That’s really his beef with Zuckerberg. He’s upset he bought old tech right before new tech changed the game, now he’s stuck. Cage matches, d$ck measuring, it’s all the ego of a petulant child upset that he bought a cookie instead of cake.
As someone who has studied martial arts and seen video of Zuck, I’m team Zuck as well. Elon, if it ever happens, will resort to illegal moves or cheap shots. If he survives zucks arm bar.
The total deal was at 43 Billion. 13 billion is on twitter books. He has pledged to spend 20bills through sale of tesla stock, got a loan of 6.25bills secured by his tesla stock and ~7 bills came from other investors.
His tesla stock has appreciated considerably since the acquisition and while he has pledged to refrain from selling any more stock till(I am hazy on this detail end of 2024) he can still secure a loan against his stock to purchase hardware he pleases.
I recall every tesla has a gpu on board(dont recall the spec), and for their computer vision models their staff is potentially already has access to gpu's that could be dedicated to x.ai's research.
An AI made to "understand the true nature of the universe"...
Not a word about physics, or mention of physicists in the team and this is led by Elon Musk, the man who think he can send persons to Mars by 2029.
This looks so promising.
Since SpaceX entered the market, ULA has stopped selling both its flight ready rockets with no replacement ready, Ariane has finished flying with no replacement ready, the Space Shuttle has stopped flying and its role has been replaced by SpaceX, Soyuz is no longer available for US and many other markets, China's rockets are similarly unavailable in the US, and a great many new competitors continue not to have vehicles that exist. Electron and some small number of less robust small launch players fly but compete in a market segment SpaceX abandoned in 2009. SLS exists but has zero commercial customers and will never have more. India and Japan's rockets exist but have near-zero market presence.
The strongest sense in which SpaceX is not a monopoly is that other companies let you order flights on vehicles that don't exist yet, but hopefully may soon.
I think you may be reading the term ‘monopoly’ in a nonstandard way. SpaceX being a monopoly just refers to them being a single dominant supplier in active launch, which is a position they built by fairly outcompeting other companies.
> We are actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join our team as members of our technical staff in the Bay Area.
It's funny that after all the talk of remote work, tech globalization and the SF/Silicon Valley exodus in the last few years (including much of it from Musk himself), we end up with pretty much all mainstream AI companies – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Scale AI, Midjourney, and now this one – primarily hiring in-office in the Bay Area.
The technological center of world continues to be a hundred square miles in Northern California, whether people like it or not.
The Texas stuff is working really well. And if I recall, he was expanding California investment at the time he was moving the HQ of Tesla. And Tesla's engineering hub is here in Palo Alto. Overall, I'd say everything there is chugging along.
Not just Intel either. Nvidia, Apple, etc have big design teams in the area, and ASML and other major players in the semiconductor space have a large presence as well.
Wasn't X.ai a calendar-scheduling assistant back when non-LLM-based chatbots were, like, a hot thing in the Valley?
There's some fucked up irony here that their domain name probably ended up being their most valuable piece of IP, and it gets bought up by Elon Musk to tout his...whatever the fuck this is.
Indeed, it was bought then shut down. As someone also working in the scheduling space, they seemed like a competitor but it turns out their service wasn't as good as they hyped.
I wonder why Elon didn't use his x.com domain though, it's still sitting there.
Relation to X Corp
We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.
I feel like the myth-building stuff really fell apart for Elon after he exposed himself with the Twitter stuff. For a good half-decade in the 2010's he was real-life Tony Stark. Rockets, self-driving cars, clean energy, super unrealistic goals that somehow he kept delivering on despite everyone saying it's impossible, and then then since like 2018 he's just been on a downward spiral. So sad.
Anyone thinking that FSD is evidence of a "downward spiral" isn't paying attention. There's plenty of objective evidence about the state of FSD and while I'm sure there can be broad disagreement about how far from "done" it is, there's no doubt it's trending in the right direction.
Sure, you can guess at motives behind two among countless thousands of business decisions. Or you can observe progress of the FSD Beta software released to customers.
Please tell me how I can observe that progress when they have stopped doing any kind of objective public reporting. What are the metrics you deem relevant to track, since not reporting safety data is just a random business decision in your mind?
A count of all-cause disengagements is not "safety data", nor is it "objective public reporting". Much like LoC it can be a signal of progress early on but these days it's ambiguous noise given that many disengagements occur because of reasons other than safety, such as spotting a good place to park moments before reaching a destination. But even where a disengagement is safety related, the data can be confounded — especially given that there has been a rather dramatic uptick in assertiveness in recent releases, revealing further edge cases masked by prior conservativeness.
It's funny, because it reminds me of provisional drivers in my home city of Sydney, Australia. Drivers with less than 1 year of road experience must show a red [P] plate on their vehicle. Drivers with between 1 and 3 years of road experience must show a green [P] plate. This is interesting to me because I consistently find that red [P] drivers are mostly conservative and green [P] drivers are mostly overconfident to the point of dangerous.
Some might say we shouldn't allow people with between 1 and 3 years of road experience to drive on our roads.
Yes disengagements can be noise, but there are significant differences between manufacturers, and Tesla's numbers were not competitive, and then they stopped reporting them, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. It is not a perfect metric, but it is a metric. You never did tell me what metric you are using to judge Tesla's progress. Since you clearly believe they are making progress, maybe you could tell me the reason why you think that.
I've had access to FSD Beta since like the very first version. It hasn't made any significant progress to be honest. It still does the dumbest most unsafe things at the absolute worst time. In super ideal conditions it may be ok, but for the most part, I don't even try to use it anymore.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but your assertion is wildly divergent from the experience of many dozens of people who have documented their experiences in full on YouTube. It would be interesting to hear why you think your opinion is correct and theirs isn't. I'd be genuinely appreciative of any thoughts you have.
I'm not saying anyones opinion is incorrect. FSD may work better in some places and worse in others. But I live in Las Vegas. We have wide roads, both highways and regular roads well maintained, great weather, and other elements that would make you think FSD would work great.
