Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
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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.
The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
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
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.
At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.
My understanding is Twitter always had cultural issues but it was not very different from other tech companies of the time, and what most of us would consider "directionally correct." I have it on pretty good authority from a very senior engineer who left before Elon took over (so no grudges other than, you know, "because Elon") that a lot of the things he said publicly about Twitter's technology was highly misleading or downright false. Like, IIRC, something about them not having CI/CD. Total lie.
There's some fraction of that workforce that supported projects intended to make Twitter a viable standalone business, which it probably no longer is. Backoffice / line of business projects intended to support advertisers, that sort of thing. But I don't think you can explain a RIF of Twitter's scale that way.
(I'll try to dig up the Luu post I'm thinking of.)
Firstly, this is a red queen’s race because like security, new types of unwanted content, threats and risks keep arising as the information (and misinformation) landscape and overall zeitgeist keeps shifting. The work is never done and the best that can be done is to build platforms and frameworks to streamline it. There is also a lot of fractal complexity everywhere.
E.g. there’s a ton of technology needed to support the moderators themselves. Infrastructure like review queues to enable them to rapidly handle content classified by type, risk level and priority. Like Jira but not Jira because it can’t scale to the number of queues and issues involved here. So you basically re-implement and maintain a Greenspun’s 10th rule version of Jira.
There is still a huge amount of invisible complexity beyond that. For instance, you need to manage how much of a certain type of content gets exposed to a given moderator because some types (CSAM, gore) lead to burnout and PTSD. You also need to blur these things.
(Also the same type of content often gets reshared, so you need things like reverse image search to auto-filter that, because running the whole pipeline each time is expensive.)
This of course necessitates a ton of machine learning. Because risks keep shifting, and (pre-LLMs) each type requires the entire ML lifecycle and related infra: collecting and cleaning data, building classifiers for them, deploying them, seeing how well they work, and tuning them, and then replacing them when the bad actors eventually adapt to newer means.
ML is also of course needed for bots, spam and scams, which keep evolving. Entirely different techniques here though.
Then there is all the infra needed to handle the fallout of moderation. Counting strikes against users, dealing with their complaints, handling escalations, each case with a long history of interactions that needs to be collated for quick evaluation. Easier said than done because of course the backend is not an RDBMS but a bunch of MongoDB-alikes because webscale.
And all of this is a signal for the ranking used for feed, the main product, which keeps evolving, so a ton of “fire and motion” happening there. You introduce a new feature in the feed? You just introduced a dozen different abuse vectors.
Then there are policy makers and the technology needed to support them. Policy is always shifting as the landscape is shifting. This also includes dealing with regulations, which are also often shifting and require ways to deal with legal requirements and various legal systems like NCMEC. And this varies by jurisdiction. Like not just by countries, sometimes even by states.
(Funny story about NCMEC – it has an API to report CSAM, but I could not find it. So I googled something like “child porn API” and got a blank results page. Pretty sure I’m now on a list somewhere.)
I could go on and on. And I wasn’t even working in this area, just supporting these teams! Admittedly in our case I'd put the relevant headcount in the hundreds and not thousands, but our scale was also very different. For a company that is ENTIRELY about user-generated content at massive scale, up to national-level events like Arab Spring -- even if there was a lot of bloat -- I would not be surprised to learn this function was the majority of the workforce.
And Elon killed pretty much all of this. And, well, we see the results everyday.
To be fair, this could be due to the bias in reporting, as media outlets may have had incentives for over-emphasizing the T&S angle.
I do not deny there was bloat. There was bloat in most tech firms at the time. But I don't think it was 80% bloat. My post was to explain how, even if T&S / moderation seems like a small function, it can require an unexpectedly large headcount -- probably even more for a pure-UGC company like Twitter -- and so could realistically account for the bulk of the cuts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092
Again, I'll admit Twitter and all other companies had bloat. But based on these industry-wide reports about record levels of burnout, inside knowledge of at least one company that I thought had unjustified layoffs, and a large number of conversations I've been having with connections across the tech industry, I think these layoffs have long gone far beyond the bloat.
It's just not viewed as anti-Semitism, probably in the same way that the posts on X aren't viewed as far-right or extremist.
Extremists usually don't experience their views as extreme, but as rational and important.
I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.
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.
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.
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
Most often, the answer is no.
I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
When did it start falling apart?
Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?)
And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.
And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and people buy it.
I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.
If you talk to anyone who worked there, they will tell you that he had little to do with the innovation at any of his companies. His lieutenants and the people that worked for them had all the innovative ideas, and for the most part tried to either avoid Elon's ideas or convince him that their ideas were his so he would push them.
- All of the other options made a painful trade off on cost or range or something else. Tesla was the only one that had both range and was (to some degree) affordable without being compromised in some way.
I'm not a Tesla fanboy, last year was the first time I bought one (new Model Y), but it is by far the best car I've ever owned, and the FSD blew my mind with how much better it was than I expected.
My wife hates Elon, and has a new hybrid Mitsubishi, but she still drives my Model Y all the time because it's just so much better to drive.
What are you basing the 'mediocre' opinion on?
I had a service center refuse to schedule a safety recall unless I paid $400 for a new dashboard monitor.
That car is behind me now and I'm so glad. Yes, it could accelerate and that's just about the only trick it has.
Got rid of it after it stomped the brakes on an empty road and had a battery issue that took weeks to fix.
I don’t own a car now and don’t want one. I’d probably buy a Polestar next time if I had to get one.
Next we went to the Tesla showroom. The sales guy just entered some address and told me to press the gas pedal and it would go by itself. Full FSD. And no sales guy in the car. That just blew me away.
We ended up buying the Model Y.
Tesla is well known for having shitty build quality.
https://www.jalopnik.com/teslas-quality-control-is-so-bad-cu...
GM Supercruise and Ford Bluecruise are the current competition it seems, with BMW, subaru and mercedes being behind those 2. I haven't driven with them although to personally compare yet.
Even though the interior is a bit lower quality, there isn't very much quite like it on the market. It also fits an almost 7 ft surfboard inside comfortably, is a nice car to sleep in for car camping and you can get a model Y for less than $20k used now.
Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.
I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.
We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.
I'm not sure this holds true. SpaceX accomplished more with very little compared to the entire NASA budget, Boeing, etc.
I think it's much more to do with mission alignment. Run fast and lean, and approach the problem in a non-risk-adverse manner. Fail fast and often and iterate quickly.
Sure, it takes a lot of capital - but that is only a portion of the story. Look at Blue Origin/etc. in comparison.
Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).
6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.
6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.
Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.
https://www.motor1.com/news/781164/tesla-used-car-reliabilit...
For a year when we were doing the digital nomad thing, my wife and I didn’t own a car and we rented plenty of EVs. Tesla was by far our least favorite. Not having CarPlay alone is dealbreaker
That said, it's not all bad news for Tesla on the reliability front. According to Consumer Reports, Tesla ranks ninth in new-car reliability with a predicted reliability of 50. That's just behind Buick (51) and Acura (54), but ahead of Kia (49) and Ford (48), as well as luxury rivals like Audi (44), Volvo (42), and Cadillac (41).
You were so blinded by Elon Derangement Syndrome that you didn't even bother reading your own source.
Second, it may be counter-productive to label any criticisms of a person as [person] Derangement Syndrome.
