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Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

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61–70 of 300 posts

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#61
post #20

How is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

I'm not interested in people's take on SpaceX this early after their IPO, they have an ambitious vision and Elon Musk gets a lot of blind hatred. You don't invest into SpaceX to see returns in a month, you're in it for the next five or more years or you're better off finding a different stock to invest in. To date SpaceX is the top leader in getting things into space for the lowest cost, everyone else pales in compar…

Other than launching satellites, being able to get things into space for the lowest cost is about as relevant as being able to get things to the bottom of the ocean for the lowest cost.

It's never going to be cost effective to send anything back down the gravity well, which means that the only way Musk's plan leads anywhere is if he's able to bootstrap an entirely self contained, self perpetrating economy in space. That's not happening in five years.

Edit: and no, data centres in space are not the answer.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#62
post #34
post #19

Reid Hoffman hates Musk. Think what you will of Musk (we all have our opinions), but Hoffman criticizing one of Musks companies is the equivalent of Steve Jobs criticizing Windows. Its a personal quibble and therefore not really news worthy.

If you want to know why you shouldn't choose Windows it makes sense to get Steve Jobs' opinion and then evaluate the opinion.

It’s like Bill Gates criticizing Apple… if you really want to split hairs about the analogy used.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#63
post #4

This shows how out of touch people like Reid Hoffman is. He thinks it's a daming accusation that SpaceX is "not AI" but in reality "not AI" means rockets and satellite internet. The parts of the business his class cares about is the garbage, not the substance Agree that X.ai is a tire fire.

The problem is that SpaceX financials supporting the IPO say SpaceX is a major AI company that has a minor side-hustle of making rockets that sell satellite internet.

That's the total picture of SpaceX, right. Does SpaceX as a whole make financial sense? No. Everyone knows the SpaceX "value story": AI means that a company that makes a minus 5 billion per year really makes plus 200 billion per year! IN SPACE! But, uh, about those Space parts? Surely those are cashflow positive ... right? RIGHT?

Well, no.

SpaceX it is the 50th or so rocket company. The previous ones did not fail because they couldn't get rockets working or couldn't improve on the state of the art in rocketry. The ones not supported by nation-states failed because they couldn't get the financials working. To be fair some of them failed because they couldn't get to earth orbit. But that's not the common case. More common: "New rocket type works! We demonstrated it succesfully! No launches ... so no money. We're publishing our work and shutting down. Bye". Irritatingly quite a few of these new rocket companies are theoretically more efficient than SpaceX will ever be. Also irritatingly most of these companies, through financial necessity, demonstrated a working rocket in one try, in contrast to SpaceX.

(my favorite? Aerospike nozzles. Aside from their great "Wiley E. Coyote" potential should launch fail they look absolutely incredible)

Did Space part of SpaceX get the financials working? No. Not even with Starlink (their debt repayments still drag it into the negative). What is their fix for too small a market? Make Spaceship, an even bigger rocket ... for a market that sees no use for the existing Falcon 9 launch capacity ...

Starlink: same. It's not even the 10th satellite internet company. The previous ones all failed, because the market was too small, and had to be bailed out by nation states, famously Iridium. Did Starlink solve the financials? No.

The most irritating bit of this is of course Elon Musk himself. Why did he succeed? Well he keeps mentioning himself and "starting from first principles". As illustrated above: he started from first principles, he failed (private, ie. profitable access to earth orbit? SpaceX doesn't do that), then he got incredible amounts of money somewhere to pour down a black hole (using artificial demand like Starlink) and so everything is still moving. Obviously Elon Musk's achievement is 100% finding this money and 0% practicing science from first principles".

That's also Elon Musk's great redeeming quality. What's his achievement? Convincing, first himself, then humanity, or at least enough humans to get ~300 billion in cash, that Space exploration is worth doing despite the fact that it's unprofitable. The actual technical Space exploration side he ... frankly didn't do particularly well, though well enough that it (eventually) worked. But the result is still fantastic: we're in space far more than before!

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There sure are a lot of people attacking the messenger here. This seems fairly par for anyone criticizing one of musks properties.

[flagged]

Literally every single top level comment except for the one is a criticism of the person. Feels very typical for a right wing attack.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#65

I wake up every morning amazed that there were enough people foolish enough to buy a company with only $18B in revenue and no profit at basically at the valuation of Microsoft (a company with $300B in revenue and $100B in profit).

Short it then

Cults remain irrational longer than the sane can remain solvent. Particularly when the cult captures regulators and governments.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#66
post #20

How is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

I'm not interested in people's take on SpaceX this early after their IPO, they have an ambitious vision and Elon Musk gets a lot of blind hatred. You don't invest into SpaceX to see returns in a month, you're in it for the next five or more years or you're better off finding a different stock to invest in. To date SpaceX is the top leader in getting things into space for the lowest cost, everyone else pales in compar…

People don't invest in SpaceX because of space launch capability, that barely counts for their valuation at all.

The valuation of SpaceX is due to AI, namely the revenue they get for renting out their GPUs to companies that actually have AI customers, as their own AI tech has not panned out.

For the large number of companies rolled into SpaceX, they are all failed attempts to grow large enough to justify their valuations, and when a company fails to do that it just gets rolled into the conglomerate as a way of hiding the failure.

Tesla's valuation contrasted with its performance means that Tesla will likely be rolled into whatever latest vehicle of Musk's has the most attention, hiding the failure of Tesla to come anywhere near to its promises.

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#67
post #25

The key part - Reid being invested in both OpenAI and anthropic should have been higher up in the article. Pretty crucial context to him trash talking XAI. Not that I disagree with his assessment…

Maybe he invested in the competition because xAI is a train wreck?

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#68

Elon Musk's companies launch rockets, build the most high-tech electric cars, host the world's most relevant social network, deploy high-speed internet to most of the world, build one of the world's leading LLMs, I could go on... Reid Hoffman runs a social network for spam.

> build the most high-tech electric cars

Teslas aren't the most high-tech these days. They have fallen behind on the hardware side, particularly in charging and batteries. Here's a charging speed comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy46Ag0djjk

Re: Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

#70
post #20

How is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.

And it doesn't help that...

'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'

that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.

He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.

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