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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

#311

Post by johnisgood »

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…

This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them.

When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too.

And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation.

In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful for the people doing the deceiving.

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

#312

Post by squidbeak »

oceanplexian wrote: post #305
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…

> But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they even remotely have the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them. Neither is a letter published by a few disgruntled employees of a San Francisco based company any kind of evidence or form of con…

> The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they have even remotely the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them.

What an ugly trope. Idealism motivates Chinese workers just as often as any other nationality.

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

#313

Post by exe34 »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #288
siva7 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm smart and you can buy my morals. So what?

Those people get paid so much anyway that they don't have to compromise their morals. I guess that's not the case for you and me

so do oil and tobacco people, no?

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

#314

Post by vessenes »

kybernetikos wrote: post #224
vessenes wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Zoning is one area that’s better in space. And power density for solar is another.

I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficient silicon. Here the demand drives revenue and earnings.

If there’s some crazy inflection point in chips then you’ll still have all the power infra in space - you can just like cut the old pod and hook up a new one: or more likely manufacturing economies of scale mean you probably just keep sending up new systems and put the old ones on work loads they can manage at market prices.

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

#315

Post by SouthSeaDude »

kvetching wrote: post #275
jazzpush2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!

I don't see the problem with this. The chatbot is the most important part of Grok, so it makes sense Elon would be dogfooding it then providing suggestions.. He wants it to be truthful... It was shown on benchmarks recently that it hallucinates the least...

I totally agree, it's his company 100%, why would you even apply for a job in a company where you don't agree with the owner or his vision.

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

#316

Post by ohyoutravel »

cyanydeez wrote: post #155
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 _was_ a great asset, however, just like models need proper data, as soon as musk removed the clamps on valuable social signals, well, he basically took a dump where he intended to eat.

They did say was, and did say Twitter, which existed in the past.

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

#317

Post by vessenes »

tartoran wrote: post #227
vessenes wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah I wonder the same thing - I keep getting told heat management in space is hard, but nobody discusses this inre the data centers. My understanding is one cooling mechanism is to just shoot lasers out into space (is this sci fi?) - I guess in that case you could just send energy back to your solar rigs, depending on wavelengths. TLDR: no idea

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

#318

Post by antonvs »

dang wrote:

> You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them.

But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right?

The word “complicit” comes to mind.

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

#319

Post by parineum »

Zigurd wrote: post #218
XorNot wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore. As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.

Even if Starlink had more than a few tens of millions of customers, China mobile has 900 million subs and is worth around $250 billion. ULA was recently valued at about 1 billion. SpaceX might be possibly worth 50 times as much or maybe even 100 times as much. Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable, and starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit and land both stages. Stars…

> Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable

The funniest part of any thread relating to Musk is how hard people go into minimizing his accomplishments.

You don't have to like the guy (I don't) to acknowledge that the Falcon 9 is an engineering marvel and ushered in an entire new era of space travel, both reusable and private.

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

#320

Post by lo_zamoyski »

0x3f wrote: post #292
hermanzegerman wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they can afford it, they are very sought after. And smart people usually have moral convictions. I know for some people on this website it's hard to understand, but not everything in life is about $$$

> And smart people usually have moral convictions. Are you sure you don't just like the moral convictions and so engage in trait bundling? Moral knowledge doesn't really exist. I mean you can have personal views on it, but the lack of falsifiability makes me suspect it wouldn't be well-correlated with intelligence. Smarter people can discuss more layered or chic moral theories as they relate to theoretical AI, maybe.

> Moral knowledge doesn't really exist.

If that is the case, then why should you or anyone prefer to believe your claim that moral knowledge doesn’t exist over the contrary?

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