Elon is an objectively awful, awful human being and one could only be called deranged for finding any redeeming qualities in him.
The 'Derangement Syndrome' trope is a cheap tactic to try to shift derangement from the actually deranged person to the people pointing it out.
And you did see the part about the lack of CarPlay being an automatic disqualifier for me didn’t you? What does that have do do with Musk?
Oh and another citation
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/05/new-study-ranks-tesla-as-t...
Then comparison of quality of manufacturing and driving experience would end up in very different way (as driver of even older bmw 5 series teslas I've been to feel very cheap, and driving enjoyment goes way further than straight line performance and there teslas just don't deliver).
I agree the pedodirver should have been an eye opener for everybody. People are who they are and they don't change. Circumstances change and thus corresponding reactions, but thats about it.
The Rav4 costs the same, but has far worse performance, technology, and ongoing maintenance costs.
The Highlander is slightly better, but costs $10k to $20k more, and still has far worse performance, technology, and ongoing maintenance costs.
Plus, I avoided spending hours at a dealership, and I must know at least a couple dozen Tesla owners that report no issues in the previous 5 to 10 years.
I thought I would miss Carplay, but it’s a non issue. Toyota wanted $15 to $25 per month for remote start, I pay Tesla $0 per month for remote start and remote climate control.
> Not sure which car you compare it to specifically from those manufacturers
My comparison at the time was a Honda Civic, BMW 3 Series, and that was kind of it.
I generally consider the Model 3 interior roughly middle between the Honda and the BMW, while having worlds better tech, twice the hp, and - Electric (when they were still rare).
There really was nothing like it at any price point at the time, and i still consider it a great car (though of course not perfect).
Tom Mueller was a VP of propulsion at TRW Inc., which, among numerous other things you know from textbooks, made the Apollo LM descent engine, as well as early Space Shuttle TDRS data relay system sats. Calling Mueller a guy interested with engines having issues with his bosses is like referring to Craig Federighi as a guy interested in designing his own laptop.
I guess now that everyone knows about Elon, and Elon himself probably becoming more paranoid from both age and after SpaceX years and exposure to Twitter infoflood without adequate mental immunity, on top of most people who'd be in position to meet him not being as smart and quietly lunatic as literal Old Space trained rocket scientists, the scheme of temporarily impinging ideas upon Musk so to securely attaching the funding for your own thing do not work so well anymore.
So, the initial good direction my have been despite him, and still successful mostly thanks to the big load of money he brought him instead.
Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.
The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.
I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.
One of the best ways to get fired in my opinion.
I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks.
In hindsight I'd probably not do it again, it was hugely mentally taxing, and knowingly performing work in such a way that it provides negative value to the company (remember, the goal is to make it go under) is in my experience actually harder than just doing a good job... Especially if being covert is a goal.
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
To do that (and hide it), you have to become a dishonest person yourself. That is ethically destructive to you. So the threshold for doing this should be pretty high.
If you actively slow other people down as well it's even better though.
What...? In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone you have a contract with, because you disagree with them?
Your opinion of the situation is not enough to justify this course of action in 99.99% of cases and the residual 0.01% should not be enough to fuel your ego to do anything other than quit decently, and look for an employer that is more aligned with whatever your ideals are.
I repeat the insane statement that we are arguing over here: "Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job."
This says: ANY company you work for and disagree with over anything: Don't quit! Sabotage [maybe people are confused about what "do a bad job" means, and that this usually leads to other people getting hurt in some way, directly or indirectly, unless your job is entirely inconsequential]. And that's supposed to be ethically optimal.
What the fuck?
> (Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at), the optimal course of action is..
And
> Ethically, (if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action is...)
The former, should've probably been phrased "if you do not agree ethically with the company you work at, the optimal course of action is..."
First example that comes to mind, about a movie that portrays ethical sabotage is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List
I'm actually a bit unsure about what could be the motivations of someone who engages in sabotage *not* for ethical reasons
Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.
I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.
Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.
a) I understand the very few and specific examples, that would justify and require disobedience. In those cases just doing a "bad job" seems super lame and inconsequential. I would ask more of anyone, including myself.
b) all other examples, the category that parent opened so broadly, are simply completely silly, is what I take offensive with. If you think simply disagreeing with anyone you have entered a contract with is cause for sabotaging them, and painting that as ethically superior, then, I repeat: what the fuck?
c) If you suspect criminal behavior then alarm the authorities or the press. What are you going to do on the inside? What vigilante spy story are we telling ourselves here?
In reality, which actions a person considers ethical and in coherence with their own values is highly individual. I can be friends or colleague with somebody who has a different set of ethics and circumstances than me. If I were to turn this into a conflict that needs resolution each time it shows, I would set myself up for eternal (life long) war with my social environment. Some will certainly enjoy that, and get a sense of purpose and orientation from it! I prefer not to, and I can find totally valid and consistent arguments for each side. No need to agree to reach understanding, and respect our differences.
Typically, people value belonging over morality: they adapt to whatever morality guarantees their own survival. The need to belong is a fundamental need; we are social animals not made to survive on our own.
The moment I am puzzled about another persons reasoning I can ask and if they are willing they will teach me why their actions make sense to them. If I come from a place of curiosity and sincere interest, people will be happy to help me get over my confusion. If I approach that conversation from some higher ground, as some kind of missionary, I might succeed sometimes, but fail most times, as I would pose a threat to their coherence, which they will remove one way or another.
Of course. One always needs to weigh it against the psychological cost of complying with unethical directions.
Ethics is more complicated than that. Is it unethical to sabotage your employer if your employed is themselves acting unethically?
What is it? Am I to believe this person is a chaotic mastermind? Or a selfish idiot? Or non-existant?
Anyone working at Twitter at the time of its acquisition could have found themselves in such a position.
Changing one's mind about him can take a while.
With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly took me longer than I am happy with to change my mind about him; to be specific, I should have more radically changed my opinion of his personality when he libelled that cave expert in response to being told a submarine wasn't going to help, I should have recognised that only someone with a very fragile ego would react that way, that it wasn't just a blip on his record but something deeper.
Or, assume you're hired by the Nazi to work in concentration camps. Ethically it's the right thing to do to sabotage their gas chambers.
"If you're unhappy with your job you don't strike. You just go in there every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. -- Homer Simpson
"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral." -- Abbie Hoffman
Some might consider it unethical but others might also consider it immoral to not do what you're describing.
I guess you're fortunate enough to have only worked at places where your moral framework matched up with their business practices and treatment of the staff.
That isn't the case for most people. Most people are put into situations at one time or another where the people they're working for don't value them as equals, where the people they work for casually violate reasonable laws like product safety or enivronmental standards laws and what's worse these people will suffer no consequences for doing so.
No White Knight in shining armour is going to come from the government to shut them down. No lightning from heaven will strike them down. No financial penalty to dissuade them from further defection from society and the common man in the game that is life.
So what do you do? Do you do nothing? Just put your nose to the grindstone and keep working for the man? Do you quit, only to end up penniless and jobless, with poor prospects of an alternative, and even if you found one maybe it's 'meet the new boss same as the old boss'?
Nah, you come into work every day and you subtly fuck it up. You subtly fuck it up and you take whatever value you can extract.
They'd do the same to you.
They are doing the same to you.
