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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

#621
post #218
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore. As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.

Even if Starlink had more than a few tens of millions of customers, China mobile has 900 million subs and is worth around $250 billion. ULA was recently valued at about 1 billion. SpaceX might be possibly worth 50 times as much or maybe even 100 times as much. Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable, and starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit and land both stages. Stars…

>Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable

Falcon delivered the vast majority of mass into orbit last year, and the year before that

>starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit

It's already deployed test satellites into orbit. You're so intellectually dishonest you refuse to acknowledge things that have already happened.

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

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.

Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this: 1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand 2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!) 3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space 4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically inte…

>Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast.

Are we still going to pretend that the man who has gotten every single prediction wrong so far knows what he is talking about?

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

#623

Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good. People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.

There is no way in hell Grok is better than Gemini. Google has the advantage of much more efficient and faster inference, with a lot more data sets.

Secondly, would you trust a model, especially for STEM research, that consistently has training loops done on it to make it to adhere to what only Musk considers as truth?

Honestly, comments like yours really make me super suspicious of whether you are a bot or not.

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

#624

I do use Grok as a chatbot sometimes. Very good for sourcing X and general web search. Not as "prude" as the others too.

Prude? I've played with all the main AI players for the last 2'ish years. I've never once thought: you know what? that was a bit prudish. Genuinely morbidly curious. What use case do you have where you end up making that conclusion?

The amount of times chatgpt has told me "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." makes me want to bash my head against the wall.

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that academia and all of the other actual places people who learn and know stuff for a living being full of leftists is some conspiracy against you and the right wing? Touch grass, my dude. These are the thoughts of someone who spends too much time on X.

I don't use X or Grok. The fact that the elite and knowledge workers in this country are generally more left-leaning is pretty evident. The right wingers in these ranks make up a distinctive subgroup. These are the thoughts of pretty much everyone everywhere in the country and this becomes apparent if you ask randoms on the street, or you have attended college lectures, or have used a dictionary, or have read wikiped…

You know the trades are union, i.e., left wing?

If you went to my hometown and asked working class men who work with their hands whether they support the conservatives, they'd laugh in your face.

Have you heard of the AFL-CIO?

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

#626
post #167

Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.

What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

Not having to deal with having to defend in court why polluting an area where you built your datacenter and fucking it up for the residents there is actually better for all man kind.

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

#627

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.

I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to of…

> I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem

I'm not sure this holds true. SpaceX accomplished more with very little compared to the entire NASA budget, Boeing, etc.

I think it's much more to do with mission alignment. Run fast and lean, and approach the problem in a non-risk-adverse manner. Fail fast and often and iterate quickly.

Sure, it takes a lot of capital - but that is only a portion of the story. Look at Blue Origin/etc. in comparison.

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

#628
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the product is mediocre at best I'm not a Tesla fanboy, last year was the first time I bought one (new Model Y), but it is by far the best car I've ever owned, and the FSD blew my mind with how much better it was than I expected. My wife hates Elon, and has a new hybrid Mitsubishi, but she still drives my Model Y all the time because it's just so much better to drive. What are you basing the 'mediocre' opinion on?

I concur. We were in the market for a new car. I went to Audi to test drive their A4; and it was OK. The sales guy sat in the passenger seat, yakking away.

Next we went to the Tesla showroom. The sales guy just entered some address and told me to press the gas pedal and it would go by itself. Full FSD. And no sales guy in the car. That just blew me away.

We ended up buying the Model Y.

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

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what your previous post was talking about. But if you insist, at least make your point clear. "African Americans" and "Africans" are wildly different genetic populations that get subsumed under the same "Black" racial category in the US. Which one were you talking about? The latter is more genetically diverse than any other human population by an incredible margin. Making generalized statements about them…

I understand your point (although I find the babybathwater-ing to be tiring), and I didn't mean to be drawn into a debate about this. But that was entirely the point - that there's a debate. Wikipedia would have you believe that there isn't.

For what it's worth, I'm mixed as hell. European, Asian, Jewish, north african, and native american. I look white, though - and I am, in fact, majority European ancestry. Therefore in most studies (of anything race related), I would presumably be lumped in with white people. It's not a perfect "measure," but it's still the easiest proxy for geographic location of our ancestors that we have and on a population level it works just fine for studies.

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

#630
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did Tesla work initially? Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics). 6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in…

Not even Tesla fans claim that Tesla is reliable. https://www.motor1.com/news/781164/tesla-used-car-reliabilit... For a year when we were doing the digital nomad thing, my wife and I didn’t own a car and we rented plenty of EVs. Tesla was by far our least favorite. Not having CarPlay alone is dealbreaker

Maybe it's up to taste. Maybe the QC fell badly after some time.
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