[FRIAM] OpenAI and the fight between Elon and Sam

Wed Feb 12 13:24:40 EST 2025

Pieter -

In response to both your litany of innovations we might attribute 
directly to Musk and to this question:

    I think Musk has managed to set precedents and break new ground in
    many areas.

      It seems possible, for example, that Tesla's dominance in the EV
    market is past... whether it is his political problems (mishandling
    the Commons with Twitter/X so egregioiusly or going full-MAGA ++)
    that will lead to that or if in fact, the precedent he set with
    (ubiquitous) EVs really has catalyzed the entire market and industry
    (in spite of his buddy Trump trying to attenuate that in favor of
    coal-rolling quad-cab 3 ton diesel pickups in every suburban
    driveway) in a way which is now taking off on it's own.

    Trump's attempt to make fossil fuels and ICEmobiles "great again"
    may actually be the challenge both EVs and renewable sources need to
    become viable.  A bit like the 16 year old kid whose father
    threatens to call the police on him for his pot-stash who then
    breaks away and finds his own way in the world (my hackneyed image
    of George and Freeman Dyson as gestured at in the chronical of his
    early years in "The Starship and the Canoe
    <https://www.harvard.com/book/9781680512786>").

    Whether Musk actually "invented" or "innovated" any/all of those
    things, he definite participated in making them mainstream.  Henry
    Ford, for example, didn't really innovate precision manufacturing so
    much as use Whitney and Taylor's pioneering work at-scale.   While
    he double wages for workers in his assembly lines, he also was
    virulently against unionization (sounds a bit like Musk?) and then
    went on to be radically anti Semitic.

        /<provided by GPT> In 1919, Ford bought The Dearborn
        Independent, a small newspaper, and turned it into a platform
        for anti-Semitic propaganda. In 1920, the paper began publishing
        a series of articles called The International Jew: The World’s
        Foremost Problem, which promoted the fraudulent Protocols of the
        Elders of Zion, a widely debunked anti-Semitic text. <GPT quote>
        /

    And not for nothing, he was awarded the /Grand Cross of the Golden
    Eagle/ by the Nazi Party in the 30s.

    Is Twitter/X an echo of the Dearborn Independent?

    His "innovations" in Orbital Launch may be hinged entirely on the
    huge disparity of tolerance on "failures" SpaceX has been allowed
    opposite NASA proper and it's major contractors (e.g. Boeing).  
    This doesn't take away from the progress he/SpaceX have therefore
    made, just frames it a little differently?   The Russian's higher
    tolerance for (public?) risk may be the main/only reason Sputnik
    preceded Vanguard by a year or so? That doesn't mean they were
    "better" or worse" than we were at innovation in that era/domain?

    Re Robotaxis and Self Driving:  Elno has been claiming FSD "just
    around the corner" for over a decade with no more than incremental
    idiosyncratic delivery of features.   Yet he has popularized the
    idea and created a belief in the possibility and an appetite for it
    which is critical to it's realization/manifestation.  Even if Waymo
    (or Apple iCar or GoogleDrive or BYD or Huawei ???) scoops him, we
    should give him credit for popularizing/normalizing it.   The
    decade+ of instrumenting all of his vehicles to provide a huge and
    diverse training set is extremely valuable by many measures.  On the
    other hand, he may have missed his moment and the first truly
    effective FSD may well be based on something less
    massive-data/brute-force just as DeepSeek may be demonstrating
    opposite the existing LLM behemoths?

