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

ft.com

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

#811

Post by tptacek »

keeda wrote: post #810
tptacek wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that he shredded trust & safety, and that Twitter got way worse afterwards in that regard. But he fired more than half the workforce, and they were not mostly T&S people.

I dunno, most reports from the time (and a quick Google AI overview just now) mentioned the cuts largely focused on T&S and moderation teams. Even the ML teams he cut reprotedly were working more on safety and integrity issues. Many who worked on "woke" issues were also cut, but the line between T&S and "woke" gets blurry quickly. To be fair, this could be due to the bias in reporting, as media outlets may have had i…

Come on. Zillions of developers have complained about getting RIF'd. It's not a mystery. I don't like Musk's Twitter. I don't like Musk. But pretending isn't getting us anywhere.

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

#812

Post by qingcharles »

numbers_guy wrote: post #68

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.

I use it because it is easily jailbroken and is willing to search for old orphan magazine PDFs I'm trying to track down. The subagents will all scream "this is copyright violation!" but the main Grok engine ignores them and finds obscure, niche forum posts etc.

So, it has its uses compared to the mainstream products.

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

#813

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tzs wrote: post #807
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plenty of empty land sufficiently far from cities Which means interconnect permitting. > For interconnect do that via satellite As in power.

Ah, I was unclear. I meant build in empty land far from cities where you also have room to put in enough solar panels and batteries to power the data center.

> where you also have room to put in enough solar panels and batteries to power the data center

Environmental reviews. (The further from civilization the higher the chances the Southern farting nuknuk or whatever nests in your nowhere.) And construction costs.

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

#814

Post by nailer »

localghost3000 wrote: post #492

Musk sounds like such a nightmare to work for. I legitimately don't understand why anyone would put up with him. What's the appeal?

Reusable rockets, paralysed people controlling things with their minds, aligned models that treat human life equally regardless of race, these are all important things. What have you done?

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

#815

Post by keeda »

tptacek wrote: post #811
keeda wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, most reports from the time (and a quick Google AI overview just now) mentioned the cuts largely focused on T&S and moderation teams. Even the ML teams he cut reprotedly were working more on safety and integrity issues. Many who worked on "woke" issues were also cut, but the line between T&S and "woke" gets blurry quickly. To be fair, this could be due to the bias in reporting, as media outlets may have had i…

Come on. Zillions of developers have complained about getting RIF'd. It's not a mystery. I don't like Musk's Twitter. I don't like Musk. But pretending isn't getting us anywhere.

I'm not sure I follow. Assuming you mean the zillions of developers that got RIF'd at Twitter, do we know how many were bloat versus working on the T&S and related functions? I tend to believe the latter based on media reports and because that has clearly had an impact on the product.

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

#816

Post by tptacek »

keeda wrote: post #815
tptacek wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. Zillions of developers have complained about getting RIF'd. It's not a mystery. I don't like Musk's Twitter. I don't like Musk. But pretending isn't getting us anywhere.

I'm not sure I follow. Assuming you mean the zillions of developers that got RIF'd at Twitter, do we know how many were bloat versus working on the T&S and related functions? I tend to believe the latter based on media reports and because that has clearly had an impact on the product.

It's OK if our premises are too far apart to hash this out. No, I don't think shredding T&S is one of the principal components of the giant Twitter RIF. Yes, T&S got killed; yes, that's bad. No, you can't explain how Musk manages to keep Twitter technically functioning as well as it does by pointing to T&S.

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

#817

Post by alberth »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #249
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…

In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!

Let’s restate this another way:

“ In an interview with {COMPANY} I was literally told that … {COMPANY-OWNER} can call us and demand anything at anytime. “

Doesn’t sound so crazy when Elon name is removed from it.

Note: I’m no Elon fan, but do think sometimes HN overreacts when his name is mentioned.

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

#818

Post by make3 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #594
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.

I don't know why the people here are naive enough to think that. Most programmers can donate more than 70% of their income to Africa if they want to make world a better place, yet they only target people earning more than 3x of them, even though majority of the world earns less than 1/3rd of them.

spending your productive output making one of the most powerful terrible people alive more powerful just sounds depressing to me. do you really want your research to be how to make the personality of Elon's anti woke mind virus LLM better at erotic talk.

I guess it comes down to your daily efforts serving only to make the world a worst place, vs having a neutral job

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

#819

Post by matthewdgreen »

alberth wrote: post #817
jazzpush2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!

Let’s restate this another way: “ In an interview with {COMPANY} I was literally told that … {COMPANY-OWNER} can call us and demand anything at anytime. “ Doesn’t sound so crazy when Elon name is removed from it. Note: I’m no Elon fan, but do think sometimes HN overreacts when his name is mentioned.

If you're designing a car, then the CEO/Founder might want the ability to add falcon wings to it at any point, and that's pretty reasonable. If you're designing a trustworthy encyclopedia, knowing that the CEO/Founder might wish to alter arbitrary facts to his whim is really not very reasonable. Is it his company? Sure. Do you want to make low-quality information artifacts? That's a judgement call.

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

#820

Post by hananova »

Rover222 wrote: post #740
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?

That's an interesting take. Left or right leaning is kind of just relative to society as a whole. If the world really was so left, I think we'd be calling Wikipedia neutral.

But many people do call Wikipedia neutral, or at least mostly neutral.
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