17 ms·

That makes only 2 of the original 8 founding scientists left. https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-update-brain-machine-implants/ https://www

That makes only 2 of the original 8 founding scientists left. 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... Elon Musk has been pretty successful at getting top talent to push the limits of engineering, but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. What I'm really interested to see is how long Karpathy will stay at Tesla as other self driving projects drop like flies (ATG, Zoox, and most recently L5)

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Am I imagining it, or have scientists across the board left lots of AI startups recently? OpenAI just had a big split too where a bunch left.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Yeah but in a lot of cases it's because money (especially AI fundraising money) is hella cheap and it's far more profitable (like, 10-100x) to co-found their own AI startup than to play senior scientist for someone else.
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    Capitalism truly is the most efficient way to allocate resources. ;) Less snarky response, perhaps if we saw more worker coops we'd care less about being a founder and more about delivering a result.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      There is no capitalism at work when there is no product sold.
      - jobigoud 5y ago
        Why? You can sell a dream.
        throwaway3699 5y ago
        Nobody seriously considers 'SV investors' to be a market. That is not how people get rich, anyway.
        hoseja 5y ago
        You must feel quite oxymoronic, being here.
    - ajwin 5y ago
      Start one! Everyone who mentions them should start one. Work super hard to get it started, deal with all the politics and then get voted out.
    - cornel_io 5y ago
      Nothing in AI would pay a cent to a worker coop, because revenues are very small right now, it's all "potential". So even though the expected value is (correctly, in the medium term, IMO) super high, everyone would get nothing based on current or near term revenues, which is exactly the situation VC exists to rectify. What you're seeing is the free market working correctly as more founders jump in to take VC money and make bets on their ability to execute.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        Well, a "mostly worker coop" in the sense of a company that takes capital from elsewhere but where shares are otherwise spread out among the workers could still work as a VC funded company as long as they addressed the issue of how to make it possible for that VC to get an exit. It becomes easier to get to a middle ground the cheaper it becomes to take capital. Interestingly one of the things Marx and Proudhon violently agreed on was that cheap credit is one of the most radical things you can create. The reasoning is simple: The cheaper credit is, the less power employers have over employees. To take a hypothetical extreme: if credit is free and guaranteed, an employee can walk out at any point and take whatever time they need to figure out what to do, at which point employer power of employees is nullified. As such, at some point along a gradient of cost and access - and it may well be an impossible point to reach - capitalism becomes indistinguishable from socialism, in that capital ownership becomes a matter of choice.
gjdjfnfhdbf 5y ago
Good to know, I may have to give Neuralink another try. My previous experience with the original 8 a few years ago during the hiring process was overwhelmingly negative. I'm hoping their culture has changed to be more in line with Musk's public persona since then.
- _qwfv 5y ago
  Musk's public persona is a nightmare, even if you only look at his public professional persona -- encouraging overwork, getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates, a total disregard for safety of both his customers and his workers, and developing an unhealthy cult of personality. I own a Tesla, I love SpaceX, I think Elon Musk is insufferable.
  - gjdjfnfhdbf 5y ago
    Fair points, but one trait that I do admire is his lack of elitism. That was sorely missing at Neuralink when I visited.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    > getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates This is both a strength and weakness. How many times have people wished CEOs actually knew what they were talking about? As long as Elon knows enough to build a decent team and lead it well, he doesn't need to know everything. From the outside it looks like he sees himself as 'one of the engineers' which is something I deeply respect, even if there's major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).
    - Pfhreak 5y ago
      Yeah, I appreciate any engineering firm that at least attempts to have some engineering leadership in charge. > major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones). That Vegas loop too... That's going to be a truly awful tunnel fire someday, and the safety systems there seem seriously lacking. (Also, the whole project feels like a grift.)
_coveredInBees 5y ago
I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on. For anyone working in the field, the end goal is extremely rewarding in terms of the long-term beneficial impact on society it would have and the numerous lives it would save. I don't think Tesla is going to drop FSD R&D anytime soon. They've also built out amazing software infrastructure under Karpathy's leadership to make use of their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to run shadow experiments with newer models in the background and continuously collect more difficult and interesting training data so they can improve their models and their internal test-sets for tracking metrics. They are also a relatively lean team from what I've heard, so it's not like they are bankrolling hundreds of very expensive ML PhDs at the moment. It is debatable if they (or anyone else) will "solve" FSD with current approaches, but I think the technology is already pretty fascinating and useful.
- shaan7 5y ago
  > it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    Yup double yup ! > numerous lives it would save If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      These are political problems, it's a different skillset.
    - logicchains 5y ago
      Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.
anonytrary 5y ago
