11 ms·

Neither of them are doing their image any favours lately. They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at

by Havoc 2y ago

tmpz22 2y ago
Whats wrong with their image? They're still able to raise billions no problem. Their day to day doesn't change. Altman just did a big deal with Apple. Musk's board is still likely to cram through a $45B+ comp package for him.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Altman has a basically fine image I think, in the sense that nobody outside of tech circles knows his name, and everyone in tech circles must at least admit that he’s good at getting investors. Musk has a reputation as being too demanding, which is one thing if you are doing something revolutionary, but nowadays the market has mostly caught up to his cars. It seems all that over-working his employees has done is produced poor QA. He’s also politically alienating to liberals, who would otherwise be inclined to buy his cars.
  - celdon25 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - NickC25 2y ago
      What's wrong with a liberal? How are they alienating to normal people? How would you define "normal"? Also, would love to hear your definition of who is and who isn't "liberal". Remember kids, the left/right & liberal/conservative is a completely false dichotomy.
      - impossiblefork 2y ago
        Liberalism is free trade, property ownership, etc. Many people are excluded from that-- it's an ideology where both the rich and the poor are forbidden from sleeping under bridges. Of course it's alienating to ordinary people. This is why you got movements like social liberalism, to try to temper the madness and turn into something less socially useless, but everything moves back towards its origin, so here in Europe even once reasonably decent social liberal parties have now decayed into liberal parties, into the inherently alienating position that is liberalism's core.
        bee_rider 2y ago
        That, of course, isn’t what people mean when they say liberal in the US context, here it just means social liberal or cultural liberal. In our defense, liberal economics are the ground state in the US, we don’t think to name them for the same reason a fish doesn’t think to name water.
        impossiblefork 2y ago
        Yes, I suppose which of the parties is the free-trade and property party to the highest degree has gone back and forth, and it's mixed up with all sorts of weirdness. I suppose now neither of them is a free party anymore at least, and I suppose both are landowner's parties.
- RIMR 2y ago
  This is a strange comment. Economic success and executive pay packages don't disqualify the claim that there is an image problem. If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image. The fact that this cash package is almost exactly what he owes creditors for the loans he took out buying Twitter, it almost looks like he's begging Tesla for an undo button for his own terrible decisions. As for Apple making a deal with OpenAI, the fact that every product integrating ChatGPT is just being ruthless enshittified as a result, this is terrible optics for Apple when their biggest competitor, Microsoft, is currently playing target practice with its feet shipping poorly advised AI integrations (see: Recall). As for OpenAI's image, the only thing they have going for them is the technical impressiveness of ChatGPT - organizationally everyone I know in the tech space assumes that OpenAI is a dumpster fire of a company.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    > If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image I hate to defend executive comp, but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018. Half of all EVs sold in the US are Teslas. In 2023, the Model Y was the world’s bestselling car, outselling the Toyota Corolla. That’s completely insane. What more do you want?
    - threeseed 2y ago
      a) Full-time, engaged CEO free of conflicts of interest e.g. X.ai. b) Stop devaluing the Tesla brand with his controversial, inflammatory comments. c) Compensation package that is more reasonable compared with other companies.
    - troupo 2y ago
      > but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018 The speculation on Tesla's stock raised the "market cap". Any stock that Tesla doesn't own brings Tesla exactly 0 dollars, no matter how hight the illusionary market cap there is. How much of the stock does Tesla actually own? How much of the stock that Tesla owns can the company safely sell to offset the $45 billion of actual money that they had to cough up for Elon?
- Havoc 2y ago
  >Whats wrong with their image? They're still able to raise billions no problem. Their day to day doesn't change. Not sure I'd classify either of those as "image".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- m463 2y ago
  > Altman just did a big deal with Apple. did Altman do it? Musk on the other hand has built things. People can disparage him all they want, but I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. who cares if he opens his mouth on social media. I mean, he went to russia to launch a rocket, figured out they were a mess, came back and... several years later the world is launching rockets all the time. (It's june 11, and just starlink launched 4 rockets since the beginning of the month) The rocket stuff is like the rise of pc hardware, where things start happening faster and all of a sudden, commercial flights are putting people in space. I kind of think openai got off mission, and won't be as good for everyone, except maybe in the sense that other folks like meta have opened up models like llama.
  - HWR_14 2y ago
    > I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. None of those make me better off in any way. Some (neuralink, the boring company) have never made anyone better off except maybe in some pilot program.
