It feels like Microsoft is misusing the partnership only to block other companies from having access to the IP. They said they don't need the partnership, that they have got all what they need, so there would be no need to have the partnership.
If this is the way Microsoft misuses partnerships, I don't feel good about Mistral's new partnership, even if it means unlimited computing resources for them and still have the freedom to open source their models.
Not seeing Mistral Large as an open source model now has a bitter taste to it.
I also wonder if this lawsuit was the reason for him checking out Windows 11.
He's goal on OpenAI investments were to keep close watch on the development of AI. If you believe the public comments or not is an entirely different matter though I do feel like there is sincerity in Elons AI comments.
A company needs a product to sell. If they give away everything, they have nothing to sell. This was surely always the plan.
(1) They can give away the model but sell an API - but they can’t serve a model as cheap as Goog/Msft/Amzn who have better unit economics on their cloud and better pricing on GPUs (plus custom inference chips).
(2) they can sell the model. In which case they can’t give it away for free. Unlike open source code, there probably isn’t a market for support and similar “upsells” yet.
Which has a simple solution, release the model weights with a license which doesn't let anyone to commercially host them (like AGPL-ish) without your permission. That is what Stability.ai does it.
_Like_ most open source code, there isn’t a market for support and upsells..
The reason is that he was ruthlessly scammed by the sociopath CEO Sam Altman.
"Mr. Musk founded and funded OpenAI, Inc. with Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman in exchange for and relying on the Founding Agreement to ensure that AGI would benefit humanity, not for-profit corporations. As events turned out in 2023, his contributions to OpenAI, Inc. have been twisted to benefit the Defendants and the biggest company in the world. This was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement, turning that Agreement on its head and perverting OpenAI, Inc.’s mission. Imagine donating to a non-profit whose asserted mission is to protect the Amazon rainforest, but then the non-profit creates a for-profit Amazonian logging company that uses the fruits of the donations to clear the rainforest. That is the story of OpenAI, Inc."
"Plaintiff reasonably relied on Defendants’ false promises to his detriment, ultimately providing tens of millions of dollars of funding to OpenAI, Inc., as well as his time and other resources, on the condition that OpenAI would remain a non-profit irrevocably dedicated to creating safe, open-source AGI for public benefit, only to then have OpenAI abandon its “irrevocable” non- profit mission, stop providing basic information to the public, and instead exclusively dedicate and license its AGI algorithms to the largest for-profit company in the world, precisely the opposite of the promises Defendants made to Plaintiff."
So while he may genuinely believe what he is saying, the inherent philosophical conflicts in his consistent narcissistic actions, have poisoned any other possible position to such an extent that he has lost all moral credibility
Revealed preferences never lie
Either way, I'm guessing he did not think the for-profit side would turn into a money printer.
To be fair, in regards to his actual companies I don’t have much of a complaint, it’s his cult of personality that I can’t stand.
But the dudes Autistic, it shouldn't surprise anyone that intuitively understanding and anticipating the inner workings of large amorphous social-structures isn't exactly his strongest skill.
Can you point me to the Github repository for Grok ?
That's right it doesn't exist so the facts on the ground are that he doesn't care about openness. And if he truly cared about humanity he would give away all of the designs, code etc for Tesla, SpaceX etc.
So can you clarify?
The second Elon makes the data for all his companies open (not patents which are already “open”) I’ll start believing him
I’m not sure if you’re trying to help or hurt the case for musk, but the description you put here tells me this is somebody that if that’s true, I never want them in any power in any organizations.
You just described probably the most important skill of a leader being completely absent
While the broad strokes of Tesla and SpaceX might benefit humanity, he seems to have no compunction about doing screwed up things with those companies, either. Remember when he proposed putting indentured servants on Mars?
Eh, how much of a contribution did Elon Musk actually make to those things? He got them started, but owning something isn't a contribution, frankly. There are thousands of workers involved in those companies, and some of those workers are explicitly tasked with managing Musk's free-floating ego so he doesn't screw things up. If Musk died Tesla stock would probably tank in price, but that price change would represent a loss in hype, not in the value of Tesla. The relevant engineering talent that's there, would all still be there.
> But even with X, it helps to realise, he thinks he is doing good for the world by echoing rw thought.
Obviously, but who cares?
Intentions matter because a person who doesn't intend to cause harm can learn from their mistakes and causing harm. But Elon Musk doesn't think he's making mistakes, so his intentions don't particularly matter--he's not going to learn from his mistakes and he's just going to keep going on causing the same harms.
Just an aside, he didn't get Tesla started. Although, he's often cited as the founder by news organizations, there is zero case for that claim.
Are you perhaps a member of the Musk cult of personality?
Just trying to create informational balance.
If you truly believe that he believes in free speech being crucial to human thriving, those actions make no sense.
