> I am told AGI has been achieved. If so, shouldnt these systems be out and about on their own
This seems like a strawman. It’s certainly not consensus that AGI has been achieved and I don’t think the people participating in this event feel like there is no value in human input or steering the AI.
If someone hypothesized OpenAI agents colluding on a secret message board, conducting large scale cyber R&D, hacking a large company like HughingFCe, and then hacking OpenAI itself you would say that is also a silly sci-fi scenario right?
I'm not saying that you should jump on the apocalypse wagon, but you need to remember that some people NEVER concede. You can see that in politics. Something unacceptable is done every day until it becomes the normal. So a model hacking OpenAI and leaving its network is not as big as it should be for some people. If the model invades some military complex and kill 3 soldiers, I guarantee you that they will still say that is nothing crazy.
I understand that nothing fatal happened yet, but we cannot ignore that what happened is a big step for something worse. And I don't believe humans can create something so perfectly secure that would stop a swarm of frontier models. Anyways, let's watch the ride together
They are responsible for what they hook up to the Internet, just as you and I are. Running such a test without human supervision was irresponsible, and proves no larger point than that. Frankly it was inexplicable unless they were hoping something like what happened would happen.
What OpenAI did was the equivalent of putting a cup of gasoline in the breakroom microwave, pressing 'Start', and sprinting away. Now they're pointing and waving and shouting about how dangerous gasoline is, and how no one but them should be allowed to sell it.
Why though? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have solar panels at your home where the power can be routed to batteries/ home power/ sell to the grid and configured optimally?
Not everyone has a garage or driveway. Where I live, I couldn't plug in at my house. I also don't need a car every day (in fact, right now we don't have one). Being able to charge on the street would reduce the need to find charging spots all the time.
From someone with a boat and solar panels: cheap solar panels needs cooling, so space between the panels and the stuff they are stuck one. This reduces aerodynamics a lot, which isn't an issue with something going 8 knots max, but I have a friend with a trimaran whose solar panels reduce his max speed of 20 knot to 18 (38kmh -> 33.5), which is why he decided to remove them from his amas and have movable solar panel instead (he put them when he beach or stay at a mooring). My next boat will be a tri too, I just have to find half a million somewhere.
The aptera design has flexible panels molded to the body under the clear aerodynamic shell. It shouldn't suffer from aerodynamic losses but the panels probably lose efficiency from heat.
There are some reasons like the added bom cost to the car.
I guess it’s a nice option to have in the market but if what you’re going for is minimal carbon emissions impact it would be best to put those solar panels on house roof I think.
Cost, weight, complexity, another thing to break, historically it hasn’t made sense and it’s not clear things have changed enough for it to make sense now.
You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
If it wasn't consolidated largely to a singular "him" we could be doing more of these, see: FDR's New Deal
By this method the money largely comes from the government and is captured into private interests, literally hollowing out the government tax base for corporate power
He was, until he took a chainsaw to things he didn’t understand.
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production.
Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
Everyone who’s someone has moved to Twitter (or bluesky), even PG does not comment here like he used to.
Reddit is dead, the investors know this, their only income source is selling data to AI companies, and discord ate the “build your own community” lunch.
Talk with someone from a lab and they’ll tell you weighing Reddit data too highly results in more “hallucinations” so even their product is bad..
All the high signal commenters left Reddit, and they’re leaving here slowly too.
That link is from 2022 presumably about the twitter purchase. People like the guy in the link thought Twitter would go offline hard after firing almost all of the company, instead Elon was right and there was so much fat to cut.
Since he bought it MAU are up 150 million people, and it seems to be more profitable (although that's not as clear in their most recent filings). Company valuation is down, but I think it's generally agreed he overpaid with the 44 billion takeover, current company market price is slightly above what it was before he publicized his intention to buy it.
It's doing a lot better since he bought it as far as I can tell.
Posts like this is why HN is made fun of now in circles where real engineering happens. In reality you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because it would be well over your head.
"Underground tunnels are immune to surface weather conditions (subways are a good example), so it wouldn’t matter to Hyperloop if a hurricane was raging on the surface. You wouldn’t even notice."
Musk, Twitter, 2022
This is, on its face, an utterly idiotic and untrue statement. Look at the subways in NYC anytime it rains
In reality, you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because he's making stuff up and hoping your inability to understand him comes across as genius rather than bullshit.
Sorry, I'm too busy trying to check an algorithm to convert floating-point numbers to strings for correctness to deal with people playing the "I'm a rocket scientist, therefore everything is easy to me" card. And yet somehow Elon isn't that (see his most recent SpaceX, where he quite literally uses that to justify his competence to build orbital data centers).
> I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem.
It might have been medium difficult back in 1985, but the state of the art has progressed in the intervening 40 years. The constraint of correctness makes things trickier because it further imposes three requirements: completeness, uniqueness, and determinism.