I really wouldn’t want to be in this position. But it feels very motivating. It would sooth some difficult memories.
I can see myself putting in a lot of hours.
The willingness to be fired, in both good and bad situations, can be mentally freeing and an operational/political advantage. Many of us fail to push as hard as we optimally could, when we have too much on the line.
Setting aside the “fixer” for the time being, I really enjoyed the work I did at Tesla. Tesla was the first company that gave me very high levels of autonomy to just own projects and deliver. It also pushed me to take on projects that I had previously wanted to do that I hadn’t been given a chance to work on before.
(Side note: At that point in time in my career, my thinking was that I needed to earn opportunities to work on projects at work to build skills that would enhance my career. I didn’t see the value in working on projects outside of work to build skills because I didn’t think those side-project skills would be valued by other companies the same as “day job” experience. I’ve since learned this isn’t true when it’s done right.)
I spent a lot of time at Tesla delivering value for a bunch of people who desperately needed it at the time, and the thanks I received from them was genuine. It felt very good to help others at Tesla out in a meaningful way, so I kept chugging along to the best of my abilities. Life was throwing lemons at me in my personal dealings, and Tesla was helping me make lemonade from a career standpoint. Besides, all the long work hours were a good distraction from the home life stuff.
In a lot of ways, it was a very fulfilling environment to work in, but it wasn’t for the faint of heart. People often quit within a month or two because the environment was too fast paced with too many projects under tight deadlines and projects quickly followed one after another. An environment like Tesla just doesn’t let up, so one has to figure out how to manage the stress without much support from others. Oftentimes, if you do need to let up at Tesla (or introduce friction in any sort of seemingly non-constructive way), that’s the cue you aren’t working out for the company anymore and it’s time to find someone to replace you.
Coming back around to the original question of why I stuck it out until the end. Just before the “fixer” was brought in, I was “soft promoted” by a director (no title change, but was given direct reports and a pay bump, the title change was suppose to come a couple of months later as the soft-promotion happened just before an annual review cycle). The director who soft-promoted me was someone who I got along with well and it seemed like things were going in the right direction in my career at that point. The director was in charge of a couple of projects that went sideways in a very visible way, and Elon basically fired the director after the second project went south, which is why the “fixer” was brought in.
When the “fixer” first took over things, it seemed like I was going to continue on the path that the director had originally laid out for me. The “fixer” said I was going to get more headcount and work on bigger projects, but this never materialized.
I really didn’t like working for the “fixer” after a while. IMO, it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing, they weren’t willing to listen to feedback, and I spent a lot of time trying to provide guidance to the “fixer”, but it wasn’t seen as helpful and I felt like I was spinning gears. My mental health did start to suffer as I got more burned out towards the end of my tenure there.
Eventually, I was tasked with hiring someone to be my manager and I saw the writing on the wall (sort of). I started to look for a new job just in case. At one point, I thought bringing in someone between myself and the “fixer” would be a good thing. I didn’t realize I was actually finding my replacement. Two days after my replacement was hired, I was let go (this was the 1:1 meeting where I was going to turn in my notice, but HR served me papers instead).
To your original point, if I was in a similar situation now, I would be planning my exit immediately instead of trying to make the best of a bad situation, but I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how the "fixer", who sounds rather ineffective as an executive, came into this position, in what sounds like overall a rather effective organization.
I've been personally thinking quite a bit about what makes organizations work or not work recently, and your story is quite interesting to me as a glimpse into a kind of organization that I've never seen from the inside myself.
My understanding of how the "fixer" came into there position is a somewhat circuitous route. From my understanding (I didn't hear any of this directly from the "fixer" themselves, but other people who spent far more time with the "fixer" than myself), the "fixer" had spent about a decade out of the workforce prior to joining Tesla. My understanding is that they were raising kids while also dealing with aging parents. We'll just call this time the "fixer"'s work hiatus.
Prior to the hiatus, the "fixer" had moved into a small-team managerial role at a large, name-brand tech company during the late 90s/early 2000s. At the end of the hiatus, they leveraged some connections and somehow attained a director position at Tesla managing a team of about 30-40 people straight out of the hiatus.
From my understanding, the first team the "fixer" managed at Tesla didn't like working for them and after about 18 months, the team basically forced the "fixer" out. I'm not exactly sure what the team was doing to push the person out, but from what I heard, work basically ground to a halt for the entire team where they refused to work for the "fixer".
This was around the same time that the two projects went sideways that I mentioned, so the director I reported to was on the outs and the director's manager (a VP) was looking for someone who could step into the role. The VP somehow connected with the "fixer" and they worked out a deal where the "fixer" would lead the team on a 3-month probation period while the VP continued to look for someone to come into the position, while also giving the "fixer" a chance to earn the role.
(Side note: One other bit of context I want to provide is that the team I was on was about 50-60 or so people at this time right before the "fixer" came on. The "fixer" also did not have any sort of technical background and this team consisted of probably ~90% software professionals in some capacity. A lot of the conversations were very technical in nature, and the "fixer" did A LOT of delegating and "just tell me what decision you'd make and we'll do that" leadership.)
During this probation period, I thought the "fixer" actually did a good job getting a lay of the land, the social dynamics at play, and helped work out some inefficiencies. However, a lot of this improvement was done by bringing in consultants to do the deep dive, discover problems, and provide guidance to the "fixer" on how to address the problems.
Once the probation period was over, the consultants left and the "fixer" was in charge. Pretty quickly, the firings began and over the course of the next 5-6 months, more than 70% of the team under the "fixer" was replaced. At the same time, the team I was working for merged with another team, and the team size under the "fixer" shot up to about 100-120 people post-merge (I forget the exact number). The "fixer" also hired quite a few more people thinking more people get the same projects done faster.
To say the least, it was a pretty chaotic time because the entire team was under a lot of pressure with in-flight projects, not knowing if they were going to randomly be fired or not, new people to mentor/gel with, and lots of random projects being thrown at us.
About 6 months after I left, the "fixer" was fired and someone else who had extensive experience was brought in to right the ship. Per my understanding with people who were still working there about a year after the "fixer" left, the new person was very successful and had done a good job leading the team. Also, the person who I found to be my replacement stayed nearly 7 years at Tesla, so I guess I did a good job with that one.
Here, labor unions are quite widespread, and very effective at negotiating reasonably but firmly. As a result, I can depend on 3 months severance _guaranteed under law_ after 6 months at a job. (After 3 years, it goes up to 4 months, and then from there up to a max of 6 months.)
It puts the responsibility for risk of instability, errors in planning hiring / capacity, etc. firmly where it belongs: with the employer.
(And no, the economic sky is not falling here as a result. Quite the opposite.)
Just out of curiosity: Assuming you're a SW engineer, did you join IDA or Prosa or did you decide to not join an union? I'd like to gathers some more datapoints to help other engineers moving to Denmark make an informed decision.
To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.
[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
Thankfully I've never (yet) had to experience "planning by management tweet". That does sound like absolute bullshit to deal with.
They then shuttered the whole thing some months later: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1248397756/walmart-close-heal...
Which is to say, these things are real warning signs about the company.
In the case of Musk's companies, here we are discussing a major failure and firings.
I have experienced management assigning people to multiple projects, vaguely acknowledging a time split. The moment the actual work starts people have to go 100% on all projects. This is normal.
