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Comment by GodelNumbering | Hacker News Reader

This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.

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It's definitely a smart move. Could easily leverage this to overtake competition.

Sometimes the tactical thing is to do the right thing.

Ben Thompson calls these strategy credits.

Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.

But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?

Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al

He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.

I read that they bought quite a few, but their DC build out is not very fast. Maybe they should just resell the hardware

You don't have to like the guy, but buying something is typically how ownership goes. I refer to my car as mine, but I did just buy it from Honda.

I mean that it's not his IP, he's not producing any GPUs/TPUs. He's just reselling his idle stock of cards.

Not to be pedantic, but although the datacenters are running Nvidia hardware, Tesla did develop their own 20-core/3-npu high bandwidth chip for their cars. It's nowhere near the computational ability of any datacenter GPU, but at 150+ TOPS it's no slouch either.

> Just be a rocket company

According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.

Get de-facto monopoly on American space launches and I don't think they need to be anything else.

Payload into space is a very limited business.

This doesn't make Space-X such a high valued company at all.

And while Space-X is doing its thing, the rest of the world started to move too (china). So first mover advantage is disappearing.

> Payload into space is a very limited business.

Today, sure. In the future, very unlikely. US military and alike are also unlikely to start to rely on China to ship stuff to space.

We already send up a ton of satelites etc.

So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?

It will not be Datacenters for at least 50 or 100 years more.

> So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?

Being familiar with US history, I'd guess they'll send up a ton of weapons and surveillance utilities basically, together with some lower-class stuff like what consumers and end-users get slight benefits from.

They already send stuff like this up.

Ok, but that means they will shrink down to $7 per share like the analysts are telling us.

The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.

Well, in the long run expansion into space is the only profitable thing.

I’m sure that’s an idea Musk wants to sell you on.

What a bizarre take.

What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?

Data centers without local protests?

I mean real things, not ridiculous bullshit to con investors and rubes

Amazon and Google are also pursuing the same thing. Either all three of these companies are full of it or they believe they have solved the blocking problems.

https://siliconcanals.com/sc-d-spacex-amazon-and-google-want...

No they don't. They invest in R&D as they in general do.

There is a aanalysis of google engineers regarding the effort for having DC consteliations in space but its clealry research and clearly shows the difficulty of it.

Musk is the only one who needs this to keep the evaluation of Space-X.

Local protests didn't stop Colossus 1 or Colossus 2.

Local protests also didn't stop Space-X. People around his DCs or Space-X still suffer today.

He had to come up with some magic story. The Payload increased only due to his Starlink. But even then, the payload into space is basically non existend.

2025 was the year with the most payload and its only 5000t.

And for us as human beings, a DC in space is the worst case scenario. This will create a lot of stress on our atmosphere (potential, reentry poisning of our atmosphere with lithium and aluminium), co2 usage and the loose of real resources.

He will send metals into space to burn them later into our atmopshere. Limited resources we as a planet have.

And for what? For a DC? A DC which you can put in any dessert on our planet for cheap energy and not having any neighbours.

Only Edge DCs need low latency, your training clusters don't need low latency to end user, plenty of inferencing jobs don't need low latency either.

Space data centers without in space manufacturing & resource mining are of course stupid. But in space infra is what is necessary for humans to move beyond Earth & that's the critical bit, that enables everything else in the long term.

That's a much longer long run than Keynes' "in the long run we are all dead".

Why would a rocket company be worth trillions? Are you trying to be funny?

As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.

Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.

These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.

Before using large language models, they used language models. Large language models perform better, at the cost of being more expensive to run.

They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.

They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.

That is probably the best solution too!

The stock market would not like that, though.

Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.

He hasn't needed to worry about money for a long long time. Arguably his entire life. But he is incredibly greedy and narcissistic and desperate to fill the hole in his soul with more.

> You're allowed to exit the AI business.

Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?

xAI is no David.

Relative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI space? Absolutely.

Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.

The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.

That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.

>The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.

I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.

The GPUs that depreciate like gangbusters. Yeah, solid long term plan.

3090s are still selling at damn near their release MSRP.

They're not filling datacenters with 3090s. With the amount of headache and the amount of infrastructure needed to support those beasts, do they even have a resale price at all? Or just scrap value?

you know you can just log onto eBay and see what the price of a used H100 is. nobody is stopping you

Wasn't thinking of H100s either. I spoke of infrastructure support, and I was being literal. A herd of GB200s needs a building built to stringent specifications to house them.