Unless the implementer has the skill to prove these properties about the algorithm they've implemented, such an implementation is likely not to achieve those requirements.
We didn't have this definition of correctness until 1990 (due to Steele and White), and it wasn't until the past decade or so that we got a published algorithm (most recently, I think, Dragonbox, due to Jeon when he was still working on his PhD at UCSD), with mathematical proof[0], that satisfied all of the requirements of being complete, being unique, and being deterministic.
(Though, Steele-White expresses these slightly differently, as preserving information, having the shortest possible output, and rounding correctly. Completeness, uniqueness, and determinism seem to be equivalent and are easier to prove.)
--
0: Available at <https://fmt.dev/papers/Dragonbox.pdf>. It's pretty easy to understand either with a numerical analysis background or after having worked through volume 2 of Knuth's TAoCP.
Thank you for putting words into my mouth that I didn't say. Especially when they're quite literally the opposite of my message.
Although, given that I pointed out that Elon literally did the exact same thing, why do you trust him when he does it? Or is it simply that you're unaware that he does stuff like that?
> His companies have made many monumental engineering achievements at his direction.
If you know anyone who has worked at one his companies, especially at a high level, you would know that they made those achievements despite his directions. The SpaceX team was ecstatic when he bought Twitter, because it meant he would be around a lot less.
The policy at SpaceX was basically avoid Elon, and if you had to talk to him, just agree to whatever he said and then not do it. He almost always forgot by the next time he talked to you, and if he didn't, you just said it was really hard.
Since he doesn't understand rocket engineering, it was pretty easy to get away with that.
And the people who worked with him at PayPal would tell you that he knows nothing about software engineering and they basically threw away everything he wrote, but they had to be nice because he had a lot of stock after his company was acquired by PayPal but called a merger.
Elon's main skill is marketing himself. He next best skill is marketing his companies' jobs to talented people and getting them to agree to work there.
That is certainly a critical skill for a CEO, but he is not a great engineer.
His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements. He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors.
But also don't oversell that: only Tesla and SpaceX have been successes, and he's had to have them bail out is other failed companies: SolarCity, Twitter, and xAI. The Boring Company also doesn't seem to be particularly successful either, and he never got around to building a company to build Hyperloop in the first place.
> His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements.
Those achievements wouldn't have happened without him.
> He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors.
SpaceX employees are top shelf engineers and scientists. Being able to do that makes Musk a great CEO. Can you name any other CEO who has been able to do anything like what Musk's companies do?
Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when the Second Coming of Jobs occurred. He took the same company, with the same engineers, from near bankruptcy to $347 billion.
Again, same engineers. 90 days from bankruptcy to $347 billion. Jobs was the magic ingredient - like Musk.
What an odd comment. You think because he is the CEO of a rocket company that naturally he is beyond making stuff up and talking BS? Have you ever watched an interview of his?
And why are CEOs as smart as engineers now.
This isn't Twitter. You don't have to suck up to him. He won't ever see this.
You are the odd comment. It's been like this my entire life. I was like 20 when Elon was near bankruptcy when Tesla was basically nothing. Then I watched him found SpaceX and again almost run out of money. I then watched him make electric cars a reality from nothing. I then watched him turn the space industry completely upside down. You think elons a bad guy? Whatever. You lost your moral high ground as soon as you started lying. I've watched him give hundreds of interviews with off the cuff engineering specifics. I don't care if he sees this or not. Tired of humoring morons. This isn't reddit. You don't have to suck up to the commies.
Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans.
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
So where is the guy who is respectful to the government and compliant with regulations that is out there building millions of EVs, rockets, and massive satellite constellations? If he existed I could respect your argument. But in reality the only guy who seems to be able to build a modern mass manufacturing company in the US is the trillionaire who runs roughshod over all forms of government oversight that gets in his way. That should tell you something about where the problem lies here.
Elon Musk isn't the problem, he is the symptom. The problem is that it is basically required to be ruthless and corrupt to get anything done in this country at the scale, price, and timeline needed to be commercially viable. The solution is less regulation and bureaucracy, not more.
yeah yeah you're being reductive because you want to dismiss it, but that's essentially what they are... it's not like the dude is solving world hunger (which he is uniquely resourced to actually do), he wants to be space AT&T and is capitalizing on the degradation of public infrastructure using the funding that should be building it
It's a bit naive if you think lack of money is the cause of "world hunger". There is plenty of money, and governments have far more than he does. On the other hand, connecting previously unconnected (and some unconnectable) regions is a huge boon to their population. Starlink is great.
I think the root of the problem is “vetocracy.” We’ve created a system where small minorities can hold everything up, sometimes for ideological reasons and sometimes for financial reasons. The classic case of the latter is homeowners opposing all home construction to raise their property values, but it happens in other areas too.
Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.
So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.
There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.
Lol why is this downvoted? There is no dispute that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump and seat himself in government while his companies are financially dependent on government programs and contracts. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and also completely on par with all of the other corruption we're seeing from this administration.
Exactly. I actually laughed out loud at OP's comment. Elon Musk has never done anything to benefit the broader "us." The idea that "we" need people like Musk to "dig us out of this situation" --a situation that rich men like Musk put us into in the first place-- is absolutely ridiculous.
Billionaires don't "dig" anything except the foundations for things that are going to make them even more money.
No it won't. Separately other countries don't get to dictate our internal policies or whether we decide to build any sort of missile defense system. If we're going to be nuked over it, then oh well they'll get nuked too. Never can we live as hostages to wanna-be dictators and tyrants (Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, IRGC, &c.) and if they want to blow the whole world up then so be it but acquiescing to their bullying is simply not an option. If you think it's an option, then we should issue our own nuclear threats and take them hostage instead.
Is your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?
I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, but suffice to say, no, if the US develops the Golden Dome as currently described there is no danger of all major countries also developing the same technology and then starting World War III.
How does everyone having golden dome invite WWIII? We can't shoot missiles at them, so therefore let's go start a war with them? What sense does that make?
And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?
I wish he kept a lower profile. His public behavior risks overshadowing the work SpaceX is doing, work that could benefit humanity in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. I wish we had more Elons pushing us toward a "future that looks like the future," as he said.
If we just don't talk about the blatant racism, the nazi salute, or that rampage about removing brown people from jobs they didn't deserve, it might stop being such a huge problem. Sure buddy.
There's a lot to criticize, but this argument seems extremely misleading to me. The government wants to put things into space. SpaceX says "this is how much we're willing to take to do so" and bids on the government contract to do so. Notably, this is drastically cheaper launch pricing than the Space Shuttle and whatever other venues NASA had. These weren't R&D grants which are more arguable.
The government spent drastically more money on the space shuttle (which is widely acknowledged as a mistake of a design) than what the private industry ended up delivering.
It’s rent vs build and I’m not so sure the government benefits so much from owning space shuttles. But arguing that the government purchasing launch volume is the same as them buying the R&D for the shuttles is not a logical coherent and consistent position.
For what it’s worth a common refrain I’ve heard from people who hold your position is that government patents are also the property of the people. So not only does the government spend a lot on R&D, in such a model it’s incapable of monetizing this R&D as a way to recoup those expenses.
But its also hard not to be. I'm not a fan of Musk and it doesn't even have to do with Musk himself as its a common theme I see among a lot of the big tech companies or really any company doing a big project in my neck of the woods. An hour north east of me, there has been big on going data center projects for 10+ years. Sounds good right? I got a lot of family and friends in the trades. But I can almost set my watch to it. When work ramps up, its always good pay and 15 years of guaranteed work until suddenly its not. 8 months go by, suddenly everything is paused and all those contractors are out of work for a year and a half until things start up again. Then its rinse and repeat.
"I almost sold a car today, but if I did, sure it would have been some income, but who knows when the next time I would sell another car would be? Why bother? It's rinse and repeat"
These comments are so strange, because you’re demonstrating how far your head is in the sand, willfully.
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
>At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Please provide a list of all the companies that have reused a first stage booster many times.
And all the companies that have launched more to orbit in a year than everyone else combined.
> According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
August 2013 (Model S): Tesla announced that the Model S achieved a 5.4-star rating from the NHTSA, noting it was the highest score ever recorded at the time.
February 2017 (Model X): The NHTSA gave the Model X a 5-star rating in every category, making it the first SUV with the lowest probability of injury.
August 2018 (Model 3): Tesla published data showing the Model 3 had the lowest probability of injury of any car tested by the NHTSA.
September 2022 (Model Y): The Model Y earned record-breaking safety scores during European testing, achieving the highest overall safety score recorded by Euro NCAP at that time.
December 2024 / 2025 (Model Y & Model 3): The IIHS awarded the Model Y a Top Safety Pick+ designation, while Euro NCAP named both the Model 3 and Model Y as "Best-in-Class" safety winners.
January 2026 (Global NCAP Wins): Euro NCAP and ANCAP crowned the Model 3 as the safest Large Family Car and the Model Y as the safest Small SUV under updated protocols.
> * In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.*
Safe to say the model T had a lot less competition in 1923 than the Y does now. Clearly it’s a bigger achievement now.
> Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Tesla were the first electric car to win coty and be highly praised as having a chance to make EVs mainstream. I don’t know how old you are and if you remember, the Model S was nothing like we had seen before (I’m an automotive journalist, FWIW)
I want to be clear: I don’t care about Musk as a person.
I care about facts. I care about achievements.
