are part of his acquaintances. Or do you really think that people with his level of wealth remotely care about real career paths for the average youth?

I don't know anybody with Hoffman's level of wealth, but I have come across a fair number of people with close to a billion dollars of wealth that now split their time between enjoying time with their own family and then trying to pursue philanthropy and non-profits meant to improve everybody's life in the community. I run into them because of their attempts to improve the community. And there are those who do it sup…

The rare few wealthy folk I've met who genuinely try to spend some portion of their wealth to actually improve the world around them are truly doing the right thing. It's their responsibility for the privilege of being allowed to accrue so much more wealth than everyone around them, which would be simply impossible to do without the hard work of the many folk who worked for (and sometimes with) them to achieve that wealth for them in the first place. Giving back a bit in genuinely positive ways to a society that allowed (and helped) their wealth to even happen is just simply the correct "thank you" (no matter how hard they may have worked or sacrificed themselves in the process, as they absolutely did not become that wealthy all by themselves). At least a couple few of the very wealthy folks I've known who "gave back in kind for their good fortune" were genuinely nice (but "wickedly" smart / "sharp as a tack") people who really did deserve their wealth, as they weren't just rich kids in adult bodies like so many of the "personality cult" folks that society so foolishly worship solely because they're rich and "cult-leadery" (and often for no other remotely valid reasons).

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#296

Post by jfil »

epistasis wrote: post #262
pydry wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't. The point was that that amount of money turns most people into assholes. Many of them donate money but it doesnt make them any less of an asshole.

Power, including financial power, reveals who people really are without constraints. President Johnson has to be my favorite example of this, he spent a political career kowtowing to racists, enforcing racism where he needed to in order to acquire power, and then when full power was finally thrust on him by JFK's assassination, he flips and pushes through key legislation from the Civil Rights Movement. I certainly di…

I just thought of an interesting thought experiment. Inagine a politician who kowtows to racists and does their bidding for his whole career and then, just before grabbing the presidency, he has a heart attack and dies. How would you see his legacy? What can you say about the essence of this person?

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#297

Post by jedimastert »

win311fwg wrote: post #230
jedimastert wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usage of the phrase has evolved past carrying about the actual generation (kind of like how people still talk about "millennials" like they're college students). Also, Hoffman very intentionally opened the door to talking about generational differences, this kind of feels like the commenter may have touched a nerve

> kind of like how people still talk about "millennials" like they're college students Is that really an evolution? "Millennial" was coined to refer to the cohort that gradated from high school in the year 2000. Not all high school graduates become college students, of course, but if we are generalizing it isn't unreasonable to think of recent high school graduates as college students. Now, there was nothing in the d…

The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences and therefore culture because they were born around a specific time (early ninties).

So yes, it would be an evolution to refer to them as college student age today

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#298

Post by trollbridge »

verdverm wrote: post #125
trollbridge wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, like how AWS has “commodified” Cursor is obviously an AI company and the main problem Cursor faced was not really having their own model and being forced to buy expensive inference from other providers. Cursor + their own data centres + the ability to train their own models is pretty big. Definitely an AI company.

Does Cursor have any meaningful market share? I cannot seem to find them on any lists. Would your requirements also make Atlassian an Ai company? They have data centers and have trained their own model and have Rovo. I certainly do not because it's not their main line of business and their "ai" sucks hard. SpaceX seems to be closer to this category than Anthropic/OpenAI

No, because Atlassian hasn’t designed self driving cars (which is xAI’s heritage), built a near frontier model, or opened data centres so in demand that Anthropic decides they need to host there.

Cursor probably had the steepest penetration in corporate markets and has a good sales organisation. They also have a great harness for beginners with a softer learning curve.

(Disclaimer: I don’t use Cursor, rarely use Grok, don’t drive a Tesla, and am not invested in SpaceX.)

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#299

Post by nailer »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #55
Havoc wrote: post #25

The key part - Reid being invested in both OpenAI and anthropic should have been higher up in the article. Pretty crucial context to him trash talking XAI. Not that I disagree with his assessment…

It was at the very top just now when I looked. That said, the site has so many distracting pop-ups and other interruptions it's hard to see anything there.

Nope, it's just:

> Reid Hoffman has watched the AI industry from virtually every vantage point—as a founder, lead investor, and decade-long Microsoft board member.

Nothing about him being an investor in 2 direct competitors.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#300

Post by win311fwg »

jedimastert wrote: post #297
win311fwg wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kind of like how people still talk about "millennials" like they're college students Is that really an evolution? "Millennial" was coined to refer to the cohort that gradated from high school in the year 2000. Not all high school graduates become college students, of course, but if we are generalizing it isn't unreasonable to think of recent high school graduates as college students. Now, there was nothing in the d…

The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences and therefore culture because they were born around a specific time (early ninties). So yes, it would be an evolution to refer to them as college student age today

> The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences

Exactly. That experience being coming of age at the turn of the millennium, with high school graduation being considered the milestone where one comes of age. Hence why Strauss and Howe called them millennials. While the people who were labelled millennials are no longer recent high school graduates, it is linguistically valid to remember them locked in that moment in time. High school graduation was the point of significance associated with the term.

> because they were born around a specific time (early ninties).

Easy to miscalculate, I suppose, but the cohort who graduated high school in the year 2000 were born in the early 80s.

"Millennial" did later evolve to be used where "Generation Y" was used previously. That represents a much larger age range — those born in the early 80s to mid-90s. Further evolution has seen millennial come to refer to those born in the latter half of the Generation Y, with "Xennial" showing up to refer to those in the earlier half. This might be where you had 90s kids in mind, but that is far from where the term originated. "Millennial" first appeared in 1987. Nobody was thinking about those born in the 90s at the time.

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