[AJRF]

How is Reid Hoffman relevant?

Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction.

Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

[tripledry]

Not commenting on Reid specifically but on the other hand I don't understand why we should listen to the Tech CEO's / Founders about their opinions on the tech they are selling.

[petilon]

Why wouldn't you listen to a company on why their product solves the problem you're having?

[tantalor]

Since you're not picking up on a social subtext, "we should not listen to them" here means "don't be influenced by them" or "don't take their words as granted". In other words, we should be skeptical, not literally shut them out.

[JumpCrisscross]

> we should be skeptical, not literally shut them out

To be fair, this isn’t obvious from the top comment. Another comment literally argues for shutting them out [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660630

[buellerbueller]

Companies lie.

[petilon]

Yes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to them. You listen to them and you evaluate their claims.

[__alexs]

To be truly impartial I don't think you should even evaluate their claims directly. This allows them to focus the comparison on things they care about, not the things you care about. Instead you should decide what problems you need solving, and evaluate solutions to those problems against your own rubric.

[buellerbueller]

It seems to me that the original poster meant "listen" in the sense of "believe," not "listen" in the sense of "hear."

[peterspath]

Humans lie

[buellerbueller]

Companies exist to influence others.

[JumpCrisscross]

What do you think anyone talking to the press or commenting on social media is up to?

[otterley]

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

[jerf]

So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.

And it doesn't help that...

'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'

that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.

He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.

[sandbags]

The AI labs have somewhat the same problem that publishers have. Essentially their asset is a static piece of IP: a huge file full of numbers. They’re like a publisher only letting you read their book through some scuzzy Flash reader UI because they have to protect that file at all costs. At some point the weights get out/get reproduced and then what they have a is bunch of sunk costs.

[efromvt]

I think the theory is that it’s not purely static - you need to keep training and tuning the model (even just for general knowledge upkeep with current architecture) and so the infra/data is a contributory moat. Exfiltrating weights would get you a depreciating asset (plus we have all the lovely legal and regulatory frameworks to further protect them, which IS more like publishing)

[mrhottakes]

> This is just trash talk.

Trash talk is Musk's entire M.O., so that seems like a good way to proceed in 2026.

[jasonlotito]

> So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

Why not? The guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to NOT trash xAI was trashing xAI.

[grumple]

Is xAI being used by any professionals? I see them acting as a data center rental service for the others, but that doesn’t justify their valuation imo. They seem to be behind on everything and don’t seem to have any relevance. The cursor purchase may change that but for how long?

[jerf]

I see no reason any portion of SpaceX justifies its current valuations. I also think taking what is probably ultimately a successful and profitable company in SpaceX, even if it is maybe not as successful and profitable as Elon might say, and tying it at the hip to the AI bubble, while being clearly on the losing end of that AI bubble so far, could well kill SpaceX in the process. I hope not, because no matter how HN may feel about Elon, SpaceX has some great tech and is definitely moving space tech forward. Rather harder to say that about xAI.

But then I'd say I don't understand the valuations of a lot of companies right now. It seems to me the stock market has written into its structure the idea that United States companies will be claiming something like 500-1000% of all TAMs in the entire world in the next 10-20 years, which seems unlikely to be the case. SpaceX's claimed TAM of "pretty much the entire United States GDP, you know, why not" is merely the most blatant instance of this.

I'm not defending SpaceX or xAI. Billionaires don't need my help. But this article is still pretty pointless. Hoffman isn't a dispassionate observer, he's one of the players. Of course he's telling everyone he's going to win and the other guy is going to lose. Even when a coach is completely objectively correct when he says in his pre-game press conference that he has every confidence that his team will win in the end, it's still an information-free statement.

[llm_nerd]

>So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

He's just stating the obvious, so I really don't see this as contentious.

xAI is irrelevant. It's so irrelevant that after being relegated hardware from Tesla, then pushed into Twitter to try to make that have value, then pushed into SpaceX because Elon Musk somehow gets away with hilarious levels of securities fraud, now it's basically reduced to renting out hardware.

