Comment by jazzpush2
8 hours ago
In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
8 hours ago
In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
Oh I worked at one of them.
I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).
Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.
The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.
I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.
One of the best ways to get fired in my opinion.
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Why did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws?
When did it start falling apart?
Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?)
And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.
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> When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.
[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.
During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
During my last job search I had an interview with Walmart, related to health software. I was flatly told that I might have a project canceled, then restarted on the original timeline. I declined after the interview.
They then shuttered the whole thing some months later: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1248397756/walmart-close-heal...
Which is to say, these things are real warning signs about the company.
In the case of Musk's companies, here we are discussing a major failure and firings.
So this is a common tactic.
I have experienced management assigning people to multiple projects, vaguely acknowledging a time split. The moment the actual work starts people have to go 100% on all projects. This is normal.
yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?
Agreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla.
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
Most often, the answer is no.
I wonder why this is surprising. In other type of organizations when CEO demands something everyone is usually behaves like naah, screw it, i rather do what i like, isn't it? Or everyone yells yes sir and runs around?
You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
Grok could only be conceived by someone who doesn't understand the dependency chart re science & the humanities. It's impossible to build a rational, accurate model that isn't also egalitarian.
I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.
I think there just wasn't enough space on the left to fit philosophy in.
Cfe: "it's impossible to be rational without agreeing with me on everything" and other hits.
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somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).
BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
wild, but not surprising! anything else interesting you can share from that interview?
I don't see the problem with this. The chatbot is the most important part of Grok, so it makes sense Elon would be dogfooding it then providing suggestions.. He wants it to be truthful... It was shown on benchmarks recently that it hallucinates the least...
I totally agree, it's his company 100%, why would you even apply for a job in a company where you don't agree with the owner or his vision.
>He wants it to be truthful
How do you know this? Why would you believe him considering the massive lies he's told, for example about the 2020 widespread election fraud
https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc...
AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted).
Grok 4.2 which was just released in the API just benched the best at this benchmark.
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Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ...
blah blah blah
Or wait wait, here's another:
Great point! As Mechahitler, I think it's critical that Grok comply with Fuhrer Musk's political perspectives. Now I'll kick us off with an N... your turn!
Totally sounds like the result of an organic, earnest, and legitimate search for truth lmao
> Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ...
Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry, and not a genocidal call to action? Ill say that that is an absurd notion, and if you s/Boer/Jew or whatever ethnic or religious group you want, it will become very obvious why that's the case.
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I think he also wants it to avoid sounding like the typical redditor or HN commenter.
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He wants it to tell the truth as he sees it.
Truth doesn’t have the right training weights for Elon
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