[Imnimo]

I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.

[jazzpush2]

In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!

[jarrettcoggin]

From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.

[dgxyz]

Oh I worked at one of them.

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.

[jarrettcoggin]

Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).

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.

[pm90]

Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.

[hananova]

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.

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.

[jarrettcoggin]

IMO, this is a good question and deserves a solid answer, so I’ll do my best.

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.

[givemeethekeys]

In my case at a different firm, I happily gave notice than to put up with the "fixer", who had been hired by the other "fixer", both of which were mostly only good at shitting all over the place and driving most of the technical organization out of the company. I got the feeling that was the whole point, so I resigned instead of waiting for my eventual layoff.

[candu]

As someone who now lives and works in Denmark: it's sad that so many of us have been conditioned to think 6 weeks severance is generous.

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.)

[sehansen]

Welcome to our cozy little country; I hope you're settling in well.

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.

[echelon]

Why did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws?

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.

[w0m]

> Why did Tesla work initially?

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.

[raw_anon_1111]

Not even Tesla fans claim that Tesla is reliable.

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

[kakacik]

Not sure which car you compare it to specifically from those manufacturers, but teslas seem much more expensive where I live than most models of those. Comparing it to corresponding BMW would be a more appropriate comparison.

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.

[numpad0]

They must have outcompeted Musk at intelligence and/or insanity with their dedication into maximizing production volume of liquid fueled rocket engines.

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.

[eucyclos]

Seeing Elon buy Twitter was like watching a functional alcoholic I admire buy a bar.

[user____name]

Everyone should look up some interviews with his father, he's turning into a carbon copy.

[mlinhares]

Tesla won because Elon is a great seller, the product is mediocre at best but I’ve heard many times from friends that it was the same quality as a Mercedes Benz, so the reality distortion field is very real.

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.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

I think you are simplifying a little. Musk had the courage to go against the big manufacturers and build the charger network which at the same a lot of smart people would never work. Same with SpaceX. They did something most people thought could never work.

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.

[QuiEgo]

Teslas have a lot of flaws, but there is just now starting to be real competition. There was nothing like the model 3 in 2019. Tesla did well because they were first to market with a disruptive product people wanted, and because Elon sold it well. Both.

[billti]

> the product is mediocre at best

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?

[novok]

I did a research project of cars that actually have decent auto lane following distance keeping cruise control for my 1hr highway commute, and tried out a few in a rental cars (hyundai and kia) and a tesla model y and tesla really is the best that is out there unless you want to potentially spend a lot more to get something that comes close. A friend of mine has done many long cross country road trips no problem with just autopilot.

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.

[greatgib]

Tesla was not initially created by Musk: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1131215_tesla-existed-b...

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.

[brendoelfrendo]

I can't find one at the moment, but I recall seeing several interviews where people claim that SpaceX is structured with "handlers" or "stage managers" to keep Elon away from where the real work was being done. SpaceX has had Elon the longest, since the beginning, so they're just the most experienced with it. Though, now that people have discussed that publicly, I wonder if Elon ever caught on...

[HerbManic]

It always seems to be companies that Musk has more impulsive interactions with that seem to end up actioning both the good and the bad ideas. Twitter and Tesla being examples of this. It seems like SpaceXs longer term goals has worked out well for them.

[Rover222]

How is Tesla falling apart? Cybertruck was a flop, but Model Y is still one of the best selling cars in the world, and very well reviewed.

[mjamesaustin]

To be considered successful, most companies need to sell more of their existing products and/or introduce new products. Tesla is doing neither – they have reduced the number of models they sell and are also selling their existing models in lower numbers.

[tapoxi]

Deliveries have been falling for the past two years.

[austhrow743]

Flat revenue for the last few years while in a market that’s otherwise growing. I don’t know if just maintaining while your competitors grow counts as “falling apart” but it isn’t good.

[onlypassingthru]

If you're in the market for a new X, S or Cybertruck, you're one of dozen(s)!

