Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 889 posts

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

#451

Post by hananova »

pm90 wrote: post #448
jarrettcoggin wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ). Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on. The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting…

Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.

Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.

I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks.

In hindsight I'd probably not do it again, it was hugely mentally taxing, and knowingly performing work in such a way that it provides negative value to the company (remember, the goal is to make it go under) is in my experience actually harder than just doing a good job... Especially if being covert is a goal.

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

#452

Post by comicjk »

annexrichmond wrote: post #332
brokencode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are really suggesting everything in Wikipedia is truthful, complete, and free of all biases?

Not everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.

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

#453

Post by mdgrech23 »

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…

I can't say I know the AI research community well but I'd imagine OpenAIs alignment w/ the military would not align w/ the the personal philosophy of many.

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

#454

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

During my last job search I had an interview with Walmart, related to health software. I was flatly told that I might have a project canceled, then restarted on the original timeline. I declined after the interview.

They then shuttered the whole thing some months later: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1248397756/walmart-close-heal...

Which is to say, these things are real warning signs about the company.

In the case of Musk's companies, here we are discussing a major failure and firings.

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

#455

Post by hananova »

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…

To not frame the amorality and negative effects centrally and primarily is to be dishonest. There is absolutely not a single person whose wage doesn't rely on not seeing it, that doesn't see that that entire branch of tech has strictly negative value to society.

But of course, line must go up, and it's not you personally being negatively affected, so it doesn't matter.

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

#456

Post by janalsncm »

Perseids wrote: post #450
janalsncm wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs. And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural…

Yes, yes, true, but you've massively moved the goalpost. The original commenter was referring to people working at xAI right now . To continue your comparison, your argument would be like Oppenheimer claiming "How could I have ever known my work would be used as a weapon? I just wanted to make big explosions." I don't know why this argument often pops up in these kinds of discussions. Approximately no one is judging…

Well if I moved it, consider this to be me putting it back where it was: people who continue to work on things which are concurrently being used in mostly harmful ways and have means to find a different job have no excuse.

As far as Oppenheimer is concerned, his argument is not that nukes are harmless, but that they are less harmful than Nazis, and much less harmful than Nazis with nukes.

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

#457

Post by hananova »

parineum wrote: post #269
robrain wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was an artificial boost created by setting a time-limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the price, then they put it back up. [1] [1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in... EDIT: grammar

What's an artificial boost? Sounds like you're describing a sale.

Sales are artificial boosts yes. The difference is in the connotation. A sale is given for something that people generally would buy anyway, but now more people will. An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy.

Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.

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

#458

Post by thereitgoes456 »

mynameisash wrote: post #303
dan-robertson wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would think it's because of the staggering money they're making. According to Fortune[0]: > Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.” > Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried t…

I see you're treating Sam Altman as some kind of trustworthy source. Might it be possible that he's making that up -- of course, nobody will ever call him on it! -- and exaggerating the numbers to make his company and team look really good and ethical for not accepting such lucrative offers, or perhaps to make them sour on Meta for not receiving $100M offers?

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

#459

Post by QuiEgo »

mlinhares wrote: post #438
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.

Tesla won because Elon is a great seller, the product is mediocre at best but I’ve heard many times from friends that it was the same quality as a Mercedes Benz, so the reality distortion field is very real. And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and peopl…

Teslas have a lot of flaws, but there is just now starting to be real competition. There was nothing like the model 3 in 2019. Tesla did well because they were first to market with a disruptive product people wanted, and because Elon sold it well. Both.

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

#460

Post by lesuorac »

hananova wrote: post #451
pm90 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.

Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job. I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks. In hindsight I'd p…

Ethically perhaps but financially and mentally its surely better to start looking for a new role (at a different company) that is more in alignment with you, no?
Post reply on HN