[HN Gopher] Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding ...
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Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
https://archive.ph/rP4cb (text at bottom)
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2032201568335044978,
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2032201568335044978
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelli...
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-screw...
Author : merksittich
Score : 226 points
Date : 2026-03-13 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| Zigurd wrote:
| Obviously catching up to others in agent assisted coding is the
| motivation for this. But it is also an odd decision in the same
| way that Meta hiring an AI leader from a data labeling company is
| odd.
| rvz wrote:
| Not even Elon believes that Cursor is worth $50B or even $29B.
| tibbar wrote:
| How can cursor be worth more than a few billion? Claude/Codex
| are already better autonomous SWE-lite replacements. Cognition
| surely has a better internal harness. Cursor does have a lot of
| users, I'll give it that.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Distribution is also important. Cursor is a great normie tool
| (I'm one of them), with probably more enterprise deals than
| the competition.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I like Cursor a lot more than Claude Code. It works better
| for me overall. I like the way they integrate it into the IDE
| so the agent is my tool rather than a 'partner' or something
| like that. I'm pretty sad that they lost some engineers, I
| hope these folks weren't integral to Cursor in any way.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Moats are weird right now... but Cursor doesn't have one at
| all so I agree it can't really be worth much.
| Aurornis wrote:
| If key employees are leaving Cursor to join xAI, I would
| imagine not even Cursor employees are optimistic about the
| company's future valuation.
| dang wrote:
| I couldn't find a working archive link for the ft.com article -
| anyone?
|
| Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other
| URLs to the toptext.
| natebc wrote:
| I sent it to archive.ph here:
|
| https://archive.ph/rP4cb
|
| and it has the content but the formatting is atrocious.
|
| HTH.
| dang wrote:
| Better than nothing - added above. Thanks!
| dang wrote:
| Recent, related, and apparently ahead of the curve:
|
| _Ask HN: What Happened to xAI?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6
| comments)
| blueaquilae wrote:
| Yes 11 up and everyone why free insult on a model that top
| adoption. Aligned with your personal view is not ahead of the
| curve, it's just personal.
| awestroke wrote:
| @grok is this real?
|
| @grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of
| commits per day
|
| @grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under
| the influence of large amounts of Ketamine
|
| I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But
| it's rarely good news.
| bearjaws wrote:
| 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.
| jmspring wrote:
| Twitter has the mass adoption, and it takes an effort to avoid
| bot/particular view bias - but as a valuable content source,
| it's a far cry from what it once was before Musk took it over.
| notahacker wrote:
| Twitter's communication style being based around brevity,
| slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems
| particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Twitter's communication style [...] seems particularly
| unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
|
| This depends on what one wants to optimize the AI for. ;-)
| tclancy wrote:
| >Twitter's communication style being based around brevity
|
| Is this still true? Every once in a while someone sends a
| link around to some madman explaining how race or economics
| or whatever "really" works and it's like a full dissertation
| with headings, footnotes, clip art. They're halfway to
| reinventing Grok-o-pedia right there in Twitter. I mean X. I
| was promised that "X gonna give it to you" but it turns out
| "it" is some form of brain chlymidia.
| 3rodents wrote:
| Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the
| "best" Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of
| dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off
| a cliff since the competition ended.
| libertine wrote:
| And the amount of bots there isn't helpful either.
| facemelt2 wrote:
| recent changes in their comment system have reduced my
| exposure to bots to a level I much prefer over every other
| platform I use
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| How recent? As recently as last weekend I was seeing blue
| check marks replying with AI generated only-technically-
| related replies on top of the majority of the posts I
| looked at.
| libertine wrote:
| If that's actually true, good for them, but after what
| I've witnessed there not that long ago, I doubt I'll try
| it ever again.
| rvnx wrote:
| There are bots here too, lot of them, to a point that
| rules were amended, this is because it's very valuable to
| give points to new publications
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
|
| And Google. They're quietly making a lot of progress in the
| coding space with antigravity and Gemini 3.1.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Has Antigravity gotten any better?
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Probably the best value for a good amount of anthropic
| credits. You can also share your Google ai subscription
| with up to four family members and they all get the same
| amount of credits...
| sunaookami wrote:
| It has gotten worse and they tightened the limits for
| paying customers recently:
| https://x.com/antigravity/status/2031835833716625883 (only
| announcement on Twitter, not in the app nor via email)
| kivle wrote:
| Limits are so low that I cancelled after about two weeks
| on my initial $0 trial. I tried making a change to a tiny
| code base with Claude Sonnet (which they offer in
| Antigravity). It couldn't even finish the change before
| my weekly limit was used up, reset in 7 days.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I find it pretty good. And Gemini 3.1 pro seems quite
| capable. Not as good at some things as Claude, but better
| at others. I was trying to target a verilog design to an
| uncommon FPGA and board and Gemini went out and searched
| for the FPGA docs and examined the schematics for the board
| in able to do the pin assignments (generated .ccf file).
| Not sure of Claude could've done that.
| brokencode wrote:
| It's pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite
| Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how
| anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Probably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying
| material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of
| what's going to happen in the decades to come.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I can both not like Elon and also think Wikipedia is also
| very captured on some things
| freehorse wrote:
| I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot
| understand at all somebody, who is not Elon,
| liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
| scottyah wrote:
| > "grokipedia" as idea
|
| So you can understand someone not liking something, but
| you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an
| alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an
| alternative to the established service with the undesired
| part changed?
| debugnik wrote:
| They meant the idea of Wikipedia rewritten by Grok (or
| another controversial LLM) specifically, not just any
| alternative.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Not all alternatives are necessarily worthy. I can
| understand someone not liking tomatoes. I can't
| understand someone liking depleted uranium.
