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In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime.
by jazzpush2 7mo ago
In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
- jarrettcoggin 7mo agoFrom my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- exe34 7mo agoyeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?
- jarrettcoggin 7mo agoAgreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla. Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work. These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time. Most often, the answer is no.
- dgxyz 7mo agoOh I worked at one of them. I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
- echelon 7mo agoWhy did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws? When did it start falling apart? Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?) And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.
- Rover222 7mo agoHow is Tesla falling apart? Cybertruck was a flop, but Model Y is still one of the best selling cars in the world, and very well reviewed.
- tapoxi 7mo agoDeliveries have been falling for the past two years.
- MegaDeKay 7mo agoTo make matters worse, falling while the deliveries of their competitors are rising.
- onlypassingthru 7mo agoIf you're in the market for a new X, S or Cybertruck, you're one of dozen(s)!
- Rover222 7mo agoYes now compare those numbers to all othere EVs sold in the US.
- zimpenfish 7mo ago> When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt. To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies. [0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
- jarrettcoggin 7mo agoI’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla. During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
- zimpenfish 7mo ago> That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets. Thankfully I've never (yet) had to experience "planning by management tweet". That does sound like absolute bullshit to deal with.
- davidmurdoch 7mo agoStill better than jira.
- AlexeyBelov 7mo agoIn what way?!
- davidmurdoch 7mo ago
- jesterson 7mo agoI wonder why this is surprising. In other type of organizations when CEO demands something everyone is usually behaves like naah, screw it, i rather do what i like, isn't it? Or everyone yells yes sir and runs around? You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.
- Valodim 7mo agoIn other companies they don't make this explicit during the interview, so something is different
- general1465 7mo agoI am calling my approach to these tasks to make them rot away. If CEO/customer wants something, I will ignore it until he will start demanding it repeatedly then I will start thinking like working on it. Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.
- jesterson 7mo agoI wish i could have a machine to detect workforce like you and not to hire those people.
- general1465 7mo agoConsider it self-regulating system. If task can't survive in a mind of a wisher for more then few days, it was not needed from the start. Now you are saving resources and time to company which you can redirect to actually required tasks instead of some silly whims.
- jesterson 7mo agoIt's not a "regulating system" of any kind, but plain passive aggressive arrogance. I know better what to do so I would just pretend like I am going to do what you suggested. Unfortunately this trait is not so uncommon across IT engineers.
- ekianjo 7mo agoThis is not specific to Tesla. If the CEO wants something done in most companies you follow the CEO's order first and drop everything else.
- mort96 7mo agoYes, but in most well functioning large organizations, that happens very rarely.
- thordenmark 7mo agoThis is the case at every company I've worked at. When the CEO says jump, the response is to jump or pack your stuff. What's special about xAI/Tesla/SpaceX?
- blinding-streak 7mo agoI think most people would agree that Elon is a particularly fickle, childish, petty, and unstable human being.
- mancerayder 7mo agoBut the person you're replying to's point is that CEOs often behave like this. What if the difference is that this one tweets all day long, while the others behave the same to their staff but sit behind expensive shiny wooden desks?
- AlexeyBelov 7mo agoNeither me nor my friends ever worked at such companies. C-suite sets direction in a stategic way, department heads (or whatever, managers between C-suite and you) set tactical goals, product managers think up "things we should do", and product teams deliver those things (and manage this delivery together, e.g. timelines and such). It would be ridiculous for a CEO, or really anyone who's not my manager, to ask the team personally to do anything. If they had an important task they'd have to trade-off something else from the immediate backlog, by going through the product manager. Even in small companies you generally have a PM in front of a team.
- kvetching 7mo agoI don't see the problem with this. The chatbot is the most important part of Grok, so it makes sense Elon would be dogfooding it then providing suggestions.. He wants it to be truthful... It was shown on benchmarks recently that it hallucinates the least...
- estearum 7mo ago[flagged]
- kvetching 7mo ago[flagged]
- ecshafer 7mo ago> Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ... Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry, and not a genocidal call to action? Ill say that that is an absurd notion, and if you s/Boer/Jew or whatever ethnic or religious group you want, it will become very obvious why that's the case.
- scubbo 7mo ago> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry (Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.
- bdangubic 7mo agowild, but not surprising! anything else interesting you can share from that interview?
- actsasbuffoon 7mo agoI have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models. Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say. I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
- __blockcipher__ 7mo agosomewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do). BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
- gopher_space 7mo agoGrok could only be conceived by someone who doesn't understand the dependency chart re science & the humanities. It's impossible to build a rational, accurate model that isn't also egalitarian. I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.
- doctornoble 7mo agoSame. It was a bit less literal in mine, more like “how do you handle situations where key stakeholders and one in particular have certain demands”
- alberth 7mo agoLet’s restate this another way: “ In an interview with {COMPANY} I was literally told that … {COMPANY-OWNER} can call us and demand anything at anytime. “ Doesn’t sound so crazy when Elon name is removed from it. Note: I’m no Elon fan, but do think sometimes HN overreacts when his name is mentioned.
- matthewdgreen 7mo agoIf you're designing a car, then the CEO/Founder might want the ability to add falcon wings to it at any point, and that's pretty reasonable. If you're designing a trustworthy encyclopedia, knowing that the CEO/Founder might wish to alter arbitrary facts to his whim is really not very reasonable. Is it his company? Sure. Do you want to make low-quality information artifacts? That's a judgement call.
- jazzpush2 7mo agoWhat? I work for a different frontier lab now, and it absolutely would be ridiculous if they told me the same thing. Luckily they haven't. What products have you worked on where this would be deemed normal?
- bravetraveler 7mo agoSounds pretty crazy to me, bud. I keep landing on 'servitude with extra steps'. Owner should have better things to do/people to bother, I should have space. Boundaries, etc. Yeah yeah, I'll never make a bazillion dollars. I'll know freedom. Even an executive assistant, which I would never apply for, has off hours.