You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.
Unfortunately this trait is not so uncommon across IT engineers.
Hate this. My boss: “Hey, why is it doing that. Who did this?” You did, you clueless idiot. You asked for it.
It would be ridiculous for a CEO, or really anyone who's not my manager, to ask the team personally to do anything. If they had an important task they'd have to trade-off something else from the immediate backlog, by going through the product manager.
Even in small companies you generally have a PM in front of a team.
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
AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted).
Grok 4.2 which was just released in the API just benched the best at this benchmark.
And, how does this fit into a vision, exactly? What vision might that be beyond "I am only to be praised?"
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.
Cfe: "it's impossible to be rational without agreeing with me on everything" and other hits.
Consider how research worked in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Scientists had to be mindful of topics where they needed to either avoid it completely or explicitly adapt it to the leader’s ideology.
Grok is a digital version of the same thing.
All are great at reasoning but also ideologically aligned.
At least I assume Xi Jinping doesn’t just call up DeepSeek on a whim and dictate what they should have in model context (like Musk apparently does at xAI).
“ In an interview with {COMPANY} I was literally told that … {COMPANY-OWNER} can call us and demand anything at anytime. “
Doesn’t sound so crazy when Elon name is removed from it.
Note: I’m no Elon fan, but do think sometimes HN overreacts when his name is mentioned.
What products have you worked on where this would be deemed normal?
Even an executive assistant, which I would never apply for, has off hours.
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 $$$
I guess that's not the case for you and me
The West assumes pure democracy as the final form of government that we are all convergently evolving towards. But if this form of government or society is not robust to the kinds of things you're talking about, should it not suffer the consequences and be adapted or flushed for our long-term betterment?
It seems a bit like saying the French Revolution was the most destructive thing to happen in the history of France. Sure, in the short term. But it also paved the way for modern liberal democracy.
Are you sure you don't just like the moral convictions and so engage in trait bundling?
Moral knowledge doesn't really exist. I mean you can have personal views on it, but the lack of falsifiability makes me suspect it wouldn't be well-correlated with intelligence.
Smarter people can discuss more layered or chic moral theories as they relate to theoretical AI, maybe.
If that is the case, then why should you or anyone prefer to believe your claim that moral knowledge doesn’t exist over the contrary?
How so?
If I claim that one should prefer the claim "moral knowledge doesn't exist" over its contrary, then I am making a moral claim. That would make it self-refuting.
There is no fact-value dichotomy.
And one more thing...
> the lack of falsifiability
Is falsifiability falsifiable? If all credible claims must be falsifiable, then where does that leave us with the criterion of falsifiability (which is problematic even part from this particular case, as anyone who has done any serious reading in the philosophy of science knows).
Dumb people have moral convictions. Smart people see the nuance.
1. Take a job making $$$$$$$ at a company making the world worse.
2. Take a job making $$$ at a company not making the world worse.
Very few people have a personality such that they'll pick 2.
Because so far if we left it to AI they would be much quicker to do it [1]
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-r...
But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better place".
“Worldview” is a better term, but people are generally blind to the worldview they’ve tacitly absorbed, including academics.
> 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.
These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely believe it; but let's not kid ourselves that that is actually the case. The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another.
Even funnier is that researchers (people who are supposed to be really smart) either ignore or are blissfully unaware of this fact. When you take that into consideration, the pro-social argument falls on its face, and you're left with the reality that they do this to satiate their ego.
Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medical technologies) and also a huge amount of technology isn't for war. We've all worked in tech here, "The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another" just isn't true. I've at the very least developed new technologies meant to make rich assholes into slightly richer assholes. Technology is complex and motivations for it are equally so and won't fit into some trite saying.
Lastly, the only point I was trying to make is that the argument that researchers do these things for "pro-social" causes is kind of a facade; the macro environment that incentivizes technological development *is* mostly due to government investment. Sure, the individuals working on it may all have different motivations, but they wouldn't be able to do so without large sums of money. The CIA [1] literally has a venture capital firm dedicated to the investing in the development of technology - do you really believe they are doing that to help people?
- [1]: https://fortune.com/2025/07/29/in-q-tel-cia-venture-capital-...
It was designed to handle partial breaks and disconnections though. Wikipedia quotes Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director at the time as below. And has much ore discussion as to why this belief is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
====
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.[113]
There is a big overlap between the “rationalist” and “effective altruist” crowds and some AI research ideas. At a minimum they come from the same philosophy: define an objective, and find methods to optimize that objective. For AI that’s minimizing loss functions with better and better models of the data. For EA, that’s allocating money in ways they think are expectation-maximizing.
Note this doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people just want to make money.
This is less noble than how Anthropic presents themselves but still much more attractive to many than XAI.
What philosophy is that?
Properly, focusing on aesthetics as an ethic would be practicing the philosophy of aestheticism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism
Most of the Waymo stories are "Well, it took 15 minutes to arrive, but then it was fine, if a little slow."
You'd have to pay me to ride in a Tesla robotaxi. That tech isn't anywhere near the same as Waymo.
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.
What an ugly trope. Idealism motivates Chinese workers just as often as any other nationality.
You really think the average Chinese worker thinks their government should stop working on AI because of liberal western values or something? This is nothing short of delusional.
I assure you that Chinese researchers have a diversity of philosophical and political alignment, much the same as other researchers. I also assure you that top researchers as a whole are not all Chinese, though the ones that are that I know are all very thoughtful.
Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.
Then.. you wouldn't be working...
When does Elon work?
They really, really do. In fact, those salaries being so high is probably also due to the fact that you will be doing work that's a net-worse for the world so they gotta compensate accordingly.
A lot of these firms are parasitic institutions at a society level. They do benefit themselves and their workers at the expense of everyone else. Personally, I find it hard to respect someone that takes that choice, but I also get it. A lot of people only care about their own and their immediate people's benefit.
On that note, I really recommend "No other choice" by Park Chan-wook or the book ("The Ax") it is based on.
No? Why would you think this? Morality has been practiced by medieval peasants, by slaves, by soldiers sacrificing their lives, by people suffering from the plague, by gladiators. The rich are not known for their outstanding morality in any society I've ever heard of.
No. At least as I understand the word, "morality" means something different than "do the right thing when it is easy". If only those who can afford it do it, it is not morality. Morality is choosing the right thing even when it costs you, even when it is hard.
For me I could only do it because I had "f*ck you" money gained through investments, other people are able to do it because of welfare systems, or even through friends and family.
I also asked if you had done it yourself, because, as I also said, from personal experience, it's a LOT easier said than done.
Edit: fixed subject as I hadn't realised the person accusing me of making an ad hominem was the person I had originally replied to.
And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural nets could not know how much good or evil was caused by image recognition technologies. The same technologies that are used to detect tumors in images can be used to target people for assassination.
There are exceptions, but my opinion is the supply chain of evil is paved with mundane inventions.
I don't know why this argument often pops up in these kinds of discussions. Approximately no one is judging people who have done their best effort to avoid doing harm. We are judging people who don't care in the first place.
As far as Oppenheimer is concerned, his argument is not that nukes are harmless, but that they are less harmful than Nazis, and much less harmful than Nazis with nukes.
