1/There is a decent chance xAI is collaborating with the Putin regime, and that the administration is throttling frontier model companies in order to share details with Musk and Putin. While there is no positive evidence to support this yet…
Happy 100th Birthday to the legendary Mel Brooks! 🎉
In 1983, Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft appeared on a British variety show and sang “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
In Polish.
From the Navy SEAL officer who planned and executed the Bin Laden raid: “In recent months, President Trump, upon advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has relieved or forced the retirement of some of the finest officers that have ever served this nation. I have personally worked with most of them in combat….And this week, in an egregious decision, the president forced General Chris Donahue to step down from his position in command of U.S. Army Europe. Donahue is without question one of the most brilliant officers I know. He is strategically focused, tactically aggressive, personally courageous, exceptionally thoughtful in his planning and execution, and compassionate with his troops. He has the respect of every man and woman who ever served with him—and you can put me at the top of that list.”
Elon Musk built one of the largest AI compute clusters on earth. Yann LeCun just explained why xAI now rents it out to rivals instead of winning with it. Musk has antagonized so much AI talent he structurally cannot hire the people he needs.
LeCun is not a critic on the sidelines. He won the Turing Award and ran AI at Meta for a decade. When he talks about who can and cannot build a frontier lab, he is describing his own world.
His verdict on xAI was blunt. He called it kind of a failure and did not soften it.
His reasoning had nothing to do with money. The founding team left or was fired. There is some uncertainty about which. Either way, the people who started the company are gone.
That is the part that matters. A frontier lab is its researchers. Lose them and the compute is just hardware.
By March, all eleven co-founders Musk recruited in 2023 had walked out. Researchers who came from DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI. Musk himself posted that xAI was not built right the first time and had to be rebuilt from the foundations up.
So Musk is left with one of the biggest clusters on earth and no way to win with it. He rents it out to other companies to recoup the cost.
The most expensive infrastructure in AI, built by someone who can no longer staff it.
Asked directly if xAI can compete at the frontier, LeCun gave a one word answer.
No.
What do you guys think about this?
Source: CNBC International Live
(🧵) THREAD: I'm an Elon Musk biographer. Musk and/or his agents have programmed his AI to make false statements about me that the AI makes no effort to substantiate or correct. So here's a thread of the substantiated claims about Musk that Grok says it can make.
Please RETWEET.
@atrupar Definition: Someone who keeps repeating obvious falsehoods over and over in the hope that eventually others will start thinking they might actually be true: a xeroxymoron.
@DrMatthewSweet Series 1 was fantastic, one of the best shows of its day. Series 2 was written and made in a rush and it shows - still good but not as good IMHO.
As a neurologist, it is now patently clear to me that the vast majority of people on the planet are suffering from neuroinflammation or brain damage (likely both)
The way people speak & behave has changed. Markedly so.
Whether irl, or via messaging/social media. It’s noticeable
@ihtesham2005 I revised for Finals by composing essays out loud and by writing them out by hand. I still prepare for meetings by going into a room and talking through all the issues out loud. I have always found it incredibly effective.
@TheLiverPunch Correct. It's a tool. You have to learn what how to use it. If you put the effort in, you find that it is incredibly useful for many things. The real issue for most people & firms (and so for the labs) is training. We won't address that with more data centers and better models.
If you gave everyone in Britain a top-of-the-range Nikon DSLR you would not get 70m David Baileys. You would get a lot of terrible photos and everyone blaming the camera.
So let me get this straight.
Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom.
Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land.
Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan.
Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted.
And I know: “But what about your paintings, Hunter?”
Please.
There are three ways the Trump story ends. In one, he is helicoptered to Moscow from the roof of a burning White House. In another he is dangled from a lamp post. Elvis Expiring on the Throne is the third.