TLDR: This technology is in its infancy but is very much so in the R&D phase. He needs to retain top scientists and avoid making promises. The research isn't there yet, which is why Elon should be trying to retain people who have deeply studied the hippocampus and brain. What the heck is he doing? Find the best people in this domain. The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. He needs more researchers in the fundamentals. I think if they've built the robot that inserts the electrodes non-invasively, they can continue to add additional electrodes and get an even more accurate measurement of what's happening elsewhere in the brain. This tech will takes years and years to master. Neuralink a science company. Or at least, it should be at this point if I'm taking it seriously. God knows there are hundreds of tech companies selling SAAS software for domains that have negligible research. Neuralink shouldn't be like that. Don't overpromise and underdeliver just yet, causing best people to leave. This company has tons of potential.
- f6v 5y ago
  > It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Not a neuroscientist, but it seems like the problem is more involved than just training a DL model on a data. We need detailed maps of the brain before we put any electrodes in it. Meanwhile, full mouse brain map is likely a decade away [0]. Humans have a bigger brain, imagine how long it’d take. It’s just a lot of manual labor which takes incredibly long time. Keep in mind that you also need to map thousands, if not millions of brains to model population heterogeneity. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. This is an unproven hypothesis. Since we do not know how computation actually happens in the brain, we can't say for sure that electrical signals can be matched to the actual computations happening, even if they are correlated. It is still possible that the electrical signals we are measuring are just byproducts, and that the real compatation happens at a chemical level or inside each individual neuron or even in microtubules as Penrose believed. The nice part is that this means that neuralink's attempts could be extremely useful to our understanding of the brain even if they fail - it would actually be an amazing discovery if they could show that you CAN'T deduce the brain's intent from observing electrical activities. We do know for sure though that you can use electrical signals to interface with motor neurons, so at least improvements in prosthetics should be something that neuralink can realistically deliver.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
interactivecode 5y ago
Ever since I learned that Musk didn't found Tesla [0] or PayPal [1] I get really uncomfortable when reading news like this. It's clearly Musk doing another hostile take over of a company someone else started. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–200... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history
- prestigious 5y ago
  I mean tesla without Elon is not really tesla. I never really thought he FOUNDED PayPal, but rather part of the so-called PayPal mafia that was successful at starting other companies. I never heard that he didn’t pull his weight from Peter thiel or the others
  - papito 5y ago
    I only wish I was slightly older during the dot com boom. I had to finish college and do it with flying colors, being from a poor family. If you had the means and some padding to take fairly reasonable risks, you walked away with riches. These people were at the right place and the right time, let's not lionize them as investment geniuses. They had money to put down on some horses, that is ALL.
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      It was certainly no sure thing, and it’s easy to say that in hindsight. There were definitely a lot of people who walked away from the dot-com era with worthless stock options and wounded egos. Plenty of people ended up taking the “safe” route too and getting a job at IBM. We’re in the same place with crypto right now. People will look back and say “oh jeez if only”. The early bazillionaires are already minted but there are a lot of crypto millionaires made every day. It’s just a lot of people dumping their life savings into BTC/ETH and enjoying the ride.
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      That doesn’t line up with what I’ve read about that time period. A lot of the companies that were well funded by such bets went bankrupt. In all likelihood you would have lost money during the bust. The companies that weathered the storm were actually delivering good products and had cash flow. That takes a lot of work on the tech and business sides. Maybe you could have timed the bubble and exited with a pile of cash, who knows. If you want to make those kinds of bets you could make them right now.
ur-whale 5y ago
>but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. The interesting aspect of your comment is in fact: what is the capital outlay and time needed for the science to actually get there. Elon has a track record of severely under-estimating those, but he is also smart enough (via PR / govt grants / leveraging past successes, etc ...) to stretch both beyond anything reasonable, to the point of actually reaching success (e.g. TESLA, SpaceX).
beyondarmonia 5y ago
I really wouldn't go far based on that list. It's mostly from the Waitbutwhy article from years ago when they were still basically a research/brainstorming group and hadn't even figured out what they wanted to do or what approach they wanted to take. For comparison to Musk's other companies , it's analogous to Bill Cantrell or Mike Griffin or that guy from sea launch at SpaceX. Some in this group were very briefly there like Tim Hanson. Some I think are misreported to not be there , unless anyone has any extra information. For example , Paul Merolla was there at the last conference , even though he's reported as not being with the company. Some I think are also advisors like Sabes , unless something has changed. One of them is just a neurosurgeon , but they already have a whole surgery department with a lead now.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stunt 5y ago
Getting top talents or investing on top talents? He has the money and he has the guts to take big risks which is remarkable for an investor. I think any scientist with a "revolutionary" idea that requires lots of capital will proactively approach Elon Musk.
gmadsen 5y ago
Zoox is very much still doing self driving...

