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Javier E

What Elon Musk's 'Age of Abundance' Means for the Future of Capitalism - WSJ - 0 views

  • When it comes to the future, Elon Musk’s best-case scenario for humanity sounds a lot like Sci-Fi Socialism.
  • “We will be in an age of abundance,” Musk said this month.
  • Sunak said he believes the act of work gives meaning, and had some concerns about Musk’s prediction. “I think work is a good thing, it gives people purpose in their lives,” Sunak told Musk. “And if you then remove a large chunk of that, what does that mean?”
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  • Part of the enthusiasm behind the sky-high valuation of Tesla, where he is chief executive, comes from his predictions for the auto company’s abilities to develop humanoid robots—dubbed Optimus—that can be deployed for everything from personal assistants to factory workers. He’s also founded an AI startup, dubbed xAI, that he said aims to develop its own superhuman intelligence, even as some are skeptical of that possibility. 
  • Musk likes to point to another work of Sci-Fi to describe how AI could change our world: a series of books by the late-, self-described-socialist author Iain Banks that revolve around a post-scarcity society that includes superintelligent AI. 
  • That is the question.
  • Instead, Musk predicts robots will be taking jobs that are uncomfortable, dangerous or tedious. 
  • Musk has cast his work to develop humanoid robots as an attempt to solve labor issues, saying there aren’t enough workers and cautioning that low birthrates will be even more problematic. 
  • “We’re actually going to have—and already do have—a massive shortage of labor. So, I think we will have not people out of work but actually still a shortage of labor—even in the future.” 
  • A few years ago, Musk declared himself a socialist of sorts. “Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm,” he tweeted. “True socialism seeks greatest good for all.”
  • “It’s fun to cook food but it’s not that fun to wash the dishes,” Musk said this month. “The computer is perfectly happy to wash the dishes.”
  • “Digital super intelligence combined with robotics will essentially make goods and services close to free in the long term,” Musk said
  • Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist whose firm has invested in the technology, predicted within a decade AI will be able to do “80% of 80%” of all jobs today.
  • “I believe the need to work in society will disappear in 25 years for those countries that adapt these technologies,” Khosla said. “I do think there’s room for universal basic income assuring a minimum standard and people will be able to work on the things they want to work on.” 
  • Forget universal basic income. In Musk’s world, he foresees something more lush, where most things will be abundant except unique pieces of art and real estate. 
  • “We won’t have universal basic income, we’ll have universal high income,” Musk said this month. “In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer because, really, I think everyone will have access to this magic genie.” 
  • All of which kind of sounds a lot like socialism—except it’s unclear who controls the resources in this Muskism society
  • In the near term, Goldman Sachs in April estimated generative AI could boost the global gross domestic product by 7% during the next decade and that roughly two-thirds of U.S. occupations could be partially automated by AI. 
  • “What is an economy? An economy is GDP per capita times capita.” Musk said at a tech conference in France this year. “Now what happens if you don’t actually have a limit on capita—if you have an unlimited number of…people or robots? It’s not clear what meaning an economy has at that point because you have an unlimited economy effectively.”
  • In theory, humanity would be freed up for other pursuits. But what? Baby making. Bespoke cooking. Competitive human-ing. 
  • “Obviously a machine can go faster than any human but we still have humans race against each other,” Musk said. “We still enjoy competing against other humans to, at least, see who was the best human.”
  • Still, even as Musk talks about this future, he seems to be grappling with what it might actually mean in practice and how it is at odds with his own life. 
  • “If I think about it too hard, it, frankly, can be dispiriting and demotivating, because…I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into building companies,” he said earlier this year. “If I’m sacrificing time with friends and family that I would prefer but then ultimately the AI can do all these things, does that make sense?”“To some extent,” Musk concluded, “I have to have a deliberate suspension of disbelief in order to remain motivated.”
Javier E

Elon Musk's Creepy Politics of Birthing - by Alan Elrod - 0 views

  • Across today’s hard right, white procreation is being held up as a solution to both America’s demographic challenges and its political and cultural ones
  • This marks a drastic shift from the old conservative politics of family values, which emphasized principles of freedom and dignity
  • Musk believes that immigration will lead to civil war in Europe, recklessly posting about the inevitability of such violence during the far-right riots that erupted across the United Kingdom in August. It’s worth pointing out that these riots were fueled in part by anti-immigrant misinformation that many participants found through Musk’s own platform.
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  • Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.
  • These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?
  • Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.
  • All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.
  • Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.
  • The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”
  • Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.
Javier E

Elon Musk's Latest Dust-Up: What Does 'Science' Even Mean? - WSJ - 0 views

  • Elon Musk is racing to a sci-fi future while the AI chief at Meta Platforms is arguing for one rooted in the traditional scientific approach.
  • Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, criticized the rival company and Musk himself. 
  • Musk turned to a favorite rebuttal—a veiled suggestion that the executive, who is also a high-profile professor, wasn’t accomplishing much: “What ‘science’ have you done in the past 5 years?”
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  • “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022,” LeCun responded. “What about you?”
  • To which Musk posted: “That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!
  • At stake are the hearts and minds of AI experts—academic and otherwise—needed to usher in the technology
  • “Join xAI,” LeCun wrote, “if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”
  • Some read Musk’s “science” dig as dismissing the role research has played for a generation of AI experts. For years, the Metas and Googles of the world have hired the top minds in AI from universities, indulging their desires to keep a foot in both worlds by allowing them to release their research publicly, while also trying to deploy products. 
  • For an academic such as LeCun, published research, whether peer-reviewed or not, allowed ideas to flourish and reputations to be built, which in turn helped build stars in the system.
  • LeCun has been at Meta since 2013 while serving as an NYU professor since 2003. His tweets suggest he subscribes to the philosophy that one’s work needs to be published—put through the rigors of being shown to be correct and reproducible—to really be considered science. 
  • “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science,” he posted in a lengthy tweet Tuesday rebutting Musk. “If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich,” he concluded. “But you’ll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.” 
  • After pushback, he later clarified in another post: “What I *AM* saying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”
  • The spat inspired debate throughout the scientific community. “What is science?” Nature, a scientific journal, asked in a headline about the dust-up.
  • Others, such as Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook executive and founder of Anduril Industries, a defense startup, took issue with LeCun’s definition of science. “The extreme arrogance and elitism is what people have a problem with,” he tweeted.
  • For Musk, who prides himself on his physics-based viewpoint and likes to tout how he once aspired to work at a particle accelerator in pursuit of the universe’s big questions, LeCun’s definition of science might sound too ivory-tower. 
  • Musk has blamed universities for helping promote what he sees as overly liberal thinking and other symptoms of what he calls the Woke Mind Virus. 
  • Over the years, an appeal of working for Musk has been the impression that his companies move quickly, filled with engineers attracted to tackling hard problems and seeing their ideas put into practice.
  • “I’ve teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually apply these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe,” Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who worked at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, said last year as part of announcing xAI’s mission. 
  • The creation of xAI quickly sent ripples through the AI labor market, with one rival complaining it was hard to compete for potential candidates attracted to Musk and his reputation for creating value
  • that was before xAI’s latest round raised billions of dollars, putting its valuation at $24 billion, kicking off a new recruiting drive. 
  • It was already a seller’s market for AI talent, with estimates that there might be only a couple hundred people out there qualified to deal with certain pressing challenges in the industry and that top candidates can easily earn compensation packages worth $1 million or more
  • Since the launch, Musk has been quick to criticize competitors for what he perceived as liberal biases in rival AI chatbots. His pitch of xAI being the anti-woke bastion seems to have worked to attract some like-minded engineers.
  • As for Musk’s final response to LeCun’s defense of research, he posted a meme featuring Pepé Le Pew that read: “my honest reaction.”
Javier E

