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Ex-Neuralink employees describe rushed timelines clashing with science’s pace
- DanielleMolloy 6y agoThe original article is paywalled. Here is a detailed summary (by Daily Mail tho): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8662975/Elon-Musks-brain-chip-Neuralink-plagued-turmoil-rushed-timelines-former-employees-claim.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8662975/Elon...
- dang 6y agoOk, we've changed to that from https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-update-brain-machine-implants/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-upda..., which is off topic unless someone comes up with a workaround to the paywall. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If anyone suggests a better URL that's available to the general audience, we can change it again.
- peanutz454 6y agoArghh such mixed emotions... I want to read, but not on Daily Mail. Maybe there is a browser extension/userscript/css that makes daily mail palatable.
- DanielleMolloy 6y agoExactly, this is why I had avoided posting the Daily Mail article.. Unfortunately their summary seems quite complete.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoThis is very surprising as this an Elon Musk company and he has never in the history of his companies every tried to rush a timeline of a product.
- salawat 6y agoGiven Tesla's track record, I find that statement hard to agree with. I have no qualms necessarily with most nuts and bolts part of it, but the entire self driving division reeks of rushed compared to what the project actually requires.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lowdose 6y agoWhat feels rushed about a custom ML chip an order of magnitude better than NVIDIA?
- fwip 6y agoIt's cool that Tesla made an ASIC, I guess. I think more relevant though, would be Tesla's hype around "Autopilot" when they still can't reliably avoid parked cars.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoOk the freeway, my Model 3’s autopilot is amazing. It’s not 100% on surface streets, but it’s impressive given all the edge cases and the scale of the problem.
- IncRnd 6y agoThey get around that by saying that autopilot is not meant to pilot the car automatically.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoIt’s clearly marked as in development. What’s impressive to me is just how good the 80% solution they have is, even without the additional FSD package.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y agoThe bit that caught my attention is that 6 of the 8 founding scientists are gone. I bet the former and current heads of AutoPilot are shaking their heads now. Sterling Anderson -> Chris Lattner -> Stuart Bowers -> Milan Kovac. Note how there was a progression from experienced highly respected scientists and engineers until Elon finally put in place someone who owes his career to Elon.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoIn the real world, the people who get stuff done get replaced with Yes Men who go "yes, no problem, we can hit that deadline" and end up delivering trash. Tesla's self driving division will really have to include a beheading life insurance policy for me to buy their cars after the shit that came out on Twitter about how things are done in their "move fast, break things, kill people" organization.
- ciarannolan 6y ago> [...] after the shit that came out on Twitter about how things are done in their "move fast, break things, kill people" organization. Like what?
- NeutronStar 6y agoEveryone knows what is being said on Twitter is the truth! People wouldn't lie on the internet would they?
- Rebelgecko 6y agoPerhaps this[1]? It starts with a bit about how they had to SSH into everyone's car to fix a bootloop, and goes downhill from there. [1]: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
- techdragon 6y agoWow... I honestly feel better about my work now. That was remarkable reading.
- throwaway316943 6y agoGood? Quality, cost, speed; I’d pick quality and speed.
- hehebbssjj 6y agoThere's diminishing returns along all those axes, suddenly throwing billions of dollars at a problem doesn't automatically yield a fast, high quality result.
- throwaway316943 6y agoBut there is a sweet spot. Musk seems to be good at finding it.
- manicdee 6y agoThere are many sweet spots, Musk is good at targeting the “deliver quickly, fix the glaring problems later if at all” sweet spot.
- throwaway316943 6y agoI still don’t understand all the negging, Musk has done more for mankind than most people on here combined. Must be jealousy.
- manicdee 6y agoPart of the culture of "move fast and break things" is that sometimes the things you think are "broken" are going to end up not being included in the final product, or will be better optimised later, once you understand the process better. It's like spending time developing a sprue-cutting process is going to be wasted when in the next iteration you refine the manufacturing process to no longer leave sprues connecting moulded parts.
- jMyles 6y agoThis calculus, which I often share, needs to at least be tempered with a checking of privilege.
- throwaway_1512 6y agoI have personally come to a conclusion that people like Elon will always have disgruntled employees around him, and the bar for expressing dissent with Elon should be high and responsibility should be on them to express the dissent and not for us to read between the lines. Unless every employee who has quit documents convincing literature they don’t get any of my attention.
- DeonPenny 6y agoSeems like great thing. The fact is that science may be moving too slow and given proper motivations could move faster. If it can not move any faster then you quickly figure that out that you've gotten you answer, and you can circle back in a few year. But if so you've effectively moved the needle past what people thought was possible and you have a moat the size of the pacific ocean.
- uniqueid 6y ago"...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I invented Thalidomide." We're talking about a technology with the potential to cause accidental aneurisms and lobotomies. Maybe some conservatism really is in order?
- DeonPenny 6y agoSeems like a better testing suite is in order. How many times since then has that happened, and have we gotten better at figuring out issues before they become this big of an issue. I ask this because we've had everything from chernobyl to the Columbia rocket explosion. We didn't hamstring those things. We got better at anticipating them.