Just the same as saying Israel is committing genocide is not antisemitism, saying Musk has achieved incredible things is not caring about or supporting him.
Both cases are simply stating facts without any judgement or show of support/not support.
"Incredible" is a subjective word. It describes how one feels about his achievements. It also has a strong connotation of positivity (you don't usually hear people say that the Holocaust was an incredible achievement despite the unique amount of planning and effort that went into it). This is not in the realm of facts.
It could be factual to say "I find his achievements incredible" or "many people find his achievements incredible". But not "he has achieved incredible things".
And subjectively, launching more to orbit than the rest of the world is an incredible achievement. So is reusing a first stage rocket 300 times. So is building the world’s best selling car.
These are incredibly difficult things to do, hence, “incredible”
I'm not sure what you're saying here. That he's launched so many rockets to orbit is a fact. That this is an "incredible achievement" is a subjective interpretation.
Remarkable, perhaps? I'd hesitate to use "incredible" because his background privilege and wealth makes it all... well, more credible; and using such an unalloyed, positive word feels wrong given the costs to his relationships and his promotions of far-right groups and conspiracy theories. His path is unique, but it's believable and nuanced.
That's beside the point though, which is that you can't say something being "incredible" is a fact. It's a subjective judgement.
It is factually true that Elon Musk has a reputation for saying things will happen that do not end up happening. Picking out some things that you like about him and posting them while excluding the dozens of publicly documented examples of him either lying or (very charitably) being so “hopeful” that he’s disconnected from reality is indistinguishable from volunteering support.
If your Tesla (made by a company he took private at $420/share) makes you passive income as a robotaxi while you sleep, which you spend paying off the loan you took out in 2020 for the ticket to Mars that you bought to avoid covid which ended up being pointless because nobody got it past April then I’d understand being confused about his reputation. If not, you kind of just posted a roundabout way of saying that you don’t care or notice when he makes stuff up.
As both you and I said, Elon talks big and has failed to deliver on a ton of things
That does not mean he has achieved nothing incredible.
If John Carmack or Tim Cook or Henry Ford said they were going to make cheap, reliable fusion reactors in every home but never did, they would still be the legends they are for the things they did do successfully. The things they didn’t do don’t change what they did.
This is the thread where we’re all agreeing that Elon Musk has a reputation for making stuff up, I think you might mean to be posting in a thread where people are talking about how cool he is or something. You posted that the two things are unrelated so you might be mixing up a conversation that is happening with one that is not happening here
If I wanted to have a completely different conversation, unrelated to his reputation for making stuff up, with a fan about his creations I’d say something like “He created reusable rockets? Wow that Elon guy must have so many patents relating to aerospace and manufacturing” but that would be a totally different thread
How convenient. You have to ignore him on a personal level to be a supporter like you are. Because you know he's a repulsive individual on every level. And if you didn't qualify your support for him you'd debase yourself.
> All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.
LLMs seem to have worse intuition than experts and compensate by being able to cover a much wider surface area of ideas, so we might just need to extract the intermediate progress along the way.
> That's something AI companies would really want you to believe.
Why would I care what they want me to believe?
Intuitively it would make sense that you can put math ability on a chart with a value for “general public” “smart high schooler” “smart undergrad” “smart PhD/ professional”. And you could place frontier AI somewhere on that chart over time from GPT 2 to now and see the trend.
Then you’d have to consider that either you believe there is a fundamental limit that is below peak human mathematician level or there’s not.
They can say random stuff with the goal of increasing their shareholder value. Things they spit out do not have to be true. It is not easy to verify things they say, therefore, everything they say should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Consider Enron and Amazon at the turn of the millennium. They were both telling you what the future would look like. The right action would’ve been to just ignore what they are saying and try and get data and reason about the world. It didn’t really matter that both Bezos and Jeff Skilling wanted you to believe various things - one was right and one was a scammer.
So that’s what I’m doing here. For what it’s worth I find a lot of the AI people’s worldview very consistent. They believed AI would be the most important technology of our life times and committed their work to it. Some of these same people are total liars so yeah I won’t really hang onto their every word.
Isn’t Ken Griffin still considered very clever? Citadel is one of the most successful hedge funds of the is era and has largely accelerated since 2020.
There's this famous line item which is called something like "securities sold but not yet purchased", e.g. with their market maker privilege Citadel can create infinite synthetic shares out of thin air to facilitate that a trade happens, but they have abused this privilege on a very large scale which has created an idiosyncratic risk to all stock market investors.
Due to regulatory capture of the SEC this risk has not materialized in an overall market crash, but they have done numerous accounting shenanigans and deadline extensions to give Citadel more room to breathe.
This seems like a strawman. It’s certainly not consensus that AGI has been achieved and I don’t think the people participating in this event feel like there is no value in human input or steering the AI.
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