The perverse thing is that betting on the irrational behavior of other investors seems paradoxically rational at this point. Just, don't get caught holding the bag.
You only need to grow your investment, sell it off to the next person, and exit before it happens
Capitalism isn't meritocratic, and the market for obtaining finance isn't rational.
Tesla: "Tesla maintains an 87% brand retention rate, with Lexus (68%) and Toyota (54%) trailing, according to a new Bloomberg Intelligence survey. Moreover, 81% of prospective US Tesla drivers are new customers switching from competing EV brands." -- https://electrek.co/2024/04/09/87-percent-us-tesla-drivers-s...
I think you would be hard pressed to find any serious thinker exclaiming that SpaceX and Starling are inferior products.
That's the A16Z bat-signal.
How is xAI worth $24BN? I bet the reason is because Elon Musk.
But until I see a significant jump in xAI making at least $100M+ a quarter, I don't think that is enough to justify that valuation to even be any where near close to Anthropic.
In fact, this means Anthropic should be worth much more and the majority of other AI companies / labs (excluding OpenAI, Midjourney, Cerebras and Groq) to be worth much less.
To downvoters:
To date as of 2024, Anthropic's valuation is around $15BN - $18BN.
So you are telling me that xAI's valuation is justified and should be worth more than Anthropic?
Care to elaborate and discuss? (Especially if you're an insider.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/technology/amazon-anthrop...
Inflection basically collapsed: the founders and best of the technical team jumped ship to MS. They were massively overvalued and basically produced nothing.
Perplexity and Stability are running on pure social-media grift. Neither will be around long once their entire business model is eaten by the big players at economies of scale they will never manage.
Anthropic is a weird middle ground. They seem to be doing novel and impactful research as well as shipping big performant models. But its still unclear how they end up really making money and justifying their valuation.
Qwen et al is better than Grok.
BYD is better than Tesla.
I don't know about the other comparisons mentioned, but Hotz himself said comma is/has always been about 2 years behind Tesla.
Are you aware of the recent issues with BYD and other Chinese EV brands? Entire dealerships have gone up in flames from dangerous vehicles. Not lone incidents but tens of dealerships at least, in just this month.
Tesla cars may have flaws but there is no way a BYD can be compared to them even on the basics. And Tesla’s software is simply way better and makes it clear that it was designed by a competent tech company not an old car company. Other brands aren’t on that level yet.
No, but I'd like to know more.
> Entire dealerships have gone up in flames from dangerous vehicles. Not lone incidents but tens of dealerships at least, in just this month.
Wow! Here's one: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2544ndvkepo
( Although no brand is given and it's a " possibly " on being caused by an EV )
Can you provide links to 19 more such incidents this month?
Cheers.
https://cardealermagazine.co.uk/publish/fire-service-has-rea...
Oops.
Last October, it was claimed that an electric or hybrid vehicle had started a huge blaze at Luton Airport’s car park, which destroyed 1,400 cars and much of the building structure.
However, an investigation later revealed that the fire was started accidentally by a diesel vehicle.
I heard on social media that a witch turned someone into a newt.
This type of snark isn’t in the spirit of HN. If you’re actually intellectually curious, go search social media for yourself. But spare us the mocking replies and false equivalence.
And perhaps try to read about the role of government censorship on this and similar issues.
https://www.ntdtv.com/b5/2024/05/16/a103881785.html (which actually lists 11 minus the most recent)
translation seems to be mostly accurate, but i can't be arsed into researching the locations listed.
but yes, tens of dealerships per month seems like a bit of an exaggeration
Certainly an extraordinary claim requiring evidence :-)
I yawned so hard my jaw unlocked.
Can't wait to see groundbreaking... checks notes... "advancements in various applications, optimizations, and extensions of the model".
Do these companies only hire yes men?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
But on the philosophical side, if an understanding can’t be communicated, does it exist? We humans only have various movements and vibrations of flesh, sensing those, text, and images to communicate.
And actually there is no need to go as far as “universe” to get to something that can’t be captured by language. Human existence is such an example.
For this reason I don’t think llms are going to be good film makers for instance. Sure an llm will be able to spit the scenario of the next action movie, those already seem to be automatically generated anyway. But making a film that resonates to humans takes a lot that can’t be formulated with language.
I disagree. The day is coming when some *BIG* problem is solved by AI just because someone jokingly asks about it.
The all-encompassing nature of it seems befitting a company producing increasingly general-purpose AI.