In my experience, it does lane keeping great and going in a straight line, slowing down for traffic. But that's about it. Making turns, the overall jank is unbearable in person (it doesn't come off as bad on video, but as a driver or passenger, getting constantly tossed around is not fun), and also just the unpredictability of the system makes it unusable for anything more than a parlor trick.
You're free to have your own opinion or listen to whoever you want, but I can tell you my experience has been consistently terrible and hasn't improved by any meaningful amount over the last 18 months.
When I was first reading about Musk, 12 years ago, I was extremely impressed, to the point of being ready to invest in Tesla and SolarCity. However, when Elon entered the AI space about 7 years ago it became clear to me that: (i) he is entering a field that he doesn't know, while talking about it as if he knew it, (ii) marketing and hype matter to him more than science.
I didn't make that assumption. I'm just saying that overpromising and underdelivering, due to a lack of a broad understanding of AI research, can backfire, create distrust, and in the end slow science down, e.g., lead to another AI winter...
> "As the name and design have changed, so have Mr. Musk’s overly optimistic predictions for when his spaceship would get to Mars. At Guadalajara, he said the first flight of the Interplanetary Transport System to Mars, carrying cargo but not people, would take off in 2022 and that the first flight with people could launch in 2024."
I am so so so glad people are seeing this human shitbag for who he is. I've been telling people for years he is an egomaniac bastard with a cult of personality.
He's shown us his character as a leader so many times at this point. When he called Vern Unsworth "pedo guy", I didn't know how to square it with my image of him, so I mostly forgot about it. Took a while to realize it's who he is.
Just because you don't like the idea doesn't mean it is "fascist". I don't find using that word flippantly contributes to intellectually substantive discussion. Frankly, it is lazy. It is better to provide reasoned criticism, but that may require revisiting some assumptions you're making, and that may be uncomfortable.
Most people are not especially disciplined in interpreting historical realities through the lens of the day. The result is that we form anachronistic and sloppy views of the past. Take, for example, women's suffrage. If we view the pre-suffrage US through the lens of the radical individualism we embrace today, then we more easily conclude, that 19th century America was a "woman-hating" land and all the usual polemic. But if you interpret the vote as one vote per family, then things start to look differently. The family, and not the individual, taken as the basic unit of society as has almost always been the case, with the husband/father as head and representative of his family and its good in society, becomes the natural voting entity. Maybe you don't like that, or think it needs some exceptions, but logically, this basic idea is coherent and it makes sense.
Now, even if you think Musk's views deserve criticism, you can, at least, appreciate the idea, especially in light of what he's said about demographic collapse and the tendency of parents to be more future- and other-oriented--given that their children will need to live in that future--than atomized individuals, who have a greater tendency to live only in a self-indulgent now (celebrated, unsurprisingly, by New Age). You can expect parents with children to vote in ways that prioritize long-term good in a way that atomized individuals would not. It's harder to not give a shit about where things are headed when you have children.
It's important not to let your sensibilities and biases get in the way of the truth, or to confuse sensibilities with reason.
You can make a lot of ideas make logical sense if you create the correct framing, which you did in your post. However, your frame excludes the discrepancy between single males, who could vote, and single females, who could not vote; we can recurse, and say that single females could barely exist in the middle-class world due to social and economic norms which prevented women from getting jobs above starvation wages, and even look further into the concept of coverture, whereby marriage was a union of baron and feme in which the feme (wife) was legally subsumed into the baron (husband) and ceased to have an existence outside the home after being wed.
If all of those things are outside the frame, sure, one-vote-per-household can be made to make sense. However, don't expect others to agree to your restrictive agenda-driven narratives.
But his point still stands.. the lens of chronological snobbery is intellectually dishonest regardless of “framing”.
Our modern society is radically oriented towards the individual, and not the family. That does bias our view of how good or bad a previously family-oriented society was.
It’s hard to fully quantify the long-term implications of that change.
Throughout history we've had single marriages, polygamy, second+ marriages, combined families, divorce, matriarchal societies, and patriarchal societies. And there was certainly a time before any kind of marriage at all existed, and it's possible nobody knew who any fathers were. Throughout all of that, the individual is the only common denominator.
There is no reason to think that a single marriage is the best format, other than it happens to work well within the framework we've built up to support it over the last few hundred or few thousand years in specific countries. So the individual is it, because it's common to all.
You're going with a modern, nuclear family idea that has really only existed for about a hundred years in specific countries. Single marriage existing in its own house is recent, and specific to some cultures. As I've written below only the individual is common to all those systems.
I think humans are past pure reproduction as a basis for society. The primary thing that humans leave behind is contribution to culture. I don't necessarily mean the capital-C Culture, though that can be it. A contribution to the lives of those around you, related or not. On a local scale I have known people without children who are absolutely treasured by the community and their loss has been felt greatly when they go. Sometimes they have buildings or rooms in a building named after them. On a larger scale, our history books are full of people who were childless. Isaac Newton was. I don't think this is isolating. I think you have full buy in to the future, with or without children. But you have to choose it.
On the flipside, I have a father in law, who is a pretty nice guy in general. He's still happily married and appears to love his kids. When asked if he was willing to fly less than 5 international vacations per year because, you know, climate change is serious and he has a grandkid... his answer was a very serious "What do I care? I'll be dead."
If you're not getting service to the community or belief in a future beyond yourself, perhaps the problem isn't marriage or your concept of individualism. Maybe it's telling people they aren't worth anything, or their contributions don't matter. Telling single people they can't vote isn't going to help that.
The 10 kids while repping on his $44 billion dollar Titanic transphobes, homophobes, etc. I'm not talking about fascism as in "kill all of the people of a certain ethnic group," but there are, if you're in the study of ideology, politics, moral epistemology, etc., smaller, lower-case fascisms before people start calling you "Fuhrer." There is something in Elon's behavior and signaled preferences that very much comes across as a bio-Darwinistic, egoistic, self-maximizing project, e.g. a fascism.