[AngryData]

I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to offering and boasted very impressive engineering and crash safety. And im sure a lot of that work was put into atleast the next 2 models released.

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.

[phil21]

> I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem

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.

[tw04]

Lucid has eaten all of their high end sales. Their mid-size SUV will likely take a sizable chunk out of the Y too.

[zimpenfish]

> When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.

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.

[jarrettcoggin]

I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.

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.

[zimpenfish]

> 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.

[davidmurdoch]

Still better than jira.

[nitwit005]

During my last job search I had an interview with Walmart, related to health software. I was flatly told that I might have a project canceled, then restarted on the original timeline. I declined after the interview.

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.

[chanux]

So this is a common tactic.

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.

[exe34]

yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?

[jarrettcoggin]

Agreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla.

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.

[thordenmark]

This is the case at every company I've worked at. When the CEO says jump, the response is to jump or pack your stuff. What's special about xAI/Tesla/SpaceX?

[AlexeyBelov]

Neither me nor my friends ever worked at such companies. C-suite sets direction in a stategic way, department heads (or whatever, managers between C-suite and you) set tactical goals, product managers think up "things we should do", and product teams deliver those things (and manage this delivery together, e.g. timelines and such).

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.

[blinding-streak]

I think most people would agree that Elon is a particularly fickle, childish, petty, and unstable human being.

[mancerayder]

But the person you're replying to's point is that CEOs often behave like this. What if the difference is that this one tweets all day long, while the others behave the same to their staff but sit behind expensive shiny wooden desks?

[ekianjo]

This is not specific to Tesla. If the CEO wants something done in most companies you follow the CEO's order first and drop everything else.

[mort96]

Yes, but in most well functioning large organizations, that happens very rarely.

[jesterson]

I wonder why this is surprising. In other type of organizations when CEO demands something everyone is usually behaves like naah, screw it, i rather do what i like, isn't it? Or everyone yells yes sir and runs around?

You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.

[general1465]

I am calling my approach to these tasks to make them rot away. If CEO/customer wants something, I will ignore it until he will start demanding it repeatedly then I will start thinking like working on it. Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.

[jesterson]

I wish i could have a machine to detect workforce like you and not to hire those people.

[general1465]

Consider it self-regulating system. If task can't survive in a mind of a wisher for more then few days, it was not needed from the start. Now you are saving resources and time to company which you can redirect to actually required tasks instead of some silly whims.

[Lich]

> Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.

Hate this. My boss: “Hey, why is it doing that. Who did this?” You did, you clueless idiot. You asked for it.

[Valodim]

In other companies they don't make this explicit during the interview, so something is different

[actsasbuffoon]

I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.

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.

[gopher_space]

Grok could only be conceived by someone who doesn't understand the dependency chart re science & the humanities. It's impossible to build a rational, accurate model that isn't also egalitarian.

I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.

[f33d5173]

I think there just wasn't enough space on the left to fit philosophy in.

Cfe: "it's impossible to be rational without agreeing with me on everything" and other hits.

[__blockcipher__]

somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).

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.

[pavlov]

This kind of conditioning has to be damaging to the model’s reasoning.

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.

[John23832]

The counter to this are the open weight models that come from China at the moment.

All are great at reasoning but also ideologically aligned.

[pavlov]

Their alignment is probably more strategically built in during the training phase.

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).

[jahnu]

You can’t put a gun to someone’s head, order them to be creative, and also expect good results.

[jfil]

Counterpoint: Sergei Korolev and Andrei Tupolev

[alberth]

Let’s restate this another way:

“ 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.

[matthewdgreen]

If you're designing a car, then the CEO/Founder might want the ability to add falcon wings to it at any point, and that's pretty reasonable. If you're designing a trustworthy encyclopedia, knowing that the CEO/Founder might wish to alter arbitrary facts to his whim is really not very reasonable. Is it his company? Sure. Do you want to make low-quality information artifacts? That's a judgement call.

