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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

#631

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

moogly wrote: post #234

I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable. The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the st…

"Might be time to start a new Musk company soon."

This made me laugh

How mamy times have we seen HN comments something like, "He started/runs [number] companies..." therefore he is a genius

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

#632

Post by chanux »

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…

So this is a common tactic.

I have experienced management assigning people to multiple projects, vaguely acknowledging a time split. The moment the actual work starts people have to go 100% on all projects. This is normal.

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

#633

Post by winrid »

darkwater wrote: post #251
twodave wrote: post #175

Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks…

Grok in Tesla is utterly terrible, a rushed out product with a very bad UX. As a simple example, it's the very first feature in Tesla's UI that does not come translated to the UI language set by the user but it's just available in English. Never happened before.

Vibe coded without remembering to tell it to use the localization system? :)

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

#634

Post by brokencode »

beeflet wrote: post #523
hananova wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but so is reality. And Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is supposed to document reality. So what's the problem?

[flagged]

Have you ever wondered why the most educated and scholarly people in the country are left leaning?

I suppose you think they were indoctrinated. But finding and teaching the truth is essentially their job. Learning how to evaluate sources and approach research logically is like academia 101.

So doesn’t it seem strange that so few of them ever manage to see that they’re being indoctrinated?

Or do you think a person’s political beliefs are assigned at birth and lefties just like academia for some reason?

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

#635

Post by kartakrak »

beeflet wrote: post #607
baublet wrote: post #552

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…

hn is left leaning too

even pg tries to shit on elon on x time to time

funniest bit was garry tan hinting that yc x and y seasons has to be renamed because pg doesnt like it

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

#636

Post by kstrauser »

bobsmooth wrote: post #617
kstrauser wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard the haha-but-serious joke numerous times that you can’t have a security department that’s not trans and furry friendly. Thing is, I completely believe that. Those groups are disproportionately represented among the security community, and I personally would not work somewhere that my friends in those groups would feel unwelcome. That’s a quite common sentiment even among us straight cis non-furry men. Well…

That's only because autism is common amongst those groups and you can't build anything worthwhile these days without a lot of autism.

I don't believe that for a second. More likely, infosec tends to attract more results-oriented personalities. To generalize, "who cares what you look like as long as you're good?" As a consequence of that, infosec tends to be a lot more welcoming than other groups I've been around. As long as you act nicely, people generally don't care if you're man, women, both, neither, or a gay horse. And it seems like there's been a feedback loop over many years: that acceptance drew more out-of-the-norm folks, which made it more accepting. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But in any case, I thoroughly believe the "joke": turn people away because they don't look / act / think like most others, and soon the very best infosec talent will want nothing to do with you. And based on this article, I'm guessing that's true for other extremely technical fields, too.

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

#637

Post by jedberg »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #445
mlinhares wrote: post #438

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…

I think you are simplifying a little. Musk had the courage to go against the big manufacturers and build the charger network which at the same a lot of smart people would never work. Same with SpaceX. They did something most people thought could never work. I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.

> I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.

If you talk to anyone who worked there, they will tell you that he had little to do with the innovation at any of his companies. His lieutenants and the people that worked for them had all the innovative ideas, and for the most part tried to either avoid Elon's ideas or convince him that their ideas were his so he would push them.

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

#638

Post by zemo »

Sol- wrote: post #134

I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies. That said, Musk's attempts…

respectfully, I do not find Mecha Hitler to be particularly free of bias.

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

#639

Post by mbs159 »

paulbjensen wrote: post #135
bearjaws wrote: post #8

Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward. I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful. Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who t…

Damn, this only validates the use of ad-blockers / sponsor-blockers even more

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

#640

Post by lucianbr »

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…

> Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford.

No. At least as I understand the word, "morality" means something different than "do the right thing when it is easy". If only those who can afford it do it, it is not morality. Morality is choosing the right thing even when it costs you, even when it is hard.

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