That is, indeed, an observed phenomenon. I work in human behavior in Washington, D.C., in a position where I am paid to think about the causes of harassment, discrimination, and violence, and how we, if we believe it is valuable or necessary to reduce these behaviors, how they come into existence, arrange human affairs such that their costs are minimized. I am not some random left-wing hack for whom fascism is anything to the right of Stalin. Musk is definitely on the fascist spectrum.
I've read articles like this since I started working in silicon valley in 2012, but I haven't seen it in person. Maybe some selection bias at play, but I'm generally pretty open.
Stuff I have seen:
- LSD usage is pretty common relative to where I grew up (midwest-ish), but usually rare (once a year, burning man, someone has tried it once) even so, I'd still guess this is a pretty small minority - I guess 15% max? I'd guess mostly this is curiosity driven, reading about it, etc. I've never seen anyone seriously use it as a productivity drug.
- Adderall is more common, but that's because it's prescribed (and it works well so everyone thinks they have ADHD if they take it) - I haven't seen it abused, I've heard people talk about modafinil but have never met anyone that was actually taking it. Even in the adderall/adhd case, I'd guess 20% max? Most people I work with do not take it.
- Ketamine I don't know anyone that's tried it beyond someone in the therapy trials and non-techie druggie types.
Maybe it's more common and I'm not in the right circles, but I don't really buy it. I think it's rare and elevated by articles like this because it's salacious not because it's common. I'd guess my made up percentages are also too high.
Personally, I haven't witness any drug use in the various developer circles I've run except for ADHD meds. The number on ADHD meds is somewhere around 5-10% I would guess...
I don't know... I think some classes of drugs amplify someones shittyness. Call it Inherent Shittyness (IS). Time is a big factor, too. The longer they are on drugs, theore shitty they become.
Δ Shittyness = IS x drug amount x duration
Sometimes people get off illegal drugs and become decent again, but
I also think that everyone has a Decency score, where
Net Shittyness (NS) = IS + Decency
Some drugs remove the Decency filter such that NS = IS. If a person knows they have a high IS, and that, say, alcohol temporarily lets that show through, and they care about their perceived NS, then it behooves them to stay away from it.
I really don’t understand this Twitter obsession. In my mind, Musk literally did a Last King Of Scotland type of drama where he proved that too much power for too long will always drive you completely insane. God complex, paranoid, and generally feeling you need to parent the world, even by force. He is not quite a warlord but digitally quite comparable.
He was good with cars, Mars, internet for the masses. Why???
If I could be in charge of, or do real meaningful engineering, why go social media mogul after that; it’s downward and it is lame. So I draw the above conclusions; he went mental with power.
Twitter is crack cocaine for narcissists, who are also vastly overrepresented in leadership roles[0]. Musk[1] buying Twitter was like buying out the cartels making the cocaine and then just dunking yourself straight into a vat of drugs.
[0] If you can get into leadership before people find out you're a narcissist, of course.
[1] No, I don't know for certain if Musk is a narcissist
Twitter is not remotely the start of what's wrong with Elon Musk. His companies have all been stupidly and impulsively managed and he only succeeds because most of the time he doesn't get sued for contract violation, blocking roads, financial fraud, or wildlife destruction.
He was not good with cars, he forced himself into a leadership role at Tesla, made changes that ran over budget, then blamed it on the real founder (Martin Eberhard) and engaged a hostile takeover. Then he violated contract by not giving him the first produced Tesla, keeping it for himself, and instead giving away the second which broke shortly after. Also his employees there all avoid him because he randomly fires underlings in fits of rage.
Tesla autonomous vehicles have always been far behind their competition, he got some guy straight out of college to lead the work, claimed that they first have to solve full sentient AI (???) before cars can drive themselves, and now that fresh grad is working at Apple or something.
I'm not going to talk about the horrendous injustice of his investor fraud for Solar City or his numerous OSHA violations or the time he lied about sleeping in a Tesla factory for a year.
SpaceX has repeatedly failed to deliver on contracts with NASA so they can pursue the UNGODLY STUPID Starship project and idiotic point to point rocket launch projects. Elon claims he'll convert Ocean oil rigs into rocket launch pads which is an impossibly dumb idea (is he trolling us??), and he fires rockets in Boca Chica at a scale he is NOT authorized to do at times he is NOT authorized to do, and has actually ruined many of the locals' lives. They literally had to evacuate their homes. His failed launches also have burned down wildlife preserves home to critically endangered cats and turtles. SpaceX employees wrote an open letter begging him to stop bullshitting about what their real work is, and he fired everyone who signed it.
Also he still hasn't delivered the sex robots he promised me. What the hell, Elon?
Iirc all but one of the scientists working on Neuralink have left because he kept lying about their work and treating them very poorly. He claimed the end goal is to play Star Craft??
But worst of all, in one interview he was asked if he prefers Emacs or Vim. He fumbled over his words for awhile and obviously didn't know anything about either of them, but he did understand that tech literate people are supposed to have an opinion on this, so eventually he managed to say it probably doesn't matter or something. Obviously Emacs is the far superior choice, shame on you Elon.
> His companies have all been stupidly and impulsively managed
This is generally a true statement, and all of your criticism of his companies is accurate.
But what I find hilarious is that HN nearly universally carried his water until The Ukraine Tweet. This site was a unanimous Elon fanboy club right up until the moment he disagreed with CIA talking points.
Nothing changed about him, his behavior, or his companies. He's always engaged in some degree of charlatanism and he's always been a prolific shitposter on twitter dot com. HN ate it up.
Until that fateful day when he had the temerity to suggest that maybe NATO expansionism wasn't the best idea, and that we shouldn't risk nuclear war.
From that point forward, he became the HN enemy, and precisely the same comments that would have been flagged previously, were highly upvoted.
Funny how political tribalism still works amongst the 130 IQ crowd.