    - m463 2y ago
      They have second order effects, usually wrt competition. Tesla might not be your favorite car, but it has created robust competition in EVs, and made the incumbent car manufacturers have to compete. Someday if you need internet in your cabin or RV, starlink made it easier even if you don't use them.
      - HWR_14 2y ago
        I don't believe in either of your listed secondary effects. How does starlink existing make it more likely for other companies to build expensive infrastructure while having to price compete with it?
        m463 2y ago
        hughes isn't the only game in town now. If you've ever looked at satellite internet, hughes was not affordable, and very slow. Now starlink has shaken things up, and it is even fast enough to do real work.
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
It would be great if both of these guys would become eccentric recluses like Howard Hughes.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > […] eccentric recluses like Howard Hughes. And not an eccentric recluse like Ted Kaczynski: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
  - Coolbeanstoo 2y ago
    A recluse like Kaczynski with the resources of someone like Elon Musk would be world or at very least American society levels of quite interesting
  - Aerbil313 2y ago
    What's the relation between the two? Kaczynski's ideas are pretty much correct. See the book Technological Slavery: https://ia800207.us.archive.org/16/items/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf https://ia800207.us.archive.org/16/items/tk-Technological-Sl...
    - tim333 2y ago
      Both were eccentric dropouts. Hughes did big flying things, Kaczynski did AI doom. Musk tweeted "He might not be wrong" about Kaczynski so maybe it's in progress. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739?lang=en https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739?lang=en
- sebzim4500 2y ago
  Or we just go back to 5 years ago Elon where he tweeted about rockets instead of far right conspiracy theories.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at That would require either of them to be good at building anything, and I don't think either has ever demonstrated that. They're just money men, and Musk went out of his way to PR himself as the real life Iron Man before utterly ruining it because he can't shut his mouth when he really, really should.
- Havoc 2y ago
  >I don't think either has ever demonstrated that. So what's your space company called?
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Give me six billion dollars and I'll also "build" a space company. I also don't know fuckall about rockets, and Elon and I have that in common.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Give me six billion dollars and I'll also "build" a space company You're off by an order of magnitude on the start-up capital SpaceX drew, and that almost exclusively from Musk.
      - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
        Doesn't change the fact that he didn't build shit. He brought money, which is what I said he did. He wrote some code back in the 90's and there's no evidence he's done any actual work since then. His job is to be rich, and write checks. Anyone can do that. I wrote a check this morning. Well, that and going on Joe Rogan to get high and crash the stock price of his companies. I could do that too I suppose but I'd prefer not to.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Doesn't change the fact that he didn't build shit. He brought money Nope. Can’t speak for the other companies, but he was in the design room and on the factory floor making changes at SpaceX.
NickC25 2y ago
Seriously. Musk has enough money to fuck off and go build something. His political and economic opinions are pretty bad. He should just shut up.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  He'll never shut up, people will learn to ignore him if they haven't already.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    Like they've learned to ignore Trump?
    - GaggiX 2y ago
      What do you mean?
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        The person who still owns one of the two major US political parties despite being manifestly unfit, and who continues to hold sway over at least 33% of voters nationwide? Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.
- r00fus 2y ago
  Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
  - woooooo 2y ago
    I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.
swat535 2y ago
The battle for AI really needs to be won with FOSS like it happened with Linux. I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy. Honestly, we take many of the great things we have thanks to FOSS for granted and come to think of it, if those were to be invented today, they would be locked behind a subscription fee or entirely discontinued because VC's couldn't figure out how to make money from them.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  It's crazy how good open weight models are already. With a 7900 XTX I can run a roughly GPT-3.5 quality q6 model at 70 TPS. FP16 at 30 TPS. I can swap out the model to cater to specific tasks. Sure, it's nowhere near the amount of knowledge as Claude Sonnet / Opus, or the suite of GPT 4s, but when you hook it up to external sources of knowledge, it's still freaking useful.
- Havoc 2y ago
  > I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy. No need to imagine. It’s already here. Look at all the open weight models - all big corporate developed and then shared because it suited their corporate objectives. There is not a hint of FOSS like organic model development in sight. On the technique and research yes but not on the actual training. It’s too expensive and thus automatically limited to big tech and gov

