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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how and why Grok would be related to "understanding the nature of the universe", as Musk puts it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but they basically just burned more cash than any human should have to buy Nvidia GPUs and make them predict natural language, right? So, they are somewhat on-par with all the other companies that did the same.

This is not innovation, this is baseless hype over a mediocre technology. I use AI every day, so it's not like I don't see its uses, it's just not that big of a deal.

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There are two answers to this.

Answer 1: Some people think that LLMs are a path to the singularity, a self-improving intelligent program that will vastly exceed human intelligence and will be able to increase its knowledge exponentially, quickly answering all answerable scientific questions.

Answer 2: LLM companies need to keep the hype train rolling. I didn't watch the whole clip; I jumped around a bit, but I noticed that every time Musk interjected something, it was to exaggerate what was previously said. "Grok contains the whole internet"—"the whole of human knowledge, actually!"

I think that both answer 1 and answer 2 apply to Musk. He seems to believe that they're building a god-like entity, and he also needs to keep the money train rolling.

There's a more short-term goal for Grok, which is to replace what is left of the federal government with AI. That will significantly boost the money train, but is also a utopian (for some, dystopian for others) goal of replacing the expensive 'deep state' with a slim set of impartial algorithms.

Glad I don't live in the US, that sounds like a miserable idea.

LLMs don't seem to be very impartial so far. Quite the opposite in fact, they're entirely beholden to the prejudices of their trainers.

Thankfully grok does not seem to have the bias the Elon promised on twitter.

Is there a citation for this?

"Elon Musk Ally Tells Staff ‘AI-First’ Is the Future of Key Government Agency" from Wired

https://archive.is/jyFCy

This isn't unequivocal proof, but the broad goal automation lends itself pretty strongly to LLMs, and oh boy what LLM technology do you think they want to use.

an ai god would fit well with the dark enlightenment ideas of musk and his cronies

>he also needs to keep the money train rolling.

this and only this, everything he says when talking about how good his products are, he lies and exaggerates to get investors - from the promise of 2 manned missions to mars in 2024, to a 300 ton payload in space, and FSD.

Whatever it takes to pad the wallet.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't contain the whole of human knowledge... I doubt grok knows my youtube password or my bank PIN

he may have deleted it but… around 2020 or so there was starting to be a lot of hype about llms. elon musk responded to a “doomer” on twitter saying that he “didnt see the potential for that” referring to LLMs achieving AGI. it was a 100% dismissal of everything he is saying now. at that point elon musk had already been saying publicly for years “AI is more dangerous than nukes.” but he also had voluntarily walked away from openAI which he would never do if he thought there was any chance of AGI. i just want to known the truth… is this really just advanced search and some jobs will be lost because they ended up being nothing more than search tasks (ie coding boilerplate) or are we really on the cusp of AGI (and therefore in a great deal of danger)? its impossible to say whether or not elon musk really believes what he is saying… there are public figures on both sides providing conflicting explanations.

as i watched the grok3 stream i became very angry. so very tired of being jerked around and not knowing whether or not i should be planning for the future or investing in the world as it is now… its really a form of psychological torture

I work in AI and love the technology. But all the hype and grandiose claims make it awkward when people ask what I do, and it makes hiring harder when experienced developers hear 'AI development' and walk away - even though it's mostly just solid full-stack engineering work.

I am always looking for roles, and I have pretty good full stack experience (a few years of C++, C#, some JS, TS, backend and frontend web, C, Zig, Rust, built a few hobby compilers and other stuff).

I apply to pretty much every job that sounds reasonably good in terms of work-life balance, but I completely ignore anything that says AI. I really, really, really do not want to be part of a company that lies to itself, and so far all AI companies look like they are. It's not AGI. It's not gonna be AGI. Ride the hype train, cash out and lay off 80% of the workforce and jump on the next hype train, whatever. But don't hope that people who want a stable job want to hop on something that delivers such a shaky definition of value.