The output will very simply tell how much 'truthful' the AI actually is.
We don’t give a s%#* about people wanting to use AI to write SEO spam, automate their customer support or generate content to keep the kids quiet. We want to use this tech as a tool to solve real world problems in a way that, looking back 500 years from now, people will see this as a time of innovation, rather than a time of decline.
Wether he’ll succeed is a different question, of course. But such a direction is clearly missing in the other players. They are just too eager to cater to the laziest segment of the economy of bits. They’re about changing pixels on other people’s screen.
There is a lot of potential for using AI in drug discovery and development, biotech more broadly and chemistry/material science. Pharma is investing heavily in this right now. If useful, the output here could potentially also support Neuralink and even SpaceX.
Coupled with the line about the "true nature of the universe", I guessed this was really about entering that space.
But when you look at the careers page [https://x.ai/careers#open-roles], they are only hiring AI engineers. No biochemists or MDs, material scientists or any other natural science domains. So, if natural science discovery is actually on the road map, either: - it is in the long term future - they have no idea what they are doing
More likely, they are not going for natural science and this is basically just a play to compete with openAI. And, in that case, I don't understand how they convinced investors to put 6 billion dollars into it.
Did x.ai just become worth more than x.com? We must be nearing the bubble popping...
And certainly 6 billion dollars down the drain, funneled to stave the collapse of X/Twitter and Musk paying his dues.
If I ask someone to give me 6B to understand the true nature of the universe they’d laugh in my face, but I sort of assume I’d have an even chance of doing better.
He's also transformed two industries and become a dominant player in each. Just do that and the investors will give you money.
NVIDIA must be happy, $5.9B will go to it.
He’s been actively pushing for more control of Tesla for exactly this https://electrek.co/2024/05/20/elon-musk-confirms-threat-giv...
What mess is afoot at SpaceX that is his doing?
The Musk reasoning here is stupid, but smart. If he makes a superhuman intelligence, he can only ask it "What is dark matter?" and it might figure out.
I have some big problems with this idea, but it isn't 100% stupid. Just 98% stupid.
At least we will go down with enough spam texts and cat pictures.
I’m curious what they’re bringing to the table to be able to fetch that valuation.
Whether it's calling Teslas cheap when accounting for your time spent filling up, taking on significant debt rather than selling company shares as Tesla/SpaceX, or leveraging his personal shares for debt, Musk is always pulling some trick to reach numbers like this. That's not to say these sorts of things aren't common among the ultra-rich, but I get the impression Musk does it at every opportunity.
All this to say that I don't think $6bn in cash changed hands for this, I'd expect there's credit lines secured on Musk's own valuation of the company, possibly service credits from compute providers (this can even be via VCs), or other clever tricks to inflate it.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-23/musk-s-xa...
For all the criticism of Elon, he has been foundational in Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX and OpenAI. Even if you think Tesla is troubled/overvalued, he has built multiple enormous companies, and one of a handful of people to have built a company into a $1T valuation (however fleeting).
So yes, the arithmetic for VCs is very straightforward: for better or for worse, Elon Musk is able to execute in the only way that matters to investors.
We’re witnessing an arms race for compute, as compute will likely be the primary constraint for building AGI.
Zuck argues it's energy, and I seem to line up behind him.
Investors paid about $12 per X user/bot.
Interesting they are opting for a spinoff rather than doing this in house. Perhaps to capitalise on the hype and attract researchers who don't want the baggage of being associated with polarising brands?
This isn’t how you gain allies.
Even if they do, it is much less of their wealth on the line managed by others to grow it.
I would think full-throated development of a diffusion model would make a lot more sense to achieve the mission, since its chief mechanism is separating signal from noise.
Considering we're the only beings in the known universe that have language, I'm not sure there are many universal insights to be gleaned from an LLM
As if we are currently living in some _false_ representation of the universe.
As it happens "AI" is proving to be a challenge to the meaning of the word "true".
This makes "the 'true' nature of universe" a particularly amusing usage.
Therefore he believes that Grok can be an LLM trained on the voices of the people using his alleged free speech platform:X.
For example: saying “cis” or “cisgender” flags your post as abusive and limits visibility. Saying the 6-letter (or 3-letter) f-slur does not.
However, as Musk has already got AI in his cars and was interested in the topic well before LLMs (founding investor in OpenAI when they were doing reinforcement learning), I'd be extremely disappointed if he had forgotten all of that in the current LLM-gold-rush.