    As a rapidly aging 'old man' (/get off all my lawns!/) I don't like
    all these advances even though it will probably mean I can keep on
    being independent well into my "Alzheimer Years" (tacky maybe but I
    did walk a Father-in-Law and a Father all the way to their graves
    down that alley in the last 15 years). This without being an acute
    danger to others (both old men referenced parenthetically had wives
    who were able to manipulate them out of driving early enough and
    stayed healthy/alert enough themselves to be their
    "self-driving/navigating car robot drivers")...   Predictive
    scheduling/navigation might even prevent me from instructing my
    self-driving car to take me places I shouldn't be going otherwise.
    My father started letting himself into neighbors' houses in the
    middle of the night.  I might start showing up in a neighboring
    state or on the opposite coast with no particular understanding of
    quite where I was or what i was doing.  Zombie snowbirds a new thing
    for the 2030s? Instead of a med-Alert bracelet with my home phone,
    my FSD car will simply "return to home" the way a DJI drone does if
    it detects it's going to run out of juice before it can or maybe if
    it has attempted to cross into restricted airspace (no longer
    apparently)?   My loved ones (if my geriatric habits don't leave me
    without any) can put soft temporal-geo-fences in my FSD
    configuration without me even knowing?

Trump Negotiator:

    A few months ago you (Pieter) confronted the list with the idea that
    "maybe Trump is a really good negotiator?"... and I have to concede
    that he has some bold tricks (like Musk does in taking over and
    running tech companies?) which can be highly effective.  At best
    he's negotiating *for* only 49.9999% of the voting citizenry of the
    US against the remainder (49.99998% Dems and allies and .000002
    "undecideds").  At worst, he's negotiating for himself, maybe
    Barron, a little Ivanka, a little less Melania, even less the other
    Trump kids (claimed and unclaimed), and only transactionally the
    tech Billionaires and Fossil Fuel and other extremely powerful
    wankers.   His loyalty to Politicians (including his corrupt Supreme
    Court Justices) is entirely transactional.. while they may benefit
    from his "negotiating skill", he is definitely NOT negotiating FOR
    them (see Hegseth, Gaetz, Patel, etc).

    So whether he is an effective /negotiator/ or not, it is worth
    asking "who is he negotiating on behalf of?  To what end?"

    Musk will be as well remembered as Ford or Lindbergh (another rabid
    Nazi-ally) are while Trump may or may not rival Hitler/Stalin or
    maybe some lesser flash-in-pan dictator wannabe?

Being "effective" is entirely orthogonal to being "good".

- Steve

On 2/12/25 4:32 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> */_For robotaxis, I’d bet on Waymo not Tesla.  Waymo is very 
> conspicuous and popular in San Francisco. _/*
>
> If you want me to place a bet, I need the fine print—short, medium, or 
> long term? US, China, or global rollout? And, of course, the 
> risk-reward profile—are we playing it safe or swinging for the fences?
>
> Now, I think some of you might suspect that my knee-jerk reaction 
> might be to bet on Tesla, but if we're for example talking short-term 
> in the US with a conservative risk-reward ratio, I'll also hedge my 
> bet with Waymo too. After all, Waymo is practically a local celebrity 
> in San Francisco, while Tesla’s robotaxi dreams are still stuck in 
> traffic.
>
> Also, if the fine print specifies China, BYD would be a good bet.
>
> On Tue, 11 Feb 2025 at 19:40, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
>     I find the OpenAI purchase attempt strange.  He must really have
>     an inferiority complex, since xAI has the hardware now to
>     compete.[1]   Or maybe they have the money and brawn but not the
>     brains?
>
>     For robotaxis, I’d bet on Waymo not Tesla.  Waymo is very
>     conspicuous and popular in San Francisco.
>
>
>     [1]
>     https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/xai-raises-another-6bn-including-from-nvidia-and-amd/
>
>     *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Jon Zingale
>     <jonzingale at gmail.com>
>     *Date: *Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 9:13 AM
>     *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>     <friam at redfish.com>
>     *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] OpenAI and the fight between Elon and Sam
>
>     "Apparently, Tesla only managed to show profitability last quarter
>     due to unrealized earnings on Bitcoin. Stock is way overvalued."
>
>     Technically, I would put a short-term (let's say 3 year) fair
>     value around $210 or so, but would likely wait to pay $150-$160.
>     Fundamentally, I would like to see the market cap closer to $300 B.
>
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