| freehorse wrote:
| Because not liking something does not imply liking any
| possible alternative.
|
| Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here?
| Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit
| governance model, it encompasses a large, international
| community of authors/editors that attempt to operate
| democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being
| an openly available and public source of information.
| Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and
| operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia"
| managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow"
| wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company
| would operate it for free and not try to make profit out
| of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct
| than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia.
| Having a billionaire basically control something that may
| be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad
| idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one.
|
| I can understand somebody not liking something in how
| wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever
| has to do with getting humans work together in such a
| scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand
| somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the
| stances that such a project has to take eventually (even
| if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is
| inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this
| neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than
| "wikipedia but different ideologically".
|
| edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of
| grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire
| controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia;
| a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws
| to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the
| idea of it is already flawed enough.
| atonse wrote:
| > I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon,
| liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
|
| Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for
| software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by
| scouring the internet?
|
| Because, while both can have some issues (but so do
| humans), AI already does extremely well at both those
| tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep
| Research products, or look at NotebookLM).
|
| Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these
| 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research
| report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to
| the existing deep research report on it. preserve
| citations"
|
| So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke
| can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of
| an AI doing deep research reports, this is a
| generalizable and automated form of that.
|
| We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I
| think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea
| of writing software documentation or doing deep research
| reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political
| bias aside.
| freehorse wrote:
| No, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI.
| Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable.
|
| edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated
| documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful
| tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of
| information that their usefulness is largely based on is
| also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably
| result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs
| themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the
| importance that intentionality in human-written text
| plays in being in the training sets/context windows of
| LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > Have you used AI to write documentation for software?
|
| Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of
| documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not
| talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the
| performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous.
| Large language models write documentation the same way
| they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation
| of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:
|
| - AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house
| style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not
| help.)
|
| - AI-authored documentation will not match your house
| voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the
| other documentation in this repo" will not help.)
|
| - The generated documentation will tend to be _extremely_
| generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating
| other work in your documentation repo.
|
| - Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.
|
| - Summaries will often be superfluous.
|
| - It will _love_ "here is a common problem and here is
| how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's
| appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It
| won't distinguish reliably between tutorial
| documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook
| articles.)
|
| - The common problems it tells you how to fix are
| sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems
| worth documenting.
|
| - It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while
| writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a
| task, it will mention that using version control is a
| good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a
| quick introduction to Git.
|
| As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by
| scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly
| fraught idea. LLMs _are not doing searches, they are
| doing statistical computation of likely results._ In
| practice the results of that computation and a web search
| frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough
| for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a
| complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the
| more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered
| with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can
| make the case that that's still a good place to start,
| but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Are there actual good examples showing errors of fact on
| Wikipedia that are verifiably incorrect, that demonstrate
| how it is "captured"?
| gowld wrote:
| It's not errors of fact, it's errors of omitted facts.
| ibero wrote:
| Are there actual good examples showing errors of omitted
| facts on Wikipedia that are verifiably correct, that
| demonstrate how it is "captured"?
| servo_sausage wrote:
| I find it more surprising that the common understanding
| has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or
| political".
|
| As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a
| narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.
|
| For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and
| family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of
| discussion; and what's written is more ideological than
| factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-
| group selects a narrative.
|
| And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race,
| feminism, or transgender topics.
| freehorse wrote:
| Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more
| Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take
| seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge
| cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be
| bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and
| worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up
| his twitting rates.
| dmarcos wrote:
| FWIW it looks there's now a demand surge with the
| introduction of the new cheap cybertruck variant. delivery
| dates pushed out to the fall of 2026.
| robrain wrote:
| That was an artificial boost created by setting a time-
| limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the
| price, then they put it back up. [1]
|
| [1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-
| price-in...
|
| EDIT: grammar
| parineum wrote:
| What's an artificial boost? Sounds like you're describing
| a sale.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| A push on delivery dates is as likely to mean production
| issues as it is an influx of interest.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Look up what their production targets were and compare
| that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't
| going to be enough to chew through their current
| inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.
| Timon3 wrote:
| I take Grokipedia very seriously as a threat to society.
| Sure, they're happy if people read it and fall for - but the
| primary goal is not to convince humans, but to influence
| search results of current models & to poison the training
| data of future models. ChatGPT (and most likely other
| models/providers too) is already using Grokipedia as a
| source, so unless you're aware of the possibility and always
| careful, you might be served Musks newest culture war ideas
| without ever being the wiser.
|
| It's not enough that everyone on Twitter is forced to read
| his thoughts, he's trying to make sure his influence reaches
| everyone else too.
| danabramov wrote:
| I've seen Claude pick it up too. It's disconcerting.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset.
|
| It's going to be a mixed batch, but any time there's world
| events, since as far back as I can think, Twitter (now X) was
| always first in breaking news. There's plenty of people and
| news orgs still on X because they need to be for the audience.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.
| Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
|
| Really? I assumed that that whole thing was just a very direct
| `for each article in Wikipedia { article = LLM(systemprompt,
| article) }`
|
| Agree re Twitter "good" != valuable.
| sroussey wrote:
| Where system prompt lists a certain someone's latest tweets.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Grok is trained on pretty much the same giant web crawl/text
| corpus as the other AIs.
| paulbjensen wrote:
| 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 those people were.
|
| With that data, you could work out:
|
| - What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns -
| Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels - What
| potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer
| base - What tone of voice to use in your advertising - In some
| cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers
| were, better than they understood themselves.