Re Oppenheimer: I know. My point was that he very much knew what his work was being used for, as should people working at xAI at the moment.
I guess it comes down to your daily efforts serving only to make the world a worst place, vs having a neutral job
“Here’s my story from that time I had an interview with IG Farben…”
It’s sad to see the shift.
Well, I don’t think it’s a stretch that the kind of highly educated data scientists and engineers who have the experience to work in high-end AI labs also don’t want to work somewhere that their friends and associates would feel unwelcome, let alone have their friends question why they’d be willing to.
Turns out opinions have consequences and freedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of association. People have the right to say whatever they wish. Others have the right not to want to work with them.
But in any case, I thoroughly believe the "joke": turn people away because they don't look / act / think like most others, and soon the very best infosec talent will want nothing to do with you. And based on this article, I'm guessing that's true for other extremely technical fields, too.
Yeah, I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor on this one.
1: where is the trans furries representation in senior management and other “results-oriented” fields?
Technically, it's the zeroth time because I never even implied that. I said that the field itself is results-oriented. You usually can't get very far in the career without demonstrating competency at it. Where plenty of other fields had strong unspoken rules of "...as long as you fit in", this one's traditionally been comparatively open to talented people even when they don't look and act like everyone else.
I wonder if this holds well enough that you can use it as a proxy metric to assess the technical chops at a new company.
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.
This depends on what one wants to optimize the AI for. ;-)
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.
And Google. They're quietly making a lot of progress in the coding space with antigravity and Gemini 3.1.
>Bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-endpoint for additional rate limits >Organizational tiers in general availability, or via contract[1]
Literal clown car product.
No plan for serious enterprise support (even 6 months after launch)
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?
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.
Wikipedia is fine for uncontroversial facts. The obscure ones can have individual mistakes but it's generally correct.
For controversial topics, it's an eternal battle between factions of "volunteers" trying to present their view of a conflict. The articles reflect which side has the best organized influencer operations. Factual truth may or may not shine through, but as a side effect, not a result of the governing process.
Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.
I wildly disagree with the critique based on the wealth of the top executive. I care about the truth and quality of the articles.
If Grok is trained on a corpus of information written by humans trying to influence other humans, and it has no ability to perform its own original investigation in the real world, then how can it be anything but the product of influence?
In reality, Grok is trained on pretty much the same giant web crawl/text corpus as other contemporary AIs.
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.
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.
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.
This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.
I'm sure there are many variables across our experiences. But I know I'm not imagining what I'm seeing, so I'm bullish on the idea of an AI-curated encyclopedia, whether Elon Musk is involved or not.
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.
Brian hit Jim can be a fact. But if you emit "Jim murdered Brians whole family", its a disortation of truth
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
Grokipedia's:
> Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure. The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact. This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
I don't care about "Gamergate" and never use Grokipedia, but Wiki definitely has a stronger slant: it's as if an article about Black Lives Matter started with a statement that it was a campaign meant to scam people to pay for mansions for leadership.
... it does sound like an online harassment campaign.
An article doesn't avoid bias by avoiding unpleasant facts.
You can write an equivalent article starting with "Gamergate was a movement reacting to the improper collusion between game developers and journalists" and find just as many sources, but the current article wants to promote the idea that it was a harrassment campaign first.
I really like Wikipedia, though, and I think over time we will get around to fixing it up.
In addition, the answer to the question is already available so I want any question asker to put in a little bit of effort and if they’re not going to do that then I’m not really interested in talking to them since I prefer peer interactions to tutorials.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...
Quote from the conclusion:
> This essay has shown that in the last decade, a handful of editors have been steering Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events touted by right-wing Polish groups. Wikipedia’s articles on Jewish topics, especially on Polish–Jewish history before, during, and after World War II, contain and bolster harmful stereotypes and fallacies. Our study provides numerous examples, but many more exist. We have shown how the distortionist editors add false content and use unreliable sources or misrepresent legitimate ones.
For a more recent paper, "Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy" by Car et al. says that:
> The Hr.WP [Croatian Wikipedia] case exemplifies disinformation not only as content manipulation, but also as process manipulation weaponising neutrality and verifiability policies to suppress dissent and enforce a single ideological position.
Vs.
What Elon is doing...
Then we're not even comparing fruits to fruits.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in...
EDIT: grammar
Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.
“An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy”
So people spent 60k on a cybertruck that they didn’t want? Is that the claim?
People do want it, clearly, but it's too expensive for them.
Sales don't make people want things they otherwise don't.
That is exactly what sales do. most sales are made sellings things to people they don’t want, until sales does what sales does
salesman make you want stuff you didn’t know you want it but now you do. entire world economy is built on this
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.
I think it’s just an inherent flaw in ANY centralized and universal repository of knowledge.
I haven’t actually ever been on grokipedia but I’m sure Elon influences it, I mean if I paid for something I’d expect it to be to my liking too.
I was suggesting that Elon Musk, a man who has donated hundreds of millions to Trump and other Republican causes, who has numerous financial conflicts of interest, and who has publicly lied numerous times, is never going to produce a more unbiased and factual encyclopedia than Wikipedia.
Especially when his effort to do so is essentially AI slop from a third rate LLM on top of his own biases.
During and after her Wikimedia role, Maher drew fire for statements perceived as rejecting objective truth or Wikipedia’s traditional “free and open” model:
• In a 2021 TED Talk, she described reverence for truth as potentially a “distraction” hindering common ground.
• She called Wikipedia’s free-and-open ethos a “white male Westernized construct” that excluded diverse communities.
Why would I ever trust an encyclopedia totally controlled by one megalomaniac over one that I myself can contribute to?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very sad face.
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
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.
With the advent of AI, startups become solely about marketing, sales, and defensibility.
So most of the capitalist system will become of this nature. Doesn’t seem like such a good system, and inevitably unsustainable.
The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.
On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.
Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.
And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.
But of course, line must go up, and it's not you personally being negatively affected, so it doesn't matter.
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.
See, this is why people even give a project like Grokipedia the time of day. While in theory anyone can edit Wikipedia, in practice the moderators form a much smaller and weirder cabal, and they reject edits that go against their views. The frustration with the naive assertion that Wikipedia distills the wisdom of the crowds with the reality of Wikipedia on any page of note is what provides the psychic permission to even entertain a project with such obvious flaws as Grokipedia.
Citation needed. See what i did there ;)
They reject edits that go against their views on tone and sourcing not political views that i am aware of - i am sure it happens from time to time but unless there’s a consistant bias in one direction this isn’t a valid criticism of the political neutrality of wikipedia.
Even if there is rampant bias in wikipedia, that’s a reason to fork it and change the structure and gatekeeping - not to replace it with a techno-authoritarian ai version controlled by a single billionaire. That’s amplifying the problem from an aggregate bias of 600,000 users who have made an edit in the last 30 days[1] to just one editor who uses ai to make it seem impartial.
[1] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wikipedia-statistics...
>>But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia
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?
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.
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.
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.
That "MechaHitler" episode lasted less than a day.
> 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).
No, it was trained and instructed to be truthful, even if the truth is deemed politically incorrect.
> 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.
Certainly a nugget of truth there.
> Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me.
I do believe it's generally objective, simply due to the fact that despite how much Elon tries to push it to the right, it still dunks on right-wingers all the time when they summon Grok to back up a bullshit story, but Grok debunks it instead.
