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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

#401

Post by __blockcipher__ »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #398
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 have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models. Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say. I…

somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).

BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.

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

#402

Post by scubbo »

ecshafer wrote: post #389
estearum wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ... Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry, and not a genocidal call to action? Ill say that that is an absurd notion, and if you s/Boer/Jew or whatever ethnic or religious group you want, it will become very obvious w…

> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry

(Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.

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

#403

Post by tapoxi »

Rover222 wrote: post #381
echelon wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws? When did it start falling apart? Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?) And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.

How is Tesla falling apart? Cybertruck was a flop, but Model Y is still one of the best selling cars in the world, and very well reviewed.

Deliveries have been falling for the past two years.

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

#405

Post by BoredPositron »

natch wrote: post #253
throwaway5752 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk * gave a Nazi Sigg Heil salute (twice) at a political even, on video. Famously. * has consistently supported a German political party that re-uses Nazi slogans, minimizes or outright denies the Holocaust, minimizes the criminality of the SS * frequently and consistently upvotes posts on X echoing white supremacist and Nazi ideology on his social media site * owns the most popular site for neo-Nazis To say "is no…

[flagged]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

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

#406

Post by zimpenfish »

jarrettcoggin wrote: post #273
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!

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.

> 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.

To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.

[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.

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

#407

Post by rchaud »

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…

In other words, using flash-in-the-pan data to build an advertising goldmine.

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

#408

Post by thinkcontext »

Animats wrote: post #206

“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk Right. The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it? It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X…

If I was a SpaceX investor I'd be considering litigation. Saying the core product has to be rebuilt right after it gets bought by SpaceX?! Maybe the SpaceX investors would have liked some diligence about that before purchase but looks like someone had a conflict of interest about that.

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

#409

Post by VirusNewbie »

nemothekid wrote: post #161

While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run. xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with ha…

Anyone Google has hired in the last ~8 years was hired onto a team that is growing and has a culture of shipping and producing. Google regularly weeds out low performers, be it new grads or long timers who started doing the rest and vest thing.

Now, I don't think most people at google are literally driving to the office or sleeping there most of the time, you'll certainly have more WLB than xAI.

I'd even say, Google is much better at calibrating the right amount to push people than some other companies.

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

#410

Post by oceanplexian »

squidbeak wrote: post #312
oceanplexian wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Idealism of what? That the government shouldn't use AI for surveillance or the military?

You really think the average Chinese worker thinks their government should stop working on AI because of liberal western values or something? This is nothing short of delusional.

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