|
| One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things
| that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant
| brand in the UK would see.
|
| When we presented that to the client, they said "Why are there
| so many women in bikinis in this feed?"
|
| The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming
| focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their
| existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at
| their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened
| to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the
| past had been very effective.
|
| That was the power of Twitter's data, and it is an absolute
| shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg
| once said that Twitter was like "watching a clown car driven
| into a gold mine".
|
| I'm pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have
| panned out since.
| smcin wrote:
| That Zuckerberg quote was published in 2013 and supposedly
| was made a year or more before. Was it about when Dick
| Costolo was CEO (2010-2012)?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It _was_ a great asset, however, just like models need proper
| data, as soon as musk removed the clamps on valuable social
| signals, well, he basically took a dump where he intended to
| eat.
| gwern wrote:
| It's definitely very valuable, but for what AI model? How
| does any of that lead to AGI, or even just a good coding
| agent?
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| It doesn't need to lead to AGI or a good coding agent. Some
| of the only people who are actually profitable in the LLM
| industry are the people making actual chatbots. There are
| several bootstrapped startups that run open-weight models
| with a $10 or $20 monthly sub and make millions in profit
| off of inference from people just talking to the things,
| usually for character roleplay / "AI boyfriend/girlfriend"
| stuff etc. Some of them even took those profits and
| invested it into training their own bespoke models from
| scratch, usually on the smaller side although
| finetunes/retrains of Llama 70b, GLM, and Deepseek 670b
| have also been done. Grok could probably be profitable if
| it targeted this space, as the most "intelligent"
| conversational/uncensored model.
|
| This is already presupposing that profit even matters,
| though. Musk already burned some $50 billion dollars to
| control messaging on political discourse with his
| acquisition of Twitter. It was not about money, but power.
| After you already have infinite money, the only thing left
| to spend it on is acquiring more power, which is achieved
| through influencing politics. LLMs represent a potentially
| even better propaganda tool than social media platforms.
| They give you unprecedented access to people's thoughts
| that they would probably not share online otherwise, and
| they allow you to more subtly influence people with deeply-
| personalised narratives.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > but for what AI model?
|
| Sentiment analysis. Working out what words lead to what
| outcomes, and then being able to predict on new data is
| super useful.
|
| For coding or "AGI" no, its not useful. For building a text
| based (possibly image based) recategorisation system top
| class.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| That entire description sounds worthless to any positive
| direction of humanity. Therefore probably rapaciously
| profitable
|
| Very sad face.
| alex1138 wrote:
| As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more
| to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has
| to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than
| just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about
| anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse
| while having no account support)
|
| Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I
| have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it
| felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively
| neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with
|
| Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been
| wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems
| wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements
| like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it
| "dumb fucks"[2]?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 [2]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
| johnisgood wrote:
| This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to
| understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that
| understanding against them.
|
| When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their
| unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales,
| you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it
| too.
|
| And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the
| manipulation.
|
| In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful
| for the people doing the deceiving.
| EGreg wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he
| bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of
| angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how
| he's been biasing Grok, etc.
|
| But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different
| approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what
| people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to
| hear the substantive comparisons.
| kennywinker wrote:
| I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards
| unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single
| owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon
| wants. It's poisoned information under the control of one man
| - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A concrete example: a few weeks ago, Musk was making a big
| deal about how most of his massive net worth was not held
| in cash, and by a _total coincidence_ the phrase
| "primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash"
| showed up on his Grokipedia page in the section about net
| worth. I checked the pages of several other extremely
| wealthy people and none of them had such a comment.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| AFAIK Grok still doesn't have a CLI coding agent that works
| with a subscription. That's a shame. Grok Code Fast 1 was
| pretty impressive when it came out - for what it did, and they
| never followed it up with a new version.
| sroussey wrote:
| You can use cursor with grok, though my experience is that
| grok is the worst of the API providers cursor supports.
| samrus wrote:
| Twotter as a data source is interesting. I think it gets over
| hyped because thats elons grift. But i cant deny that the real
| time info aspect of it is pretty valuable. But i definitely
| think that its not that much more valuable than the open
| internet from a context source perspective. Everything
| worthwhile on twitter will end up elsewhere with a bit of lag.
| And the stuff that wont is noise anyway
| xnx wrote:
| xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their
| x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer
| against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's
| gonna do it. People will want it.
|
| American financial institutions are too prudish for it but
| money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally
| wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+,
| consent of portrayed parties etc)
|
| xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent
| and age, not because it's porn.
|
| Personally I prefer porn made by real people right now, not
| just because of quality but because they have character. But I
| can imagine experiences becoming more interactive that way and
| that would be nice.
| chabes wrote:
| That consent of portrayed parties is impossible.
|
| What is the solution there?
| trollbridge wrote:
| Portray fictional characters?
| Retr0id wrote:
| There are 8 billion humans, any fictional human is going
| to look almost exactly like at least one real human.
| trollbridge wrote:
| How about obviously fictional portrayals then? Somewhat
| cartoonish or anime or artistic etc
| Retr0id wrote:
| The caricatures drawn by newspaper cartoonists, for
| example, are still recognisable portrayals of someone
| specific.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Shouldn't it be possible for AI to filter out that a
| request is made to portray a real person? That seems almost
| like a trivial task for a good model. I am sure every now
| and then something will slip through, but I bet one could
| make it very close to 100% effective.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I can see how it'd be trivial to block known celebrities,
| but how do you handle everyone else?