FULL TRANSCRIPT: Elon Musk Interviews Donald Trump - The Singju Post - 0 views

  • DONALD TRUMP:
  • let’s go back to the the economy, we have to bring energy prices down. Energy started at the price of gasoline.
  • You’re going to need a lot of electricity. You’re going to need tremendous electricity, like almost double what we produce now for the whole country, if you can believe it.
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  • But your product is incredible. But the gasoline, Elon, is the the cost of energy, not only gasoline. It’s the cost of heating your house and cooling your house. That has to come down. It’s gone up 100 percent, 150 and 200 percent. And that has to come down when that comes down. And we’re going to drill baby drill. You know, they stopped drilling and then they went back to drilling because they went back to the Trump policy.
  • DONALD TRUMP: But if they won the day after they get into office, we’re going to — this country will go out of business because they’re going to go to an energy policy that’s not sustainable. Wind and different things. You’re not going to have any. And I know you’re a big fan of the A.I.
  • And I have to say that A.I. and this is shocking to me, but A.I. requires twice the energy that the country already produces for everything. So what you’re going to have to build, we’re going to have to build a lot of energy if our country will be competitive with China, because that’s our primary competitor for this on the A.I.
  • DONALD TRUMP: Now, your cars don’t require too much gasoline. So, you know, you’re you have a good and you do make a great product. I have to say I have to be honest with you. That doesn’t mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details.
  • we were sitting on the biggest pile of liquid gold anywhere in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Russia. And we were going to drill and we were going to make so much money. We were going to supply Europe with oil. I had stopped the Russian pipeline and we were going to supply them with oil and gas.
  • ELON MUSK: I want to say something about, like, you know, maybe my views on climate change and oil and gas, because I think it’s probably different from what most people would assume, because my views are actually pretty, I think, moderate in this regard, which is that I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy. And if we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse.
  • So it’s you know, I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry. And the world has a certain demand for oil and gas, and it’s probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US. And at the same time, obviously, my view is, is like, we do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy, because eventually you do run out of I mean, you run out of oil and gas.
  • ELON MUSK: It’s not there. It’s not infinite. And there is some risk. I think it’s not the risk is not as as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming.
  • But I think if you just keep increasing the cost of a million in the atmosphere long enough, eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe, people don’t realize this. If you go, if you go past 1000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range, we’re adding, I think, about roughly two parts per million per year. So I mean, still gives us what it means, like, we still have quite a bit of time.
  • But so there’s not like we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or right basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.
  • DONALD TRUMP: How crazy is that? Where I mean, you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle and the whole, the whole world.
  • DONALD TRUMP: But it’s largely taken its lead from us. I do say, though, I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants. And, you know, so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment. I mean, someday you might be able to.
  • But I do hear we have anywhere from 100 to 500 years left. You know, much of it hasn’t even been found yet.
  • ELON MUSK: Yeah.
  • So I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows. But during that time, something will come around that will be very good.
  • ELON MUSK: And you know, that’s what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress and progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, we like we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re, you know, sexy.
  • But I mean, my view is like if you just look at sort of the past million that increments every year, you know, you get sort of two or three past million every year of CO2. I mean, I think some of that it’s problematic if it accelerates, if you start going from two or three to, say, five. And then there may be some situations where you get a step change increase in the CO2. And I think we don’t — we don’t want to get too close to a thousand PPM because like that’s that’s actually makes it uncomfortable to agree, like just existing in a thousand PPM CO2 is on top of that’s like a that’s considered like an industrial hazard.
  • So so, you know, that’s you start getting headaches and stuff. So even without global warming, it’s not comfortable. So you don’t want to get too close to that.
  • ELON MUSK: But I mean, I think we’ve got I think we want to just move over and like and if if I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re I don’t know, mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be OK. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately, but I think it is something we need to to move towards and on, you know, on balance, it’s probably better to move there faster than slower.
  • But like I said, without vilifying the oil and gas industry and without causing hardship in the short term, I think this can be done without, you know, people can still have, you know, a stake and they can still drive gasoline cars and, you know, it’s OK.
  • It’s like it’s not — I don’t think we should vilify people for it, but I think we should just just generally lean in the direction of sustainability. And I actually think solar is going to be a majority of of us energy generation in the future and certainly trending that way. And so you get the solar power, mind that with with with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night and and they use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long term sustainable solution.
  • ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, my estimate would be, you know, a little more aggressive than that. But it’s not the sort of like we’re all going to die in five years stuff that that’s obviously BS.
  • I mean, they’re cool. I mean, the sexy joke Model S, Model 3, Model X and Y spells out sexy is probably most expensive joke out there. But, you know, I just I don’t know, I like cheesy humor, you know, so and but I’m I’m a big fan of like, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s let’s work towards, you know, a better future and would do so without demonizing. Right.
  • DONALD TRUMP: I’m OK. You know, it’s very interesting. You use the word global warming and today they use the word climate change because, you know, you have some places that go up and so they were getting themselves in a little trouble with the word global warming because not every place is warming. Some places are going the opposite direction.
  • DONALD TRUMP: But I would think and I have no idea because that’s not my world. But I would think that this would be something that would be interesting. But, you know, the one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that’s an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries where you have major nuclear and, you know, probably some others are getting there and that’s very dangerous.
  • That’s where you need a strong American president because you just you don’t want to have this proliferation. But you have five countries and getting where, you know, China is much less than us right now, but they’re going to catch us sooner than people think. They’re way lower. Russia and us are number one and we’re sort of tied.
  • And China is far behind, but they’re developing at a level that, you know, you’re not surprised to hear very fast. It’s going to they’ll end up catching up, maybe even surpassing. But to me, the biggest problem is not climate change. It’s not and everything’s a problem.
  • ELON MUSK: Yeah, actually, there’s a bad side of nuclear, which is a nuclear war, very bad side. But there’s there’s also, I think, nuclear electricity, absolutely underrated. And it’s actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear, nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation.
  • It’s just a huge misunderstanding. And if you look at the injuries and deaths, you know, caused by, say, I mean, I’m not going to pick on coal mining, but just any kind of mining operation. And there’s a certain number of injuries and deaths per year, and you compare that to nuclear. Nuclear is actually way better.
  • ELON MUSK: So it’s underrated as an electricity source. And I think it’s something that’s worth reconsidering. But there’s so much regulation that people can’t get it done. So that, you know, —
  • DONALD TRUMP: Maybe they’ll have to change the name — the name is the rough name. There are some areas like that, like when you see what happened in Japan, the brand that we have to give it a good name, we’ll name it after you or something, you know. No, it has a branding problem.
  • DONALD TRUMP: You know, you realize it’s pretty bad,ELON MUSK: But it’s actually not that bad. So like after Fukushima happened in Japan, like people were asking me in California, you know, are we worried about like a nucleic cloud coming from Japan? I’m like, no, that’s crazy. It’s actually it’s not even dangerous in Fukushima. I actually flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. And I donated a solar water treatment, solar powered system for a water treatment plant.
  • ELON MUSK: It’s like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically. But let’s see.
Javier E