(That's not a "no"; he's disappointed before).
AIs like AlphaFold are hardly in the news compared to OpenAI and its competitors.
Of course they're not going to make any fundamental contributions to natural science or mathematics (or likely even LLM training/understanding).
Their founder has a track record of making his investors a lot of money while solving really hard, important problems.
Current valuations:
- Tesla $570B
- SpaceX $180B
- Neuralink $5B
- Boring $5.6B
Boring and Neiralink are just valuations with unknown revenue base and future which may be not justified, and weak proof to justify another valuation.
Elon Musk Prada Leather Jacket
Elon Musk Rectangular Sunglasses
Considering the price of e.g. BTC, maybe thinking "People with money can't be this dumb!" is the dumbass move...
That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”
Humans with money are mostly just humans that are much less likely to face real consequences if they eff it up.
https://www.ft.com/content/2a96995b-c799-4281-8b60-b235e84ae...
> Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Collectively our team contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, μTransfer, and SimCLR. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.
They are already competitive despite the late start: https://x.ai/blog/grok-1.5v
So they hired some guys from other AI companies.
And Elon's recent polarising nature and the callous nature with which he disbanded the Tesla Supercharger team means that truly talented people aren't going to be as attracted to him as in his early days. They are only going to be there for the money.
It's 6B down the drain. Saying grok 1.5 is competitive is a joke, if it was any good it would be ranked well in chatbot arena (https://chat.lmsys.org/). Elon is a master in hyping underperforming things and this is no exception.
The real bull case - Elon doesn't kowtow to mentally ill basement nerds and the media/politicians trying to not lose power.
Can you image someone running in to tell Elon the fat nerds on HN are in a tizzy about Grok telling people to eat rocks?
Other bull case he's obviously silo-ing Twitter for unique training data. Reddit can only ask nicely you don't train off them.
Twitter with a good AI could become quite strong. I'm not as bullish on this, but... Twitter is all the cutting edge news. ChatGPT was happy to be years out of date.
No one cares Russia has finally manned up and launched a tactical nuke 24 hours after it happens, something new will be trending. This is Twitters strength, to the minute data. One of the AI's will have to specialize in this.
As do Amazon and Apple who aren't just sitting back doing nothing.
So I think even 4th place is putting it nicely. Far more likely to be 6th at best.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240415120557/x.ai/about
I don't know enough about the AI/ML scene to say if any of these are notable people.
Very few of the names stand out to me (being adjacently familiar with the space). However I did search based on your link… (Edit: with the exception of Chris Szegedy, thanks to the reply below for pointing that out)
Most of them seem to have been secondary/tertiary people on the projects listed. Definitely feels a bit like resume padding.
It’s also unfortunate that searching for the first person after Elon nets results for their domestic abuse arrest over any achievements in the space.
Further down, one of the only two women involved is a “creative AI writer/filmmaker”. Not a strong amount of diversity on their roster but also a weird role to highlight.
None of this is to diminish the work the people here do or have done, but it’s a startlingly high valuation for a company without high name recognition technical expertise in this domain.
Elon has traditionally relied on well known expert partners in the areas he’s expanded into, so this feels like an outlier.
The rest? Who knows.
So the team could largely be newbies to AI (with extremely good fundamental knowledge/skill), rather than folks we've all heard of from the AI scene.
Jim Simmons that recently passed away did exactly this in finance decades ago. He didn't build a team of the brightest minds in finance.
He hired brilliant people that specifically did not work in finance. I think he even mentioned that astronomy was one of his favorite areas to hire from for finance.
I am sure we highly underestimate the indoctrination against new ideas that anyone at the top of a field has been subject to.
Humans love to turn everything into a high school prom king/queen popularity election though even when it is obvious the best people for the job didn't even go to the prom.
> Our Series B funding round of $6 billion with participation from key investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.
I regularly try to ask them to give me fluid dynamics simulation code to see what level they are at. Right now, they can't do that kind of thing all by themselves, and I don't know enough to debug the code they give me.
But even without any questions about free will or consciousness or whatever, a sufficiently capable — not yet existing — transformative search engine (as it has been derided as) and a logical inference engine (which it isn't, but it can use) could have produced the Aclubiere metric with nothing newer than the Einstein field equations and someone asking the right question.
I do not expect transformer models to be good enough to do that given their training requirements, but I wouldn't rule it out either.