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Am I imagining it, or have scientists across the board left lots of AI startups recently? OpenAI just had a big split too where a bunch left.

bpodgursky 5y ago
Yeah but in a lot of cases it's because money (especially AI fundraising money) is hella cheap and it's far more profitable (like, 10-100x) to co-found their own AI startup than to play senior scientist for someone else.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  Capitalism truly is the most efficient way to allocate resources. ;) Less snarky response, perhaps if we saw more worker coops we'd care less about being a founder and more about delivering a result.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    There is no capitalism at work when there is no product sold.
    - jobigoud 5y ago
      Why? You can sell a dream.
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        Nobody seriously considers 'SV investors' to be a market. That is not how people get rich, anyway.
        hoseja 5y ago
        You must feel quite oxymoronic, being here.
  - ajwin 5y ago
    Start one! Everyone who mentions them should start one. Work super hard to get it started, deal with all the politics and then get voted out.
  - cornel_io 5y ago
    Nothing in AI would pay a cent to a worker coop, because revenues are very small right now, it's all "potential". So even though the expected value is (correctly, in the medium term, IMO) super high, everyone would get nothing based on current or near term revenues, which is exactly the situation VC exists to rectify. What you're seeing is the free market working correctly as more founders jump in to take VC money and make bets on their ability to execute.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      Well, a "mostly worker coop" in the sense of a company that takes capital from elsewhere but where shares are otherwise spread out among the workers could still work as a VC funded company as long as they addressed the issue of how to make it possible for that VC to get an exit. It becomes easier to get to a middle ground the cheaper it becomes to take capital. Interestingly one of the things Marx and Proudhon violently agreed on was that cheap credit is one of the most radical things you can create. The reasoning is simple: The cheaper credit is, the less power employers have over employees. To take a hypothetical extreme: if credit is free and guaranteed, an employee can walk out at any point and take whatever time they need to figure out what to do, at which point employer power of employees is nullified. As such, at some point along a gradient of cost and access - and it may well be an impossible point to reach - capitalism becomes indistinguishable from socialism, in that capital ownership becomes a matter of choice.

gjdjfnfhdbf 5y ago

Good to know, I may have to give Neuralink another try. My previous experience with the original 8 a few years ago during the hiring process was overwhelmingly negative. I'm hoping their culture has changed to be more in line with Musk's public persona since then.

_qwfv 5y ago
Musk's public persona is a nightmare, even if you only look at his public professional persona -- encouraging overwork, getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates, a total disregard for safety of both his customers and his workers, and developing an unhealthy cult of personality. I own a Tesla, I love SpaceX, I think Elon Musk is insufferable.
- gjdjfnfhdbf 5y ago
  Fair points, but one trait that I do admire is his lack of elitism. That was sorely missing at Neuralink when I visited.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  > getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates This is both a strength and weakness. How many times have people wished CEOs actually knew what they were talking about? As long as Elon knows enough to build a decent team and lead it well, he doesn't need to know everything. From the outside it looks like he sees himself as 'one of the engineers' which is something I deeply respect, even if there's major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    Yeah, I appreciate any engineering firm that at least attempts to have some engineering leadership in charge. > major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones). That Vegas loop too... That's going to be a truly awful tunnel fire someday, and the safety systems there seem seriously lacking. (Also, the whole project feels like a grift.)

_coveredInBees 5y ago

I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on. For anyone working in the field, the end goal is extremely rewarding in terms of the long-term beneficial impact on society it would have and the numerous lives it would save. I don't think Tesla is going to drop FSD R&D anytime soon. They've also built out amazing software infrastructure under Karpathy's leadership to make use of their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to run shadow experiments with newer models in the background and continuously collect more difficult and interesting training data so they can improve their models and their internal test-sets for tracking metrics. They are also a relatively lean team from what I've heard, so it's not like they are bankrolling hundreds of very expensive ML PhDs at the moment. It is debatable if they (or anyone else) will "solve" FSD with current approaches, but I think the technology is already pretty fascinating and useful.

shaan7 5y ago
> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
- wiz21c 5y ago
  Yup double yup ! > numerous lives it would save If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    These are political problems, it's a different skillset.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.