[jazzpush2]

What? I work for a different frontier lab now, and it absolutely would be ridiculous if they told me the same thing. Luckily they haven't.

What products have you worked on where this would be deemed normal?

[bravetraveler]

Sounds pretty crazy to me, bud. I keep landing on 'servitude with extra steps'. Owner should have better things to do/people to bother, I should have space. Boundaries, etc. Yeah yeah, I'll never make a bazillion dollars. I'll know freedom.

Even an executive assistant, which I would never apply for, has off hours.

[doctornoble]

Same. It was a bit less literal in mine, more like “how do you handle situations where key stakeholders and one in particular have certain demands”

[bdangubic]

wild, but not surprising! anything else interesting you can share from that interview?

[kvetching]

I don't see the problem with this. The chatbot is the most important part of Grok, so it makes sense Elon would be dogfooding it then providing suggestions.. He wants it to be truthful... It was shown on benchmarks recently that it hallucinates the least...

[Braxton1980]

>He wants it to be truthful

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

[kvetching]

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc...

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.

[SideQuark]

Of all the valuable metrics on that site, all of which grok does badly at except one, you managed to pick that single one.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models

[Braxton1980]

This isn't a response to my question. I asked why you trust him

[SouthSeaDude]

I totally agree, it's his company 100%, why would you even apply for a job in a company where you don't agree with the owner or his vision.

[jazzpush2]

Do you think the investors of xAI want this behavior baked into the model? Do you think other frontier labs enforce their models to praise their CEO and never insult them?

And, how does this fit into a vision, exactly? What vision might that be beyond "I am only to be praised?"

[karmakurtisaani]

Some of us have a pesky addiction to food and shelter.

[etchalon]

He wants it to tell the truth as he sees it.

[timacles]

Truth doesn’t have the right training weights for Elon

[yoyohello13]

> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).

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.

[smith7018]

I completely agree. The tech industry has long been overrun by people sacrificing morals for money and it's destroyed society and presumably the world. We've given people a free pass to work for companies we've all known are harming the fabric of society and look where it's gotten us. I'm sorry, I would rather be poor and switch careers if my only option was xAI and making image generation models that explicitly allow people to undress others. At X's scale, technology like that harms an unfathomable amount of people. I could never have that on my conscience. All so I could make more money than a job at another tech company? I'd rather work somewhere innocuous like Figma, Cloudflare, Notion, Jetbains, Linear, etc. Hell, if you only wanted to work for an AI company then at least go to Anthropic.

[sph]

I like how some in this thread are telling their anecdotes about how shitty the company is from when they were in, or interviewing with, xAI. I mean, thanks for your input guys, but how do you go through life without having a moral backbone?

“Here’s my story from that time I had an interview with IG Farben…”

[jihadjihad]

Shame is a powerful social tool, but sadly some are simply immune.

[janalsncm]

The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs.

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.

[Perseids]

Yes, yes, true, but you've massively moved the goalpost. The original commenter was referring to people working at xAI right now. To continue your comparison, your argument would be like Oppenheimer claiming "How could I have ever known my work would be used as a weapon? I just wanted to make big explosions."

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.

[janalsncm]

Well if I moved it, consider this to be me putting it back where it was: people who continue to work on things which are concurrently being used in mostly harmful ways and have means to find a different job have no excuse.

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.

[Perseids]

Thanks, I can very much agree with that.

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.

[Ar-Curunir]

Plenty of the scientists involved in the Manhattan projects had immediate regrets. Plenty of rich people working in tech don't. That's the difference between having morals and not having morals, and the latter group needs to be judged and shunned.

[glitchc]

Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the larger ones.

[yoyohello13]

We are not talking about some destitute person hocking cigarettes on the street for minimum wage. We are talking about smart, educated people who are making 500k a year to build the torment nexus. There is no excuse for this. It’s pure greed and any other explanation is deflection.

[jerojero]

It's always baffling to me to see people in tech, particularly in hackernews, talking about others earning salaries many times the median of the country and acting like these are people who just simply have no other choice.