Yes. Their resale price is in the same range as the cost of a new car. I'd buy one if I could, but they're too expensive for me.

David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.

xAI, by all accounts, is not a real playing the frontier AI model market. By a long shot by many accounts.

Did we forget how XAI meant to be uncensored model (because censorship is a lie and lying models cannot be good)

But it is not uncensored it is just differently censored

A $2,500,000,000,000.00 startup. An underdog really.

Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world. How is he the scrappy underdog in any context?

>Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world

*publicity known, and overwhelming majority of his wealth is not liquid but tied to companies. Arguably the most powerful publicly known person is the US president.

That would be a strategic move.

You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.

But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology

That's too flattering. It's about ego.

Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.

So just like Trump. Birds of a feather.

I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:

"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."

I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?

He needs to be able to skew the worlds AI towards racism and whatever else he believes at the moment.

Doesn't saltman effectively have full control of the company?

what do you mean they couldn't even get rid of him, then people left because of that

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology

It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.

What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.

I just don't get it, I'm sorry.

What rule about steelmanning? We’re commenting online, not writing peer reviewed research.

And yeah, some people lose the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but actions have consequences.

Elon doesn’t just get to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by eliminating USAID and expect everyone to treat him the same way.

He’s made enemies for life, and he deserves it.

Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?

Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?

How does this work?

The issue is that only Congress had the authority to cut funding to a congressionally authorized program. What Elon did was illegal and also heinous.

> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?

This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.

The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.

The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.

If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.

I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.

Well said.

There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?

The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.

And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.

Opinions differ.

> Some religions ephasize such things.

Theoretically, the religion of most of the voters of the current POTUS emphasizes and almost mandate being charitable and help the poor.

> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?

> How does this work?

Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.

I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA (Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil)

I think the video is the best short exposition but you could try reading the paper the video is about

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf

Or reading about the paper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Moralit...

Pretty easy.

Nazi salute. Supporting all nazi and far right movements in Europe, publicly. Inventing DOGE so he could fire judges and pave his way out of trouble.

Yes. Is easy to see why some hate him, for life.

I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?

USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.

We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.

We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.

But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?

Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.

I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"

Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.

But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.

Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.

Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.

You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.

The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).

  Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.

You don't sound sorry.

I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.

I can only assume it's deliberate.

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology.

I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.

Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.

Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.

Musk itself doesn't make things. He only puts the money, and other people build the things. How many times, they need to work around him or fix his crazy ideas ?

People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.

Weird how other people can put up more money and not be able to make the same things as Musk’s companies.

The people with that level of money are very few.

Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.

Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.

It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.

He's good at exploiting naive people's dreams.

Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.

Profound. 1/55k regarding wealth really diminishes the role wealth plays.

Easy he constantly forces them to cut corners and take risks put their lives in danger "Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands", "Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. "

That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.

And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.

I'm no ER physician, nor OSHA expert - but if 600 accidents with the sorts of heavy equipment and rocketry that SpaceX does every day included only one death, then my conclusion would be that the vast majority of that 600 were pretty minor stuff. You'd have a lot more bodies otherwise.

Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.

Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.

Musk seems obsessed with making socially valuable physical things which are extremely difficult to make. And (overall) he's darned good at it.

Back when America's star was rising, that was far more common.

There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.

BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.

He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. To his credit he probably saved it. But we also don’t have the counter factual.

“Because of his political views” This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.

"political actions" even!

not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.

Honestly, this is exclusively about money. xAI and X were complete money pits, Tesla's brand was tarnished and SpaceX was the only remaining untainted brand but it has an obvious problem.

Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.

Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.

> They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring

Cool. Sounds like a wise financial management. Musk's early background is actually in finance.

People call him software and physics but rarely remember he's a finance genius too.

p.s. you probably wanna have a look how indebted legacy auto is compared with Tesla. That's why merger with SpaceXAI makes sense.

I don’t know, I wouldnt be suprised if he finds a way. All the tools around, he just have to make a jump in the quality. With GLM as example they should be able to het to opus level and cut the costs

Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.

> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”

Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.

He’s a fast-talking dingbat.

> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”

I thought it was mostly on a whim that turned out to be binding, and the 'everything app' plan came later?

He bought Twitter to restore free speech.

He had to bought twitter because he was legaly bind after he said too much stuff.

He then leveraged his buy as a propaganda platform.

It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.

>just stop.

Thats not how AI psychosis works.

> Your product's brand name is mud.