- You've mentioned that Musk isn't good with cars, yet under his leadership, Tesla has emerged as the world's most valuable automaker. This seemingly contradicts the notion of Musk being inept in the automotive industry.
- Your claim about Tesla's autonomous vehicles lagging behind competition appears misinformed. From what I understand, Tesla's self-driving technology, which does not rely on high-definition maps, is far advanced compared to most companies in the same space. Moreover, the self-driving team, led by Karpathy and now Ashok, are highly competent individuals.
- To suggest that SpaceX hasn't been successful or valuable to NASA is just wrong. You label the Starship project as 'dumb,' but isn't it a more cost-effective way to launch larger payloads into space? I'm curious if you had similar thoughts when the Falcon 9 was announced? Today, it delivers over double the tons to orbit compared to all other organizations combined.
- Regarding the open letter signed by SpaceX employees, less than 3% of the workforce supported it. The letter primarily critiqued Musk's Twitter activity, which is unrelated to his employees' professional roles and contributions.
- On the subject of the promised 'Tesla bots,' they appear to be progressing at a considerable pace, as evidenced by the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQkeWOFwmk.
- With Neuralink, the ultimate objective is to integrate human brains with AI. More immediate goals include improving the quality of life for individuals suffering from conditions such as blindness or paralysis.
I sense a bit of humor in your comment, but I still wanted to clear up a few things. These inconsistencies make me think twice about the other points you're making.
"Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX."
the same Elon Musk who dropped 44bn on Twitter and fought like a child to weasel out of the sale for almost six months? You mean that same sink-dragging guy who fired everyone once he took over at Twitter, locked everyone out of the office, and unbanned Andrew Tate and Kanye West?
There is no way this question is in good faith. The reasons are abundantly clear, and even if this was somehow true ignorance, a single google search will answer it.
I like that you’re familiar enough with Andrew Tate that you feel it necessary to point out that you’re not a “supporter” but not familiar enough with him that you need strangers on HN to explain him to you.
I'm familiar enough with Tate to not be interested in him, but I don't know enough about him why he is such a disaster to have on Twitter. There are many such people, so I'm asking if you know why exactly he was banned and why we should be kept off. Beyond that you don't like him, which I don't either, that's not the point.
You are interested enough to ask people to explain why they wouldn’t want him on a website.
I’m curious, have you not googled him in the past six months?
If no: Why are you asking about him here?
If yes: Could you make a guess as to why someone might argue that he should be kept off of a social media platform? Just a guess beyond “not liking him”?
If you aren’t capable of guessing a reason beyond “not liking him” given up to date information, you will categorically disagree with any answer to your question.
It has been the collective goal of the many fields of science, throughout the history of humankind, to understand the true nature of the universe.
There's something that feels incredibly ostentatious about the opening sentence "The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.". Not because I think it's a bad goal, or a goal that no company can claim, but because of the broader context around AI and Musk's antics.
I'm genuinely curious to see what comes out of this, but it also gives me the same queasy feeling in my gut that I got when looking at various crypto initiatives over the years.
I don't doubt that there are incredibly smart people getting involved. It's just a bit difficult to take it seriously. I hope to be proven wrong.
- Tesla was launched to transition the world to sustainable energy (not that electric cars do that up close, but never mind).
- SpaceX was launched to make us a multiplanetary species.
- Twitter was bought to fight the woke mind virus that is destroying the world.
- And now xAI will understand the Universe.
One of the clear rules of PR for Musk is that whatever he says it must involve at least one whole planet, ideally multiple planets, galaxies, or ideally, the whole Universe. What is delivered is another story entirely.
- Tesla was launched to capture free regulatory credits and launder them to the top 3 ICE auto makers, eventually making a halfway decent EV along the way
- SpaceX was founded to capture more free government money in the form of billion dollar NASA contracts / contracts with DOD for spy satellites / etc.
– Tesla was launched prior to regulatory credits. The ICE makers, not Tesla, lobbied for the credits system. There's no evidence that these credits did anything other than give Tesla more capital to build factories faster, accelerating their trajectory from debt to profit. Tesla's current financial success is unprecedented low COGS and enviable automotive gross margins, directly as a result of good engineering (superbottle, octovalve, whole body castings, etc).
– Even if SpaceX existed to "capture free government money" the result which matters is US taxpayers saving tens of billions of dollars because of how much cheaper SpaceX was compared to all alternatives. SpaceX has also cut off billions of dollars of US taxpayer money getting exfiltrated to Russia, whether directly (e.g. access to ISS) or indirectly (e.g. ULA buying RD-180 engines).
– Or maybe facts exist
– What's there to get? Like anyone else, Elon has opinions and some amount of money. They're not necessarily your opinions or your amount of money. But the principle remains the same.
The OpenAI API is slightly less constrained than the ChatGPT interface, but it still has plenty of guardrails, regardless of what you put in the system prompt.
I wonder if you would say the same with many nations doing their own space program? Why copy NASA and others when you can focus on poverty and other things than to worry about the rest of the Universe?
Some competition would be great IMO.
I wish Elon started a TSMC competitor though. A moat so high it affects geopolitics.
Their self driving will work right around the same timeframe spaceX actually succeeds a launch with a final budget lower then the most expensive NASA launches were.
It's honestly hilarious how he was lauded as tony stark in the flesh considering the only thing he excelled at was getting simps to gift him money
> The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.
Indeed, I'm sure it's marketing speech but it tells me nothing about what xAI actually does. Yeah, something AI-related I guess, way to go...
I'm currently reading C. G. Jung ("L'homme a la découverte de son âme", French title, doesn't seem to be an English edition to this one though, roughly translates to "man discovering his soul") where among other things he talks about the nature of reality: "the psyche is the real entity in the supreme degree, since the only immediate one". And also that your typical Western man usually suffers from "the disease of knowing-a-priori-everything-better-than-anyone"...