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.

[Morromist]

"Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford."

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.

[glitchc]

I think we're agreeing. Morality requires some sacrifice. The rich have surplus to pay for it, the poor do not.

[lucianbr]

> Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford.

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.

[awesome_dude]

Speaking as someone that has spent a large amount of time unemployed because I have a moral compass - let me know when you actually walk that talk.

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.

[lucianbr]

Textbook ad hominem. If the implication is that nobody sacrifices things for a principle or ever makes hard choices, that is so obviously wrong. Read some history.

[awesome_dude]

I literally said that I personally had done so; so the only ad hominem is coming from you.

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.

[YetAnotherNick]

I don't know why the people here are naive enough to think that. Most programmers can donate more than 70% of their income to Africa if they want to make world a better place, yet they only target people earning more than 3x of them, even though majority of the world earns less than 1/3rd of them.

[make3]

spending your productive output making one of the most powerful terrible people alive more powerful just sounds depressing to me. do you really want your research to be how to make the personality of Elon's anti woke mind virus LLM better at erotic talk.

I guess it comes down to your daily efforts serving only to make the world a worst place, vs having a neutral job

[YetAnotherNick]

Allowing it to users who ask for erotic talk is in my opinion way better than forcing someone to watch shady ads based on private conversations.

[awesome_dude]

>> If you are wealthy

Then.. you wouldn't be working...

[yoyohello13]

Why is Elon still working then?

[rsynnott]

I'm not sure that posting deranged tweets at three in the morning _really_ qualifies as work.

[awesome_dude]

At the risk of drawing moderation ire..

When does Elon work?

[timacles]

He works pretty hard to destabilize democracy

[kstrauser]

I’ve heard the haha-but-serious joke numerous times that you can’t have a security department that’s not trans and furry friendly. Thing is, I completely believe that. Those groups are disproportionately represented among the security community, and I personally would not work somewhere that my friends in those groups would feel unwelcome. That’s a quite common sentiment even among us straight cis non-furry men.

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.

[Balinares]

This absolutely fits my observations and it's got to be one of my favorite secret things about the industry. More generally, the higher the skill level at a given org, the more trans furries you'll find, it seems like. There was a time you couldn't throw a stuffed fox across a Google SRE office without hitting one.

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.

[bobsmooth]

That's only because autism is common amongst those groups and you can't build anything worthwhile these days without a lot of autism.

[kstrauser]

I don't believe that for a second. More likely, infosec tends to attract more results-oriented personalities. To generalize, "who cares what you look like as long as you're good?" As a consequence of that, infosec tends to be a lot more welcoming than other groups I've been around. As long as you act nicely, people generally don't care if you're man, women, both, neither, or a gay horse. And it seems like there's been a feedback loop over many years: that acceptance drew more out-of-the-norm folks, which made it more accepting. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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.

[sph]

This is the first time I hear someone equate furries and trans with “results-oriented personalities.” [1] Not saying they necessarily are not, but it’s finding correlation where there absolutely isn’t one just to disagree with actual evidence.

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?

[kstrauser]

> This is the first time I hear someone equate furries and trans with “results-oriented personalities.”

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.

[3371]

That's... not what was written there. Better read gp again slower.

[lich_king]

Anthropic, maybe, but what is the philosophical niche of OpenAI? Their only consistent philosophical position about AI is "let's make more money".

[tibbar]

I think OpenAI is more of an aesthetic. Very... Apple-like, polished, with an eye towards making really cool stuff. And aesthetics are a type of philosophy.

This is less noble than how Anthropic presents themselves but still much more attractive to many than XAI.

[tokioyoyo]

The feeling on the street is that Anthropic IS the Apple of the AIs.

[tibbar]

Come now, surely Anthropic is a premium Linux distribution.

[ysleepy]

And Apple a premium Unix derivative?