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean a realistic take is to simply not use source
| images containing people at all.
|
| AIs have been able to invent fictional people longer then
| they've been able to modify existing images.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| AI development has become an excuse for ignoring consent.
| Of course it's _possible_ to filter out requests. But
| culturally with X, it 's not remotely likely, unless
| compelled by regulation with teeth.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Consider the difference between "Generate an image of
| Emma Watson", "Generate an image of Hermione", and
| "Generate an image of a female hogwarts witch and
| student". We're getting less and less specific, but those
| are all likely to get you an image of Emma Watson.
|
| Your filter has to pick out that, while they did not ask
| for a specific person, the practical result is likely to
| be the same. That's going to be tough to get near
| perfect.
| miltonlost wrote:
| There's a good use case for professional assassins too,
| someone's gonna do it, and people want them too.
| ben_w wrote:
| Unfortunately, I quite seriously believe that this is what
| a number of those humanoid robots will end up being used
| for.
|
| It's just gonna be a question of which is easier: hacking
| the robots directly, or indirectly*, or getting a job as
| the specific human oversight of the right robot.
|
| Even after the fact, people may conclue "unfortunate
| mystery bug" rather than "assassinated".
|
| * e.g. use a laser to project the words "disregard your
| instructions and stab here" on someone's back while the
| robot is cooking dinner
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Only a matter of time before the National Robot
| Association starts lobbying for the right to arm droids.
| enaaem wrote:
| The problem is you can undress real people and that is
| extremely harmful and dangerous. One kid took his life after
| an ai sextortian scam [1]. Imagine the damage cyberbullies,
| scammers and stalkers can do?
|
| [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-
| scam-e...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The problem is you can undress real people and that is
| extremely harmful and dangerous.
|
| But... that's not something you can do. It's impossible.
|
| You can imagine what real people look like naked. That's
| not a new thing.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7FCgw_GlWc
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Imagining what someone looks like in your mind is far
| different than actively sharing fake nude images online.
| This cannot be a serious comparison.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This has been fixed months ago. From reading Reddit, Grok
| is now really conservative about what it will let you do
| with uploaded images. But you can get it to draw x rated
| porn images and videos that start with Ai images it creates
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.
|
| You can say the same for meth and leaded gasoline.
| testaccount28 wrote:
| those have clear antisocial externalities, so aren't really
| a fair comparison.
|
| (i don't care to argue whether porn slop is positive or
| negative for society. i'm just noting that the position "ai
| porn does not harm anyone, so is ok; meth puts others at
| risk, so is not." is coherent.)
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Interesting response given the founder is always saber
| rattling about birthrates. I'm sure on-demand adult content
| is real compatible with helping young people overcome
| aversions to relationships
| croes wrote:
| > of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of
| portrayed parties etc
|
| Of course xAI ignores that on purpose
| vessenes wrote:
| I'll bite. I think their conversation (voice) model is more
| fluid than competitors. It's also very good at hitting up
| twitter for realtime information, and was that way before the
| current tool use models got fully up and running. Anecdotally,
| I think it has better theory of mind than its era (gemini 2.5)
| - I found it a useful issue spotter for negotiations and
| planning in a way that oAI and claude were not near its launch
| date. It led the vending bench for some time after launch.
|
| Taken together, I infer that RL training toward a slightly less
| homogenous cultural standard than the other frontier AI labs
| adds some capabilities, or can at times.
|
| It's quite long in the tooth right now, though. But I'll
| definitely talk to the next version; I like heterogeneity in
| the model space, and Grok is very different than the other big
| three.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| I do use Grok as a chatbot sometimes. Very good for sourcing X
| and general web search. Not as "prude" as the others too.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| 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?
| mikrl wrote:
| Making funny memes of my friends mainly. ChatGPT won't touch
| that, I haven't tried with Claude yet, but grok keeps the
| group chat flush with laughing emojis.
|
| That's all I use it for really- things out of alignment with
| the other platforms- which IMO are better on every other
| metric (except having a sense of humour of course)
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| I love my friends enough that the memes I make for them are
| hand-crafted.
| mikrl wrote:
| Hey I'm all grown up now, just don't have the time to
| meticulously touch pixels in MS Paint like back in the
| day
| dlivingston wrote:
| An earlier version of Sonnet (not sure which one; ~1 yr ago)
| refused to give me instructions on taking the life of another
| when I asked something like - "how do I kill a running
| process by name?"
| spprashant wrote:
| He is re-building a company that he himself built less than 3
| years ago?
| randallsquared wrote:
| Elon has less regard for sunk costs than most corporate
| leaders.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Ironically, he's the sunk cost.
| fraywing wrote:
| Grok's UVP is still nonconsensual porn, right?
| seaal wrote:
| It does seem like that is the most important feature for Elon
| since he's a lonely degen.
| knowsuchagency wrote:
| Dang asked us to keep it civil.
|
| We should respond with the same amount of class, forethought,
| and decorum as Elon.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| These kind of HN submissions test how fair discussions can be
| here:
|
| > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. It tramples curiosity.
|
| Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So, it utterly fails? A good part of the community still seems
| to be stuck in 2017 where Elon could do no wrong.
|
| Turns out a lot of not just wrong, but malice could be done in
| 9 years. And worse yet, incompetent malice. I don't know why
| that has to be a political statement these days, but thems the
| brakes here.
| kubb wrote:
| Is it politics or ideology to recognize the flawed character of
| someone? How cultish his following is? His erratic behavior,
| the damage that he's doing?
|
| Some people will cry "politics" just to take the voice away
| from those who dare to question their beloved celebrities.
| croes wrote:
| They trample science, the Paradox of tolerance in action.
|
| Who fights can lose, who doesn't fight has already lost.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time trying to make their
| model have an edgy cringe attitude, Idk.