Even if you're an AI-skeptic, it's hard to argue that companies building AI customer support for example aren't en route to improving the whole "calling your ISP's team in India" experience.

Absolutely, but that doesn't seem to be most companies I see

You must be new to Elon's modus operandi.

I absolutely hate the Elon hypetrain, but I also don't understand the social media hate I see for AI, like comparing every ChatGPT answer to one wasted bottle of water.

Can we stop for a second and just marvel at a new piece of human ingenuity? Let's not give Elon too much credit, but I think that AI as a whole helps us all understand the nature of intelligence, and therefore humans' place in the universe.

One of the fundamental questions of human existence is: what does it mean to exist and think? Every time we build a new human-like thing it helps us understand the context of our own existence. (Not just computers or AI, but also airplanes, factories, etc.)

True AGI would force us to rethink what it means to be a thinking human being, and I think current LLMs already should and do.

LLMs don't make me question what we know about humans and thinking. They are really good at convincing us that they're good, but really, that's other humans building stuff to convince us that it's good. There is no intelligence here, other than the perceived intelligence of predicting words intelligent people have written previously.

It does make me question humans and thinking but in the opposite direction.

It is like sitting down at a piano, sight reading a piece from sheet music and then someone who has no idea what they are talking about claiming you composed the music on the fly. Then when you point out the sheet music they just double down on some bullshit as to why they are still right and that is still composing even though obviously it is not.

Best analogy so far. I am adopting this for the next wave of "wait until the next model" and "but humans hallucinate, too" comments. Yes, when we feed back our own output (language on the web) into ourselves, things become tricky to tease apart, and it would seem like intelligence to us. Then again, the mechanical turk appears intelligent, too. If we point out how it works, then the "magic" should vanish.

> There is no intelligence here, other than the perceived intelligence of predicting words intelligent people have written previously.

I think this is my main point- isn't it amazing that a thing that predicts words other humans have previously written manages to appear intelligent, or, more pointedly, have utility in communicating real thoughts and ideas?

If you've ever asked an LLM a question and gotten a satisfying answer, that means that there is some human-level intelligence somewhere in the token filtering / recombinating that an LLM does.

Specifically I think the test of human-like intelligence is literally the output- If we get utility from the arrangements of the tokens it outputs, that in and of itself demonstrates that some portion of human intelligence could be this same token generation mechanic.

No. Just means we are easy to fool. Like apes who see themselves in the mirror and fail to recognize they are seeing themselves in the mirror, thinking it is a different ape (and trying to mate with or attack it).

The invention of the mirror by humans probably provided an interesting insight into our own existence... I wonder what it would have been like to see your own reflection for the first time as a technology. How would that change your outlook on your self-hood and identity?

Great question to ponder. Surely people would have seen their own reflections in water, but the mirror itself would have made "Reflection Technology" for "Artificial Introspection" more scalable. I suspect the mirror offered modern people a new viewpoint, allowing one to see how one is perceived by others. I do not think selfhood and identity would have been affected. My main question is about when people came to behave differently than apes. Douglas Hofstadter's "The Mind's I" may have a few hints on perception of self for you.

> There is no intelligence here

Can you list a few demonstrations from a text-outputting computer program that would each convince you that there is intelligence here? Eg writing a bestselling novel, proving an unsolved number theory conjecture, etc. Or is your belief uncontestable?

I think he just needs the model to be installed in a humanoid robot.

That's not really a fair question. To answer it, the OP would have to define intelligence. If you have done so already, then by all means, do share your definition. If not, then you are in no better position to claim intelligence than the OP is in claiming lack thereof.

> I also don't understand the social media hate I see for AI, like comparing every ChatGPT answer to one wasted bottle of water. Can we stop for a second and just marvel at a new piece of human ingenuity?

I don't know, man. We're staring down the barrel of at best a WW3-event and at worst an extinction-event. We're doing absolutely nothing to stop it, even though we have all the answers and the resources to do so. Instead, we're making the problem even worse all so some marketers and scammers can spend someone else's money to generate garbage pictures and SEO spam, so the worst people on the planet can gain even more money and power than they already have.