[energy123]

To a researcher, the aesthetic is more like Bell Labs, with many research teams working with some autonomy, which is why the public naming of model releases appears chaotic. Very different to the top-down approach of Apple.

[j_maffe]

> aesthetics are a type of philosophy.

What philosophy is that?

[dbspin]

It's literally called aesthetics, the philosophical approach is the original meaning of the word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

Properly, focusing on aesthetics as an ethic would be practicing the philosophy of aestheticism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism

[hoppyhoppy2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

[small_model]

"You can use my model to kill others if Dario won't do it sir"

[tyleo]

It’s interesting because for a long time people wanted to work for Elon because he held the moral high ground. “I’ll bring electric cars and space colonization online or die trying.”

It’s sad to see the shift.

[mattbillenstein]

This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.

[etchalon]

Very few people down here want to ride in them, and I have multiple friends with hilariously disastrous stories.

Most of the Waymo stories are "Well, it took 15 minutes to arrive, but then it was fine, if a little slow."

[boc]

Wamyos in SF are nearly indistinguishable from ubers/lyfts at this point. Maybe a bit slower if you don't have the highway mode enabled on your account, but they are everywhere and arrive within 5min most of the time I order one. I've ridden them so often I've lost count.

You'd have to pay me to ride in a Tesla robotaxi. That tech isn't anywhere near the same as Waymo.

[mdgrech23]

I can't say I know the AI research community well but I'd imagine OpenAIs alignment w/ the military would not align w/ the the personal philosophy of many.

[dan-robertson]

Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this philosophical bent you describe?

[ladberg]

You are paying the smartest people in the world to think really really hard, and turns out they might also think really really hard about not making the world a worse place

[asddubs]

it's not working

[numpad0]

US isn't randomly launching nukes yet

[jerojero]

yet.

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...

[stogot]

virtue signaling is the goal and its working

[bdangubic]

Is this really the case though? How many smartest people do you really think are there that fit this narrative?! I want to believe there are at least some but I think they are minority in this group… otherwise I think all these pretty much evil corporations would have a awfully difficult time attracting talent? maybe some do but…

[saagarjha]

Most evil corporations have fairly normal jobs available.

[bdangubic]

if you want to make the world a better place as OP stated perhaps you can get a normal job in maybe less evil corp?

[saagarjha]

Most companies are evil in some way, the question is how evil and how close you are to the evil. Most people will pick "not that evil but pays a lot". A few will take "pretty evil and pays more than a lot". Some will choose "less evil and pays poorly". (It's worth noting that there are a lot of jobs that are not at the Pareto frontier and are "more evil and pay worse" but social mobility etc. cause them to be selected anyway).

[munificent]

When presented with a choice between:

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.

[watwut]

Except they do? They are certainly not making it better place. Like, ok, it is money for few companies and salary, it is business and probably fun work.

But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better place".

[metalcrow]

I'm not sure you can provide an objective (i.e way to show that it is absurd) means of explaining how an AI researcher is making the world a worse place. It's going to come down to disagreeing about some axiom like "is ASI rapidly approaching" or "Is AGI good to have" and there's no right answer to those.

[jasonfarnon]

not really. 15-20 years ago that same upper echelon of college/professional school graduates you're describing were going into finance.

[mynameisash]

I would think it's because of the staggering money they're making. According to Fortune[0]:

> 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.

[0] https://archive.ph/lBIyY

[thereitgoes456]

I see you're treating Sam Altman as some kind of trustworthy source. Might it be possible that he's making that up -- of course, nobody will ever call him on it! -- and exaggerating the numbers to make his company and team look really good and ethical for not accepting such lucrative offers, or perhaps to make them sour on Meta for not receiving $100M offers?

[tdb7893]

My experience with researchers (though not in AI) is that it's a bunch of very opinionated nerds who are mostly motivated by loving a subject. My experience is that most people who think really deeply and care about what they do also care more that their work is prosocial.

[Sl1mb0]

> care more that their work is prosocial

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.