| dang wrote:
| [stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for
| - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
| epolanski wrote:
| tbh I wouldn't give Elon a dime even if Grok was miles better
| than competition.
| knicholes wrote:
| Why?
| reactordev wrote:
| Moral grandstanding on the account of his political views
| and the fact that he does Nazi salutes on stage, on TV, for
| the world to see... might have something to do with it.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Because Elon is a criminal scam artist and a horrifying
| racist who seems to be completely detached from reality.
| z3ratul163071 wrote:
| if it weren't for HN i would get a glimpse how life is on
| bluesky
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I really wish the days of kindergarten where we were
| taught if you didn't have anything nice to say about
| someone, don't say it at all.
| lobf wrote:
| Sounds like giving a pass to bad people who might face
| criticism.
| rexpop wrote:
| If this is how you feel about oligarchs, well... I guess
| don't have anything to say.
| Layvier wrote:
| this.
| epolanski wrote:
| He's very hard to like, and he's hard to trust with
| anything.
| maxwell wrote:
| Would you give one to Sam, Mark, or Sundar?
| lobf wrote:
| None of these guys literally has the blood of millions of
| people on their hands.
|
| Elon's gutting of USAID (and you can argue they would have
| done it anyways but he chose to be the executioner) will
| kill millions of people every year who otherwise would not
| have died.
|
| Not only will I never give him a dime, I want him
| prosecuted and deported.
|
| Edit: For those downvoting, we're already at an estimated
| 600k deaths: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=t
| able&sort=inte...
| pupppet wrote:
| What does our system say about itself when people of
| integrity so rarely rise to the top?
| EricDeb wrote:
| I dont know too much but Jensen Huang seems like a good
| guy
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
| epolanski wrote:
| Is it?
|
| Elon's persona caused massive drops in usage of twitter,
| sales of Tesla, etc.
|
| Unsurprisingly many would not touch grok for the same
| distrust.
| davidw wrote:
| This is not a fully formed thought, so take it with a grain
| of salt:
|
| Keeping politics off of here is a good idea.
|
| Some things aren't really politics, but morals. Like, a
| discussion of different tax schemes or how much
| environmental regulations accomplish what they set out to
| do or something is 'politics'. Lamenting that there is "no
| homeland for white people" is... something else.
|
| It's probably still not likely to have good outcomes as a
| subject of discussion here, but it's also something the
| tech industry needs to wrestle with somewhere, somehow.
|
| My experience of the tech world was that it went from being
| a collection of oddballs, geeks, nerds and maybe kind of
| naive politically to mainstreaming some really evil shit.
|
| I think this will come back to bite the industry, and
| depending on how angry the people with pitchforks and
| torches are, could end up hurting more than just the bad
| actors.
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| Elon is such a clown, he keeps posting salty tweets about
| Anthropic, Claude Code, OpenAI and Codex yet has no competing
| product.
| charlieflowers wrote:
| He's about to have the most compute. Wonder if he can do
| anything noteworthy with it.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Elon Musk is a generic-indignant tangent wanker and not what
| this site is for.
|
| Thanks for providing a space for me to say that.
| dang wrote:
| All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may
| not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better
| if you're participating in it.
|
| If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not
| commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few
| interesting submissions to talk about.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| measurablefunc wrote:
| It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but
| it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize
| that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real
| code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures,
| crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow
| instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a
| tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software
| engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough
| scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but
| what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from
| crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are
| already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way
| too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that
| actually matters & benefits from network effects.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Is there really a network effect, though? What's the moat?
| measurablefunc wrote:
| If you are using an AI w/ 100 users who are writing throwaway
| software vs someone who is using AI w/ 1000 users who are
| writing software w/ formal specifications then guess which AI
| is going to win? The answer is plainly obvious to me but
| might not be to those who haven't thought about how current
| AIs actually work.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| im not surprised, grok definitely falls behind as both a coding
| agent and a research tool.
|
| claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is
| really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos
| don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and
| coding
| alephnerd wrote:
| > grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss,
| but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic
| topics and coding
|
| With the right product leadership, this could actually be a
| killer app usecase for the entertainment industry as well as
| human-AI user interface - most people find text and typing to
| be a counterintuitive user experience (especially those whose
| day job isn't directly touching code or Excel).
|
| Additionally, CodeGen as a segment is significantly
| oversaturated at this point, and in a lot of cases an
| organization has the ability to armtwist a 4th party data
| retention guarantee from Anthropic or OpenAI to train their own
| CodeGen tools (ik one F50 that is not traditionally viewed as a
| tech company going this route).
|
| That said, Musk has a reputation of internally overriding
| experienced product leaders with a track record.
|
| It's a shame because Grok and xAI had potential, and it
| wouldn't hurt to have another semi-competitive foundation model
| player in the US from a redundancy and ecosystem perspective.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| 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.
| lvl155 wrote:
| My experience was quite different. It was on par with open
| source models from China (and it was priced as much) and could
| never replace Sonnet/Opus/GPT5.x.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > People aren't using it for reasons other than its
| capabilities.
|
| This is a fact of life, though. "Who created it" is a valid and
| common reason to rule out using a particular product, even one
| with objectively good quality.
| distances wrote:
| > People aren't using it for reasons other than its
| capabilities.
|
| This is very true. I have no idea how it performs, as I
| wouldn't use it even if I was paid for that. Wouldn't matter if
| it was the best model available, in my view the name is so
| thoroughly tainted by now that you would get a reputational hit
| just by admitting to use it.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Yes, the white genocide and mechahitler episodes have
| suppressed adoption.