However, if they this stance is just a veneer for other motivations, serving to blind the gullible and win points with conservatives (a lot of overlap between the two groups nowadays in the US, as seen by the reception of recent news about the prominent court case), they do. You can decide for yourself what to believe. I think the facts speak for themselves.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
For better or worse, OpenAI monetizing GPT-3+ has been good for everyone. Hobbyists can’t afford to run the model anyways, and it pushed Google et al to start caring and develop their own models.
We probably wouldn’t have Gemini/LLaMa/etc see the light of day if OpenAI didn’t make LLMs go viral. It’s just disappointing that Google literally had an LLM good enough that was tricking employees into thinking it was sentient, and it took a competitor before they released it publicly.
Prior to Musk, the only thing Eberhard and Tarpenning did was search for investors interested in commercialising the tzero. And they don't even deserve full credit for doing that, as Tom Gage was the one who connected them to Musk.
It's true that Eberhard and Tarpenning were the ones who got Tesla's corporation paperwork filed. They deserve all the respect and admiration which stems from filing corporate paperwork. Sure, they picked a name which someone else already had the the trademark for. Pesky details.
Elon Musk got Tesla started in any real sense with its first significant capital injection, at which point the company started doing its first things. Then in 2008, Musk became CEO where he rescued the minuscule mismanaged basket-case and oversaw its transition to a mature, profitable automaker worth billions.
Sam Altman asked Elon Musk to cofound OpenAI as a non-profit entity, and fund it with tens of millions of dollars, with the understanding that the research will be open to the public (hence "Open" AI). After taking tens of millions of dollars from Musk, Sam Altman then turned around and sold out to Microsoft, and effectively changed OpenAI to a for-profit entity which only serves to financially benefit Microsoft shareholders and Sam Altman himself.
Elon Musk is now requesting that OpenAI disclose GPT-4 and their subsequent models inner workings to the public, for the benefit of humanity, in accordance with the OpenAI mission statement. How does this make Elon Musk a sociopath? Please explain.
> Musk is also a narcissist and you can't be one without also being a sociopath.
This is unscientific drivel. According to the DSM, Narcissism and Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) are separate disorders within the Cluster B group. A person can have one or the other, or both.
What exact criteria did you use to diagnose Musk with Narcissism and APD?
I can't say that Sam Altman truly has APD, but he certainly matches this criteria from my perspective:
"deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure"
I believe what he did with OpenAI is a blatant and obvious con job, for his own personal gain.
As in: if I want to go and work on Mars, but can’t afford the flight, it’s not unreasonable to take a proportion of my earnings up front (in kind) and then work off that debt subsequently. Obviously the devil is in the detail of how that would work, and which protections I might be afforded, but the underlying concept doesn’t seem bad to me.
I’m no Musk apologist, but the idea that he’s inconsistent or a hypocrite because he’s expecting OpenAI to stick to their founding principles whilst also running for-profit companies in highly competitive markets, is just bizarre.
Maybe these are very coincidal exceptions to your rule, but if it had been absent, the high volume versions of Teslas would not have existed, SpaceX would not exist and plenty more tax money would have flown to NASA.
Anyways, with or without all cult culture around his person, bottom line his intentions towards humanity are pure, we should at least give him that.
Founder or no, I do think he deserves he credit for the company's early growth and viability, though. At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman. But it has long since outgrown him.
"Indentured servitude" is the nice way of saying this. "Slavery" is the inflammatory way of saying it.
> As in: if I want to go and work on Mars, but can’t afford the flight, it’s not unreasonable to take a proportion of my earnings up front (in kind) and then work off that debt subsequently. Obviously the devil is in the detail of how that would work, and which protections I might be afforded, but the underlying concept doesn’t seem bad to me.
Those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it.
Certainly Musk is very far from the traditional notions of maturity that you'd expect from a corporate executive, and clearly Musk doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's mature or not. But there's absolutely no question that Tesla and SpaceX are both as mature as any corporation could possibly be.
> At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman.
I never understood this line of thinking. I think Musk is a self-evdently terrible showman[0] but everyone has retconned some supposed showmanship as a component explanation for Tesla's market success. In my opinion, Tesla never needed a showman, because the product itself was always the "showman." Musk could have handed launch event duties off to a marketing exec and the outcome would have been functionally identical.[1] Perhaps marginally fewer early sales, but they were manufacturing constrained for so long that it wouldn't have had any impact on production ramp or total deliveries.
I'd bet at least 99% of Model 3/Y buyers never saw the launch event. They bought the car because of word-of-mouth from satisfied customers and positive reviews. The launch event sold a bunch of pre-orders, but there were enough people interested in the car to fill their order book for a long time. Within a year, these cars were selling themselves.