[compiler-guy]

Although the Rand corporation did contribute some ideas theoretically connected to nuclear survivability (packet switching in particular). All that work was pre-ARPAnet and don’t really motivate the design in that way.

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]

[tdb7893]

So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population.

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.

[Sl1mb0]

I never claimed any techology is good or bad; you also seem to be in agreement with me that technology used in warfare _can_ have "good" applications (I mentioned that the benefits are secondary to their applications in war, that doesn't sound like me saying there are no benefits).

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-...

[cloverich]

This isnt unique to top AI researchers. Top talent has a long history of being averse to authoritarian/despotism at least in part because, by near definition, it must suppress truth. You cant build the future effectively with that approach.

[wombatpm]

Because it is not Macrodata Refinement and you can’t stop them thinking off the clock.

[janalsncm]

Aside from the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points others are making, I believe it has something to do with the history of AI research.

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.

[refulgentis]

Maybe you’re reading “philosophical bent” as “armchair philosopher”, as in they are dabbling in a field unrelated to their profession and letting it drive their profession - worldview might have made it clearer?

[lo_zamoyski]

Indeed. Philosophically, I have not been impressed by the more vocal people associated with the field. They may not be representative - I think most do it for the money and it being hip.

“Worldview” is a better term, but people are generally blind to the worldview they’ve tacitly absorbed, including academics.

[derektank]

Because a lot of them are academics that are doctors of philosophy

[hermanzegerman]

Because they can afford it, they are very sought after.

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 $$$

[0x3f]

> And smart people usually have moral convictions.

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.

[lo_zamoyski]

> Moral knowledge doesn't really exist.

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?

[0x3f]

Different kinds of claims, it's not self-referential

[lo_zamoyski]

> Different kinds of claims

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).

[lelanthran]

> And smart people usually have moral convictions.

Dumb people have moral convictions. Smart people see the nuance.

[siva7]

I'm smart and you can buy my morals. So what?

[hermanzegerman]

Those people get paid so much anyway that they don't have to compromise their morals.

I guess that's not the case for you and me

[exe34]

so do oil and tobacco people, no?

[refulgentis]

So what, indeed (not sure what you mean)

[yoyohello13]

True, many smart people will gladly (or even begrudgingly) do evil for money. That's why there is so much suffering in the world, because of people like you.

[0x3f]

Is ad tech and the like really causing so much suffering? The government work, mass surveilance, killing people etc. doesn't actually pay that much, typically.

[yoyohello13]

I think ad tech is probably the single most destructive technology of the new millennium. The shift toward "engagement at all costs" business strategies is basically the root cause of societies current political polarization. Engagement bait cultivates fear and rage in the populace to get clicks. We are now seeing the consequences of shoving ads that sow fear, anger, doubt and inadequacy into peoples faces 24/7. This doesn't even touch on the fact that mass surveillance is only possible because of the technologies forged by the Ad tech industry.

[zeroCalories]

It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.

[vessenes]

There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

[NeutralCrane]

My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.

[tptacek]

I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.

[keeda]

Is there anything from Dan Luu you could point me offhand at about Twitter's culture? The only thing I recall was a blog about technical issues but that didn't seem to have much bearing on the culture.

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.

[tptacek]

I have no idea what Musk did or didn't say. I don't pay attention to him; I think he's odious. But he did cut more than half the entire workforce and the service works as well as it ever has, which is pretty damning. I'm not willing tie myself into the pretzel required to explain how antebellum Twitter was well-managed given that.

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.)

[KaiserPro]

I don't really think thats true.

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.

[vessenes]

I think we are saying the same thing. He builds trillion dollar companies that are labor efficient; nobody said they are good places to work.

[Freedom2]

Many ex-employees have said to me that working for Elon did not enrich them at all, either financially or professionally.

[hermanzegerman]

He's a notorious cheapskate and Tesla is known for firing people shortly before their stock options vest

[rconti]

What about all the ones who are suing him for shortchanging them?