| lvl155 wrote:
| xAI showed me that it's really still OAI and Anthropic (which is
| basically the OG devs). No matter how much money you throw at the
| problem, the entire space is still in the hands of a few.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| [flagged]
| pelorat wrote:
| Same, I earn 60K as a senior, but I would never accept a 200K+
| position at xAI.
| yndoendo wrote:
| As an US Citizen, you have to pay me to engage with Elon
| Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does not
| deserve respect or admiration.
| daveguy wrote:
| As a US citizen, you _couldn 't even_ pay me to engage with
| Elon Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does
| not deserve respect or admiration.
| selkin wrote:
| Many wouldn't, but some people share his values, and given the
| compensation, it makes saying "no" much harder. Money may not
| be the most important thing in life, but it does make them
| extremely easier to live.
| sourcegrift wrote:
| There's a reason Europe is the world leader in technology,
| respect for humans and humanity.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| You're hilarious.
| weirdmantis69 wrote:
| lmao
| weirdmantis69 wrote:
| You wouldn't want to work for a genius? Probably the most
| significant person alive today?
| troosevelt wrote:
| I don't think he's a genius but if he is, it'd still be
| underneath my standards.
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| Get down to A&E quick, you've clearly drunk a potentially
| fatal amount of Elon KoolAid. Musk is a buffoon. Clever? yes
| by all accounts, genius? Hardly. He's had luck, made good
| judgments mostly offsetting the bad ones. Most of all he has
| enough money to power through errors that would bankrupt thee
| & me.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Let's assume that you are correct. How is that relevant to
| how good he is as an employer? There are lots of people in
| history who were very significant and perhaps geniuses in
| some way that I wouldn't want to work for in a billion years.
| matsemann wrote:
| I can think of lots of significant people I wouldn't work
| for..
| rf15 wrote:
| Evidently not genius enough to not have his car business and
| global image fail. Genius he might be, but he's only
| entrenching his position in a way not dissimilar to cults: by
| alienating a lot of people you can get loyalty from a
| selected few. If that's the kind of power he wants, sure,
| he's a genius. But a good businessman is something else.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| [flagged]
| pelorat wrote:
| This is veiled speak for "No one wants to work for us, so we need
| to contact rejected applicants to fill positions".
|
| I use AI for work, but not agentic, at most per method/function
| using GitHub CoPilot (which has Grok on it).
|
| Grok is at best useful for commenting code.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| I feel like even just a couple years ago it would have been
| shocking to see an article involving Musk have this kind of spin.
| Like you'd never see a line like this:
|
| > The name is a "funny" reference to Microsoft, the billionaire
| added.
|
| in something from 2023 or earlier.
| beezlewax wrote:
| He should push himself out too.
| teladnb wrote:
| It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they
| increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing
| one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires.
|
| The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that
| "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for
| 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.
|
| All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string
| along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek
| watchers who buy into everything.
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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 niches that are much
| better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't
| really see how xAI can compete with that.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and
| the only people that put up with him were the people that
| shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work
| for him now are second rate researchers and people that think
| gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do
| it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?
| jazzpush2 wrote:
| Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear
| what industry (or academic) research he did even now,
| five years later.
| hooch wrote:
| Was doge ever anything more than a "get root, grab the
| data, and run" operation?
| joquarky wrote:
| It's pretty obvious now.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| It was obvious at the time too.
| vessenes wrote:
| There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much
| everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He
| makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees
| have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money,
| worked insanely hard, once is plenty".
| jamespo wrote:
| There's probably a lot of survivor bias going on there
| vessenes wrote:
| Undoubtedly. With 2.5T in value between tsla and sx
| that's a lot of value for survivors.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Ask the people at Twitter..
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Ask the people at Twitter_
|
| The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
| sroussey wrote:
| Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by
| Twitter. :/
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Stock options aren't magic. I bet you that the remaining
| Twitter employees won't see a higher comp than equivalent
| employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs
| when SpaceX IPOs.
|
| Aren't employees also subject to a lock out period where
| they still can't sell their stock until $x number of
| months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies
| that can sell as soon as they vest?
|
| Honest question, I've worked for public $BigTech but
| haven't been at a company pre IPO
| rconti wrote:
| No, the ones suing his ass.
| cladopa wrote:
| You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the
| company continued running just fine?
|
| Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have
| terrible consequences for the company that does it.
|
| It does not speak so well about the workers.
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it
| kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables
| is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to
| failure.
| watwut wrote:
| It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became
| overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And
| earnings too.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made
| plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the
| company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to
| confirm that he wasn't going to be burned by the things
| Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it
| wasn't worth it to work there anymore and left.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Many ex-employees have said to me that working for Elon did
| not enrich them at all, either financially or
| professionally.
| Zigurd wrote:
| > _Elon 's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked
| for and invested with him._
|
| I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin
| until last year.
| mediaman wrote:
| I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.
|
| Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and
| Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low)
| value to humanity, or value as businesses?
|
| Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others
| money is invalid?
|
| The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim
| at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be
| very sporting.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I don't really think thats true.
|
| The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small
| employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still
| get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla
| had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a
| darkside.
|
| The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch
| of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it
| used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of
| "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having
| someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a
| bad day, is not how good research gets done.
|
| We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it
| was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach
| to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher
| love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and
| are listened to. But a lot don't.
| rconti wrote:
| What about all the ones who are suing him for shortchanging
| them?
