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

I've been saying this for a while, but if I had to use Grok for anything programming-related I'd feel very sad and unproductive. I was playing around with a local TTS model codebase but having some issues getting it to work, so I tried explaining the problem to all the major models to see how they performed. Grok performed the worst by a significant margin, and the worst part was that it easily became stuck trying minor changes that didn't solve the key problem.

If we are to take any claims of Recursive Self Improvement seriously at all, then having a competent coding model seems like a key asset where you need to guarantee that you're remaining competitive. Why wouldn't you make coding models a top priority if you expect it to ultimately help your internal teams become more productive and effective?

There's also not an unlimited supply of researchers and engineers for them to keep burning through people at the rate at which they've been working. Although I guess for people with short timelines it makes sense to sprint hard, while people with longer timelines are more likely to treat this as a marathon. Maybe the years of burning bridges and developing such a toxic reputation are finally catching up to Elon. I think part of the harm that Elon has done is framing all the work in xAI as engineering while being highly dismissive of research, but a lot of research requires running experiments or thinking about problems and exploring them for long periods of time. If you're just grinding out work nonstop you don't really have time to let your mind wander and explore new ideas.

Honestly, I'm surprised they've done such a terrible job with programming. I remember around summer last year it was quite apparent how far behind they were with coding tools, but Elon was posting about taking that domain a bit more seriously. Why didn't any of those efforts materialize into real outputs? Something must be truly dysfunctional inside of xAI for them not to be shipping anything at all, especially considering Elon's propensity to ship undercooked products while continuing to iterate on them, as he has done in many previous cases.

I've noticed that Elon has also gone very hard on social media posting a ton of criticisms against the other big AI company CEOs like Daario Amodei. This suggests to me that he must feel very threatened, otherwise he wouldn't be resorting to such childish behavior. He must feel incredibly frustrated that no amount of money is able to make him more competitive within the AI space.

> artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy.

People do want it, clearly, but it's too expensive for them.

Sales don't make people want things they otherwise don't.

Ok, change it to "what we call race as a proxy for general geographic locations that people's ancestors come from."

Which is what we all mean by race, anyways.

> Sales don't make people want things they otherwise don't.

That is exactly what sales do. most sales are made sellings things to people they don’t want, until sales does what sales does

So you deeply admire a man who threw a temper-tantrum when his giant box designed by a bunch of people with no experience in anything underwater or rescue, much less underwater rescue - and was deemed unusable to rescue people from an underwater cave with passages so small divers had to remove their gear and push it ahead of them? And repeatedly, directly, said the lead rescuer was a pedophile?

You deeply admire a man so unable to restrain his ego and temper that much of his production team at Tesla quit, some right to his face, because they couldn't meet his nearly impossible goal of extreme levels of automation on the Model 3 production line? Which, if all else is ignored, cost Tesla billions in delays because of his demands?

You deeply admire a many who is vehemently racist and misogynistic?

You deeply admire a man who latches onto just about any conspiracy theory?

You deeply admire a man who is so desperate for attention he unblocks himself from Twitter users' accounts?

You deeply admire a man whose companies were under investigation by nearly every federal enforcement agency there is?

You deeply admire a man who has failed to meet the vast majority of his own publicly stated benchmarks?

And who engages in PT Barnum levels of bullshit, like having "AI robots" that are actually just robots piloted by unemployed actors?

The man is a pathological liar who has failed upward not because of some sort of unique talent or skill, but because he's extremely abusive and willing to break any regulation or law he sees as inconvenient.