Yes, xAI is irrelevant, and Hoffman is just pointing out the blatantly obvious. Its only value is in renting out hardware that can be better used by more capable orgs. It is basically a scalper that happened to get loads of nvidia hardware pre-orders in just before the AI run-up, and the entire SPCX scam relies upon everyone trying to buy usage of it.

[DoesntMatter22]

XAI is very relevant. They have one of the best video models, they own cursor which has a good percent of the coding market. Anthropic runs thier ai on xai’s data centers.

Saying they aren’t relevant is comical

[mrhottakes]

They're relevant in the sense that all of their products are 100% silly junk compared to the rest of the market, which is about 80% silly junk.

[llm_nerd]

>They have one of the best video models

In porn and deepfakes. Yeah, they should be regulated to obliteration.

>they own cursor which has a good percent of the coding market

They don't own cursor. They announced an acquisition immediately after the insane SPCX valuation to desperately scrabble to lock in some of that laughably nonsensical hype valuation (as the entire US equities market has become firmly detached from reality, and at some point is going to catastrophically crash to reality). It doesn't close for months.

I mean, the fact that you had to cite that as their credibility fully demonstrates how completely worthless it is. GPUs that were originally Tesla's (before the whole robo-taxi scam fell apart), then shuffled to Twitter, then to SPCX.

>Anthropic runs thier ai on xai’s data centers

That was literally the foundation of my comment. xAI is so worthless that they get better value become another vanilla rent-a-GPU operation.

xAI is a joke. Somehow Elon's pathetic Matryoshka doll routine keeps suckering fools.

[AJRF]

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant.

He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he?

Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.

[DanielHB]

Sam Altman is not an AI researcher, I don't think he ever worked directly with tech as an engineer either. Pure MBA-with-engineering-degree type.

[mschild]

> He is connected and gives money to people

Thats why. Not that we should listen to him (no clue who exactly he is) but thats why he gets attention.

[mrhottakes]

All that Zuck, Altman, Musk, etc do is give money to people

[dwa3592]

>>He is connected and gives money to people

this is also known as influence so..

[N_Lens]

Sir this is Capitalism.

[otterley]

I truthfully don’t know the answer, but if I had to guess, his connections and positions provide him with an unusual amount of knowledge and perspective. Another might be that his opinions often are correct in hindsight.

[raincole]

It means his opinions about xAI are worth less than a random HNer's, since he has a very strong incentive to talk bad about it.

[endemic]

So he has money.

[nottorp]

That Microsoft who added LARGE BLUE copilot buttons on the dialogs you get in Visual Studio when it stops on a breakpoint or exception?

[xnx]

Is Elon credible? He's been wrong so so many times about "full" self driving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

[Mountain_Skies]

He's said many things that didn't come to be but since he controls over a trillion dollars in assets, anything he says will be impactful, perhaps even more so if it is something incorrect.

[CamperBob2]

You might as well ask if L. Ron Hubbard, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, or Bhaghwan Shree Rajneesh is credible.

[nailer]

And? Self driving works. I've taken a bunch of cars in Miami and UAE where somebody was at the wheel for legal reasons only.

[JumpCrisscross]

> How is Reid Hoffman relevant?

What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken this use of relevance as an influencer metric.

[nailer]

It means why do we care what the LinkedIn founder has to say about xAI.

The answer seems to be "we don't, he's on the board of a competiting AI company"

[JumpCrisscross]

> answer seems to be "we don't, he's on the board of a competiting AI company"

That seems like a good reason to listen to him? He is prominently placed in the field. Has a lot to lose by knowingly making false statements in public about a competitor. And has an incentive (and the resources with which) to dig deeply into them in a way e.g. a trash-talking YouTuber does not.

He has his set of biases. But Board member at a multi-trillion dollar established software and AI kingmaker seems like a weird way to dismiss an opinion.

[petilon]

Other than co-founding one of the most successful tech companies, that is.

[michaelmrose]

Elon said we should spend most or all of our GDP building more silicon than we can actually make to launch it all into space where we had no meaningful solution to economically cooling it burning all of our money for a product that currently makes no money delivered in a fashion that can't possibly work. It's not clear that he understands AI or rockets.