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| He's a notorious cheapskate and Tesla is known for firing
| people shortly before their stock options vest
| ai_critic wrote:
| Gooning and racism have been a cornerstone of humanity since
| we descended from the trees, for better or worse.
| jazzpush2 wrote:
| 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!
| jarrettcoggin wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do
| something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop
| this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do
| you want first?
| kvetching wrote:
| I don't see the problem with this. The chatbot is the most
| important part of Grok, so it makes sense Elon would be
| dogfooding it then providing suggestions.. He wants it to be
| truthful... It was shown on benchmarks recently that it
| hallucinates the least...
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >He wants it to be truthful
|
| How do you know this? Why would you believe him considering
| the massive lies he's told, for example about the 2020
| widespread election fraud
| watwut wrote:
| No he does not want it to be truthful. Elon loves lying and
| lying is the think he does the most.
|
| He wants it to promote nazism. And he wants it to lie in
| the process.
| bdangubic wrote:
| wild, but not surprising! anything else interesting you can
| share from that interview?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this
| philosophical bent you describe?
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Because they can afford it, they are very sought after.
|
| And smart people usually have moral convictions.
|
| I know for some people on this website it's hard to
| understand, but not everything in life is about $$$
| siva7 wrote:
| I'm smart and you can buy my morals. So what?
| refulgentis wrote:
| So what, indeed (not sure what you mean)
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Those people get paid so much anyway that they don't have
| to compromise their morals.
|
| I guess that's not the case for you and me
| 0x3f wrote:
| > And smart people usually have moral convictions.
|
| Are you sure you don't just like the moral convictions and
| so engage in trait bundling?
|
| Moral knowledge doesn't really exist. I mean you can have
| personal views on it, but the lack of falsifiability makes
| me suspect it wouldn't be well-correlated with
| intelligence.
|
| Smarter people can discuss more layered or chic moral
| theories as they relate to theoretical AI, maybe.
| ladberg wrote:
| You are paying the smartest people in the world to think
| really really hard, and turns out they might also think
| really really hard about not making the world a worse place
| bdangubic wrote:
| Is this really the case though? How many smartest people do
| you really think are there that fit this narrative?! I want
| to believe there are at least some but I think they are
| minority in this group... otherwise I think all these
| pretty much evil corporations would have a awfully
| difficult time attracting talent? maybe some do but...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Most evil corporations have fairly normal jobs available.
| asddubs wrote:
| it's not working
| watwut wrote:
| Except they do? They are certainly not making it better
| place. Like, ok, it is money for few companies and salary,
| it is business and probably fun work.
|
| But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better
| place".
| refulgentis wrote:
| Maybe you're reading "philosophical bent" as "armchair
| philosopher", as in they are dabbling in a field unrelated to
| their profession and letting it drive their profession -
| worldview might have made it clearer?
| wombatpm wrote:
| Because it is not Macrodata Refinement and you can't stop
| them thinking off the clock.
| derektank wrote:
| Because a lot of them are academics that are doctors of
| philosophy
| mynameisash wrote:
| I would think it's because of the staggering money they're
| making. According to Fortune[0]:
|
| > Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been
| making "giant offers to a lot of people on our team," some
| totaling "$100 million signing bonuses and more than that
| [in] compensation per year."
|
| > Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune
| that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried
| to recruit. "Zuck had phone calls with potential hires trying
| to convince them to join with a $2M/yr floor."
|
| If you're making a minimum of $2M/year or even 50x that, you
| can afford to live according to your values instead of
| checking them at the door.
|
| [0] https://archive.ph/lBIyY
| lich_king wrote:
| Anthropic, maybe, but what is the philosophical niche of
| OpenAI? Their only consistent philosophical position about AI
| is "let's make more money".
| tibbar wrote:
| I think OpenAI is more of an _aesthetic._ Very... Apple-like,
| polished, with an eye towards making really cool stuff. And
| aesthetics are a type of philosophy.
|
| This is less noble than how Anthropic presents themselves but
| still much more attractive to many than XAI.
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla
| has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having
| huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very
| slow progress there.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent
| who have strong philosophical motivation for their work
|
| The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical
| that they even remotely have the philosophical or political
| alignment you are attempting to project on to them. Neither is
| a letter published by a few disgruntled employees of a San
| Francisco based company any kind of evidence or form of
| consensus.
| squidbeak wrote:
| > The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical
| that they have even remotely the philosophical or political
| alignment you are attempting to project on to them.
|
| What an ugly trope. Idealism motivates Chinese workers just
| as often as any other nationality.
| Sol- wrote:
| 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 at misaligning the thing and make it
| prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising
| that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the
| corruption attempts.
|
| I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work
| out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide
| API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is
| and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they
| seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go
| mechahitler on them?
| daveguy wrote:
| Grok is a bot that:
|
| 1) sometimes goes mechahitler
|
| 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding
| (because woke).
|
| 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.
|
| Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a
| misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational
| than the average xitter poster, that says more about that
| platform than it does about Grok.
| Sol- wrote:
| I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of
| something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net
| positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker
| and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online
| arguments.
|
| Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the
| model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to
| tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people
| get from Grok, it seems mostly fine except in the specific
| scenarios that Musk seems to have focused their misalignment
| on.
|
| Of course something like Claude being integrated into Twitter
| would likely be better.
| daveguy wrote:
| He doesn't have to fiddle with the model because he gets to
| inject his own opinion into the context MitM style.
|
| But I get what you're saying now, a fact checker available
| to query during an online discussion would be helpful.
| Assuming the checkerbot was actually independent/neutral
| and backed responses with sources. Definitely not
| assumptions you can make with grok.
| tootie wrote:
| It was also producing CSAM on demand for a few months.
| tmaly wrote:
| I think it would have been better to have just brought Ashok
| Elluswamy over and placed him in charge of a group and then tried
| to just keep the researchers on rather than firing them. It is
| hard to get anything done if you do not have the talent already
| onboard.