[jamespo]

There's probably a lot of survivor bias going on there

[vessenes]

Undoubtedly. With 2.5T in value between tsla and sx that’s a lot of value for survivors.

[sumeno]

What % of that is owned by employees that aren't named Elon Musk?

[raw_anon_1111]

Ask the people at Twitter..

[cladopa]

You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine?

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.

[mattbillenstein]

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

[iknowstuff]

Source on pre/post traffic numbers?

[keeda]

I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!

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.

[spullara]

the people that built the infrastructure that runs twitter left before he showed up. most of it was written by a half dozen people that left around 2016.

[watwut]

It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And earnings too.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Ask the people at Twitter

The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?

[sroussey]

Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by Twitter. :/

[raw_anon_1111]

Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.

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

[htrp]

180 day lockup period is standard

[rconti]

No, the ones suing his ass.

[Zigurd]

> Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him.

I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.

[mediaman]

I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.

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.

[iamacyborg]

He’s saying that it’s easy to say good things when the market’s on an upswing.

[Zigurd]

I'm also saying that almost all of TSLA's price is roughly the same as all of bitcoin's price, which is to say vibes-based. It's a fandom. A cult.

[LZ_Khan]

After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.

[hooch]

Was doge ever anything more than a "get root, grab the data, and run" operation?

[boc]

Maybe, but destroying USAID was an unforgivable sin. Short of nukes, rapidly turning off direct medical and food aid that people in critical need have relied on for years is objectively one of the fastest way to kill millions of people.

[pstuart]

Don't forget the destruction of USAID and countless projects that had the word "diversity" in its work.

[markdown]

I think more important than that was shutting down all investigations into Musk's companies.

[joquarky]

It's pretty obvious now.

[yoyohello13]

It was obvious at the time too.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?

[cmorgan31]

Mate, wouldn’t it make sense that these rules are applied via hierarchy? If Elon respects Karparthy he almost certainly gave him a longer leash and Karparthy’s output was strong enough to not warrant intervention. It’s clear he did not want to stay long term so I’m not sure this is a strong line of thinking.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

It's possible. I don't know. My tone comes off as support Elon, and I do not, at all. I've seen first-hand almost all of these tactics while I was at <Elon Company>. I'm observing that some people seem to do OK at Elon's companies, and for many years, and never seem to get the boot or be abused in other ways. Therefore, Elon is probably not quite as bad a manager as he is made out to be. This is all I am saying. Since I have firsthand knowledge, I believe my opinion has value. Those that disagree? Show me your Source of Truth. Thank you.

[cmorgan31]

I don’t believe Elon is even remotely related to a people manager. He’s a stakeholder and operator which require different skill sets. He finds folks who will manage to o bring the empathy he tends to lose in his pursuit of his next project. I believe your evidence may be anecdotally valuable but let’s be clear about the dynamic of a founder/ceo.

[jazzpush2]

Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear what industry (or academic) research he did even now, five years later.

[ai_critic]

Gooning and racism have been a cornerstone of humanity since we descended from the trees, for better or worse.

[tim-tday]

Even people who are purely money motivated have an instinct for self-preservation.

[GardenLetter27]

The main issue is the requirement for relocation tbh.

[PunchTornado]

Sorry, but what is the philosophical niche of openai really? Obtain money at all cost? No red lined when using your modele in war? Work for scam altman?

[general_reveal]

What do you mean “philosophical”? Ethics and morals are not required, Elon can get whatever type of asshole he needs. Something else is up.

[oceanplexian]

> But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work

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.

[TheEzEzz]

> 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.

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.

[squidbeak]

> The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they have even remotely the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them.

What an ugly trope. Idealism motivates Chinese workers just as often as any other nationality.

[oceanplexian]

Idealism of what? That the government shouldn't use AI for surveillance or the military?

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.

[dminik]

I have my doubts that top Chinese AI researchers want to work for an AI company with direct tires to the white house and zero morals. Not for any great ethical concerns mind you. Simply because the US is a geological rival to China.