Neither of them are doing their image any favours lately. They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at

by Havoc 2y ago

Neither of them are doing their image any favours lately. They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at

tmpz22 2y ago

Whats wrong with their image? They're still able to raise billions no problem. Their day to day doesn't change. Altman just did a big deal with Apple. Musk's board is still likely to cram through a $45B+ comp package for him.

bee_rider 2y ago
Altman has a basically fine image I think, in the sense that nobody outside of tech circles knows his name, and everyone in tech circles must at least admit that he’s good at getting investors. Musk has a reputation as being too demanding, which is one thing if you are doing something revolutionary, but nowadays the market has mostly caught up to his cars. It seems all that over-working his employees has done is produced poor QA. He’s also politically alienating to liberals, who would otherwise be inclined to buy his cars.
- celdon25 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - NickC25 2y ago
    What's wrong with a liberal? How are they alienating to normal people? How would you define "normal"? Also, would love to hear your definition of who is and who isn't "liberal". Remember kids, the left/right & liberal/conservative is a completely false dichotomy.
    - impossiblefork 2y ago
      Liberalism is free trade, property ownership, etc. Many people are excluded from that-- it's an ideology where both the rich and the poor are forbidden from sleeping under bridges. Of course it's alienating to ordinary people. This is why you got movements like social liberalism, to try to temper the madness and turn into something less socially useless, but everything moves back towards its origin, so here in Europe even once reasonably decent social liberal parties have now decayed into liberal parties, into the inherently alienating position that is liberalism's core.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        That, of course, isn’t what people mean when they say liberal in the US context, here it just means social liberal or cultural liberal. In our defense, liberal economics are the ground state in the US, we don’t think to name them for the same reason a fish doesn’t think to name water.
        impossiblefork 2y ago
        Yes, I suppose which of the parties is the free-trade and property party to the highest degree has gone back and forth, and it's mixed up with all sorts of weirdness. I suppose now neither of them is a free party anymore at least, and I suppose both are landowner's parties.
RIMR 2y ago
This is a strange comment. Economic success and executive pay packages don't disqualify the claim that there is an image problem. If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image. The fact that this cash package is almost exactly what he owes creditors for the loans he took out buying Twitter, it almost looks like he's begging Tesla for an undo button for his own terrible decisions. As for Apple making a deal with OpenAI, the fact that every product integrating ChatGPT is just being ruthless enshittified as a result, this is terrible optics for Apple when their biggest competitor, Microsoft, is currently playing target practice with its feet shipping poorly advised AI integrations (see: Recall). As for OpenAI's image, the only thing they have going for them is the technical impressiveness of ChatGPT - organizationally everyone I know in the tech space assumes that OpenAI is a dumpster fire of a company.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image I hate to defend executive comp, but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018. Half of all EVs sold in the US are Teslas. In 2023, the Model Y was the world’s bestselling car, outselling the Toyota Corolla. That’s completely insane. What more do you want?
  - threeseed 2y ago
    a) Full-time, engaged CEO free of conflicts of interest e.g. X.ai. b) Stop devaluing the Tesla brand with his controversial, inflammatory comments. c) Compensation package that is more reasonable compared with other companies.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018 The speculation on Tesla's stock raised the "market cap". Any stock that Tesla doesn't own brings Tesla exactly 0 dollars, no matter how hight the illusionary market cap there is. How much of the stock does Tesla actually own? How much of the stock that Tesla owns can the company safely sell to offset the $45 billion of actual money that they had to cough up for Elon?
Havoc 2y ago
>Whats wrong with their image? They're still able to raise billions no problem. Their day to day doesn't change. Not sure I'd classify either of those as "image".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
m463 2y ago
> Altman just did a big deal with Apple. did Altman do it? Musk on the other hand has built things. People can disparage him all they want, but I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. who cares if he opens his mouth on social media. I mean, he went to russia to launch a rocket, figured out they were a mess, came back and... several years later the world is launching rockets all the time. (It's june 11, and just starlink launched 4 rockets since the beginning of the month) The rocket stuff is like the rise of pc hardware, where things start happening faster and all of a sudden, commercial flights are putting people in space. I kind of think openai got off mission, and won't be as good for everyone, except maybe in the sense that other folks like meta have opened up models like llama.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  > I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. None of those make me better off in any way. Some (neuralink, the boring company) have never made anyone better off except maybe in some pilot program.
  - m463 2y ago
    They have second order effects, usually wrt competition. Tesla might not be your favorite car, but it has created robust competition in EVs, and made the incumbent car manufacturers have to compete. Someday if you need internet in your cabin or RV, starlink made it easier even if you don't use them.
    - HWR_14 2y ago
      I don't believe in either of your listed secondary effects. How does starlink existing make it more likely for other companies to build expensive infrastructure while having to price compete with it?
      - m463 2y ago
        hughes isn't the only game in town now. If you've ever looked at satellite internet, hughes was not affordable, and very slow. Now starlink has shaken things up, and it is even fast enough to do real work.