Maybe Elon should read it and get a grasp of himself because I probably won't take lessons about the true nature of the universe from the guy who literally wants to do dick measuring contests on twitter.
Posting flamebait and then editing your post to goad people into downvoting it for being flamebait so you can cry about Hacker News trying to silence you is intellectually dishonest.
I was downvoted first, and then edited it. Way I see it, what I responded to is flamebait, and what I said it common sense. I think it says a lot you're trying to spin it the other way around. No, no one wants to get his comment downvoted and cry about it. That's an assinine misrepresentation. But what could I expect from the permanently offended brigade.
Seems pretty familiar to me. First you post something that you want to say and hope people agree with it. They don't, so you then put something on the end like "the woke liberals disagree with this". Obviously this just makes everyone upset, both the actual woke liberals and people who are not woke liberals but don't care for this kind of drivel, and they downvote you even harder. Then you can point at your comment and now go "I was going to speak something profound but the woke liberals brigaded it. Obviously it would be upvoted if they didn't come here and target me!"
I'm from Europe, and I neither think in terms of "woke liberals" nor "rightwing conservatives". I speak what's common sense, and of course I notice afterwards what seems obvious in retrospect: certain topics are highly politicized, leading to atypical score (you'll notice I almost have no negative score on my comments).
And yes this makes an impression on me, am I allowed to notice or not?
It’s basically all dudes that jumped from FAANG to FAANG. Impressive but I would expect to see biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists etc
That's a very romanticized Michael Crichton experts-of-various-fields-get-together-to-solve-a-problem like scenario, but in reality, when you're an AI company and you have 12 people, you kinda need them to handle the AI basics first.
Say, we can hire a philosopher to ponder what a true apple should taste like, but you better hire first farmers with experience in growing apples.
What do you want Musk to do? Visit every university in the US and Europe to poach off the top women in AI, so that he could have a mixed team? Would that actually be good for the world? Those poor uni AI departments worked really hard to find a woman to hire and then Musk comes along and poaches her off.
Musk is pretty toxic at this point I’m guessing the appeal of working for him as a woman is somewhere between challenge trials for cholera and becoming a live crash test dummy.
What makes you say that? The history of physics (our most successful endeavor in this direction) is very monocultural (by the standard of granularity you are using).
Science was once the domain of Catholic monks and wealthy gentry because they were the few literate people with access to books. Monoculture is not a sign of merit.
This is a weird position to take in absolutes. There are single gender schools in the UK, and I'm sure if you spent some significant time with those boys or girls, you would recognize some have more merit than their peers.
I'm all for diversity for diversity's sake, but I find this to be a very strange position. What difference between men and women are you proposing that allows one or both to have unique insights into the nature of the universe?
It seems like everything I know about the fundamental universe does come from a dozen or so dudes (for historical reasons rather than competency, of course), like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Turing, and von Neumann. I fully believe that women could have solved the same problems, it just doesn't make sense to me to say that men can't, considering that they already have.
Moreover, it's important to note that five of them are East Asian. That's a population over-representation of eight times. This is a completely unacceptable display of Asian Supremacy in action.
No dolphins or tardigrades, as well. How the hell is their model going to "understand the universe" without dolphins in charge of racking the H100s?
Without a rainbow coalition of employees, the embedding tokenizer for this company will look something like this:
embed_tok("give me a recipe for the best Italian Cannoli") -> [71822, 3, 915, 74, 162, NULL, NULL]
What Musk needs to do is fund smart people to do interesting stuff and then get out of the way. If that's what this is, great. If it's just another opportunity for him to do something high-profile and half-baked to massage his weirdly fragile ego: Ugh.
> What Musk needs to do is fund smart people to do interesting stuff and then get out of the way.
So, OpenAI? The problem is always that his ego gets in the way. He wants to be recognized as the messianic figure behind AI, but the ship is sailing ahead without him. Hence all the new efforts (Tesla AI robot, XAI) and grandiose promises ("understanding the nature of the universe").
Sure, but are we at the point where science is now just a "data problem", as in: we have a lot of data we can't interpret, so we need AI help there? I honestly don't know, but would guess that that's not the case.
The people who could instruct such AI and evaluate its outputs would be domain experts. Without them how would you even start to approach those problems?
Have you looked at the papers and C.V.s of the people on the front page of x.ai? Many have already worked on machine guided proofs and I see people with pure math and physics backgrounds.
Formal verification research is conducted since 30+ years and LLMs aren't really good at math and logic, so based on what grounds can we expect a breakthrough in machine guided proofs anytime soon?
Various recent math olympiad results from deep mind and openai.
I think we'll see something analogous to the classification of the finite simple groups collaboration, but where some core researchers will do several proofs in the area to show it the kinds of things needed and it can help fill in others. Things where there is a large volume of similar work to be done.
I think understanding information, cognition, computation, whether an LLM has the emergent property of understanding, all give us some great insight into the nature of the universe that can be applied elsewhere as well.
I wonder if this can understand Twitter. I'm also curious as to how it can possibly "even out" his portfolio even as it tanks in value, and how he got those folk to join up at this stage...
270 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadLast I knew Elon wasn't. And yeah he's bigger, but that much skill is hard to overcome.
For the cage match I'm team Zuck.
His tesla stock has appreciated considerably since the acquisition and while he has pledged to refrain from selling any more stock till(I am hazy on this detail end of 2024) he can still secure a loan against his stock to purchase hardware he pleases.
I recall every tesla has a gpu on board(dont recall the spec), and for their computer vision models their staff is potentially already has access to gpu's that could be dedicated to x.ai's research.
Some historical bedtime reading for the curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
Not a word about physics, or mention of physicists in the team and this is led by Elon Musk, the man who think he can send persons to Mars by 2029. This looks so promising.
The strongest sense in which SpaceX is not a monopoly is that other companies let you order flights on vehicles that don't exist yet, but hopefully may soon.