anonytrary 5y ago

TLDR: This technology is in its infancy but is very much so in the R&D phase. He needs to retain top scientists and avoid making promises. The research isn't there yet, which is why Elon should be trying to retain people who have deeply studied the hippocampus and brain. What the heck is he doing? Find the best people in this domain. The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. He needs more researchers in the fundamentals. I think if they've built the robot that inserts the electrodes non-invasively, they can continue to add additional electrodes and get an even more accurate measurement of what's happening elsewhere in the brain. This tech will takes years and years to master. Neuralink a science company. Or at least, it should be at this point if I'm taking it seriously. God knows there are hundreds of tech companies selling SAAS software for domains that have negligible research. Neuralink shouldn't be like that. Don't overpromise and underdeliver just yet, causing best people to leave. This company has tons of potential.

f6v 5y ago
> It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Not a neuroscientist, but it seems like the problem is more involved than just training a DL model on a data. We need detailed maps of the brain before we put any electrodes in it. Meanwhile, full mouse brain map is likely a decade away [0]. Humans have a bigger brain, imagine how long it’d take. It’s just a lot of manual labor which takes incredibly long time. Keep in mind that you also need to map thousands, if not millions of brains to model population heterogeneity. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
tsimionescu 5y ago
> The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. This is an unproven hypothesis. Since we do not know how computation actually happens in the brain, we can't say for sure that electrical signals can be matched to the actual computations happening, even if they are correlated. It is still possible that the electrical signals we are measuring are just byproducts, and that the real compatation happens at a chemical level or inside each individual neuron or even in microtubules as Penrose believed. The nice part is that this means that neuralink's attempts could be extremely useful to our understanding of the brain even if they fail - it would actually be an amazing discovery if they could show that you CAN'T deduce the brain's intent from observing electrical activities. We do know for sure though that you can use electrical signals to interface with motor neurons, so at least improvements in prosthetics should be something that neuralink can realistically deliver.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

interactivecode 5y ago

Ever since I learned that Musk didn't found Tesla [0] or PayPal [1] I get really uncomfortable when reading news like this. It's clearly Musk doing another hostile take over of a company someone else started. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–200... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history

prestigious 5y ago
I mean tesla without Elon is not really tesla. I never really thought he FOUNDED PayPal, but rather part of the so-called PayPal mafia that was successful at starting other companies. I never heard that he didn’t pull his weight from Peter thiel or the others
- papito 5y ago
  I only wish I was slightly older during the dot com boom. I had to finish college and do it with flying colors, being from a poor family. If you had the means and some padding to take fairly reasonable risks, you walked away with riches. These people were at the right place and the right time, let's not lionize them as investment geniuses. They had money to put down on some horses, that is ALL.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    It was certainly no sure thing, and it’s easy to say that in hindsight. There were definitely a lot of people who walked away from the dot-com era with worthless stock options and wounded egos. Plenty of people ended up taking the “safe” route too and getting a job at IBM. We’re in the same place with crypto right now. People will look back and say “oh jeez if only”. The early bazillionaires are already minted but there are a lot of crypto millionaires made every day. It’s just a lot of people dumping their life savings into BTC/ETH and enjoying the ride.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    That doesn’t line up with what I’ve read about that time period. A lot of the companies that were well funded by such bets went bankrupt. In all likelihood you would have lost money during the bust. The companies that weathered the storm were actually delivering good products and had cash flow. That takes a lot of work on the tech and business sides. Maybe you could have timed the bubble and exited with a pile of cash, who knows. If you want to make those kinds of bets you could make them right now.

ur-whale 5y ago

>but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. The interesting aspect of your comment is in fact: what is the capital outlay and time needed for the science to actually get there. Elon has a track record of severely under-estimating those, but he is also smart enough (via PR / govt grants / leveraging past successes, etc ...) to stretch both beyond anything reasonable, to the point of actually reaching success (e.g. TESLA, SpaceX).

beyondarmonia 5y ago

I really wouldn't go far based on that list. It's mostly from the Waitbutwhy article from years ago when they were still basically a research/brainstorming group and hadn't even figured out what they wanted to do or what approach they wanted to take. For comparison to Musk's other companies , it's analogous to Bill Cantrell or Mike Griffin or that guy from sea launch at SpaceX. Some in this group were very briefly there like Tim Hanson. Some I think are misreported to not be there , unless anyone has any extra information. For example , Paul Merolla was there at the last conference , even though he's reported as not being with the company. Some I think are also advisors like Sabes , unless something has changed. One of them is just a neurosurgeon , but they already have a whole surgery department with a lead now.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stunt 5y ago

Getting top talents or investing on top talents? He has the money and he has the guts to take big risks which is remarkable for an investor. I think any scientist with a "revolutionary" idea that requires lots of capital will proactively approach Elon Musk.

gmadsen 5y ago

Zoox is very much still doing self driving...