[GodelNumbering]

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.

[ballon_monkey]

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

[sidcool]

Sometimes the tactical thing is to do the right thing.

[aikinai]

Ben Thompson calls these strategy credits.

[CobrastanJorji]

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.

[this_user]

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.

[m463]

> 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.

[Zardoz84]

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.

[aikinai]

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

[hello4263]

The people with that level of money are very few.

[bell-cot]

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.

[exadeci]

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. "

[dmarcos]

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?

[estearum]

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

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

[vladmk]

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.

[halfmatthalfcat]

So just like Trump. Birds of a feather.

[nchmy]

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

[furyofantares]

no

[beanjuiceII]

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

[imtringued]

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.

[dzhiurgis]

> 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.

[jimmygrapes]

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.

[brokencode]

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.

[Barbing]

  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

[xp84]

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?

[nextaccountic]

> 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...

[metabagel]

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.

[mikem170]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[brokencode]

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.

[permalac]

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.

[FeepingCreature]

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.

[Brian_K_White]

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.

[mandeepj]

> 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.

[Gigachad]

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

[piokoch]

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.

[azinman2]

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.

[monknomo]

"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.

[NikolaNovak]

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.

[Grombobulous]

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.

[wouldbecouldbe]

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

[reverius42]

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.

[ychnd]

> supported primarily by xAI (Grok)

Citation needed.

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

[OtherShrezzing]

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...

[reverius42]

Thank you for providing the citation.

[rob74]

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...

[afavour]

The stock market would not like that, though.

[derektank]

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.

[sumeno]

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.

[andsoitis]

> You're allowed to exit the AI business.

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

[yoyohello13]

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

[akimbostrawman]

>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.

[beams_of_light]

xAI is no David.

[RIMR]

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

[andsoitis]

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

[verandaguy]

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.

[anonym29]

>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.

[LastTrain]

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.

[andsoitis]

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

[dzhiurgis]

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

[charcircuit]

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.

[__float]

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

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

[charcircuit]

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

[wombat-man]

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

[michaelmrose]

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.

[tootie]

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.

[solumunus]

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

[embedding-shape]

> Just be a rocket company

[estearum]

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.

[embedding-shape]

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

[imtringued]

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

[Lomlioto]

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.

[Gigachad]

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.

[m4rtink]

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

[tbrownaw]

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

[Gigachad]

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

[sumeno]

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"?

[solumunus]

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

[IncreasePosts]

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

[cyberax]

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

[fragmede]

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.

[cyberax]

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

[wombat-man]

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

[dimgl]

> Your product's brand name is mud.

It is?

[Gigachad]

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.

[brightball]

Reddit is not “the average person”

[Gigachad]

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.

[exodust]

> "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.

[Culonavirus]

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.

[HDBaseT]

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.

[ligne]

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".

[reverius42]

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

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

[jorisw]

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

[dzhiurgis]

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

[Gigachad]

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

[ryandvm]

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!!!"

[Telemakhos]

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.

[tbrownaw]

> 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?

[marbro]

He bought Twitter to restore free speech.

[Lomlioto]

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.

[mexicocitinluez]

> 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.

[cgh]

He’s a fast-talking dingbat.

[citizenpaul]

>just stop.

Thats not how AI psychosis works.

[hsnewman]

That is probably the best solution too!

[nine_k]

That would be a strategic move.

[hn1986]

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

[qup]

... 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.

[idiotsecant]

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.

[imann128]

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