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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

#421

Post by johnisgood »

caaqil wrote: post #396
johnisgood wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing. The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own. On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low o…

I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.

Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.

And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.

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

#422

Post by dminik »

oceanplexian wrote: post #410
squidbeak wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have my doubts that top Chinese AI researchers want to work for an AI company with direct tires to the white house and zero morals. Not for any great ethical concerns mind you. Simply because the US is a geological rival to China.

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

#423

Post by timacles »

etchalon wrote: post #356
kvetching wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

He wants it to tell the truth as he sees it.

Truth doesn’t have the right training weights for Elon

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

#424

Post by rsynnott »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #371
awesome_dude wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you are wealthy Then.. you wouldn't be working...

Why is Elon still working then?

I'm not sure that posting deranged tweets at three in the morning _really_ qualifies as work.

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

#425

Post by jarrettcoggin »

zimpenfish wrote: post #406
jarrettcoggin wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.

During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.

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

#427

Post by janalsncm »

dan-robertson wrote: post #260
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…

Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this philosophical bent you describe?

Aside from the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points others are making, I believe it has something to do with the history of AI research.

There is a big overlap between the “rationalist” and “effective altruist” crowds and some AI research ideas. At a minimum they come from the same philosophy: define an objective, and find methods to optimize that objective. For AI that’s minimizing loss functions with better and better models of the data. For EA, that’s allocating money in ways they think are expectation-maximizing.

Note this doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people just want to make money.

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

#428

Post by nateburke »

It feels like xAI is perpetually playing catch-up.

They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.

If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.

The leash is too tight!

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

#429

Post by yoyohello13 »

glitchc wrote: post #413
yoyohello13 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.

Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the…

We are not talking about some destitute person hocking cigarettes on the street for minimum wage. We are talking about smart, educated people who are making 500k a year to build the torment nexus. There is no excuse for this. It’s pure greed and any other explanation is deflection.
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