Elon Musk's Text Messages Explain Everything - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures
  • the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.
  • I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media
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  • The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash.
  • Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”
  • The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth.
  • “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”
  • The men in Musk’s phone also appear wildly confident in their own abilities and those of their peers. Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the media conglomerate Axel Springer, infamously texted Musk his bullet-pointed plan for Twitter, which began with the line item “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”
  • They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.
  • Ultimately, Exhibit H documents the loneliness and isolation of being the world’s richest man. As told via the texts, the seed of Musk’s Twitter purchase was planted by sycophants deferential to the billionaire who will never give him hard, truthful advice, because they wish to stay close to him.
  • the one time he receives actual, honest feedback from Agrawal, Musk behaves aggressively and impulsively, sealing his fate.
Javier E

The Bright Side of the Trump-Musk Summit - Heatmap News - 0 views

  • In addition to a litany of false statements and odd non sequiturs, Trump was illogically dismissive of climate concerns: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property.”
  • He also lamented the imaginary fact that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle,” an area apparently of deep concern to him; elsewhere he has claimed that Kamala Harris “wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change.”
  • Neither of these things is remotely true (though farmers forced to sell their cattle due to drought are now eligible for extra tax relief as of 2022).
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  • The Tesla chief offered his own brand of misinformation; like many a semi-informed autodidact, he often says things that are true in some sense but deeply misleading. Talking about carbon in the atmosphere, he told Trump, “Eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past 1,000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range … we still have quite a bit of time. We don’t need to rush.”
  • While it’s true that it would be difficult to breathe at a CO2 concentration of 1,000 parts per million, the danger of rising carbon emissions isn’t that someday we might all choke to death; as climate scientist Michael Mann said in response, by the time we reach that point the myriad effects of climate change “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse.”
  • On the whole, the interview showed Musk praising Trump and nodding along with some of the former president’s loopier statements, but eventually attempting to convince him that carbon emissions can be lowered painlessly (albeit in ways that would just happen to make Musk even richer). “People can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it’s okay,” he reassured Trump.
  • “When you look at our cars, we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re sexy. They’re cool,” Musk said, concluding that “I’m a big fan of, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s work towards a better future.”
  • if the goal were to talk Trump into lessening his opposition to any and all efforts to mitigate climate change, that might be the only way to do it. Even in the course of the conversation one could see Trump coming around, at least here and there. “I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars,” he told Musk. “I’m sure you’ll be the first, but it would seem that a solar panel on the roofs, on flat surfaces, on certain surfaces might be good, at least in certain areas of the country or the world where you have the sun.”
  • For the moment, Trump’s bromance with Musk — or marriage of convenience — has even led the former president to moderate his rhetoric on electric vehicles, which he has often condemned in the past. “I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he said at a rally in July. “I’ve driven them and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”
  • None of this is to say that Trump has anything but a deeply reactionary climate agenda.
  • rhetoric does matter, and Trump doesn’t have to become a climate hawk to begin influencing his admirers to see the issue in a slightly different way. Even if all it means is that they become a little more open to looking at climate mitigation as not a dire threat to their way of life, but rather something that won’t make much of difference to them one way or the other — in other words, if they move from being hostile to climate efforts to being simply indifferent — that would be a significant change.
  • The theory behind favoring carrots over sticks in climate policy — more subsidies, fewer mandates — is in part that diffusing opposition is an important component of policy success. If Elon Musk encourages Trump to start talking about climate in ways that make addressing the problem sound less threatening to his supporters, it couldn’t hurt.
Javier E

Elon Musk Has the World's Strangest Social Calendar - The New York Times - 0 views