It is?

Yes, to the average person grok is known for generating csam, mechahitler, and undressing people for sexual harassment.

And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.

Reddit is not “the average person”

The AI undressing scandal was on mainstream news and being discussed publicly by politicians. It's not some underground drama. The real life people I know still remember he called the cave diver a pedo after a disagreement.

There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.

No, there's very few >left wing< people left in the world not soured on Elon.

What mainstream news and which politicians? Cnn, Msn, Bbc? Which "scandal"? You mean that Grok Imagine had some security holes that let you "put XYZ into bikini" which were promptly patched but not before the far left and professional complainers activated their "mainstream news" co-conspirators and blown this out of proportion like they do with everything Elon related (or Trump related... well at least Trump deserves it)?

Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal? Yea it's not his big mouth, nobody actually cares about that, the real reason why the left hates him is Twitter, or to be more specific that one fateful day when he decided to buy Twitter, throwing out the iron grip (that still continues to fester on Reddit and Wikipedia by the way) of the left on political discourse out of the (Overton) window. An isult to injury was Elon firing 80% of Twitter and nothing bad happening (except "safety" hall monitors and other do-nothings having to find jobs elsewhere). Then Elon financially supported Trump's campaign and that was the last nail in the coffin. Forever enemy.

The fact that you present this as "very few people left in the world" is peak western progressive brain rot, but I get it, it's what your people do.

Covid rules and Trump election were probably the main driving factor of speeding up the opening of platform s rules on speech, but Twitter purchase made it possible, it opened up the floodgates and many followed. (To the point that today , I would argue, Instagram is way more casually racist than X. Youtube is pretty open too compared to 5 years ago.)

Btw since leftists often play dumb and ask silly questions: if you think there are more than two genders or that the "white man" has some form of original sin that needs to be punished or that immigration enforcement is evil or you support Hamas - you are the "leftist" I'm talking about here. You are not the "normal ones", you never were, you just stole the discourse and made everyone fear stepping out and now you're mad when someone in power does that back to you. That's the truth.

This.

When I was less into tech (2010-2015), I hated how everyone fawned about Elon (remember Hollywood casting him in iron man?). As I started to transition into tech I remember being impressed by the design principles of his companies (simplify, remove complexity).

But I am absolutely baffled how his detractors don't see that exactly what you mentioned, that they are part of subset of society, with very strong opinions (think race, economics, religion) and can't fathom somebody having a different opinion without that person being immoral. And the worst part is what you mention at the very end: the mental policing of this group in the past 10-15 years. I liken it to a religious sect (ironically, even though they hate Christianity, probably closest to a new age christian sect).

I've had this discussion up here last week pointing out the vitriol Elon gets is, to my mind, for the wrong reasons (and the reasons are exactly what you mention).

> since leftists often play dumb

And there goes the merit of your rant

No i mean it genuinely. Right wingers are often racist and xenophobic (some have lived experience basis fot these, some not) and lately (along with leftists) quite antisemitic, lets not mince words, we know this, but leftists use deception in argumentation much more often.

There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this:

"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."

I think both sides have a genuin different view of their idology.

Right wing people idology is about themselves and humans are secondary.

Left wing people idology is about all of us as a whole and humans are critical.

The right wing person wants the immigrant to go home, or want them dead but the good immigrant (their partner, wife, friend whatever) is the positive exception. You need to fight the dehuminisation of right wing propaganda so that stuff like mobs and genoicde is not happening.

The left wing person wants to help everyone and might not allow the level of individuality which doesn't allow to help everyone.

Obama was hart on immigration control but you didn't see a ICE Police who wasn't trained well, hurting people left and right.

> There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this

Retweet it all you want, but it won't make it any more true.

In Europe the sales for Tesla cars drope significantly for quite a long time after Elon Musks Hitler Salute. That happened and it cost Tesla real money.

The CS stuff on Grok went through media here in germany too.

"Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal?"

Is this some kind of joke? You do understand that Elon Musk is not just someone and whatever you think it means that 'he is on the spectrum', he is the richest person on the planet. He literaly is responsible for satelites burning up in our atmosphere were researches just a few weeks ago mentioned that they are concered that all of that metal getting into our atmosphere could have real consequences for all of us (this is one example of many) and because Elon Musk has the 'do first accept the fallout later' attitude, he can affect all of us.