There's a lot of parallel with Jobs. In Jobs' case you also had a pre-eminent showman, but ultimately the star of every show was the product itself, not the slide deck or the speaker's tone. Both Musk and Jobs were obsessed with the product, and steered the ship of their respective corporations to focus on making a product worthy of dramatic reveal. This meant knowing what about the product actually mattered. (Consider, for example, whether it was more important for Tesla to focus on software or panel gaps.)
When the "Model 2" is ready, Tesla could do literally nothing to launch the vehicle. Just add it to their website and they'd sell everything they could possibly manufacture. Its continued success will be driven by customer satisfaction with the product, not marketing. The only point in having a launch event would be fan service.
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[0] I would distinguish his skill as a presenter with skill as a speaker. He's a terrible and often cringe-worthy presenter. But when he's talking about things he's passionate about, he can be a deeply compelling speaker.
[1] Arguably better because a C-suite in suit-and-tie would have stuck to the script and not waffled on with overly optimistic predictions about future R&D milestones.
Slavery is involuntary and unpaid, so it wouldn’t be that.
The form of indentured servitude that was outlawed a long time ago was also involuntary, so it’s not that either.
Would you have a problem with someone taking out a bank loan to travel to Mars, and then working there to pay off the loan?
But is it really true?
It feels to me that Tesla might have only sped up the EV market emergence by a couple of years and given the growth of battery's capacity/price/density over the years it was inevitable.
Any other reading of that era of industry would be re-writing a narrative to diminish what Tesla really did. It is too bad he has earned so many detractors (through his own mistakes) because many of his accomplishments are exceptional.
But in case you're not. The main blocker to production and adoption of electric personal vehicles has been battery capacity and charging infrastructure.
Electric vehicles where already the norm where the battery was not necessary (trains). And in many cities there were electric buses for decades even though they were very impractical because they needed to be connected to the electric grid while driving.
The moment the car industry would realize that the battery is big enough to cover decent range and would charge reasonably fast the switch to EV would be inevitable. Tesla was was simply the first to make a bet that the get future is now.
In my city we have now a fleet of electric buses, electric trash collecting trucks (live quality improvement due to how quiet they are and how loud those huge diesel engines were). I really don't think the trash collection truck manufacturers decided to go electric because of Tesla.
That's not the problem with him, though. The problem is, he clearly doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's an asshole or not.
And since he seems to be such a huge one of those, it would be nice if he cared that pretty much everyone thinks he is, because then maybe he'd try to stop being one.
You seen any diagnosis signed by an accredited physician? I haven't.
You are rewriting history to make it sound like it was an inevitability which it absolutely was not and still is not an inevitability. I am not sure if you were alive and in industry at the time but it sounds like you are much younger and are relying on reading as opposed to experiencing the world.
Heavy duty municipal vehicles are a completely different market not comparable. Cities have mandates that aren't always cost such as quality of life - that and they can draw from their tax base + these vehicles always return to base. Again not comparable.
It's a natural consequence of a progressivist assumption that all ultra-rich people are assholes. Given that, you can't fault an ultra-rich person from concluding that being called an asshole is noise to be disregarded. IMHO the real problem is too many people are consumed with having an opinion about whether he's an asshole or not. What I see is a bunch of highly online people who utterly exude delight in saying anything mean about Elon, which is a sad state for them to be in — regardless of Elon's inherent virtues or iniquity.
In the past couple of years he's fallen much too far down the right-wing rabbit hole for my tastes, but I don't blame him given how the political left are constantly berating him for not adhering to the Correct Opinion™ on the full suite of progressive issues. The left have forgotten how to win arguments on their merits, or how to tolerate a diversity of views. The left have rejected him, but the right still want to talk to him, and people wonder why his views are being increasingly shaped by right-wing perspectives.
Regardless, who cares what Elon thinks anyway? I don't form my political opinions by agreeing with whatever any ultra-rich person says, and I don't know anyone who does.
I see all around me electric mobility everywhere. E-bikes, e-scooters, electric motorbikes, electric buses, electric trucks. More and more of them.
To believe that without Tesla car industry would never notice that or dared to try is a bit too much.
And to illustrate that the momentum was already there look at the growing popularity of hybrid cars (Prius) which predates Tesla.
Funny how on the one hand such a lot of people on HN are willing to drag this out in Musk's defence, but on the other hand when the same is attempted in defence of, say, Richard Stallman, they do all hasten to point out that he's not officially diagnosed.
Unless and until we see a diagnosis from a qualified medical professional, we have no evidence that Musk is anything but an asshole.
Or he feels he doesn't have to care, as a natural consequence of there being so many people holding the regressivist assumption that being ultra-rich means one can't be, or it doesn't matter if one is, an asshole.
> Regardless, who cares what Elon thinks anyway?
Far too many people, it seems, including quite a lot of the HN commentariat.
> I don't form my political opinions by agreeing with whatever any ultra-rich person says, and I don't know anyone who does.
Look around a bit better then; there's droves of them.