I'd love to be positive about this tech, I'm sure it's cool or whatever, but it's really hard to be positive about anything right now, especially when the tech in question is speeding us straight along the path to mass death. The world sucks and the people running the LLM stuff are amoral monsters putting all of their resources into making it worse. I'm not excited about any of this.

What's happening definitely makes me nervous, but "at best a WW3-event and at worst an extinction-event" seems a bit much. Mainly because there are a _lot_ of unknowns. Better try to get comfortable with just riding this out.

It really isn't. Climate change is going to make large amounts of land unlivable. That's going to cause a climate refugee crisis. I agree the effects of that refugee crisis are unknown, but I can't see any resolution that doesn't involve increased nationalism, civil wars, and violent resource conflicts. Given this is a global crisis, that's a recipe for WW3.

This was all avoidable, of course. But instead of fixing it, we spent decades fiddling around with toys like LLMs. Whee.

It's cringe but not so much more than deepmind's OG "solve intelligence then use it to solve everything else"

I feel like that's part of what Elon is flexing. Teslabot was late comer compared to competitors like BD.

Elon is showing off he can marshal enough resources and talents to be on par (kinda) with state of the art products in crazy time. That's been most of his superpower so far - not breakthrough tech that didnt exist before. We've had rockets before.

I don't like Elon either, but not only has SpaceX created breakthrough tech that didn't exist by landing an orbital class rocket, as of today still nobody else has done it.

Landing a rocket was considered impossible and unthinkable 10 years ago, and then SpaceX completely changed the game. And they're reinventing rocket tech again with Starship by catching it midair.

We can all thank Gwynne Shotwell for this though.

Gwynee Shotwell works for Elon Musk.

Have you listened to her interviews? You can find some on YouTube.

I'm sure she has been very helpful in navigating the US govt/NASA bureaucracy and winning SpaceX deals, but she's clearly not a visionary.

It still blows my mind that nobody has meaningfully replicated the Falcon 9 after thirteen years of it flying commercially.

The number of people that have the capital and connections required to even attempt such things is very small, so it's not necessarily Musk's abilities that made those things happen, just the combination of having the power to allocate enough resources and an interest in such things.

He started both Tesla and SpaceX when he had "only" a few hundred million to his name and no more connections than would be expected of a Silicon Valley guy making payment software. And lots of brilliant guys, including John Carmack for instance, have tried their hand at aerospace - and failed. Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin before SpaceX was even founded, and it was literally only last month that they finally managed to get a rocket into orbit for the first time. There's a joke in the industry: 'How do you become a millionaire in the aerospace industry? Start out as a billionaire in the aerospace industry!'

And we live in a world of millions of millionaires, and thousands of billionaires. For that matter, even China is trying their hardest to replicate SpaceX tech given all the resources of the world's largest economy, and 1.4 billion people (meaning a proportionally larger chunk of intellectual outliers), and defacto authoritarian power to make it all happen. Yet they remain (in terms of rocket technology) behind SpaceX.

Nit: musk is not a tesla founder. He bought his right to be called that for $6M

While technically correct, the Tesla that Elon bought has basically nothing in common with current Tesla.

When Musk 'joined' Tesla it was a name and two other guys. The latter two of whom left the company before a single car had been produced. They then sued for the right to be called founders a couple of years after they left, and once it became clear the company would stand a reasonable chance of success.

If my memory serves me correctly, they had put some Sony Handicam batteries on a chasis and driven it around before Musk. Musk was there for every actual product and its development.

This is a patently false retelling — check your sources.

Being the most successful out of three or even a dozen doesn't make someone exceptional. Because so few people with interest in space have "only" a few hundred million, we can't really say if it's actually his talent that made it possible or simply the result of having access to resources that the vast majority of people could never dream of.