  • They describe someone whose closest friendships (many of them longstanding) are with other wealthy tech luminaries of middle age.
  • He regularly takes meetings until 9 or 10 p.m., but when he goes out, he does so with frenetic bombast, almost as if live-action role-playing a billionaire playboy
  • A fan of lavish costume parties, Mr. Musk revels in settings, like the desert art festival/rave Burning Man, where he can take on a role outside himself.
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  • Mr. Musk favors intense, one-on-one conversations — one person described a party conversation with him for 90 unbroken minutes about astrophysics.
  • Mr. Musk once acknowledged in an interview with Axel Springer’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that he gets lonely; in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that as a child he vowed to never be alone.
  • One obvious way that he staves off loneliness is using Twitter. Mr. Musk, who frequently responds to the many Regular Joe accounts that tweet at him, uses the service almost every day, in a way that suggests the website is an outlet not just for his ideas but for his emotions.
  • “I spent almost every day with Elon for five years — apart from family time, he spends nearly every waking hour working,” Mr. Teller said. “If your idea of fun is a long weekend of rocket engineering in a humid, sparsely populated corner of South Texas, then you should be jealous of Elon’s social life.”
  • Many of his closest friends are longtime investors in his companies and share his technical worldview and his geeky preoccupations. Mostly in their 40s and 50s, these friends often see Mr. Musk at quiet dinners in the private back rooms of restaurants — low-key affairs in which the conversation turns to subjects like science fiction or World War II fighter planes.
  • ebecca Eisenberg, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., who was senior counsel at PayPal from 2001 to 2007, was catching up with Mr. Thiel, she said, when Mr. Musk broke into the conversation. According to Ms. Eisenberg, Mr. Musk expressed his opinion that China was likely to invade Taiwan and that the American workers at a new Taiwan-owned chip factory in Arizona would never be as skillful as their Taiwan counterparts. Mr. Thiel, meanwhile, was largely quiet.
  • “I have two teenagers and four pets,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “It seemed like Peter was the dominant dog, and Elon was trying to impress him.”
Javier E

Elon Musk's Outlook on Our Future Turns Dour - WSJ - 0 views

  • these days, Musk sounds worried—about everything from cyclical business jitters to existential global concerns.
  • his past week he warned during a forum on X about “civilizational risk” stemming from the Israel-Hamas war cascading into a wider conflict that would pit the U.S. against a united China, Russia and Iran. “I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War III,”
  • over the years, Musk has framed his business endeavors as striving to prevent calamity, a motivating ideal that helps inspire employees, investors and fans while inducing eye rolls among critics and rivals.
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  • For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.
  • He said he worried that activating Starlink then would have further stoked the conflict. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” he is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk.” 
  • “I tend to view the future as a series of probabilities—there’s certain probability that something will go wrong, some probability that it’ll go right; it’s kind of a spectrum of things. And to the degree that there is free will versus determinism, then we want to try to exercise that free will to ensure a great future.”
  • “Nuclear war probability is rising rapidly,” he tweeted last fall after months of fighting between the two countries. 
  • with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”
  • “Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities—many are certain!” he tweeted a couple of years ago. “Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength.”
  • “We’re like a pro sports team that has been winning the championship for so long and so many years in a row that we have forgotten what losing even looks like,” Musk said. “And that’s when the champion team loses.” 
  • “My brother believes an economic winter is coming every single day,” Kimbal Musk once told lawyers about his older sibling’s mindset during a legal procedure. 
  • “To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days,” Musk said last year during an update on SpaceX’s large rocket development. “I’m an optimist, but I think we got to protect the downside here and try to build that city on Mars as soon as possible and secure the future of life.”
  • Among his stated worries, of which he has tweeted: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense” and “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
  • he framed his creation of an artificial-intelligence startup called xAI in his typically grandiose terms, cautioning that the technology has the potential to spiral out of control and essentially turn on its master, something akin to “The Terminator” movie. 
  • “I think it’s actually important for us to worry about a `Terminator’ future in order to avoid a `Terminator’ future,”
  • This past week, Musk returned to calling for peace, saying U.S. policies risk pushing Russia into an alliance with China just as the Israel-Hamas war has the potential to expand. He cautioned that many people overestimate U.S. military might in such a scenario
  • “Cheery fatalism is very effective.”
Javier E

Elon Musk Ramps Up A.I. Efforts, Even as He Warns of Dangers - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At a 2014 aerospace event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Musk indicated that he was hesitant to build A.I himself.“I think we need to be very careful about artificial intelligence,” he said while answering audience questions. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”
  • That winter, the Future of Life Institute, which explores existential risks to humanity, organized a private conference in Puerto Rico focused on the future of A.I. Mr. Musk gave a speech there, arguing that A.I. could cross into dangerous territory without anyone realizing it and announced that he would help fund the institute. He gave $10 million.
  • OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit, with Mr. Musk and others pledging $1 billion in donations. The lab vowed to “open source” all its research, meaning it would share its underlying software code with the world. Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman argued that the threat of harmful A.I. would be mitigated if everyone, rather than just tech giants like Google and Facebook, had access to the technology.
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  • as OpenAI began building the technology that would result in ChatGPT, many at the lab realized that openly sharing its software could be dangerous. Using A.I., individuals and organizations can potentially generate and distribute false information more quickly and efficiently than they otherwise could. Many OpenAI employees said the lab should keep some of its ideas and code from the public.
  • Mr. Musk renewed his complaints that A.I. was dangerous and accelerated his own efforts to build it. At a Tesla investor event last month, he called for regulators to protect society from A.I., even though his car company has used A.I. systems to push the boundaries of self-driving technologies that have been involved in fatal crashes.
  • During the interview last week with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Musk said OpenAI was no longer serving as a check on the power of tech giants. He wanted to build TruthGPT, he said, “a maximum-truth-seeking A.I. that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
  • Experts who have discussed A.I. with Mr. Musk believe he is sincere in his worries about the technology’s dangers, even as he builds it himself. Others said his stance was influenced by other motivations, most notably his efforts to promote and profit from his companies.
Javier E