Remember prepared statements can be written by smarter people. Ask him to speak extemporaneously and find out how stupid he really is.

[fhdkweig]

Guy who sells trips to space says we need to put more stuff in space. AI is hot now, so he has to connect his business to AI. Remember when he put a car in orbit? This is more of the same.

[Fricken]

Reid Hoffman isn't relevant. Don't attack the person, attack the substance of their argument. How is xAI not a total shitshow? This is the question you need to be able to answer.

[nailer]

> How is Reid Hoffman relevant?

He's in the Epstein files as an island visitor?

He's a sleazy guy. From Wikipedia (which leans left):

> He funded a group involved in Project Birmingham (a 2017 Alabama Senate race disinformation effort using fake Facebook pages and tactics mimicking Russian interference to hurt Roy Moore). He later apologized, saying he wasn't aware of the specific methods.

[jcgrillo]

They're all clowns. None of them are credible. TBH this extends much further down than the C-suite. Generally it seems like something happens to people's brains when they hit roughly Director+ where they just start spouting absolute nonsense.

[blenklo]

How is he less relevant than Elon Musk?

He co-founded linkedin a platform every one knows.

Elon Musk invented the Cybertruck and has a weird cult following through Tesla.

i mean Elon Musk called some of his kids this:

X Æ A-Xii Musk, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk and Techno Mechanicus Musk

What opinion should i give more value?

[sixothree]

There sure are a lot of people attacking the messenger here. This seems fairly par for anyone criticizing one of musks properties.

[giancarlostoro]

I'm not interested in people's take on SpaceX this early after their IPO, they have an ambitious vision and Elon Musk gets a lot of blind hatred. You don't invest into SpaceX to see returns in a month, you're in it for the next five or more years or you're better off finding a different stock to invest in. To date SpaceX is the top leader in getting things into space for the lowest cost, everyone else pales in comparison.

[epistasis]

People don't invest in SpaceX because of space launch capability, that barely counts for their valuation at all.

The valuation of SpaceX is due to AI, namely the revenue they get for renting out their GPUs to companies that actually have AI customers, as their own AI tech has not panned out.

For the large number of companies rolled into SpaceX, they are all failed attempts to grow large enough to justify their valuations, and when a company fails to do that it just gets rolled into the conglomerate as a way of hiding the failure.

Tesla's valuation contrasted with its performance means that Tesla will likely be rolled into whatever latest vehicle of Musk's has the most attention, hiding the failure of Tesla to come anywhere near to its promises.

[dtj1123]

Other than launching satellites, being able to get things into space for the lowest cost is about as relevant as being able to get things to the bottom of the ocean for the lowest cost.

It's never going to be cost effective to send anything back down the gravity well, which means that the only way Musk's plan leads anywhere is if he's able to bootstrap an entirely self contained, self perpetrating economy in space. That's not happening in five years.

Edit: and no, data centres in space are not the answer.

[efdee]

In that case you'd be better off waiting 6 to 12 months before buying into SPCX.

[spacington]

Space-x is it's biggest customer.

Star Link is the main thing which increased the payload to space significantly.

Star Link only has 10 million customers and every few minutes a satellite handover is happening which makes it hard to use for video call (was my experience at a friend's house)

While this business is paying of right now others will get into it too and destroying SpaceX margin (china etc)

Now what else on payload is there? Ah yes Datacenter.

It would take 300-400 Sparship launches alone to get a current 200-300Mwh DC into space alone.

Starship doesn't deliver yet what it needs to be able to do. Neither on payload side nor on cost reduction due to reuse.

A DC will be cheaper on earth for a long time as long as earth is as empty as it is especially for areas which are just dessert.

It would be a lot better long term investment to just build its own Datacenter city in the dessert as ai doesn't need that low of latency and use everything realtime in the other Datacenter we already have.

SpaceX Elon musk fantasy is 50-100 years to early.

You gonna wait so long?

[Mountain_Skies]

Given who are the biggest customers for Starlink services, the worst thing for the company might be peace breaking out.