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.

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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?