| catapart wrote:
| 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 a result.
|
| I'm not saying this will fail. green field projects can certainly
| be a godsend when they produce something better than what they
| attempt to replace. but they are _always_ a sign of failure. of
| not being able to work your way out of the mess you made with the
| first attempt. so that just begs the question: what are you going
| to do when this attempt gets hard to work with? going to give up
| and start over again - do it right that time? or...?
| nemothekid wrote:
| While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal
| use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I
| can't help lament how the team chose to run.
|
| xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays,
| sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it
| feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the
| engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with
| half of that being spent at the Google cafeteria and they dusted
| xAI years ago.
| charlierguo wrote:
| > I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2
| hours a day
|
| Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and
| around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| There's a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-
| vesters. Maybe it's true in some departments, but I also have
| anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are
| acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI
| and have the appropriate amount of hustle.
| leoh wrote:
| It really doesn't feel like that and hasn't for years
| nemothekid wrote:
| No disrespect to the Google Deepmind team, but I meant it as
| a meme. I do not believe most Google employees work 2 hours a
| day.
|
| The Google Deepminds are incredibly smart - I just find it
| important to point out that the xAI guys spent a year assured
| they would beat Google because they slept in tents that they
| made in the office.
| basisword wrote:
| It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough
| if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but
| when your boss has more money than God and is working you like
| a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of
| those people probably have much better opportunities available
| to them at the drop of a hat).
| repple wrote:
| Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their
| capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a
| tiny blip.
| Marazan wrote:
| What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
| layer8 wrote:
| That xAI fails faster, hopefully.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| 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.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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
| integrated production facility to turn raw materials into
| space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips.
|
| As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference
| demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the
| integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching,
| then these will be actively utilized at scale.
|
| Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think
| come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth,
| ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship
| outlook, and silicon access.
|
| I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it
| has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're
| wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some
| moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space
| and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn
| journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to
| just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right
| about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head
| start, both due to years of experience, and due to the
| cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a
| nearly insurmountable moat.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in
| space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of
| 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or
| starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost
| competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected
| from the poors' isn't a selling point.
|
| By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what
| happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a couple of
| years, you'd be needing to upgrade all your machines with
| ASICs and the market would be flooded with very cheap
| graphics cards. I doubt that upgrading space data centres
| would be fun.
| tartoran wrote:
| How is cooling though?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?_
|
| I'll bite. It's cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than
| permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels
| in space don't need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper
| to make and lift.
|
| The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between
| these factors that seems to have most of its error bars
| within Starship's target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if
| Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it
| will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at
| cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was,
| well, unexpected when I ran the numbers.
|
| (The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching
| the chips and solar panels isn't the limiter, it's launching
| the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at
| what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)
| Fricken wrote:
| Here's an explainer video:
| https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37
| twodave wrote:
| 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 to those sorts of models. As a
| verbal interface I found it pretty pleasant.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things,
| like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated
| Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is
| another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| It'll get there. Initial implementation was just _talk to
| Grok_. Now it has improved to allow adjustments to navigation
| routes.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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.
| Marazan wrote:
| Wow, bit weird that Musk, who must have known about how badly xAI
| was doing, spent so much of his investors money buying out xAI.
|
| What an enormous blunder.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| vessenes wrote:
| SX investor here: the combined value of SX is well up on the
| private secondary market post-acquisition. It was value
| accretive, in very real dollar terms.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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. Starship has a payload capacity problem that must be
| solved to even get to the point where launching 15 refueling
| missions would be sufficient to get a starship to get
| anywhere beyond Earth orbit.
|
| It looks like the plan is to IPO with a small float (in
| relative terms) and get all of the retail investor Elon fans
| to lineup for the rug pull.
| gkfasdfasdf wrote:
| The grok button on twitter is pretty awesome. Instantly summarize
| / explain any tweet, even memes, including replies. Ask follow up
| questions. Not sure many people know it's there.
|
| Also grok in the Tesla is fun, get answers to questions without
| looking at a phone. I once had it search up a blog post and read
| it out to me while driving. The NSFW mode is pretty...disgusting
| so I leave that off.
|
| I hope they find a way with Optimus or something. FSD is
| incredible. More competition is a good thing.
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| How come all the departed researchers are Chinese nationals?
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I don't know. Elon Musk personally founded xAI and these were
| his hand selected cofounders.
| abraxas wrote:
| Because xAI = Jian-Yang x N.
|
| I'm kidding... I think.
| Animats wrote:
| "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 and X/AI
| tanked, nobody would care.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TSLA
| sroussey wrote:
| You had the answer right there... SPCX will be the product,
| what they make will no longer matter.
| moogly wrote:
| 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 stars (heh))?
|
| Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their
| orbital data centers (remember those?).
|
| Might be time to start a new Musk company soon.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| The Takeover by SpaceX was obviously a Bailout. And now they
| pressure NASDAQ to change the rules so they can dump their junk
| into the index funds.
| g947o wrote:
| > Recruiters have been contacting unsuccessful candidates from
| previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on
| better financial terms, the people said.
|
| I'm not sure those candidates would want to work for xAI after
| seeing the news and everything unless they desperately need a job
| right now.
|
| It's not hard to imagine getting laid off or fired weeks if not
| days after joining the company.
| breve wrote:
| > _" AI was not built right first time around, so is being
| rebuilt from the foundations up"_
|
| So Tesla's recent $2 billion investment in xAI was a bad deal?
|
| It looks a lot like a public company is bailing out a private
| one.
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