I don't know anybody with Hoffman's level of wealth, but I have come across a fair number of people with close to a billion dollars of wealth that now split their time between enjoying time with their own family and then trying to pursue philanthropy and non-profits meant to improve everybody's life in the community.

I run into them because of their attempts to improve the community. And there are those who do it super quietly, give big, and do everything they can to avoid getting credit for it; there's another Silicon Valley Reed that does this in my community. Steve Jobs apparently did this too, big donations but anonymously.

Do not take the blabbering idiots on the All-In podcast as representative of all of Silicon Valley, the old Valley was far different than those people and there are still plenty of people that pursue wealth not for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement and power.

The slip mines need more PhD labour to label stuff - that’s your future and you better learn to love it.

The sloppings will continue until morale improves.

I've embraced it, and I'm coding faster than all my colleagues, some days I open more PRs than the rest of my team combined.

> ok boomer.

Reid Hoffman is not a boomer. He was born in 1967. Also: ageism isn't sexy.

This is largely escapism because the current paradigm of growth is ending, rather messily. The definition of living well is going through a forced change, and adjusting is hard.

College students totally have the capital to gamble all day on kalshi.

Did we blame the kids for smoking back in the day too, or recognize the harm and regulate it out of their lives?

We made that world. There are very smart people who spent their talent making the most addictive social media as possible.

People should stop exploring new ideas the second they graduate college??

Sounds like a sad way to live.

Why wouldn't you listen to a company on why their product solves the problem you're having?

So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.

And it doesn't help that...

'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'

that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.

He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant.

He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he?

Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.

It means his opinions about xAI are worth less than a random HNer's, since he has a very strong incentive to talk bad about it.

So he has money.

That Microsoft who added LARGE BLUE copilot buttons on the dialogs you get in Visual Studio when it stops on a breakpoint or exception?

You can’t do an unweighted analysis like so. Even if he did get a single thing right, you need to weigh it by the impact.

He's said many things that didn't come to be but since he controls over a trillion dollars in assets, anything he says will be impactful, perhaps even more so if it is something incorrect.

You might as well ask if L. Ron Hubbard, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, or Bhaghwan Shree Rajneesh is credible.

And? Self driving works. I've taken a bunch of cars in Miami and UAE where somebody was at the wheel for legal reasons only.

If you are talking about LinkedIn, I don't know how universally they are considered a tech company. Is any company that does its core business on a website a tech company now, even if their innovations aren't tech? NY Times has some fancy tech, but you'd be hard pressed to consider them a tech company.

It means why do we care what the LinkedIn founder has to say about xAI.

The answer seems to be "we don't, he's on the board of a competiting AI company"

Guy who sells trips to space says we need to put more stuff in space. AI is hot now, so he has to connect his business to AI. Remember when he put a car in orbit? This is more of the same.

Leans left as in "not yet sufficiently captured by far right".

If you are going to include a speaker's child-naming prowess as a factor in assigning value to an opinion, you might as well just flip a coin, go with vibes, go with the one that matches your biases, or all three.

When I was a child my brother taught me to always consider the incentives, especially the monetary ones, of a speaker. 'Follow the money'. So, in this case neither Musk nor Hoffman would get much traction with me as both of them are incentivized to form a pro or con opinion of xAI.

>He co-founded linkedin

That alone should be justifiable cause for exile from society.

People don't invest in SpaceX because of space launch capability, that barely counts for their valuation at all.

The valuation of SpaceX is due to AI, namely the revenue they get for renting out their GPUs to companies that actually have AI customers, as their own AI tech has not panned out.

For the large number of companies rolled into SpaceX, they are all failed attempts to grow large enough to justify their valuations, and when a company fails to do that it just gets rolled into the conglomerate as a way of hiding the failure.

Tesla's valuation contrasted with its performance means that Tesla will likely be rolled into whatever latest vehicle of Musk's has the most attention, hiding the failure of Tesla to come anywhere near to its promises.

Other than launching satellites, being able to get things into space for the lowest cost is about as relevant as being able to get things to the bottom of the ocean for the lowest cost.

It's never going to be cost effective to send anything back down the gravity well, which means that the only way Musk's plan leads anywhere is if he's able to bootstrap an entirely self contained, self perpetrating economy in space. That's not happening in five years.

Edit: and no, data centres in space are not the answer.

In that case you'd be better off waiting 6 to 12 months before buying into SPCX.

Space-x is it's biggest customer.

Star Link is the main thing which increased the payload to space significantly.

Star Link only has 10 million customers and every few minutes a satellite handover is happening which makes it hard to use for video call (was my experience at a friend's house)

While this business is paying of right now others will get into it too and destroying SpaceX margin (china etc)

Now what else on payload is there? Ah yes Datacenter.

It would take 300-400 Sparship launches alone to get a current 200-300Mwh DC into space alone.