deepfriedchokes 2y ago

It would be great if both of these guys would become eccentric recluses like Howard Hughes.

throw0101d 2y ago
> […] eccentric recluses like Howard Hughes. And not an eccentric recluse like Ted Kaczynski: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
- Coolbeanstoo 2y ago
  A recluse like Kaczynski with the resources of someone like Elon Musk would be world or at very least American society levels of quite interesting
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  What's the relation between the two? Kaczynski's ideas are pretty much correct. See the book Technological Slavery: https://ia800207.us.archive.org/16/items/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf https://ia800207.us.archive.org/16/items/tk-Technological-Sl...
  - tim333 2y ago
    Both were eccentric dropouts. Hughes did big flying things, Kaczynski did AI doom. Musk tweeted "He might not be wrong" about Kaczynski so maybe it's in progress. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739?lang=en https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739?lang=en
sebzim4500 2y ago
Or we just go back to 5 years ago Elon where he tweeted about rockets instead of far right conspiracy theories.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at That would require either of them to be good at building anything, and I don't think either has ever demonstrated that. They're just money men, and Musk went out of his way to PR himself as the real life Iron Man before utterly ruining it because he can't shut his mouth when he really, really should.

Havoc 2y ago
>I don't think either has ever demonstrated that. So what's your space company called?
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Give me six billion dollars and I'll also "build" a space company. I also don't know fuckall about rockets, and Elon and I have that in common.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Give me six billion dollars and I'll also "build" a space company You're off by an order of magnitude on the start-up capital SpaceX drew, and that almost exclusively from Musk.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      Doesn't change the fact that he didn't build shit. He brought money, which is what I said he did. He wrote some code back in the 90's and there's no evidence he's done any actual work since then. His job is to be rich, and write checks. Anyone can do that. I wrote a check this morning. Well, that and going on Joe Rogan to get high and crash the stock price of his companies. I could do that too I suppose but I'd prefer not to.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Doesn't change the fact that he didn't build shit. He brought money Nope. Can’t speak for the other companies, but he was in the design room and on the factory floor making changes at SpaceX.

NickC25 2y ago

Seriously. Musk has enough money to fuck off and go build something. His political and economic opinions are pretty bad. He should just shut up.

GaggiX 2y ago
He'll never shut up, people will learn to ignore him if they haven't already.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Like they've learned to ignore Trump?
  - GaggiX 2y ago
    What do you mean?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      The person who still owns one of the two major US political parties despite being manifestly unfit, and who continues to hold sway over at least 33% of voters nationwide? Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.
r00fus 2y ago
Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
- woooooo 2y ago
  I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.

swat535 2y ago

The battle for AI really needs to be won with FOSS like it happened with Linux. I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy. Honestly, we take many of the great things we have thanks to FOSS for granted and come to think of it, if those were to be invented today, they would be locked behind a subscription fee or entirely discontinued because VC's couldn't figure out how to make money from them.

Zambyte 2y ago
It's crazy how good open weight models are already. With a 7900 XTX I can run a roughly GPT-3.5 quality q6 model at 70 TPS. FP16 at 30 TPS. I can swap out the model to cater to specific tasks. Sure, it's nowhere near the amount of knowledge as Claude Sonnet / Opus, or the suite of GPT 4s, but when you hook it up to external sources of knowledge, it's still freaking useful.
Havoc 2y ago
> I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy. No need to imagine. It’s already here. Look at all the open weight models - all big corporate developed and then shared because it suited their corporate objectives. There is not a hint of FOSS like organic model development in sight. On the technique and research yes but not on the actual training. It’s too expensive and thus automatically limited to big tech and gov