He had to buy twitter after he couln't keep his mouth shut and now he also has a big propaganda platform. You might like his right stuff more than whatever, but he changed the algorithm so that he showed up in your feed more often than he would otherwise. He also started grokpedia to 'adjust' opinions and we all know that they finetuned grok until it becamse mechahitler temporariily.

"it's what your people do."

Come on it has nothing to do with what specific people do, just look at the evidence.

And i have no clue what you mean with your floodgate. YT has not changed at all.

Regarding your other random points you try to make?

Biologiy wise science sees sex and gender on a spectrum btw. and yeah most people identify themselves as male or female. Who cares if 1% or less want to call themselves something different?

Immigration enforcement is not bad, but it makes a difference if you create a organization like ICE who kills human beings, separate kids from their parents and an overall country who accepts very cheap and illegal labor as slaves and flip flops agressivly of wanting to slaves and than wanting to throw out slaves. Especially from a country which is funded by immigrants.

Not sure about your Hamas thing, they genuin fight for freedom, plenty of actions they do are for sure not okay at all but this conflict is not about Hamas, its about Israel and Palestine people. Do you say "Hamas is bad and Israel is bad" or do you only point out some Hamas in concext of what you think is left wing politics?

The truth is that life is not that easy. Free speech is great until someone with more power missuses it. If the richest person on the planet is allowed to manipulate everyone just because they are rich and can buy twitter, this is a problem for all of us.

> "mainstream news...cave diver...the world soured on Elon"

Must be stressful maintaining the low quality rhetoric and negativity?

Straight from reddit I presume, to regurgitate tales about cave divers. This is the diver who bizarrely and publicly attacked Musk for trying to help rescue kids from a cave. "Shove his submarine up his rear end" or something. Musk fired back his own stupid words. The court awarded the diver zero dollars. Diver wanted $190 million! Pay day denied! Justice served.

> The real life people I know...

Any real life person who keeps it real, knows the diver was an absolute tool. Attempting to twist history for some kind anti-Musk ammo is a fool's game.

The CSAM stuff went through german and EU news. BBC, SZ, FAZ, Tagesschau etc.

There was real impact on Tesla sales too.

The silly part of this story is people calling that diver a hero.

There were 100 divers involved with total of 10,000 people, 100 agency reps, 900 police officers and 2000 soldiers.

There was no single hero in that story.

All it really shows is that the British court system will sell you all the justice that money can buy.

In fact, most people try and distance themselves from Reddit as much as possible.

Most people I spoke to don't even know what Grok is, or that Twitter had (or needed) an AI.

Well quite. But that means that to the extent that most people know anything about grok, it's as "that twitter AI that called itself Hitler and made naked pictures of children".

Right, to the actual average person, they have never heard of Grok.

The average person who has heard of Grok is already on Reddit.

Grok is right there in the app stores alongside ChatGPT and Claude...

I don't think the average person has heard of Claude either.

I explained to someone who hadn't heard of it what Claude was, and they asked, "so it's another kind of ChatGPT?"

Ever wondered why mass media didn't amplify the same news about chatgpt which did exactly the same?

Because ChatGPT wasn’t integrated in to a social media platform to post this stuff inline. And because it was significantly stricter.

This is what a normal company might say.

xAI is not a company, it’s a financial instrument. The growth potential as perceived by investors is there to prop up the stock price.

Now that SpaceX is public, at a valuation that is both very high and supported primarily by xAI (Grok), it cannot simply go back to making rockets.

> supported primarily by xAI (Grok)

Citation needed.

What was the relative value of the companies before the merge?

Decent summary of it here[0]. The “space” part of “SpaceX” is valued by market analysts and money managers at around 5% of the company’s entire value. Almost all of the rest is “AI stuff”, and Twitter is a rounding error.

That is, if SpaceX went back to being a space-only entity, and dropped the AI stuff, its share price should be expected to fall from $130/share to around $7/share.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...

Thank you for providing the citation.

I would have agreed to "you're allowed to exit the AI business" a few months ago, but now that SpaceX has had its IPO promising a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI, I guess they're stuck with it...

Lol. Not when you just told everyone that you're going to increase your revenue by 100 times over the next 4 years "bY uSiNG AI!!!"

They've still managed to capture a slice of government business because they have explicitly aligned themselves with one of the two major American political parties.

I don't know anyone who would trust Grok Build anymore. I'd be wary of Cursor in the next few months too.

... it's open source.

Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.

Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.

Couldn't agree less. It isn't a "For the community move", it's more of a save-face strategy.

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