He has certainly made some bizarre choices running Twitter though.
like who?
> Unsurprising really given that he was offering ~$10M/year in com
where did you get this from?
Ah, nevermind. He's just pissing away investor money. Must be fun!
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that AI development appears to be heading the same way.
Don't get me wrong: Musk has and will continue to get into serious trouble for things he insists are true but nobody else believes (420 etc.), I'm just saying there's a huge gap between them.
How this is not a conflict of interest, I do not know; then again it may explain why Elon wants to reincorporate Tesla in Texas - away from Delaware courts
The only universe they're going to end up understanding is the one inside Elon's head.
I wonder if everyone on this list is a co-founder? I would imagine they’d have preferred to list by seniority.
Since when? If that's the case then why are Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and even Google not nr 1 right now?
IMO the deciding factor for success is super obviously leadership. Hence why xAI got 6 billy thrown at it.
Microsoft is nr 1 right now, via OpenAI. Microsoft was behind on AI so they sent their compute for 49% of OpenAI and full access to OpenAI's models.
Getting a deadline wrong?
It's a doubly linked list where the head contains a pointer to the tail, and a flag that determines which pointer in the nodes is forward and which is backward.
The engineers did not think it would be a disaster, they thought it would erode as it had in previous testing (which would've been fine since the water plate system was already being designed), but hadn't expected the concrete to shatter the way it did.
Nearby residential properties have already either been bought by SpaceX or are otherwise required to be evacuated before launches. Those evacuation notices are a big part of tracking when launches are actually about to happen.
I don't hate Elon because I don't think about Elon beyond commenting on the occasional article he happens to be referenced in and shaking my head when I see him do something stupid. I'm glad he put money towards both projects (Tesla/Space-X) and got them off the ground, and now I wish he would just leave them both alone and let adults run the show.
Yes, he literally took ownership of making the call for a concrete pad despite the engineers telling him it was going to fail.
https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition
>Elon was clear that the decision to fly in that configuration with no water or diverter was his call, and in this case it almost destroyed the pad, accelerated the rocket’s failure, and led to the program being grounded pending FAA review.
Just like he was the one who insisted on a yoke without progressive steering in the Model S that is absolute garbage and quite frankly dangerous, and any real engineer would have told him if he had cared to ask.
Even if he had the best names in the industry attached, he would always put himself first.
I don’t think it’s wrong he’d do so either , because he has a cult of personality that would make him the biggest feature (positive/negative) of any company he is involved with.
Hence why I specifically only ask for other people on note here.
Using it for knowledge is bonkers.
Why not buy some educational textbook company and use 99.9% correct data? Oh and use RAG while you are at it so you can point to the origin of the information.
The real evolution still has to come though, we need to build a reasoning engine (Q*?) which will just use RAG for knowledge and language models to convert its thought into human language
In other words - say you have a model that is semi-smart, often makes mistakes in logic, but sometimes gives valid answers. You use it to “brainstorm” physical equations and then use formal provers to weed out the correct answer.
Even if the llm is correct 0.001% of the time, it’s still better than the current algorithms which are essentially brute forcing.
interesting.
This is both true and irrelevant. When Musk took over, the Tesla Death Watch was running strong because it had made 100-and-something individual vehicles in total and relied entirely on finding more investors to not go bankrupt.
What Tesla needed is exactly what Musk is: a salesman who can sell a dream to both investors and customers.
> Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars
Humans on Mars shouldn't be on that list, even if he's wrong about every specific — it's the point of everything else he does.
This is a pretty big thing to overlook, regardless of subsidies, as it's at least in the low hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue.
Hype, sure, that's the lighting every company wishes it could bottle for their product launches. Even the metaphorical launches rather than Musk's more literal use of the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster
Is "hype" a dirty word for you? Because my point is, that brought in actual sales, which they didn't meaningfully have before.
> Without credits and customer subsidies they wouldn’t ever have made anything
And? The sole purpose of those things is to convince the private sector to get something done. You're complaining that they worked.
I think it might be similar to game companies where people are attracted to the work itself (whether it’s because they’re True Believers in Musk or because electric cars and space are cool, not sure, probably mostly the latter). This lets the company pay less for the same level of talent, since the work is in itself a form of compensation (as perceived by the people who accept the jobs for lower pay).
I don't know what you mean by that.
If you mean qualia, then sure. Unsolved and undescribed. But other than that, I think everything has a linguistic form; perhaps inefficient, but it is possible.
