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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

#681

Post by eucyclos »

numpad0 wrote: post #472
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.

They must have outcompeted Musk at intelligence and/or insanity with their dedication into maximizing production volume of liquid fueled rocket engines. Tom Mueller was a VP of propulsion at TRW Inc., which, among numerous other things you know from textbooks, made the Apollo LM descent engine, as well as early Space Shuttle TDRS data relay system sats. Calling Mueller a guy interested with engines having issues with…

Seeing Elon buy Twitter was like watching a functional alcoholic I admire buy a bar.

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

#682

Post by Sl1mb0 »

tdb7893 wrote: post #434
Sl1mb0 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> care more that their work is prosocial These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely…

So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population. Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medi…

I never claimed any techology is good or bad; you also seem to be in agreement with me that technology used in warfare _can_ have "good" applications (I mentioned that the benefits are secondary to their applications in war, that doesn't sound like me saying there are no benefits).

Lastly, the only point I was trying to make is that the argument that researchers do these things for "pro-social" causes is kind of a facade; the macro environment that incentivizes technological development *is* mostly due to government investment. Sure, the individuals working on it may all have different motivations, but they wouldn't be able to do so without large sums of money. The CIA [1] literally has a venture capital firm dedicated to the investing in the development of technology - do you really believe they are doing that to help people?

- [1]: https://fortune.com/2025/07/29/in-q-tel-cia-venture-capital-...

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

#684

Post by lockjog »

mintplant wrote: post #648
sidcool wrote: post #645

The pleasure people get at seeing Elon's companies failing is astounding.

I'm trans. This man has actively and intentionally made life harder for myself and my loved ones. So yes, I'm going to enjoy any news that weakens his ability to do that, and no, I won't apologize for it.

[flagged]

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

#685

Post by stephbook »

Animats wrote: post #206

“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk Right. The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it? It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X…

> How does he do it

He always promises something 3 years into the future. He uses the new money to keep the old stuff afloat. He mad SpaceX buy Tesla Cybertrucks when noone else wanted them. Now buy data centers.

Tomorrow he'll have a new idea, a new snake oil, new investors and his "BEAM transportion" company, totally real in 3 years, will buy shitty space data centers noone else has a use for.

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

#686

Post by ajam1507 »

catapart wrote: post #152

lol! no surer sign of a junior/naive/ignorant developer or manager than the sentiment "okay, well, let's start from scratch and do it right this time." big projects generate cruft. there are ways to minimize it, but as you go along there will always be some stuff that doesn't quite mesh with whatever else you've got going on. if you insist on ironing out every single wrinkle (admirable!) you'll never actually deliver…

This is far too general of a philosophy to be applied in the dark. You can't say, without any familiarity with what the actual software looks like whether a rewrite is the best way to proceed. There are plenty of projects that get bogged down in the inertia of a system that wasn't built right in the first place.

Also, modern AI is only a few years old at this point. Whatever has been built so far is hardly load bearing.

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

#687

Post by zimpenfish »

jarrettcoggin wrote: post #425
zimpenfish wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla. During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a fe…

> That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.

Thankfully I've never (yet) had to experience "planning by management tweet". That does sound like absolute bullshit to deal with.

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

#688

Post by Balinares »

kstrauser wrote: post #546
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’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…

This absolutely fits my observations and it's got to be one of my favorite secret things about the industry. More generally, the higher the skill level at a given org, the more trans furries you'll find, it seems like. There was a time you couldn't throw a stuffed fox across a Google SRE office without hitting one.

I wonder if this holds well enough that you can use it as a proxy metric to assess the technical chops at a new company.

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

#689

Post by throwaway77385 »

throwawaypath wrote: post #666
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

CR notes, though, that Tesla has improved, with its latest models demonstrating "better-than-average reliability." It’s now in the top 10 of the publication’s new car predictability rankings—just avoid those older models. That said, it's not all bad news for Tesla on the reliability front. According to Consumer Reports, Tesla ranks ninth in new-car reliability with a predicted reliability of 50. That's just behind Bu…

Two thoughts come to mind: First, looking at the data is always a good idea. Thank you for adding that information and correcting the record.

Second, it may be counter-productive to label any criticisms of a person as [person] Derangement Syndrome.

Elon is an objectively awful, awful human being and one could only be called deranged for finding any redeeming qualities in him.

The 'Derangement Syndrome' trope is a cheap tactic to try to shift derangement from the actually deranged person to the people pointing it out.

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

#690

Post by jaimex2 »

sidcool wrote: post #645

The pleasure people get at seeing Elon's companies failing is astounding.

Which is all media driven mostly and a fantasy.

His companies bring in billions and boost each other up. None can be called company in decline, quite the contrary.

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