Here's some links I found for the 3 names I searched on
Igor Babuschkin :
* https://babushk.in/index.html
Yuhai (Tony) Wu :
* https://yuhuaiwu.github.io/
* NeurIPS Chats — Yuhuai Wu: LMs for Math (Minerva) + the Future of Bootstrapping Reasoning [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4DFvgs810o
Toby Pohlen :
* https://github.com/TobyPDE
It's funny that after all the talk of remote work, tech globalization and the SF/Silicon Valley exodus in the last few years (including much of it from Musk himself), we end up with pretty much all mainstream AI companies – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Scale AI, Midjourney, and now this one – primarily hiring in-office in the Bay Area.
The technological center of world continues to be a hundred square miles in Northern California, whether people like it or not.
I wouldn't want Musk half-building something in my city and then just abandoning it
If your definition excludes the likes of the entire semiconductor industry for example.
Not just Intel either. Nvidia, Apple, etc have big design teams in the area, and ASML and other major players in the semiconductor space have a large presence as well.
There's some fucked up irony here that their domain name probably ended up being their most valuable piece of IP, and it gets bought up by Elon Musk to tout his...whatever the fuck this is.
I wonder why Elon didn't use his x.com domain though, it's still sitting there.
https://www.bizzabo.com/blog/xai-sunset
Relation to X Corp We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.
Does anyone know?
It's funny, because it reminds me of provisional drivers in my home city of Sydney, Australia. Drivers with less than 1 year of road experience must show a red [P] plate on their vehicle. Drivers with between 1 and 3 years of road experience must show a green [P] plate. This is interesting to me because I consistently find that red [P] drivers are mostly conservative and green [P] drivers are mostly overconfident to the point of dangerous.
Some might say we shouldn't allow people with between 1 and 3 years of road experience to drive on our roads.
In my experience, it does lane keeping great and going in a straight line, slowing down for traffic. But that's about it. Making turns, the overall jank is unbearable in person (it doesn't come off as bad on video, but as a driver or passenger, getting constantly tossed around is not fun), and also just the unpredictability of the system makes it unusable for anything more than a parlor trick.
You're free to have your own opinion or listen to whoever you want, but I can tell you my experience has been consistently terrible and hasn't improved by any meaningful amount over the last 18 months.
You're assuming he's not exploiting the marketing and hype so he can fund the science that's needed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13216427
HyperLoop (Not a new idea, has existed for at least 50-60 years, earlier if you look at the atmospheric train)
Tesla Semi (tell us how much they can actually haul, elon)
Cyber Truck (Delayed, and not really very truck-like https://twitter.com/whatsinside/status/1628569254659518464)
Tesla Roadster
Working AI robot at AI day 2
He said they had full self driving back in 2018.
Spaceships to Mars by 2022 - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/science/elon-musk-starshi...
> "As the name and design have changed, so have Mr. Musk’s overly optimistic predictions for when his spaceship would get to Mars. At Guadalajara, he said the first flight of the Interplanetary Transport System to Mars, carrying cargo but not people, would take off in 2022 and that the first flight with people could launch in 2024."
Most of his promises have no reality backing them
https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/elon-musk-appea...
Most people are not especially disciplined in interpreting historical realities through the lens of the day. The result is that we form anachronistic and sloppy views of the past. Take, for example, women's suffrage. If we view the pre-suffrage US through the lens of the radical individualism we embrace today, then we more easily conclude, that 19th century America was a "woman-hating" land and all the usual polemic. But if you interpret the vote as one vote per family, then things start to look differently. The family, and not the individual, taken as the basic unit of society as has almost always been the case, with the husband/father as head and representative of his family and its good in society, becomes the natural voting entity. Maybe you don't like that, or think it needs some exceptions, but logically, this basic idea is coherent and it makes sense.
Now, even if you think Musk's views deserve criticism, you can, at least, appreciate the idea, especially in light of what he's said about demographic collapse and the tendency of parents to be more future- and other-oriented--given that their children will need to live in that future--than atomized individuals, who have a greater tendency to live only in a self-indulgent now (celebrated, unsurprisingly, by New Age). You can expect parents with children to vote in ways that prioritize long-term good in a way that atomized individuals would not. It's harder to not give a shit about where things are headed when you have children.
It's important not to let your sensibilities and biases get in the way of the truth, or to confuse sensibilities with reason.
If all of those things are outside the frame, sure, one-vote-per-household can be made to make sense. However, don't expect others to agree to your restrictive agenda-driven narratives.
Our modern society is radically oriented towards the individual, and not the family. That does bias our view of how good or bad a previously family-oriented society was.
It’s hard to fully quantify the long-term implications of that change.
There is no reason to think that a single marriage is the best format, other than it happens to work well within the framework we've built up to support it over the last few hundred or few thousand years in specific countries. So the individual is it, because it's common to all.
I think humans are past pure reproduction as a basis for society. The primary thing that humans leave behind is contribution to culture. I don't necessarily mean the capital-C Culture, though that can be it. A contribution to the lives of those around you, related or not. On a local scale I have known people without children who are absolutely treasured by the community and their loss has been felt greatly when they go. Sometimes they have buildings or rooms in a building named after them. On a larger scale, our history books are full of people who were childless. Isaac Newton was. I don't think this is isolating. I think you have full buy in to the future, with or without children. But you have to choose it.
On the flipside, I have a father in law, who is a pretty nice guy in general. He's still happily married and appears to love his kids. When asked if he was willing to fly less than 5 international vacations per year because, you know, climate change is serious and he has a grandkid... his answer was a very serious "What do I care? I'll be dead."
If you're not getting service to the community or belief in a future beyond yourself, perhaps the problem isn't marriage or your concept of individualism. Maybe it's telling people they aren't worth anything, or their contributions don't matter. Telling single people they can't vote isn't going to help that.
But most people are fascist at some level if the definition is simply diminishing democracy.
Wouldn't be surprised if he is also microdosing LSD, it is quite popular right now in high-tech circles (see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-microdosing-keta... ), but I don't think someone has accused him of that yet.