The U.S. has a long history of aerospace innovation, from NASA to private contractors, and Musk was able to use this ecosystem. China doesn't have that.

WEF cites a global space economy at $630 billion, alongside investments of $70 billion. [1] And as anybody with half a head on their shoulder can see, space will be where the big future economic growth will come from. Even if somebody has 0 interest in space, which I think is very few people, that's where the next 'big boom' in economics will come from. And SpaceX was started on a fraction of $0.3 billion with Carmack and Bezos just being a couple of names people on here would be familiar with, amongst tens of thousands. Yet no competitor is anywhere to be found.

And the US doesn't have a long history of aerospace innovation. In 1962 Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech, 7 years later in 1969 we'd go from having nothing to putting a man on the Moon. From 1969 (well 1972 in particular) to the birth of SpaceX (early 2000s) US space technology not only stagnated but regressed. This is why Boeing (who was a major part of the original space race) can't manage to even begin to replicate what we achieved in the 60s, in 7 years no less!

Incidentally this is also a big part of what motivated Elon to start SpaceX. He was looking at NASA's future plans for human spaceflight and they were basically nonexistent. So he wanted to launch a greenhouse to Mars and stream it growing, to inspire people and hopefully get things moving in the right direction again. NASA wasn't interested in any such things, the Russians wanted too much $$$, and so SpaceX was born.

[1] - https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/space-economy-techno...

> I feel like that's part of what Elon is flexing. Teslabot was late comer compared to competitors like BD.

When it come to bipedal robots, Tesla is far ahead of Boston Dynamics in terms of actually creating a product.

Have you seen Unitree robots? They started mass producing them. It's Chinese company.

We've had rockets before

Yeah, but we didn't have reusable orbital rockets, and that's a distinction with a big difference.

You don’t understand the Musk business model. It has been the same for years. His wealth doesn’t come from his products, but from his fanbase buying his stock. The purpose of everything he does is to influence the public opinion to make him the tech genius of today in the collective psyche.

Of course, he needs to do impressive things, stuff that a normal person wouldn’t have the resources to achieve. It’s similar to Mr. Beast’s channel on YouTube, just on a way bigger scale. Do things that people can’t see anywhere else.

Musk’s money will come from his fans. And ETFs, trust funds and such will amplify this when he reaches a certain market cap. His crypto coins are the exact same scheme. Once you stop thinking in classic business school terms, it starts making way more sense.

Some of his ventures actually produce value! But that’s not where the money comes from. It comes from the belief, the adoration and the celebrity status that he has.

This is the real power in today’s world. People need to know you from the screen. This clout catapulted him to the government of the US, made him the most wealthy man in the world and given him the license to do anything he wants publicly without repercussions.

There is an exception: Tesla FSD (the US version, not the horrible EU version) this is rather cool and impressive, and unbeaten in the market for now.

Though free and open-source solutions are not that bad like https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo

But the build quality of a Tesla car itself, omg. It feels like a carton box with an amazing battery.

See my other comment. Some of his ventures do produce value. That’s not where the money comes from.

> His profits don’t come from his products, but from his fanbase buying his stock.

SpaceX is private, Starlink makes real money from real users.

> Everything he does is done to influence the public opinion to make him the tech genius of today in the collective psyche.

Well that's clearly not right. He's doing a lot of things to make himself seem like a total tool that we should all boycott no matter how good the products are. If he actually did what you say, he wouldn't be burning all these bridges.

The bulk of his wealth is the Tesla stock. I know that SpaceX produces value. Some of his ventures do. But the image of a genius entrepreneur is way more valuable than any government contract he might get.

Remember he was way less crazy before his market cap skyrocketed. Now he can afford being polarizing as a PR strategy once his fanbase has reached a certain critical mass. He’s been constantly testing what works.

He'd still be one of the richest people in the world just based on his stake in SpaceX (IIRC valued over $100B)

He would be one of the richest people in the world even if he didn't start both SpaceX and Tesla, just from what he made from the sale of Paypal. Hell, he'll be one of the richest people in the world even if he didn't start the original X and just lived off the $13m he made from Zip2. $13m still places you in the top 0.5% in the world today.

