331–340 of 889 posts
But now he is poaching the two heads of engineering of a company that's trying to move very quickly, how is that going to affect their speed and success?
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.
It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
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> Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.
I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make. Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses? Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid? The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.
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From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
Most often, the answer is no.
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…
I assure you that Chinese researchers have a diversity of philosophical and political alignment, much the same as other researchers. I also assure you that top researchers as a whole are not all Chinese, though the ones that are that I know are all very thoughtful.
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> 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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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…
The fact that this lunatic is polluting humanity's view into the universe mainly for enriching himself and his shareholders, and that everyone is playing along with this, is sickening.
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Anthropic, maybe, but what is the philosophical niche of OpenAI? Their only consistent philosophical position about AI is "let's make more money".
I think OpenAI is more of an aesthetic. Very... Apple-like, polished, with an eye towards making really cool stuff. And aesthetics are a type of philosophy. This is less noble than how Anthropic presents themselves but still much more attractive to many than XAI.
What philosophy is that?
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It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.