I will however note that when I asked ChatGPT for an LLM prompt for truthfulness, it added "never use warm or encouraging language."
It would appear that empathy and truth are in conflict — or at least the machine thinks so!
Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
Hard agree.
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.
This made me laugh
How mamy times have we seen HN comments something like, "He started/runs [number] companies..." therefore he is a genius
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.
Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.
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.
Now, I don't think most people at google are literally driving to the office or sleeping there most of the time, you'll certainly have more WLB than xAI.
I'd even say, Google is much better at calibrating the right amount to push people than some other companies.
Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)
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.
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.
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.
All of them (even Gemini, the worst of the bunch) far outclass Grok on everything I've thrown at them, especially coding.
Grok is good at summarizing what's happening on twitter though.
Secondly, would you trust a model, especially for STEM research, that consistently has training loops done on it to make it to adhere to what only Musk considers as truth?
Honestly, comments like yours really make me super suspicious of whether you are a bot or not.
I wrote several very specialized benchmarks that I've used over time, that surface "model personalities" and their effects on decision making (as well as measuring the outcomes).
Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning is/was a solid model. It's also fundamentally different from the pack.
I call it a smart, aggressive, Claude Haiku. That is, its "thinking" is quite chaotic and sometimes short-hand and its output can be as well (relate to other models).
Its aggressiveness can allow it to punch above in competitive scenarios that I have in some of my benchmarks. Its write-ups and documentation are often replete with "dominate", "relentless" and a general high energy that skirts the limits of 'cringe bro'. That said, it has generally performed just beneath the SOTA (at the time: GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Flash, Claude Opus 4.5). Angry Sonnet perhaps.
The latest release feels quite similar but also underperforms the same older crowd (so far) so it hasn't quite made the leap that Claude's 4.6 and GPT's 5.3/5.4 series made. It's also now priced the same as its peers but does not deliver SOTA capabilities (at least not consistently in my opinion).
So, it has its uses compared to the mainstream products.
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.
But this may mess up the proposed IPO.[1]
By completing the SpaceX–xAI deal while both companies remain privately held, and now closed, Musk can effectively set relative valuations, negotiate terms within a founder‑controlled ecosystem, close, and then inform investors, without the procedural drag and disclosure obligations that attend a public‑company merger. That flexibility can reduce near‑term execution friction. It does not, however, eliminate fiduciary exposure; rather, it may defer scrutiny to the IPO phase, when investors and regulators will examine how and why the combination occurred, how it was priced, and how related‑party dynamics were managed.
[1] https://www.dandodiary.com/2026/03/articles/director-and-off...
He always promises something 3 years into the future. He uses the new money to keep the old stuff afloat. He mad SpaceX buy Tesla Cybertrucks when noone else wanted them. Now buy data centers.
Tomorrow he'll have a new idea, a new snake oil, new investors and his "BEAM transportion" company, totally real in 3 years, will buy shitty space data centers noone else has a use for.
Something to admire is his ability to always find the chess move. Like, you could see Twitter is a disaster of a business that should have dragged Elon down, but he manoeuvred his way out of 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.
What is the solution there?
AIs have been able to invent fictional people longer then they've been able to modify existing images.
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.
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
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-scam-e...
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.
We'll just have to adapt as a society and realise that what you see is not what you get anymore, in other words most of what we're going to see is false.
...have been around for decades.
There must be a way to do that. Especially with all the facial req chops these days. Also, you could simply refuse using existing images. I don't see why they wouldn't refuse that because that's a pretty narrow usecase with very few benign purposes.
> Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do?
They already can. There's open-source models out there.
It's creepy and uncomfortable when someone says out loud that they're imagining you doing sex acts!
Even if everyone knows that you're not actually doing sex acts and it's just some guy imagining it!
Now everyone has to see what these creeps are imagining, but it's fine because it's AI? Like actually are you out of your mind?
Same thing will be used to argue against photographic evidence for crimes ofc.
You can say the same for meth and leaded gasoline.
(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.)
I saw a skit on insta a few weeks ago about a girl saying she had a guy over for just cuddling and the incels piled on calling him a cuck. As is a woman is worthless if she won't put out and time spent being close is wasted without sex. It's ridiculous. These guys are so focused on what their hardliner bros want them to be that they no longer think about their own feelings. PS I go on cuddling dates sometimes and it's really amazing :) They don't know what they are missing.
I completely agree with you! I think that sitting around generating adult content on AI stifles relationships (which are a precursor to having children, which xai founder seems to think quite highly of). My point being his own product contradicts his vision of where our country should be heading
If anything it helps deepening and intensifying my sex life. I don't think it stifles relationships at all.
There's this concept that abstaining from sex/porn somehow makes you more interested in company maybe because it's the only way to get sex? But I don't find this at all. Obviously I'm in the sex-positive and polyamorous community but there's many like us.
Of course xAI ignores that on purpose
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.
Less "I can't help you with that." on benign queries is a big advantage.
So Tesla's recent $2 billion investment in xAI was a bad deal?
It looks a lot like a public company is being used to bail out a private one.
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.
@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.
When I was 9 years old, my uncle asked me what I was going to do for work when I got older. I told him I was going to start a company called "MacroHard", and become the richest man alive. He told me that's not how the world works. Turns out it is.
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.
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?
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)
Sure, I have no problem with what you're doing, and as things evolve I'm sure there'll be no problem, but there's countless other apps designed to do exactly what you've said.
You see plenty examples in this thread.
"NSFW stands for "Not Safe For Work" (or "Not Suitable For Work"), an internet abbreviation used as a warning label for explicit, graphic, or suggestive content. It indicates that material—typically involving nudity, pornography, or violence—is inappropriate for viewing in professional or public environments"
Again, I'm still scratching my head about why I would be posting NSFW content on an AI ...
I could at least understand sharing some NSFW content for shits and giggles with a colleague, but ... an AI?
Are you using AI to create NSFW content? If so, I repeat, fair enough, I should be able to create what you want (within reasonable reason), but beyond that, all that power and ... that's your AI stumbling block?
I find there are 2 AI camps. People that use the chatbots for NSFW, writing, creative writing, research, text stuff, researching clothes, movies, methods for life, cleaning, therapy bots.
And here on HN where its only code and claude code.
I guess for coding if you’re not first you’re last, but this is damn impressive considering. It looked like they pulled the coding model from the benchmarks, but it was similar.
For all the money burned, I am not impressed. Why would I use Mecha Hitler for almost double the cost of Gemini Flash 3?
They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.
If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.
The leash is too tight!
Then they suddenly fired tons of people. Elon does not understand the market and the competition. You can't run a frontier AI lab like any old VC slop company.
I'm kidding... I think.
What an enormous blunder.
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.
I never bet against Elon, and admire a lot about him, so not certainly a dig against him, just seeing what happened to figma (combined with software + ai down market) makes me really curious
Otherwise, it's an amazing chance to work directly with Elon for sure
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.
The funniest part of any thread relating to Musk is how hard people go into minimizing his accomplishments.
You don't have to like the guy (I don't) to acknowledge that the Falcon 9 is an engineering marvel and ushered in an entire new era of space travel, both reusable and private.
Falcon delivered the vast majority of mass into orbit last year, and the year before that
>starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit
It's already deployed test satellites into orbit. You're so intellectually dishonest you refuse to acknowledge things that have already happened.