Elon Musk's 'anti-woke' Grok AI is disappointing his right-wing fans - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Decrying what he saw as the liberal bias of ChatGPT, Elon Musk earlier this year announced plans to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of his own. In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to tread lightly around controversial topics, Musk’s would be edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke,” meaning it wouldn’t hesitate to give politically incorrect responses.
  • Musk is fielding complaints from the political right that the chatbot gives liberal responses to questions about diversity programs, transgender rights and inequality.
  • “I’ve been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants,” posted Jordan Peterson, the socially conservative psychologist and YouTube personality, Wednesday. The former is “near as woke as the latter,” he said.
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  • The gripe drew a chagrined reply from Musk. “Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he responded. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”
  • While many tech ethicists and AI experts warn that these systems can absorb and reinforce harmful stereotypes, efforts by tech firms to counter those tendencies have provoked a backlash from some on the right who see them as overly censorial.
  • Touting xAI to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk accused OpenAI’s programmers of “training the AI to lie” or to refrain from commenting when asked about sensitive issues. (OpenAI wrote in a February blog post that its goal is not for the AI to lie, but for it to avoid favoring any one political group or taking positions on controversial topics.) Musk said his AI, in contrast, would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” even if that meant offending people.
  • So far, however, the people most offended by Grok’s answers seem to be the people who were counting on it to readily disparage minorities, vaccines and President Biden.
  • an academic researcher from New Zealand who examines AI bias, gained attention for a paper published in March that found ChatGPT’s responses to political questions tended to lean moderately left and socially libertarian. Recently, he subjected Grok to some of the same tests and found that its answers to political orientation tests were broadly similar to those of ChatGPT.
  • “I think both ChatGPT and Grok have probably been trained on similar Internet-derived corpora, so the similarity of responses should perhaps not be too surprising,”
  • Other AI researchers argue that the sort of political orientation tests used by Rozado overlook ways in which chatbots, including ChatGPT, often exhibit negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.
  • Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment as to what actions they’re taking to alter Grok’s politics, or whether that amounts to putting a thumb on the scale in much the same way Musk has accused OpenAI of doing with ChatGPT.
Javier E

How Elon Musk spoiled the dream of 'Full Self-Driving' - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
  • “The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action
  • “Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.
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  • “No one believed me that working for Elon was the way it was until they saw how he operated Twitter,” Bernal said, calling Twitter “just the tip of the iceberg on how he operates Tesla.”
  • In April 2019, at a showcase dubbed “Autonomy Investor Day,” Musk made perhaps his boldest prediction as Tesla’s chief executive. “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware,” Musk told a roomful of investors. The software updates automatically over the air, and Full Self-Driving would be so reliable, he said, the driver “could go to sleep.”
  • Investors were sold. The following year, Tesla’s stock price soared, making it the most valuable automaker and helping Musk become the world’s richest person
  • To deliver on his promise, Musk assembled a star team of engineers willing to work long hours and problem solve deep into the night. Musk would test the latest software on his own car, then he and other executives would compile “fix-it” requests for their engineers.
  • Those patchwork fixes gave the illusion of relentless progress but masked the lack of a coherent development strategy, former employees said. While competitors such as Alphabet-owned Waymo adopted strict testing protocols that limited where self-driving software could operate, Tesla eventually pushed Full Self-Driving out to 360,000 owners — who paid up to $15,000 to be eligible for the features — and let them activate it at their own discretion.
  • Tesla’s philosophy is simple: The more data (in this case driving) the artificial intelligence guiding the car is exposed to, the faster it learns. But that crude model also means there is a lighter safety net. Tesla has chosen to effectively allow the software to learn on its own, developing sensibilities akin to a brain via technology dubbed “neural nets” with fewer rules, the former employees said. While this has the potential to speed the process, it boils down to essentially a trial and error method of training.
  • Radar originally played a major role in the design of the Tesla vehicles and software, supplementing the cameras by offering a reality check of what was around, particularly if vision might be obscured. Tesla also used ultrasonic sensors, shorter-range devices that detect obstructions within inches of the car. (The company announced last year it was eliminating those as well.)
  • Musk, as the chief tester, also asked for frequent bug fixes to the software, requiring engineers to go in and adjust code. “Nobody comes up with a good idea while being chased by a tiger,” a former senior executive recalled an engineer on the project telling him
  • Toward the end of 2020, Autopilot employees turned on their computers to find in-house workplace monitoring software installed, former employees said. It monitored keystrokes and mouse clicks, and kept track of their image labeling. If the mouse did not move for a period of time, a timer started — and employees could be reprimanded, up to being fired, for periods of inactivity, the former employees said.
  • Some of the people who spoke with The Post said that approach has introduced risks. “I just knew that putting that software out in the streets would not be safe,” said a former Tesla Autopilot engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “You can’t predict what the car’s going to do.”
  • Some of the people who spoke with The Post attributed Tesla’s sudden uptick in “phantom braking” reports — where the cars aggressively slow down from high speeds — to the lack of radar. The Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to show incidences surged last year, prompting a federal regulatory investigation.
  • The data showed reports of “phantom braking” rose to 107 complaints over three months, compared to only 34 in the preceding 22 months. After The Post highlighted the problem in a news report, NHTSA received about 250 complaints of the issue in a two-week period. The agency opened an investigation after, it said, it received 354 complaints of the problem spanning a period of nine months.
  • “It’s not the sole reason they’re having [trouble] but it’s big a part of it,” said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser for NHTSA, who has criticized the company’s approach and recused herself on matters related to Tesla. “The radar helped detect objects in the forward field. [For] computer vision which is rife with errors, it serves as a sensor fusion way to check if there is a problem.”
  • Even with radar, Teslas were less sophisticated than the lidar and radar-equipped cars of competitors.“One of the key advantages of lidar is that it will never fail to see a train or truck, even if it doesn’t know what it is,” said Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car developer and consultant who worked on Google’s self-driving car. “It knows there is an object in front and the vehicle can stop without knowing more than that.”
  • Musk’s resistance to suggestions led to a culture of deference, former employees said. Tesla fired employees who pushed back on his approach. The company was also pushing out so many updates to its software that in late 2021, NHTSA publicly admonished Tesla for issuing fixes without a formal recall notice.
  • Tesla engineers have been burning out, quitting and looking for opportunities elsewhere. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, took a months-long sabbatical last year before leaving Tesla and taking a position this year at OpenAI, the company behind language-modeling software ChatGPT.
  • One of the former employees said that he left for Waymo. “They weren’t really wondering if their car’s going to run the stop sign,” the engineer said. “They’re just focusing on making the whole thing achievable in the long term, as opposed to hurrying it up.”
Javier E