Stuff I have seen:
- LSD usage is pretty common relative to where I grew up (midwest-ish), but usually rare (once a year, burning man, someone has tried it once) even so, I'd still guess this is a pretty small minority - I guess 15% max? I'd guess mostly this is curiosity driven, reading about it, etc. I've never seen anyone seriously use it as a productivity drug.
- Adderall is more common, but that's because it's prescribed (and it works well so everyone thinks they have ADHD if they take it) - I haven't seen it abused, I've heard people talk about modafinil but have never met anyone that was actually taking it. Even in the adderall/adhd case, I'd guess 20% max? Most people I work with do not take it.
- Ketamine I don't know anyone that's tried it beyond someone in the therapy trials and non-techie druggie types.
Maybe it's more common and I'm not in the right circles, but I don't really buy it. I think it's rare and elevated by articles like this because it's salacious not because it's common. I'd guess my made up percentages are also too high.
There's strong selection bias with drug use because drug users tend to cluster together, I suspect it's a lot less common than people think.
Demand is not what the weed industry thought it would be.[1]
[1] https://www.foodengineeringmag.com/articles/99944-price-per-...
They’re shitty before the drugs too.
Δ Shittyness = IS x drug amount x duration
Sometimes people get off illegal drugs and become decent again, but
Net Shittyness (NS) = IS + Decency
Some drugs remove the Decency filter such that NS = IS. If a person knows they have a high IS, and that, say, alcohol temporarily lets that show through, and they care about their perceived NS, then it behooves them to stay away from it.
8 years ago, wasn't Musk doing this with OpenAI?
He was good with cars, Mars, internet for the masses. Why???
If I could be in charge of, or do real meaningful engineering, why go social media mogul after that; it’s downward and it is lame. So I draw the above conclusions; he went mental with power.
[0] If you can get into leadership before people find out you're a narcissist, of course.
[1] No, I don't know for certain if Musk is a narcissist
One of Musk's visions is "X, the everything app", like Chinese WeChat.
An everything app needs social network and messaging to drive adoption.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.
He was not good with cars, he forced himself into a leadership role at Tesla, made changes that ran over budget, then blamed it on the real founder (Martin Eberhard) and engaged a hostile takeover. Then he violated contract by not giving him the first produced Tesla, keeping it for himself, and instead giving away the second which broke shortly after. Also his employees there all avoid him because he randomly fires underlings in fits of rage.
Tesla autonomous vehicles have always been far behind their competition, he got some guy straight out of college to lead the work, claimed that they first have to solve full sentient AI (???) before cars can drive themselves, and now that fresh grad is working at Apple or something.
I'm not going to talk about the horrendous injustice of his investor fraud for Solar City or his numerous OSHA violations or the time he lied about sleeping in a Tesla factory for a year.
SpaceX has repeatedly failed to deliver on contracts with NASA so they can pursue the UNGODLY STUPID Starship project and idiotic point to point rocket launch projects. Elon claims he'll convert Ocean oil rigs into rocket launch pads which is an impossibly dumb idea (is he trolling us??), and he fires rockets in Boca Chica at a scale he is NOT authorized to do at times he is NOT authorized to do, and has actually ruined many of the locals' lives. They literally had to evacuate their homes. His failed launches also have burned down wildlife preserves home to critically endangered cats and turtles. SpaceX employees wrote an open letter begging him to stop bullshitting about what their real work is, and he fired everyone who signed it.
Also he still hasn't delivered the sex robots he promised me. What the hell, Elon?
Iirc all but one of the scientists working on Neuralink have left because he kept lying about their work and treating them very poorly. He claimed the end goal is to play Star Craft??
But worst of all, in one interview he was asked if he prefers Emacs or Vim. He fumbled over his words for awhile and obviously didn't know anything about either of them, but he did understand that tech literate people are supposed to have an opinion on this, so eventually he managed to say it probably doesn't matter or something. Obviously Emacs is the far superior choice, shame on you Elon.
Vscode and Visual Studio are obviously the answer.
This is generally a true statement, and all of your criticism of his companies is accurate.
But what I find hilarious is that HN nearly universally carried his water until The Ukraine Tweet. This site was a unanimous Elon fanboy club right up until the moment he disagreed with CIA talking points.
Nothing changed about him, his behavior, or his companies. He's always engaged in some degree of charlatanism and he's always been a prolific shitposter on twitter dot com. HN ate it up.
Until that fateful day when he had the temerity to suggest that maybe NATO expansionism wasn't the best idea, and that we shouldn't risk nuclear war.
From that point forward, he became the HN enemy, and precisely the same comments that would have been flagged previously, were highly upvoted.
Funny how political tribalism still works amongst the 130 IQ crowd.
- Your claim about Tesla's autonomous vehicles lagging behind competition appears misinformed. From what I understand, Tesla's self-driving technology, which does not rely on high-definition maps, is far advanced compared to most companies in the same space. Moreover, the self-driving team, led by Karpathy and now Ashok, are highly competent individuals.
- To suggest that SpaceX hasn't been successful or valuable to NASA is just wrong. You label the Starship project as 'dumb,' but isn't it a more cost-effective way to launch larger payloads into space? I'm curious if you had similar thoughts when the Falcon 9 was announced? Today, it delivers over double the tons to orbit compared to all other organizations combined.
- Regarding the open letter signed by SpaceX employees, less than 3% of the workforce supported it. The letter primarily critiqued Musk's Twitter activity, which is unrelated to his employees' professional roles and contributions.
- On the subject of the promised 'Tesla bots,' they appear to be progressing at a considerable pace, as evidenced by the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQkeWOFwmk.
- With Neuralink, the ultimate objective is to integrate human brains with AI. More immediate goals include improving the quality of life for individuals suffering from conditions such as blindness or paralysis.