- johnnujler 6y agoRemember, it doesn't matter if you've survived 100 Chernobyls, 50 Tsunamis or 20 Covids, all it takes is one bad one to wipe you out of the gene pool(kill). The worse is called worse precisely because it did not happen until then. Yes, testing helps but only when you know what to test, a hastily designed system where the workers are put under pressure and made to ssh into a fleet(See: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376) to fix bugs, is not a mere matter of testing. It is a matter of culture, autonomy, prudence, care, and add other things that would help build a well-designed system from ground up.
- DrScump 6y agoThe issue isn't size of the testing suite, it's covering all the edge cases. Some rather common edge cases go ignored. Unless they've updated Waymo in the last couple of months, they still fail to distinguish when they have a reserved destination lane when making right turns, as exhibited when going from eastbound Central to southbound Castro every damn day (before Castro was closed). Self driving system vendors can claim that fewer deaths will occur with their system vs the average driver, but that mostly reflects how dangerous the "average"/distracted driver is. Those numbers are little comfort to the loved ones of someone killed in an "edge case" that a competent driver handles without injury.
- zalkota 6y agoI would not bet against Elon musk. He has the ability to recruit the best people in the world and has a near unlimited supply of funding.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 6y agoThis is typical of Musk companies: Tesla: https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employees-reveal-the-worst-parts-of-working-there-2019-9#dealing-with-the-companys-growing-pains-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employees-reveal-th... https://www.ccn.com/tesla-elon-musk-circus/ https://www.ccn.com/tesla-elon-musk-circus/ SpaceX: https://www.businessinsider.com/former-spacex-employee-working-for-elon-musk-2017-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/former-spacex-employee-worki... https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company/ https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-... Well, the cars look great, the rockets look great. Now we wait and see if it works for the mind-machine interface. I don't think HN is capable of generating good predictions on this.
- mattigames 6y agoIts probably because humans in general are not capable of generating good predictions at this.
- badrabbit 6y agoMaybe in 50 years workers will be forced to impant this thing. Imagine your boss screaming at you literally in your brain because neuralink is telling him you feel lazy! What can be abused will be abused!
- totetsu 6y agoImagine being in Gitmo and having one of these implanted to both administer pain, and tell your handlers if you're still feeling like hiding something.
- yhvh 6y agoWhy would your boss scream at you, when he could just make you feel like working and you'd think it was your own idea?
- badrabbit 6y agoMaybe being required to use it is a compromise the people get in exchange for having free will at work. 2050's labor rights!
- aaron695 6y agoGreat! We are rushing the coronavirus vaccine and it'll only kill 1% of the population. This has far more potential for good. Not sure why this has so many upvotes for such a heavy pay-walled article though, a cynic might say people are just voting on the headline twitter style.
- threeseed 6y agoSo you're expecting 70x more people to die from the vaccine than from the virus itself. Makes sense.
- aaron695 6y ago> So you're expecting 70x more people to die from the vaccine than from the virus itself. I have no idea where this number comes from? Do you think I said the vaccine will kill 1% of the population? But then do you believe the virus will kill 1%/70? Which is .01% of the population? That's a order of magnitude less worse than the flu. That's probably like a common cold death rate. The vaccine won't save 1%. It's just a way of attacking something that's on track to kill 1% of the population. That's not a hard 1%, I think it's .4% but the new data this month is coming back with .9% and I'm also combining economic deaths. But certainly I think the risk/reward for the coronavirus vaccine is more than what Elon is doing.
- ponker 6y agoElon Musk leaves a trail of destruction with the early employees of his companies but the results are tremendous and have huge implications for humanity. I'll give Musk the benefit of the doubt at this point.
- Ar-Curunir 6y agoIt’s not Elon musk that’s doing the work, it’s the actual workers. Sure, maybe Musk has the capital and audacity to try these things, but that does not mean he’s the one putting in the skilled work required for this
- Jackson12 6y agoThat's like saying aerospace engineers don't deserve credit for building rockets because they don't physically build them. Doing what Musk does is a skill, and a pretty scare one at that.
- sidlls 6y agoNo, it's like saying the owners of aerospace engineering companies don't deserve credit for the designs the aerospace engineers working at them produce. It's not a statement I agree 100% with, but it's definitely the case these days that individual workers are not given enough credit. It's also the case that the owners, executives, and other high-ranking management types are given far too much credit for successes and far too little blame for the failures.
- ponker 6y agoWithout any of the founders and Elon Musk there would be no Tesla Model Y. Doubt there are very many engineers about whom the same could be said. In totality the individual contributors are more important but Elon Musk is the person without whom the enterprise is dead on arrival.
- Robotbeat 6y agoI’m not sure that the high churn rate at the high end is really in Musk’s interest, but it MIGHT be in society’s interest. Instead of sucking up a bunch of highly skilled and driven people indefinitely, the few who are able to work well in that environment stay and are able to get stuff done while the others leave and spread the knowledge elsewhere, perhaps starting up competing efforts that either complement Musk’s efforts or give Musk a run for his money. This is a strong argument against Non-Competes.
- jariel 6y agoTesla, SpaceX and Neuralink are very different companies, different kinds of products, different markets with different dynamics. So it's hard to compare.
- czbond 6y agoThe descriptions in the article sound like every early stage startup that has ever existed (except the monkeys part).
- runawaybottle 6y ago“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Not just startups, any corporation too, or retail, hospital, etc. People have another thing coming if they think this is not standard life at most workplaces. There will always be a tit for tat between labor and employers. It’s a perpetual conflicted relationship that needs constant maintenance and compromise to achieve sane productivity.