The Contradictions of Sam Altman, the AI Crusader Behind ChatGPT - WSJ - 0 views

  • Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it’s uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models.
  • He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity. 
  • His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI. Mr. Altman even thinks that humanity will love AI so much that an advanced chatbot could represent “an extension of your will.”
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  • The Tesla Inc. CEO tweeted in February that OpenAI had been founded as an open-source nonprofit “to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”
  • Backers say his brand of social-minded capitalism makes him the ideal person to lead OpenAI. Others, including some who’ve worked for him, say he’s too commercially minded and immersed in Silicon Valley thinking to lead a technological revolution that is already reshaping business and social life. 
  • In the long run, he said, he wants to set up a global governance structure that would oversee decisions about the future of AI and gradually reduce the power OpenAI’s executive team has over its technology. 
  • Mr. Altman said he doesn’t necessarily need to be first to develop artificial general intelligence, a world long imagined by researchers and science-fiction writers where software isn’t just good at one specific task like generating text or images but can understand and learn as well or better than a human can. He instead said OpenAI’s ultimate mission is to build AGI, as it’s called, safely.
  • In its founding charter, OpenAI pledged to abandon its research efforts if another project came close to building AGI before it did. The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity.
  • While running Y Combinator, Mr. Altman began to nurse a growing fear that large research labs like DeepMind, purchased by Google in 2014, were creating potentially dangerous AI technologies outside the public eye. Mr. Musk has voiced similar concerns of a dystopian world controlled by powerful AI machines. 
  • Messrs. Altman and Musk decided it was time to start their own lab. Both were part of a group that pledged $1 billion to the nonprofit, OpenAI Inc. 
  • OpenAI researchers soon concluded that the most promising path to achieve artificial general intelligence rested in large language models, or computer programs that mimic the way humans read and write. Such models were trained on large volumes of text and required a massive amount of computing power that OpenAI wasn’t equipped to fund as a nonprofit, according to Mr. Altman. 
  • “We didn’t have a visceral sense of just how expensive this project was going to be,” he said. “We still don’t.”
  • Tensions also grew with Mr. Musk, who became frustrated with the slow progress and pushed for more control over the organization, people familiar with the matter said. 
  • OpenAI executives ended up reviving an unusual idea that had been floated earlier in the company’s history: creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, that would report to the nonprofit parent. 
  • Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who advised OpenAI at the time and later served on the board, said the idea was to attract investors eager to make money from the commercial release of some OpenAI technology, accelerating OpenAI’s progress
  • “You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.”
  • The decision further alienated Mr. Musk, the people familiar with the matter said. He parted ways with OpenAI in February 2018. 
  • Mr. Musk announced his departure in a company all-hands, former employees who attended the meeting said. Mr. Musk explained that he thought he had a better chance at creating artificial general intelligence through Tesla, where he had access to greater resources, they said.
  • A young researcher questioned whether Mr. Musk had thought through the safety implications, the former employees said. Mr. Musk grew visibly frustrated and called the intern a “jackass,” leaving employees stunned, they said. It was the last time many of them would see Mr. Musk in person.  
  • Mr. Musk’s departure marked a turning point. Later that year, OpenAI leaders told employees that Mr. Altman was set to lead the company. He formally became CEO and helped complete the creation of the for-profit subsidiary in early 2019.
  • OpenAI said that it received about $130 million in contributions from the initial $1 billion pledge, but that further donations were no longer needed after the for-profit’s creation. Mr. Musk has tweeted that he donated around $100 million to OpenAI. 
  • In the meantime, Mr. Altman began hunting for investors. His break came at Allen & Co.’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho in the summer of 2018, where he bumped into Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, on a stairwell and pitched him on OpenAI. Mr. Nadella said he was intrigued. The conversations picked up that winter.
  • “I remember coming back to the team after and I was like, this is the only partner,” Mr. Altman said. “They get the safety stuff, they get artificial general intelligence. They have the capital, they have the ability to run the compute.”   
  • Mr. Altman shared the contract with employees as it was being negotiated, hosting all-hands and office hours to allay concerns that the partnership contradicted OpenAI’s initial pledge to develop artificial intelligence outside the corporate world, the former employees said. 
  • Some employees still saw the deal as a Faustian bargain. 
  • OpenAI’s lead safety researcher, Dario Amodei, and his lieutenants feared the deal would allow Microsoft to sell products using powerful OpenAI technology before it was put through enough safety testing,
  • They felt that OpenAI’s technology was far from ready for a large release—let alone with one of the world’s largest software companies—worrying it could malfunction or be misused for harm in ways they couldn’t predict.  
  • Mr. Amodei also worried the deal would tether OpenAI’s ship to just one company—Microsoft—making it more difficult for OpenAI to stay true to its founding charter’s commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first, the former employees said.
  • Microsoft initially invested $1 billion in OpenAI. While the deal gave OpenAI its needed money, it came with a hitch: exclusivity. OpenAI agreed to only use Microsoft’s giant computer servers, via its Azure cloud service, to train its AI models, and to give the tech giant the sole right to license OpenAI’s technology for future products.
  • In a recent investment deck, Anthropic said it was “committed to large-scale commercialization” to achieve the creation of safe AGI, and that it “fully committed” to a commercial approach in September. The company was founded as an AI safety and research company and said at the time that it might look to create commercial value from its products. 
  • Mr. Altman “has presided over a 180-degree pivot that seems to me to be only giving lip service to concern for humanity,” he said. 
  • “The deal completely undermines those tenets to which they secured nonprofit status,” said Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who co-founded a machine-learning company
  • The cash turbocharged OpenAI’s progress, giving researchers access to the computing power needed to improve large language models, which were trained on billions of pages of publicly available text. OpenAI soon developed a more powerful language model called GPT-3 and then sold developers access to the technology in June 2020 through packaged lines of code known as application program interfaces, or APIs. 
  • Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei clashed again over the release of the API, former employees said. Mr. Amodei wanted a more limited and staged release of the product to help reduce publicity and allow the safety team to conduct more testing on a smaller group of users, former employees said. 
  • Mr. Amodei left the company a few months later along with several others to found a rival AI lab called Anthropic. “They had a different opinion about how to best get to safe AGI than we did,” Mr. Altman said.
  • Anthropic has since received more than $300 million from Google this year and released its own AI chatbot called Claude in March, which is also available to developers through an API. 
  • Mr. Altman disagreed. “The unusual thing about Microsoft as a partner is that it let us keep all the tenets that we think are important to our mission,” he said, including profit caps and the commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first. 
  • In the three years after the initial deal, Microsoft invested a total of $3 billion in OpenAI, according to investor documents. 
  • More than one million users signed up for ChatGPT within five days of its November release, a speed that surprised even Mr. Altman. It followed the company’s introduction of DALL-E 2, which can generate sophisticated images from text prompts.
  • By February, it had reached 100 million users, according to analysts at UBS, the fastest pace by a consumer app in history to reach that mark.
  • n’s close associates praise his ability to balance OpenAI’s priorities. No one better navigates between the “Scylla of misplaced idealism” and the “Charybdis of myopic ambition,” Mr. Thiel said. 
  • Mr. Altman said he delayed the release of the latest version of its model, GPT-4, from last year to March to run additional safety tests. Users had reported some disturbing experiences with the model, integrated into Bing, where the software hallucinated—meaning it made up answers to questions it didn’t know. It issued ominous warnings and made threats. 
  • “The way to get it right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe,” Mr. Altman said.
  • After Microsoft’s initial investment is paid back, it would capture 49% of OpenAI’s profits until the profit cap, up from 21% under prior arrangements, the documents show. OpenAI Inc., the nonprofit parent, would get the rest.
  • He has put almost all his liquid wealth in recent years in two companies. He has put $375 million into Helion Energy, which is seeking to create carbon-free energy from nuclear fusion and is close to creating “legitimate net-gain energy in a real demo,” Mr. Altman said.
  • He has also put $180 million into Retro, which aims to add 10 years to the human lifespan through “cellular reprogramming, plasma-inspired therapeutics and autophagy,” or the reuse of old and damaged cell parts, according to the company. 
  • He noted how much easier these problems are, morally, than AI. “If you’re making nuclear fusion, it’s all upside. It’s just good,” he said. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible.” 
Javier E