Separately, transformers don't have to use what humans recognise as a langue, this means they can use things such as DNA sequences and pictures. They're definitely not the final answer to how to do AI, because they need so many more examples than us, but I don't have confidence that they can't do these things, only that they won't.
This is both extremely powerful and limiting.
An LLM is never going to give you some of the most famous films like "Star Wars" which bounced around before 20th Century Fox finally took a chance on it because they thought Lucas had talent. Is what we want? A society that just uses machines to produce variations of the same thing that already exist all the time? It's hard enough for novel creative projects to succeed.
Yes, state of the art models like midjourney, sd3 are _really_ good. You are bounded only by your imagination.
The idea that generative AI is only derivative was never an empirical claim, its always been a cope.
Because you focus on how they are similar and not how they are different, to me it is extremely obvious they are very different. Students make mistakes and learn and then stop doing them soon after, when I taught students at college I saw that over and over. LLM however still does the same weird mistakes they did 4 years ago, they just hide it a bit better today, the core different in how they act compared to humans is still the same as in GPT-2 to me, because they are still completely unable to learn or understand their mistakes like almost every human can.
Without being able to understand your own mistakes you can never reach human intelligence, and I think that is a core limitation of current LLM architecture.
Edit: Note that many/most jobs doesn't require full human general intelligence. We used to have human calculators etc, same will happen in the future, but we will continue to use humans as long as we don't have generally intelligent computers that can understand their mistakes.
There are deep mathematical results about our limits to understand things simply because we communicate through finite series of symbols from finite dictionaries. Basically what we can express and prove is infinite but discrete, but there is much larger infinities than that that will be beyond our grasps forever. Things like theorems that are true but can not be proven to be true, or properties on individuals real numbers that exist but can not be expressed.
And there is no reason to believe the universe doesn't have the same kind of thing: it remains to be shown whether or not you can describe or understand the universe with a finite set of symbols.
It begs the question, if sifting through noise is a meaningful way to look for scientific progress. And of course, what if it's wrong? Both the Library of Babel and AI are fully capable of leading us down untested and nonsense rabbit-holes. The difference between Alice and Wonderland and Jabberwocky is unknown to us; we wouldn't know which books are worth reading and which are not.
On the one hand, you have people excited by this idea. Some people really do think that the world's answers are up on a bookshelf in the Library of Babel, somewhere. The philosophical angle runs deeper yet, though; what kind of cargo-cult society would we build relying on a useful AI? Are we guaranteed meaningful progress because an AI model can keep pressing the "randomize" button? Do we eventually hit a point where fiction and reality are indistinguishable? It's all hard to say.
That is not the same as what you said. He made the final call (him taking ownership over decision making is literally his job, the alternative is blaming engineers for not forseeing every issue and devolving back to old space's wasteful waterfall style development), you claimed that the engineers knew it would be a disaster. That is false.
Meanwhile your source is - yourself? Who also appears to think (both in this thread and your post history) that anyone who points out Elon's flaws "hates" him.
While that is true, it is also noteworthy that Jensen Huang thinks Tesla is far ahead in self-driving cars. https://autos.yahoo.com/nvidia-ceo-says-tesla-far-110000305....
If you need to effectively provide this whole secondary dataset to have better answers, what value do the tweets add to training other than perhaps sentiment analysis or response stylization?
It would be hard to judge rate of improvement at this point, since the company has only been around for 1.25 years, and grok 1.5 is yet to be released for general access.
a16z invested $350 in Adam Neumann's real estate venture - after WeWork. VCs will absolutely knowingly invest on hype if they think it's going to last long enough for them to cash out with great returns.
Tesla still has one local operator per car who has to be able to have twitch reactions at all times.
Competitors like Honda and Mercedes also let you take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road in certain areas (level 3), which Tesla hasn't yet achieved.
Tesla FSD is still a level 2 system.
So far as I know, all current AI need far more examples than we do.
But, that's not why LLMs are "unable" to learn: the part which does that is simply not included in when it's deployed for inference.
Maybe others can complete it, maybe it'll be easy to complete it in twenty years, with a little more hindsight. Maybe.
Ok, but that's more on you than on current AI; the models which get distributed (both LLMs and Stable Diffusion based image generators) are already found in re-trained and specialised derivatives created by people who know how to and have a sufficiently powerful graphics card.
The weights are frozen on purpose. You can "thaw" them.