xAI
x.ai
x.ai
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.
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.
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.
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.
People are misinterpreting this as the research goal. No, it's an implicit negation of an ethos - AI Ethics, Trust & Safety, ESG, Politically Correct - that have dominated decision making in product and hiring in tech for the past decade.
Whether or not you agree with him, it's hard to deny that Musk is the only one offering researchers an escape from the bowing to the orthodoxy while also offering an A+ pedigree institution.
in short: do you really believe this is Musk producing an objective truth-aligned AI and not just a Musk-aligned AI?
Hm, I don't think that's true. How does that manifest itself?
> started to micromanage its moderation to benefit himself
Has anyone been banned from the platform?
+ we are talking about Twitter, right? Elon uses Twitter for fun, it's pretty obvious from many of his troll tweets.
Do you have any evidence that people cannot disagree with him when working directly in a professional environment (eg office, zoom call, etc)?
Yes, evidently: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/media/twitter-musk-journalist...
> Do you have any evidence that people cannot disagree with him when working directly in a professional environment (eg office, zoom call, etc)?
Seems so: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twit...
But I admit I don't follow Musk and his controversies very closely, I just looked these up. If you consider yourself disinterested and not a Musk supporter, and you think your take on Musk is representative of the general consensus, I'm happy to learn from you.
The accounts are doing just fine. Stop reading the news. Especially the ones who are consistently attacking Elon to get their portion of ad revenue.
What ideological belief does Musk hold that would create friction with his employees?
What is wrong is this woke supremacist nonsense, that some imbecile in Silicon Valley can dictate the truth about the world according to the woke bible, that's where the problem lies. Americans have gotten really intolerant of other cultures and ways of life. There's 8 billion people on this planet, ffs. We don't need the heavy handed paternalistic nonsense of OpenAI.
If a study is published in a research journal why should ChatGPT not be allowed to give you a summary of it? Why should it be censored because the woke cultists find it too icky?
When you start putting "ethics" in fields like biology (not medicine or bioengineering, just inductive biology) you end up with nonsense like Lamarckism.
Reality has an underlying structure independently of how this structure interacts with our constructed ethical systems.
> Americans have gotten really intolerant of other cultures and ways of life.
It's unclear who to me in America is intolerant. I do think there is an extemism, and it scares me, but I don't think we agree on what the scary intolerance is. And I hope I can be clearer & less bitter/extreme/polarizing when I go to discuss the intolerant extremism I see.
> Why should it be censored because the woke cultists find it too icky?
Censoring is a much higher bar for me. OpenAI is just some corporation, doing their thing. They aren't compelled to hallucinate anything on anyone's behalf, just because there's something out there for them to hallucinate off. An entity should be able to pick what it wants to say. And there's a lot of heinous ugly shit on this planet, and in "research journals" of varying levels of quality that would look bad to bayesian parrot back out.
I can't imagine what authority, what the premise would be, to insist private companies or private citizens must ingest & output any content they find. Or any research journal content, for that too is not some clear objective qualifier; many nations & powers would & could exploit that qualifier to get in biased slanted content, if we started demanding peer reviewed journal as being compelled hallucination material.
This is a private company. They aren't required to hallucinate things that would harm their reputation to produce. That seems fine, & required if they are to survive.
Please stop flagging replies so actively! The intolerance here is saddening.
I don't know a single person on earth who can speak on the full gamut of "tech" topics without revealing themselves "illiterate" on at least some of them. I've no doubt Musk is not some singular exception to this rule.
Genuinely curious: Does anybody take this stuff seriously?
I just feel embarrassed to be working in tech (in Silicon Valley of all places), being associated with these charlatan clowns peddling nonsense like this and being praised for it.
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.
That's kind of what the whole natural sciences community is doing. Like that is one way to define what natural sciences are about. That's basically the biggest goal anyone could mention. Like your cliche "world peace" answer that no beauty contestant ever says any more.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelli...
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.
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
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.
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").
Understanding the true nature of intelligence would be a good start, and also a better fit for a company with AI in its name.
Here's some links I found for the 3 names I searched on
Igor Babuschkin :
* https://babushk.in/index.html
Yuhai (Tony) Wu :
* NeurIPS Chats — Yuhuai Wu: LMs for Math (Minerva) + the Future of Bootstrapping Reasoning [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4DFvgs810o
Toby Pohlen :
Last 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.
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.
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.
Some historical bedtime reading for the curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
What makes us think we can understand it?
How would we know if we could or could not?
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.
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 just whish I could remember/ relive it rather than the tenuous grip of that moment I still preserve.
To be explicit. I'm not claiming what I felt/experienced was 'the thruth' or even 'real'. Just think it was for me the most 'clear' vision in my life, and that I feel a mild sadness it was so fleeting.
42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
… and then what?
$9.17b market cap and traded $148m today. Been trading in a stable range for the last year.
I'm not involved with it, but since you cited it as if it were some lost artifact of history I thought I'd look it up.
"returns 42"
"and if we make a few bucks along the way, hey, mission accomplished."
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?
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.
Demographics might differ for AI researchers or other STEM fields adjacent but in general it seems odd to be surprised when it's literally how things have been for at least decades.
Not saying this is a good thing, that I know why it is like this, or what should be done if anything, I have no idea. But why act surprised? The gender ratio is super off balance for a lot of jobs. My career isn't that long but across four jobs, as far as I can remember, the ratio has remained about as skewed as publicly available metrics suggest it would be, not that I personally pay all that much attention.
I'm not trying to suggest in some roundabout way that this is good or even not bad, but it is rather arbitrary. In truth, "one person" rarely does anything, since in many senses, all of us stand on the shoulders of giants. But, even then, the accomplishments of individual people have been pretty impressive. There are singular people who have discovered the nature of a lot of things despite only having one perspective to bring on their own.
For example:
https://www.celential.ai/blog/percentage-of-female-software-...
https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/
Provide other data if you think that's wrong.