Opinion | Elon Musk's Savior Complex - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Some historians and psychologists have marveled at how many of the most significant figures in history lost a parent at an early age, either to death or abandonment — from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. These are what one psychologist termed “eminent orphans.”
  • It’s easy to put Elon Musk into that category
  • In the midst of that bleak childhood, Musk dived into science fiction, computer games and comics, and in some sense never left. In that world, Musk seems to have been gripped by a story just as fervently as a religious person is gripped by a holy book.
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  • I believe most of us tell a story about our lives and then come to live within that story. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell a coherent story about yourself. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of
  • “A man is always a teller of tales,” the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed. “He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them, and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.”
  • The story Musk came to inhabit is one of the oldest in our civilization: A male hero of uncertain reputation emerges from an obscure place to save a doomed people through acts of daring
  • It is the story of Moses, Jesus, Superman, John Wayne westerns, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.
  • “While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view,
  • Musk’s self-conception is that he is building companies to save humanity, according to Isaacson. SpaceX is to make humans a multiplanetary species, so we can escape to Mars if something apocalyptic happens to earth. Tesla’s mission is to move humanity past a hydrocarbon economy, toward a sustainable future. His new firm xAI is there to help prevent artificial intelligence from taking over the world. Neuralink, which embeds technology into people’s brains, is there to help the blind see and the paralyzed walk.
  • Sometimes the story Musk tells about himself seems so grandiose it enters the realm of epic myth.
  • A person so consumed by a myth is not seeking to be conventionally successful, Dennis Ford argues in his book “The Search for Meaning”; he or she is trying “to be faithful to the mythic pattern.”
  • A person within this mythic consciousness can easily distort reality, confabulate and lie. Such a person can have the grandiose sense that he is indispensable to our species
  • Musk’s perennial crisis/urgency mentality, which drives him to behave as a craptaculous jerk to the people around him and serves as a rationalization for when he does, also fits.
  • People who have met Musk sometimes say it’s as if he is not a fully rounded human being, but seems like a character playing a role.
  • Perhaps it’s because he is still inhabiting an adventure story.
  • Musk’s apparent attachment to the hero myth seems to both make him fearless and also frequently a kind of monster. The mythic mind is a self-involved mind, which can never quite regard other people as being as important as the hero/self
  • the Musk of Isaacson’s book is on a series of epic quests — and is complex enough to be simultaneously hero and villain.
Javier E

The New Musk Biography Is a Distraction - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Musk is still alive, his influence still growing. We don’t need to understand how he thinks and feels as much as we need to understand how he managed to amass so much power, and the broad societal impact of his choices—in short, how thoroughly this mercurial leader of six companies has become an architect of our future.
  • The cover of Elon Musk shows Musk’s face in high contrast staring straight, with hands folded as if in prayer, evoking a Great Man of History and a visual echo of the Jobs volume. Isaacson’s central question seems to be whether Musk could have achieved such greatness if he were less cruel and more humane. But this is no time for a retrospective.
  • In Isaacson’s introduction to Elon Musk, he explains that the man is “not hardwired to have empathy.” Musk’s role as a visionary with a messianic passion seems to excuse this lack. The thinking goes like this: All of his demands for people to come solve a problem right now or you’re fired are bringing us one step closer to Mars travel, or the end of our dependence on oil, or the preservation of human consciousness itself. His comfort with skirting the law and cutting corners in product development also serves a higher purpose: Musk believes, and preaches in a mantra to employees at all of his companies, that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”
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  • By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents.
  • Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.
Javier E

Will Elon Musk-owned Twitter end up as a "deal from hell"? | The Economist - 0 views

  • mergers and acquisitions that end happily do so for a variety of reasons. It’s the unhappy ones that are alike. This is particularly true of m&a deals done at the top of the business cycle, when hubris runs amok, lofty valuations make acquirers sloppy with their money and the most radical ideas are made to sound plausible. In this category sits Elon Musk’s shotgun wedding to Twitter
  • Mr Musk’s latest attempt to justify it is to describe it as a step towards a Chinese-style “everything app”. It is just as likely to go down in history as a top-of-the-market “deal from hell”.
  • the stock phrases that sum up such debacles—wrong target, wrong time, wrong price tag—already seem applicable to his pursuit of Twitter, and may explain why he has spent so long trying to wriggle out of the deal
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  • the first hints of hell come from hubris. The self-styled “Technoking” has every reason for self-belief. Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker. SpaceX is literally rocket science in action. Yet for executives like him it’s a fine line from that to overconfidence. Sony’s Morita Akio crossed it. So did AOL’s Steve Case and RBS’s Fred Goodwin
  • The corollary of hubris is sloppy financing, another attribute of top-of-the-market megaflops. This is particularly true at the tail end of bull markets
  • as with many M&A deals, deteriorating markets can turn a flawed acquisition into a disaster. That possibility must haunt Mr Musk. The digital-advertising market on which Twitter depends has crumbled. Tesla’s own shares, the source of most of his wealth, have lost a third of their value since he made the bid (don’t cry for him, he is still worth $220bn). The deal financing includes $13bn of high-risk debt and spreads on this kind of instrument have soared
  • the repercussions are likely to be troubling. Either banks are stuck with hard-to-sell debt and suffer hefty losses or, in the unlikely event that they abandon the deal, a superhero of 21st-century capitalism faces a $44bn day of reckoning
  • Finally there is strategy. In Mr Bruner’s analysis, the worst M&A deals are done when the target is in an industry far beyond the acquirer’s “domain knowledge”. That is surely true of Mr Musk and Twitter
  • it also has a hellish side. It could pit the world’s most powerful businessman against tech regulators. It could stir up trouble geopolitically (imagine a reinstated Donald Trump weighing in, as Mr Musk has done, on Russia and Ukraine). And it could enrage China, thwarting Tesla’s prospects there. Another deal for the history books, no doubt
Javier E