Starship doesn't deliver yet what it needs to be able to do. Neither on payload side nor on cost reduction due to reuse.

A DC will be cheaper on earth for a long time as long as earth is as empty as it is especially for areas which are just dessert.

It would be a lot better long term investment to just build its own Datacenter city in the dessert as ai doesn't need that low of latency and use everything realtime in the other Datacenter we already have.

SpaceX Elon musk fantasy is 50-100 years to early.

You gonna wait so long?

Saying it's like Pepsi criticizing Coca Cola is probably a better analogy.

I would want jobs opinion because Jobs would give a good analysis, more so because I would value his opinion.

Any other person selling an alternative… might just be BS.

It’s like Bill Gates criticizing Apple… if you really want to split hairs about the analogy used.

I think that’s a pretty inappropriate comparison and you should withdraw it. Please edit your post?

It would only be like that if MLK was trying to become the lead white supremacist.

ridiculous comparison

That's the total picture of SpaceX, right. Does SpaceX as a whole make financial sense? No. Everyone knows the SpaceX "value story": AI means that a company that makes a minus 5 billion per year really makes plus 200 billion per year! IN SPACE! But, uh, about those Space parts? Surely those are cashflow positive ... right? RIGHT?

Well, no.

SpaceX it is the 50th or so rocket company. The previous ones did not fail because they couldn't get rockets working or couldn't improve on the state of the art in rocketry. The ones not supported by nation-states failed because they couldn't get the financials working. To be fair some of them failed because they couldn't get to earth orbit. But that's not the common case. More common: "New rocket type works! We demonstrated it succesfully! No launches ... so no money. We're publishing our work and shutting down. Bye". Irritatingly quite a few of these new rocket companies are theoretically more efficient than SpaceX will ever be. Also irritatingly most of these companies, through financial necessity, demonstrated a working rocket in one try, in contrast to SpaceX.

(my favorite? Aerospike nozzles. Aside from their great "Wiley E. Coyote" potential should launch fail they look absolutely incredible)

Did Space part of SpaceX get the financials working? No. Not even with Starlink (their debt repayments still drag it into the negative). What is their fix for too small a market? Make Spaceship, an even bigger rocket ... for a market that sees no use for the existing Falcon 9 launch capacity ...

Starlink: same. It's not even the 10th satellite internet company. The previous ones all failed, because the market was too small, and had to be bailed out by nation states, famously Iridium. Did Starlink solve the financials? No.

The most irritating bit of this is of course Elon Musk himself. Why did he succeed? Well he keeps mentioning himself and "starting from first principles". As illustrated above: he started from first principles, he failed (private, ie. profitable access to earth orbit? SpaceX doesn't do that), then he got incredible amounts of money somewhere to pour down a black hole (using artificial demand like Starlink) and so everything is still moving. Obviously Elon Musk's achievement is 100% finding this money and 0% practicing science from first principles".

That's also Elon Musk's great redeeming quality. What's his achievement? Convincing, first himself, then humanity, or at least enough humans to get ~300 billion in cash, that Space exploration is worth doing despite the fact that it's unprofitable. The actual technical Space exploration side he ... frankly didn't do particularly well, though well enough that it (eventually) worked. But the result is still fantastic: we're in space far more than before!

If this happened it would make Elon emperor of the known universe. Can’t imagine the level of influence this would buy.

It also seems impossible. What are people seeing that I don’t?

Data centers do not trade on 100x earnings, and if you believe that they should, then there are plenty that don't have rocket ship and social media companies attached to them.

Either you are in need of as much as compute as possible since you're building frontier AI models or you're not and you're just renting out the compute. And let's face it - Grok, if not failure, is just a toy.

From GP's point of view, Google is not a data center company because they're not renting out data centers to other companies; they're using them for their own usage.

Yeah, like how AWS has “commodified”

Cursor is obviously an AI company and the main problem Cursor faced was not really having their own model and being forced to buy expensive inference from other providers.

Cursor + their own data centres + the ability to train their own models is pretty big. Definitely an AI company.

This is nitpicky (and it supports your point, I'm not arguing): Colocated data centers became a commodity decades ago. Currently they are a scarce commodity that's in high demand, but I agree with you that this will eventually come full cycle.

They would be very upset with your comment if they could read!

There are more than those two options, both of which are "take unnecessary risk on a hugely uncertain investment."

Cults remain irrational longer than the sane can remain solvent. Particularly when the cult captures regulators and governments.

I'm with the parent post, and I did!

Look at the time I posted my comment.

I commented 51 mins ago when there were around two comments here that were not talking about Reid's bias against xAI.

5 more comments appeared afterwards in roughly the same timeframe when I posted my reply and that was the first mention of Reid being an OpenAI investor which is enough to explain his obvious bias here.

When it falls I’ll just average down.

SpaceX: "Not an AI company, but priced like one"

Tesla: "Not a tech company, but priced like one"