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Comment by LittleTimothy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much stock people put into people like Andrej's opinion on an Elon Musk project? I would imagine the overwhelming thing hanging over this is "If I say something that annoys that man, he is going to call me a pedophile, direct millions of anonymous people to attack me and more than likely will attempt to fuck with my job via my bosses".

Let's say the model is mediocre. Do you think Karpathy could come out on X and say "this model sucks"? Or do you think that even if it sucks people are going to come out and say positive things because they don't want the blow back?

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He didn't just gush about Grok 3. He detailed his tests which appear to be reproducible, what he did, which one passed, which one failed.

Karpathy knows Musk better than the vast majority of people - he worked for him for an extended period of time when he was head of AI at Tesla. We're likely talking personal phone number and getting invited to dinner kind of "knows", it was early enough. He also spoke about Musk and his management style favorably in various public talks. But when it comes to feedback on the model - if you read Karpathy's post, it's not all positive. It is a strong model (eval scores attest to that), but it is still deficient in some niches, and he points that out.

Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same. It's endlessly curious how people who don't know him are confident they know better.

Many people who work under him say he’s the worst kind of seagull boss imaginable: swoops in, understands nothing, fires people for funsies, gives unreasonable orders, and leaves. Don’t be around when Musk is at the office is a common refrain.

But yeah, I’m sure he presents himself well to his C-suite “peers.”

Can confirm via anecdata: some people have always seen him as the narcissist child he is, and have proactively avoided reporting to him in any capacity. A few years ago I found this perplexing and hyperbolic. Boy was I wrong.

Who specifically? Could you name names? Or are you going to ask us to believe without evidence that the guy who got FIVE mega-Unicorns off the ground (3 of them "impossible") "understands nothing"?

That's actually pretty good evidence he understands nothing.

Either he's the faster learner in the history of mankind or he actually knows very little about his _10_ companies, 14 children, and countless other video game accounts.

He seems to understand more than you suggest.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/136923606/is-musk-smart-doe...

He could be one of the greatest learners of all time as he is likely the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

He has a degree in Physics, that is like half of any engineering curriculum. Before funding SpaceX he hired several industry consultants to educate him, indicate aerospace engineering textbooks to study, etc. And then he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla. And somehow, after he and the SpaceX team achieved what dozens of other teams with more funding failed, he "understands nothing"? No need to be "the faster learner in the history of mankind".

Someone being capable in one field doesn't means he isn't a insufferable jerk or a moron in other fields. I don't understand this impulse to paint someone as completely black or completely white.

> He has a degree in Physics

Consensus seems to be that he has some kind of a dual degree (obtained simultaneously) which includes B.S. in economics and a B.A.(!) in physics. That A would imply that he probably took the easier physics related classes (and probably not that many in total given the 2 degrees for 1 thing).

Regardless, a bachelor degree hardly means much anyway...

Is there any indication that he's a particularly (or at all) talented engineer (software or any other field)? I mean, yeah, I agree that it doesn't really matter or change much. Just like Jobs had better/more important things (not being sarcastic) to do than directly designing hardware or writing software himself.

I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.

He also "held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games."[1] , has some software patents (software patents should be abolished) from his time at Zip2, and made and sold a simple game when he was twelve.

So he has a little experience working directly at the low level with his physics degree and coding knowledge, but of course it was not his talent in those that made him a billionaire, it might even have been the opposite. So there is indication for the "at all" but not on how talented. I guess one versed in BASIC can read the source of his game, but that was when he was twelve...

But yeah, nowadays he has thousands of engineers working under him, of course he is going to delegate. The the important thing is the system engineering, making sure the efforts are going in the right direction and well coordinated. He seems knowledgeable and talented enough at that. Evidence for SpaceX: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191228213526/https://www.cnbc.... , https://fortune.com/longform/book-excerpt-paypal-founders-el...

Don't let the facts get in the way of the "Musk is a midwit who just stumbles into founding trillion dollar companies" story. ;) It's an article of faith for these people.

I'm not sure how Musk not being anywhere close to being a talented engineer or scientist somehow diminishes his extreme success in other fields? That seems mostly orthogonal.

Having a PhD. or any field is relatively ordinary and not that impressive on the grand scale of thing. Founding several extremely successful tech/etc. companies is on a whole other level. Being a horrible software engineer (as his public action/communication on the topic would imply) seems entirely insignificant and hardly relevant when he has much more important things to do.

Of course other with comparable achievements (e.g. like Jobs who I don't think ever claimed that he was a talented engineer) weren't even as remotely insecure or narcissistic as him.

> I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.

Is there any conclusive evidence either way? IIRC he allegedly got into graduate program 2 years before getting his 2 B.S. / B.A.?

> he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla

So, by your own admission, he knows a lot about 2/10 of his companies.

20% is a F not a passing grade.

You are making a big logical jump here. I only gave one company as example because that is enough to disprove your previous post.

Also, before you thought he knew very little about his many companies, implying no distinction, but now you adjusted up his knowledge about two companies, but inexplicably down for the others.

You also imply he should give equal attention to all of them, ignoring some of them are bigger, more important, or simply more interesting to him. Is equal attention the optimal strategy here, or you would be getting an F grade if you suggested that?

He didn't need to invest a lot of time to make a good investment in DeepMind, that was then bought by Google, for example. Investing in what you know and understand is a good investment advice, but so is to diversify your portfolio and to not spend too much time optimizing your investments in lieu of everything else.

Some of his "investments" are more like spending on a hobby (as destructive as it can be, in the case of twitter for example... or constructive like SpaceX), so not even bound by those rules...

> Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same.

Most of these people know that there is a price to pay for bruising Elon's ego. We all know he is vindictive. Not unlike his new friend.

Yep. This came out in that recent issue with him hiring someone to play a game. As I recall, he got called out for it by some streamer, and Elon ended up blocking him.

You can list lots of people who haven't suffered his wrath. But that's not evidence, that's lack of evidence. I can provide you with someone who does have his phone number and does know him and says something quite different[1]. There's a litany of examples of Musk deliberately endangering people he's decided to go to war with - whether that's spurious accusations of pedophilia or forcing a former employee to go into hiding.

[1]:https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elon

Have you been on X lately? Half of the tweets are insulting Musk, regardless who or what you follow

Yeah but those people don't have anything to lose by saying that. They're either nobodies or politicians/celebrities that are well known for being liberal.

Just because they won't face consequences, doesn't mean Karpathy won't.

He's trustworthy.

If he had that level of neuroticism he would just not say anything or only offer surface level praise.

tbh with his startup doing absolutely nothing I can smell a hint of „please hire me back“.

I thought his Twitter post was fair and covers both things that worked and things that did not.

I like Karpathy, but I find it odd how he always backs up his former boss’s technological assertions, even the more controversial ones. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him openly disagree with Musk.

> ... direct millions of anonymous people

direct millions of anonymous bots

FTFY.

Yeah, how can you honestly review something associated with the world’s most powerful person? Who’s also shown they’re willing to swing their weight against any normies that annoy them?

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