Elon Musk Creates New Artificial Intelligence Company X.ai | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Creates New Artificial Intelligence Company X.ai

wsj.com

32 pointstzm20 comments

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Sigh. I'm tired.

Wait, didn't Elon JUST SAY that we needed to put a halt on AI development?

No. He said you did. How else would he catch up?

Unfortunately the man has deluded himself into thinking he’s the savior of humanity.

He thinks AI is bad for humanity, but not if he controls it.

This is in the same vein that he thinks censorship is the worst thing ever unless he is the one doing the censoring.

It’s just sad that his ultimate goal for humanity is letting Grimes’ children live on a Mars space station while Earth is destroyed.

He constantly uses his grand plan as justification for why he should get to hoard obscene amounts of cash .. instead of paying taxes and contributing to the health of the society we currently live in.

His hypocrisy is staggering.

Just as it isn’t inconsistent that Ron Paul put in “earmarks” for his constituents, while simultaneously voting against them all — it isn’t inconsistent for Elon to say “slow down” while accelerating AI R&D.

Any company/nation hobbling their AI programs will be lethally impaired in defence & commerce.

Given his reputation, why would any software engineers want to work for one of his companies?

https://archive.md/qzbbb

I'm interested to see what he does. From his public comments, he doesn't understand AI at all, but that's often helpful as a businessman, because you are not constrained by what the technology actually does.

The staggering pride of HNers never ceases to astonish me.

Doesn’t understand AI? While he

- deploys one of the highest capacity inference platforms on the planet

- deploys the most advanced AI self-driving platform

- lands rockets with automation that exceeds the capabilities of traditional control systems

He’s probably forgotten more practical AI expertise than anyone in this conversation is ever going to know…

People who work for him may well be experts. That doesn’t mean he knows anything at all about it himself.

Musk didn’t do any of the things you listed, companies he has ownership in did.

So he simultaneously has limited competency in areas (AI, passenger vehicles, spacecraft, tunnel boring, computer/nerve integration, …) yet he is capable of isolating and hiring and keeping world-leading experts in (checks notes) EVERY one of these areas?

As painful as it may be to realize, Tony Stark is a comic book/movie character and not a real person.

Musk is a bullshitter who has bootstrapped his way to success, admittedly successfully. However, when you look at his well covered statements (too darned many of them :) post-Twitter, it’s obvious that he, for example, knows nothing about software, datacenter admin, nor the world of advertising. I’m willing to extrapolate to believe that he knows little more than the veneer of science and technology that’s necessary to persuade others to finance him.

QED

You’re going to need to prove that you know what you’re talking about. Go print out all of the code you’ve written and be ready to defend it.

/s, hopefully obviously.

The (checks notes) thing is such a poor rhetorical device.

Well these people know they can't reach where he is at, they might be finding some meaning trashing him

Steve Job didn't "understand design", but he understood what a good design can do for his product, and knew what he liked.

So he put the design team as the highest in Apple, and had every other team answer to the constraints of the design. It worked.

Musk may not "understand AI", but he understands what AI can be made to do, and he knows what he likes.

Which frankly, for the boss, is more important than understanding the code. And, he knows how to find and hire the right talent, how to excite them, and how to keep them. And how to ship.

IMO it is unfair to say "his company did it" especially when his rivals in each of those industries failed where he succeeded (including OpenAI, which he gets at least some credit for). He understands enough of what he needs to about both AI and business to make it work.

> While he

s/he/his companies/g

His public comments on AI have left me with the same impression. He probably doesn't understand the technical details of neural nets or statistics. His capabilities are elsewhere (rockets, business, etc).

It isn't pride. It's morbid fascination. Twitter Elon reveals the real competency of that guy. He's Howard Hughes and Starship is a steel Spruce Goose. Starlink has about two orders of magnitude fewer subs than it needs to be sustainable. Etc. So much drama is going to unfold in public. Can't look away.

> deploys the most advanced AI self-driving platform

Other companies are operating with no one in the driver seat.

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