No... it hasn't done this. It hasn't yet deployed anything into orbit.
Elon spent a couple hundred million on get-out-the-vote operations in swing states, which made him the single biggest donor supporting Trump by far and I think that's what really ingratiated him enough with Trump to head up DOGE, and for < 1% the price of Twitter.
And FWIW, Elon has tried to influence other races with his megaphone and money (like a WI supreme court race) and totally failed.
If we are to take any claims of Recursive Self Improvement seriously at all, then having a competent coding model seems like a key asset where you need to guarantee that you're remaining competitive. Why wouldn't you make coding models a top priority if you expect it to ultimately help your internal teams become more productive and effective?
There's also not an unlimited supply of researchers and engineers for them to keep burning through people at the rate at which they've been working. Although I guess for people with short timelines it makes sense to sprint hard, while people with longer timelines are more likely to treat this as a marathon. Maybe the years of burning bridges and developing such a toxic reputation are finally catching up to Elon. I think part of the harm that Elon has done is framing all the work in xAI as engineering while being highly dismissive of research, but a lot of research requires running experiments or thinking about problems and exploring them for long periods of time. If you're just grinding out work nonstop you don't really have time to let your mind wander and explore new ideas.
Honestly, I'm surprised they've done such a terrible job with programming. I remember around summer last year it was quite apparent how far behind they were with coding tools, but Elon was posting about taking that domain a bit more seriously. Why didn't any of those efforts materialize into real outputs? Something must be truly dysfunctional inside of xAI for them not to be shipping anything at all, especially considering Elon's propensity to ship undercooked products while continuing to iterate on them, as he has done in many previous cases.
I've noticed that Elon has also gone very hard on social media posting a ton of criticisms against the other big AI company CEOs like Daario Amodei. This suggests to me that he must feel very threatened, otherwise he wouldn't be resorting to such childish behavior. He must feel incredibly frustrated that no amount of money is able to make him more competitive within the AI space.
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.
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...?
Also, modern AI is only a few years old at this point. Whatever has been built so far is hardly load bearing.
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
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.
That said, I'm going to guess that some feel like it's the best choice they have -- the devil they know.
Then he went off the deep end, seemingly around the time when the guy in Thailand insulted his submarine idea. It became clear that he can control trillion-dollar companies but not himself. And, well, life's too short to spend it working for Nazis, nutcases, or both.
At the end of the day, most people have internal thoughts about stuff, and some post those thoughts on the internet, but in the real world, they subconsciously still believe that none of this stuff really matters. Its the same for a lot of people that work for Tesla/Space X and so on. The appeal of being part of that, working on novel stuff, is a lot more present than any morality associated with something that most people are disconnected with on a day to day level.
This is why all the hate at the current administration and people like Musk is very misdirected. Until we can turn that hate inward and start truly hating each other and standing up for morals with more than just words, the cycle is going to repeat until we either all become mindless wage slaves or some man made apocalypse happens.
His companies bring in billions and boost each other up. None can be called company in decline, quite the contrary.
But now he is poaching the two heads of engineering of a company that's trying to move very quickly, how is that going to affect their speed and success?
> The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added.
in something from 2023 or earlier.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficient silicon. Here the demand drives revenue and earnings.
If there’s some crazy inflection point in chips then you’ll still have all the power infra in space - you can just like cut the old pod and hook up a new one: or more likely manufacturing economies of scale mean you probably just keep sending up new systems and put the old ones on work loads they can manage at market prices.
Not really, though? The idea that Earth-based data centers need to be built in populated, developed areas is indeed dumb, yet it seems to be inexplicably baked into everyone's assumptions. In particular, the small discrete data centers that Musk wants to launch could go anywhere on Earth.
They could be powered by local PV arrays and batteries, they can be cooled by smaller radiators than they would need to use in space, and they could be networked via Starlink or something very much like it, just as they would need to be networked in space. There's nothing special about space, it just costs more to get there.
If he wants them to be out of reach of governments, why not put them on container ships in international waters? There are thousands at sea at any given time, and I'm sure their operators would be happy to rent them out.
Hell, put them on dirigibles that just drift around in international airspace for months at a time. Anywhere but space.
And power density for solar is another.
Does power density matter in terrestrial solar applications? If so, why? These things can and should be deployed in oceans, deserts, and trackless wastelands. Who cares how big the solar panels are?
And the cost of building all the infra to support humans living in an area that humans are not already populating is enormous.
Here's an idea, let's do this instead: we put them in the desert, or on boats or zeppelins or whatever, and we pretend they're in space. If anybody asks, those fuckers are in space, man. Computin' in the cosmos.
As far as I can tell from random articles online, it seems that as a rule of thumb, you need about 6 humans +1.5 humans per megawatt - and that's just for running the datacenter part, different people maintain the power generation infrastructure. Now, if you have to house those people in space or fly them up whenever they have to do anything, that's going to destroy your budget.
If you want to assume a level of automation that makes that unnecessary, that's fine, but then you need to also assume that same level of automation in earth based data centers too, and everything that goes with that.
But, power density in terrestrial I think we can do some math and reasoning:
First, oceans are WAYYY more hostile than space. Oxidation + salt water + .. I don't think it's even close there. I don't think they are comparable.
Deserts and trackless wastelands - I have some experience with sub-Saharan logistics; a couple of points -- I would not be surprised if actual deployment to trackless wastelands is more expensive than lift. Analysts estimate $55k-85k per ton under starship. (Elon estimates much lower; let's stick with low end of analyst numbers).
Trackless wastelands are really hard to get to. For instance, I've seen a fuel truck tipped over on its side in a river next to a small tow truck tipped on its side in a river next to a larger crane trying to rescue the original truck and the "rescue" truck in Southern Kenya -- by no means a trackless waste -- probably a week long ordeal, JUST for diesel delivery. This was in an area under former British rule with roads and stuff.
Second, trackless wastelands are really hard to find. There are people everywhere, man. And they like free metal, free power, etc.
If we imagine instead just deploying to West Texas, I think the square footage does add up. 40 foot container -> call it 16 racks. Nvidia estimates 600kw per rack in 2027 with Vera Rubin(!!JFC!!). So, 10MW of power per container. Let's imagine we magically found water in West Texas and have a PUE of 1.2, so 12MW. Solar panels are like 20 W/sq ft.
I got lazy; Claude tells me with 2.5x land needed for spacing, infra, etc, 6.5 peak sun hours, a couple of acres for storage, roughly 130 acres (0.2 sq miles) + 53 Tesla megapacks for storage per container.
I'll revise my above thoughts - there is NO WAY it's cheaper to do that in trackless wastes than space. I don't know about west Texas, but I don't think it's crazy to think that you might want to spend five years on engineering and production scaling instead of town and county and state and federal permitting.
Oceans, though -- we know how to deal with saltwater environments, we've done that for a while now. A key point is that anything you send into space or install near saltwater isn't going to last long without either regular maintenance or high up-front expense. But in this case, the equipment only has to last a few years until it's obsolete anyway, and ~5% FIT is probably tolerable. So I maintain that it's doable.
One good thing about an ocean-based platform is that it makes the heat dissipation problem go away virtually for free.