SpaceX is not where most of his valuation comes from: it principally comes from Tesla stock, which is vastly, hilariously overvalued compared to it's performance as a car company, and definitely compared to it's performance as a technology company.

Even more importantly, analysis of Elon's tweeting patterns versus Tesla stock valuation makes the why Twitter became so central to him obvious[1] - it was a massive driver of Tesla stock value. Buying it was a good move from the perspective that he really couldn't afford to be banned from Twitter.

[1] https://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/article/10.11648/j.ij...

> Buying [twitter] was a good move from the perspective that he really couldn't afford to be banned from Twitter.

Another good move would have been to not be an ass. I mean, if he really did care about the stock price like this thread implies. Being seen as a genius entrepreneur doesn't imply you should also be a racist conspiracy theory nut. I'll repeat it again: the thesis that he's doing all these things due to competency is absurd. Never attribute to competence what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.

He's doing these things because he's lost his marbles. Trying to make it out like he's doing it for reasonable reasons is like trying to claim Trump is playing 5-D chess. It's the same as Q-anon logic. It just falls flat against Occams Razor.

I'm interested in what you're saying about classical business terms. Can you elaborate on that a little? I've always found these kinds of people hard to understand.

The man has almost unlimited wealth and his motivations seem consistently petty and strange or just downright ludicrous. He's like an alien to me.

I've noted the same feeling when seeing VCs/business people speak when I've encountered them.

The classic business is about producing valuable economic outputs and creating a stable revenue flow from bringing them to market.

The modern era post-business is about dipping into everyone’s pockets, by securing cash flow from the stock market and the government.

Here building a profitable business model is less important than convincing people and the government to give you that dough. And the best way to do it is to have clout.

> his motivations seem consistently petty and strange or just downright ludicrous. He's like an alien to me.

I think it could help to try to think of a historical figure that has done impressive things but which you don't have an overly negative view of. A lot of them seem really weird or alien. In democracies, political leaders are (sometimes!) more "normal" because they have to get elected. So think of a CEO/Founder you like (Jobs?) or earlier people (Napoleon? I dunno, pick yours)

Read a bio on them, they're pretty strange (I like Churchill, dude was wild). It seems that to do extraordinary things you need some traits that make you ludicrous. I don't really know, but it's definitely a pattern

this is 100% false..

How so? Care to provide any meaningful information to support that?

>his fanbase buying his stock

That doesn't make sense as most (66%) of the stock is owned by institutions. [1]

[1]: https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/TSLA/institutional-...

Institutions are organized people. They aren’t more immune to the information firehose than me or you.

That's pretty normal for a company like this. Also, let's be honest, based on historic data, it has been a good investment.

Only people engaged in active buying and selling set the price of Tesla stock. It's called "price discovery." Any institution such as an index fund passively holding stock does not effect the value of the stock, so the percentage of institutional ownership doesn't itself matter.

It's not much better than DeepSeek's old slogan "Unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity. Answer the essential question with long-termism."

Musk promises revolution and sells evolution.

Promises FSD, sells EVs.

Promises Mars colony, sells self landing rockets and sattelite internet.

Promises faster tunnel boring, sells smaller tunnel boring machine that drills smaller tunnels.

Promises less corruption and bureaucracy, just fires people.

Overpromising and underdelivering are the cornerstones of advertising/marketing/sales. "Use this deodorant and a gorgeous woman will want you".

Do you know why people do it? Because it works.

That's great for a startup, but bad for nuclear weapons and financial data.

In fact governments are among the worst offenders I can think of in over promising and under delivering.

And that's not just Trump's government either, how's this whopper? https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/06/12/joe-biden...

Is this the first time you're hearing Elon Musk speak? His entire public presence consists of stuttering out vapid stentences like these.

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