- Assessments of Musk's technical and engineering aptitude appear more convincing when coming from sources like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
I sense a bit of humor in your comment, but I still wanted to clear up a few things. These inconsistencies make me think twice about the other points you're making.
the same Elon Musk who dropped 44bn on Twitter and fought like a child to weasel out of the sale for almost six months? You mean that same sink-dragging guy who fired everyone once he took over at Twitter, locked everyone out of the office, and unbanned Andrew Tate and Kanye West?
People still let this guy "lead" anything?
You are interested enough to ask people to explain why they wouldn’t want him on a website.
I’m curious, have you not googled him in the past six months?
If no: Why are you asking about him here?
If yes: Could you make a guess as to why someone might argue that he should be kept off of a social media platform? Just a guess beyond “not liking him”?
If you aren’t capable of guessing a reason beyond “not liking him” given up to date information, you will categorically disagree with any answer to your question.
There's something that feels incredibly ostentatious about the opening sentence "The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.". Not because I think it's a bad goal, or a goal that no company can claim, but because of the broader context around AI and Musk's antics.
I'm genuinely curious to see what comes out of this, but it also gives me the same queasy feeling in my gut that I got when looking at various crypto initiatives over the years.
I don't doubt that there are incredibly smart people getting involved. It's just a bit difficult to take it seriously. I hope to be proven wrong.
This looks like a scam. Not the typical regular person type of scam, but the kind specifically targeted to "wealthy Silicon Valley idiot."
> We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.
You know, just in case any investors decide to sue afterwards based on misrepresentation.
- SpaceX was launched to make us a multiplanetary species.
- Twitter was bought to fight the woke mind virus that is destroying the world.
- And now xAI will understand the Universe.
One of the clear rules of PR for Musk is that whatever he says it must involve at least one whole planet, ideally multiple planets, galaxies, or ideally, the whole Universe. What is delivered is another story entirely.
- SpaceX was founded to capture more free government money in the form of billion dollar NASA contracts / contracts with DOD for spy satellites / etc.
- Twitter, Saudi money mostly
- xAI ?????
I think with all his monkeying around, this time his plans will fail.
– Even if SpaceX existed to "capture free government money" the result which matters is US taxpayers saving tens of billions of dollars because of how much cheaper SpaceX was compared to all alternatives. SpaceX has also cut off billions of dollars of US taxpayer money getting exfiltrated to Russia, whether directly (e.g. access to ISS) or indirectly (e.g. ULA buying RD-180 engines).
– Or maybe facts exist
– What's there to get? Like anyone else, Elon has opinions and some amount of money. They're not necessarily your opinions or your amount of money. But the principle remains the same.
Who wants to bet it's going to end up launching a "me too" generative AI product.
Maybe Musk should first take these skills to Tesla's self driving division then worry about the rest of the universe.
"Below is a conversation between an intelligent AI assistant which deeply understands the true nature of the universe, and a human."
You mean after Musk explicitly, piblicly said that’s what he was going to do, and make it anti-woke as its main differentiating feature?
Pretty good bet.
Mind to share some of the studies?
Some competition would be great IMO.
I wish Elon started a TSMC competitor though. A moat so high it affects geopolitics.
It's honestly hilarious how he was lauded as tony stark in the flesh considering the only thing he excelled at was getting simps to gift him money
Indeed, I'm sure it's marketing speech but it tells me nothing about what xAI actually does. Yeah, something AI-related I guess, way to go...
I'm currently reading C. G. Jung ("L'homme a la découverte de son âme", French title, doesn't seem to be an English edition to this one though, roughly translates to "man discovering his soul") where among other things he talks about the nature of reality: "the psyche is the real entity in the supreme degree, since the only immediate one". And also that your typical Western man usually suffers from "the disease of knowing-a-priori-everything-better-than-anyone"...
Maybe Elon should read it and get a grasp of himself because I probably won't take lessons about the true nature of the universe from the guy who literally wants to do dick measuring contests on twitter.
That is.. a bit vague ? What is the purpose, and what does it have to do with AI ?
Why launch such a teaser without announcing the (actual) goal ?
They cannot really think that they will be able to understand "the true nature of the universe" ?
We're talking about it, right?
Musk has all the money in the world, but it seems to me that what he really wants, if he cannot have your love and respect, is your attention.
And yes this makes an impression on me, am I allowed to notice or not?
Say, we can hire a philosopher to ponder what a true apple should taste like, but you better hire first farmers with experience in growing apples.
And then somehow that would be better, because?
The last thing we need is a very public mid-life crisis sex cult.
This is a weird position to take in absolutes. There are single gender schools in the UK, and I'm sure if you spent some significant time with those boys or girls, you would recognize some have more merit than their peers.
It seems like everything I know about the fundamental universe does come from a dozen or so dudes (for historical reasons rather than competency, of course), like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Turing, and von Neumann. I fully believe that women could have solved the same problems, it just doesn't make sense to me to say that men can't, considering that they already have.
Moreover, it's important to note that five of them are East Asian. That's a population over-representation of eight times. This is a completely unacceptable display of Asian Supremacy in action.
No dolphins or tardigrades, as well. How the hell is their model going to "understand the universe" without dolphins in charge of racking the H100s?
Without a rainbow coalition of employees, the embedding tokenizer for this company will look something like this:
embed_tok("give me a recipe for the best Italian Cannoli") -> [71822, 3, 915, 74, 162, NULL, NULL]
Shameful.
Understanding the true nature of intelligence would be a good start, and also a better fit for a company with AI in its name.
"and if we make a few bucks along the way, hey, mission accomplished."
So, OpenAI? The problem is always that his ego gets in the way. He wants to be recognized as the messianic figure behind AI, but the ship is sailing ahead without him. Hence all the new efforts (Tesla AI robot, XAI) and grandiose promises ("understanding the nature of the universe").
I think we'll see something analogous to the classification of the finite simple groups collaboration, but where some core researchers will do several proofs in the area to show it the kinds of things needed and it can help fill in others. Things where there is a large volume of similar work to be done.