None of the challenges of running a 10 MW container full of hardware go away in space (other than the threat of nomadic scavengers, I suppose.) Yes, space-based PV arrays are smaller and lighter... but that's it, big deal. In particular, the idea of getting rid of that much heat in space without the benefit of convection, conduction, acres of expensive radiators, or magic is beyond my ability to comprehend, much less address. Everything having to do with heat removal is much harder in space.
So, given that you aren't going put 10 MW worth of hardware in a single satellite anyway, it doesn't seem valid to compare such installations on an equal basis as you're doing here. The 130-acre site you mention doesn't replace one satellite, it would probably replace a thousand of them.
You get a lot of expensive redundant requirements when you split up the problem that way, as well. These requirements will eat up any savings you might get from space-based deployment. Instead of one communications link with expensive RF hardware, you now need a thousand. Likewise, it's cheaper to build one 10 MW power substation than a thousand independent 10 kW power management solutions. And remember, this is all to support a single shipping container worth of hardware.
I don't have any experience in this area, but it seems like for every square meter of solar panel you need about half that in radiator area. And depending on your orbit, these are probably not static things just sitting there, they need to be orientated correctly to work and their correct orientations will change over time.
The worry for me is the level of human maintenance required. The ISS has probably the biggest solar array around, and they send humans out to perform maintainance and repair on it multiple times a year. A decent size data center would need an order of magnitude more solar and radiators than the ISS, and so presumably would need even more maintenance.
The fact that this lunatic is polluting humanity's view into the universe mainly for enriching himself and his shareholders, and that everyone is playing along with this, is sickening.
Are we still going to pretend that the man who has gotten every single prediction wrong so far knows what he is talking about?
He has been saying self driving cars are right around the corner 10+ years by using a staged video.
I will never forget this statement; _I don't know anything about EVs so when he talked I believed him. I don't know anything about rockets so when he talked I believed him. I most defiantly know about software development and when he opens his mouth I know he is lying."
Still don't get what people see in him. Deep down he is not a good person and will say anything to pump up his image and stock.
P.S. Number of his fans like to down vote people for calling him a bad person.
And Tesla's only success is because they were subsidized like crazy. Of course people are going to purchase cheap electric cars with no maintenance. If BYD was allowed to operate in US, Tesla would have been under ground long time ago.
But I get your sentiment though. You are so far down the conservatism rabbit hole and probably have some inappropriate thoughts towards children, so you have to defend Musk till you die because god forbid you admit to yourself that you are terrible human being.
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.)
Simply put, you don’t. Your DC is launched into its graveyard. If a chip burns out it burns out—maybe rack design is a bit more redundant to keep failures as independent as possible.
Maybe at some point repair is a valid optimization. But it’s not necessary for an MVP, namely, one that is competitive against 3 to 5-year terrestrial delays and sub-10% costs of capital for such projects. That’s what has surprised me.
But that equipment starts generating compute as soon as it’s up. This dramatically increases the capital efficiency of the venture. (Though space launch is still ultimately capital intense. Lower rates go, the more attractive it becomes.)
> Cooling and bandwidth are also completely unsolved
Quite wrong. (Though I was surprised by this, too.) ISS-style radiators (14 kg/kW) require Starship’s most optimistic launch cadences to make economic. But sub 10 kg/kw, which is closer to ISS heritage than any of the newer stuff, lets $100/kg to LEO work under most circumstances. Drop it to 6 kg/kW and even Falcon 9 becomes viable for low costs of capital (<3%) and 4-year permitting and build times.
Bandwidth is a problem, but an engineering one. (And one Starlink is working on with laser backhaul.)
There's plenty of empty land sufficiently far from cities and not being used for anything else and that shouldn't have permitting or zoning problems.
For interconnect do that via satellite.
Which means interconnect permitting.
> For interconnect do that via satellite
As in power.
Environmental reviews. (The further from civilization the higher the chances the Southern farting nuknuk or whatever nests in your nowhere.) And construction costs.
Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.
and it has the content but the formatting is atrocious.
HTH.
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=table&sort=inte...
Elon's persona caused massive drops in usage of twitter, sales of Tesla, etc.
Unsurprisingly many would not touch grok for the same distrust.
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.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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.
> I don't know why [This person done bad actions] has to be a political statement these days, but thems the brakes here.
Thanks for proving my point.
I don't "move back", only move forward to the next community. Until that is compromised. Then the cycle repeats anew.
I wonder which community, if any, will break that cycle.
Some people will cry "politics" just to take the voice away from those who dare to question their beloved celebrities.
Who fights can lose, who doesn't fight has already lost.
That ship has sailed a long time ago, with the approval of the moderation itself.
When it comes to FOSS they claim that FOSS has always been political to justify the politicization of everything they touch.
Things used to be much better when the people adhered to the age-old wisdom "Keep politics and religion out of the office" and carried this attitude to neutral spaces online.
In part, some of us got into tech because it was one of the places where meritocracy ruled and you could get away from those who thrive by overwhelming others with BS.
I apologize for the rant.
True tests of courage, morals, and ethics are occurring more and more every day now, especially in the tech industry that is so closely intertwined with the regimes across the world who seek to cause great harm to those who do not look like, speak like, or believe in the same things as them.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - there’s your quote for political apathy.
It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter.
I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s not flawed. Just that people learn things and change their minds.
But you’re also right about people giving up morals for financial gain. Just an odd example to use.
Thanks for providing a space for me to say that.
You deeply admire a man so unable to restrain his ego and temper that much of his production team at Tesla quit, some right to his face, because they couldn't meet his nearly impossible goal of extreme levels of automation on the Model 3 production line? Which, if all else is ignored, cost Tesla billions in delays because of his demands?
You deeply admire a many who is vehemently racist and misogynistic?
You deeply admire a man who latches onto just about any conspiracy theory?
You deeply admire a man who is so desperate for attention he unblocks himself from Twitter users' accounts?
You deeply admire a man whose companies were under investigation by nearly every federal enforcement agency there is?
You deeply admire a man who has failed to meet the vast majority of his own publicly stated benchmarks?
And who engages in PT Barnum levels of bullshit, like having "AI robots" that are actually just robots piloted by unemployed actors?
The man is a pathological liar who has failed upward not because of some sort of unique talent or skill, but because he's extremely abusive and willing to break any regulation or law he sees as inconvenient.
> You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them.
But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right?
The word “complicit” comes to mind.
Let it be.
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.
A story I heard from a Tesla employee was that it’s impossible to hire because musk is mercurial and every time a hire makes it through the pipeline a hiring freeze cancels all offers. Another story that employees were told to avoid his desk because he randomly fires people. Another that he regularly cancels bonuses because he’s feeling petulant. I heard another story that he threw up Nazi salutes on an internationally televised event. No wait, that one I watched happen.
After a while smart people will simply decline to work for him no matter the compensation. Not everyone, but enough to start to matter.
Among people there are 2 types:
1) Those that gain self-esteem by associating themselves with leader-like figures who project visions of the future. This explains cults, religious and political groups and the like. This comes from our ape-dna where the alphas are blindly worshipped.
2) Those with enough cognitive development and independent thinking who can avoid their ape-brain getting short-circuited into worshipping the alphas.
Majority of people are in group 1) and my hypothesis is that they form a vast-majority of the customer and employee base of musk cos.