The Man Whose Musings Fuel Elon Musk's Nightmares - WSJ - 0 views

  • The book is an extension of Saad’s career exploring how human evolution informs modern consumer behavior—a controversial way of looking at the world that is sometimes called evolutionary psychology.
  • Saad wrote that “The Parasitic Mind” was inspired, in part, by his experience in academia, where he described a herd mindset that chastised innovative thinkers. He described pushback he encountered, including his ideas being labeled as “sexist nonsense” and his efforts to use “biologically-based theorizing” to explain consumer behavior being dismissed as too reductionistic.   
  • “The West is currently suffering from such a devastating pandemic, a collective malady that destroys people’s capacity to think rationally,” the 59-year-old Saad wrote at the beginning of his book. “Unlike other pandemics where biological pathogens are to blame, the current culprit is composed of a collection of bad ideas, spawned on university campuses, that chip away at our edifices of reason, freedom, and individual dignity.” 
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  • “The Lebanese war taught me early about the ugliness of tribalism and religious dogma,” Saad wrote. “It likely informed my subsequent disdain for identity politics, as I grew up in an ecosystem where the group to which you belonged mattered more than your individuality.” 
  • Musk has said his concerns about Woke Mind Virus, his way of labeling progressive liberal beliefs that he says are overly politically correct and stifling to public debate and free speech, helped fuel his desire to acquire the social-media company Twitter turned X in late 2022. It is on that platform where Musk, 52 years old, has aired many of his concerns.
  • For his part, Musk says his politics are “fairly moderate”—what he describes as his supporting safe cities, secure borders, a neutral judiciary and sensible spending. And, he adds, what he calls being “pro environment.”
  • Still, Musk is prone to painting risks at their most extreme and gravitating to others with similar world views. 
  • “For many years now, I have warned that the path that the West is taking will result in civil war. It might take 5 years, 50 years, or 100 years but it is inevitable,” Saad tweeted on the day of Tesla’s quarterly earnings call last month. 
  • Before joining that call, Musk was on X, agreeing with Saad in a thread of responses. “War will come whether we want it or not,” Musk posted. 
Javier E

Even Elon Musk Wants More Power - WSJ - 0 views

  • the past few weeks might well live on as a business-school case study on the complexity of managing a superstar talent who has succeeded with maverick ways but also, for some, can go too far
  • Just as it isn’t easy for a manager to course-correct a star performer who gets out of line, a board can struggle to rein in a celebrity CEO, especially if everyone is enjoying the company’s stock performance that papers over troubling signs. 
  • At present, Musk directly holds 13% of Tesla shares, or about 21% if including unexercised options, according to the company’s most recent regulatory filing. That’s down from 21% directly held at the end of 2016. 
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  • That plan, which became subject to litigation, set numerous stretch goals, including the addition of $600 billion to the company’s market value. It offered him tranches of payouts along the way, giving him options in total to about 10% of the company’s stock, worth around $60 billion Friday after exercising costs. 
  • Now, he’s publicly asking for 25%, to give him more voting power in corporate matters.  
  • “If I allocate time to Tesla—if I overallocate time to Tesla at the expense of making humanity a space-faring civilization—then I’m not sure what would serve the greater good,” Musk said. “But if there were additional economic resources available that could then subsequently be applied to making life multiplanetary, then perhaps that would serve the greater good.” 
  • Musk surprised many by completing the final tranche of his plan in 2022—to his and investors’ benefit. 
  • His public airing of his demands were made even more unusual given that he and the board have plenty of reasons to make something work. His unexpected departure would hurt the stock’s value, which would be bad both for his own wealth and for the board responsible for ensuring shareholder value.  
  • “This is primarily about ensuring the right amount of voting influence at Tesla,” Musk tweeted. “If I have 25%, it means I am influential, but can be overridden if twice as many shareholders vote against me vs for me. At 15% or lower, the for/against ratio to override me makes a takeover by dubious interests too easy.” 
Javier E

Opinion | Elon Musk Is Buying Twitter. Shudder. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Carnegie and the steel barons elected Republican lawmakers and presidents committed to protecting their companies’ profits by levying high tariffs on foreign competitors. Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites.
  • What makes Mr. Musk particularly powerful and potentially more dangerous than the industrial-era moguls is his ability to promote his businesses and political notions with a tweet
  • The likely consequences of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership will be political as well as economic disruption.
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  • It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.
  • Mr. Musk is correct that “free speech” must be honored and protected. But is it not time that we, as a people and a nation, engage in a wide-ranging, inclusive public debate on when and how free speech creates “a clear and present danger” — as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago — and whether we need government to find a way, through law or regulation or persuasion, to prevent this from happening?
  • Elon Musk is a product of his — and our — times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.
Javier E

How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk's Number - The New York Times - 0 views

  • a Scottish moral philosopher.The philosopher, William MacAskill,
  • his latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a best seller after it was published in August.
  • His rising profile parallels the worldwide growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and volunteer kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a significant force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen-Z giving.
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  • In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
  • “If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.
  • Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.
  • Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.
  • If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades,
  • Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent mosquitoes from giving people malaria.
  • Mr. MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.
  • The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them — like preventing artificial intelligence from running amok or sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species
  • The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at M.I.T. with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
  • Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly.
  • Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.
  • Bloomberg recently estimated that Mr. Bankman-Fried was worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices. That puts Mr. Bankman-Fried in the unusual position of having earned his enormous fortune on behalf of the effective altruism cause, rather than making the money and then searching for a sense of purpose in donating it.
  • Mr. Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.
  • Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations
  • Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.
  • Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.
  • In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)
  • Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”
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