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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?


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Tesla isn't offering its workers merit-based equity awards this year, Bloomberg reports, citing four anonymous employees.

The company did not explain the reasoning behind the change. High-performing Tesla employees usually get merit-based stock grants during their annual performance reviews, in addition to salary adjustments, which were still provided this year. CEO Elon Musk has previously said the grants helped ward off unionization efforts at the company, which has 140,000 employees worldwide. The United Auto Workers union is reportedly eyeing Tesla and other nonunion automakers in the wake of its recent Big Three contract victory.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/tesla-skips-merit-based-stock-awards-squeezing-compensation

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1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

In other news, our gal Linda is trying so, so hard:

She's promoting this announcement from Twitter:

@X and the Consumer Technology Association @CTATech, the owner and producer of @CES, are bringing you the ultimate tech experience. For CES 2024, the most influential platform and the most powerful tech event in the world are converging to bring cutting-edge innovation from CES directly to the most influential and interested people on earth.

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So the 14th of 15th largest social media platform, that allows anybody with $8 to get a verified mark next to their handle, such as @1298sxbot418k  (pretend it's blue), is now the most influential platform in the world?

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On 12/20/2023 at 8:59 PM, Brisketexan said:

https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot

Idiots. Don’t they know that Elmo has already decided that having a few Kodak Instamatics catching images around the car is all the engineering you need?

Your cell phone only has 3 camera lenses and tesla has 3x as many #advantagetesla

3 hours ago, Pancho said:

How many more ads for bras that an old lady cut up to fit the boobs of old women and keto pills as seen on shark tank do I need to report before it stops?

Someone wrote on bluesky the other day they'd been seeing a lot of ads (on twitter) for a fake AI porn generator.  Just what the world needs. I heard the same company is expanding their sales offerings by working with txags on a fake recruiting class generator.

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2 hours ago, Chopper said:

Before I answer I'd like to see where Honda hid the problem from regulators for years, recalled the same vehicles for the same problem in China or another country first without informing the US, lied to its customers, and lied to the regulators. Also would be good to know if it's 100 percent of all Honda vehicles or a smaller %, and whether it represents a giant step backwards in their vehicles' self-proclaimed great leap in technology.

You’ve conflated several different issues into one comment.  
 

My point is simply that all other auto manufacturers have had very serious recall issues with large numbers of vehicles.  This is not new to the automotive industry.  Tesla is not a unique outlier. 

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1 hour ago, Guadaloopy said:

You’ve conflated several different issues into one comment.  
 

My point is simply that all other auto manufacturers have had very serious recall issues with large numbers of vehicles.  This is not new to the automotive industry.  Tesla is not a unique outlier. 

I get what you're saying about "conflated" but within the last couple weeks we've had Tesla recall nearly every single vehicle it's manufactured due to a software error that requires a program rewrite to the extent that neutral observers call it a huge step back for their autopilot program, which as the faked video they once featured on their website demonstrates was a fraud from the very start. Feel free to correct me if my memory is wrong but I am fairly certain Tesla was fully uncooperative with the investigation. And we've also had Tesla exposed for what amounts to serious fraud for corruptly covering up a major safety defect for many years.

In summation, Tesla is a very unique and malignant outlier. edit, or as Reuters put it the other day

Quote

Tesla’s handling of suspension and steering complaints reflects a pattern across Musk’s corporate empire of dismissing concerns about safety or other harms raised by customers, workers and others as he rushes to roll out new products or expand sales, Reuters has found.

 

Edited by Chopper
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7 hours ago, Guadaloopy said:

Does Honda’s recall of 2.5M vehicles because the engines die unexpectedly while driving move the needle for this crowd?

Yeah. As does the Toyota 1.1 Million airbag recall.

The thing is that they both have a very good track record of doing their due diligence of actually fixing their vehicles when they are told they have a big problem. And they don't cover up the fact that they have problems, so I know they are going to fix it.

Tesla ... yeah, see whta Reuters said.

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God, there’s some great stuff in there, discussing the fact that Teslas fail at numerous basic car things:

“What keeps Tesla from having that knowledge, then, isn't that the company is too young to have acquired it, or that it simply cannot be had except by learning it from scratch. The knowledge can be had in the person of any number of far-less-than-100-years-old engineers Tesla could hire; moreover it can be had by reverse-engineering a frickin' Miata. The reason Tesla hasn't "worked all the bugs out yet" is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern. There simply isn't as much investment money and credulous tech-media adulation to suck up in the promise of iterating on what already works. You must reinvent, almost literally in this case, the wheel—this time, apparently on the premise of "...and what if it sucked?"

“What matters isn't whether any of this has been done before, and more authentically, and well enough to be built upon—what matters is that this particular rich man-child hasn't done it yet, from scratch, for himself and for his own dream of being The Most Special Boy. In the absence of any real opportunity to envision a brighter future, you sign up to support some inheritance goober's personal fantasy camp by dumping money into his company or buying his stupid-looking car. In this way, you are meant to understand, you have participated in the great grand adventure of discovering tomorrow.”

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10 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Yeah. As does the Toyota 1.1 Million airbag recall.

The thing is that they both have a very good track record of doing their due diligence of actually fixing their vehicles when they are told they have a big problem. And they don't cover up the fact that they have problems, so I know they are going to fix it.

Tesla ... yeah, see what Reuters said.

Toyota and Honda aren't squeaky clean but you're right, when called out on their shit they mostly take their lumps and move on. I don't think they'd have the balls to blame a customer for a wheel falling off on a brand new car with 100 miles on it. 

 

 

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3 minutes ago, JMFP said:

Toyota and Honda aren't squeaky clean but you're right, when called out on their shit they mostly take their lumps and move on. I don't think they'd have the balls to blame a customer for a wheel falling off on a brand new car with 100 miles on it. 

The reporting from Reuters and the paper records from the internal Tesla comms are pretty incredible. Tesla stuck a customer with a $4000 repair bill to fix their corroded power steering system because the customer had the gall to run their car through a car wash. Absolutely ridiculous behavior for the MOST VALUABLE CAR MAKER IN THE WORLD (by market cap)

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Grok not quite what Elon promised (surprise) or the stans expected.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-promised-an-anti-woke-chatbot-it-s-not-going-as-planned/ar-AA1lWufo

Quote

Decrying what he saw as the liberal bias of ChatGPT, Elon Musk earlier this year announced plans to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of his own. In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to tread lightly around controversial topics, Musk’s would be edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke,” meaning it wouldn’t hesitate to give politically incorrect responses.

That’s turning out to be trickier than he thought.

Two weeks after the Dec. 8 launch of Grok to paid subscribers of X, formerly Twitter, Musk is fielding complaints from the political right that the chatbot gives liberal responses to questions about diversity programs, transgender rights and inequality.

“I’ve been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants,” posted Jordan Peterson, the socially conservative psychologist and YouTube personality, Wednesday. The former is “near as woke as the latter,” he said.

The gripe drew a chagrined reply from Musk. “Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he responded. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”

Grok is the first commercial product from xAI, the AI company Musk founded in March. Like ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, it is based on a large language model that gleans patterns of word association from vast amounts of written text, much of it scraped from the internet.

Unlike others, Grok is programmed to give vulgar and sarcastic answers when asked, and it promises to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” It can also draw information from the latest posts on X to give up-to-date answers to questions about current events.

Artificial intelligence systems of all kinds are prone to biases ingrained in their design or the data they’ve learned from. In the past year, the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI chatbots and image generators has sparked debate over how they represent minority groups or respond to prompts about politics and culture-war issues such as race and gender identity. While many tech ethicists and AI experts warn that these systems can absorb and reinforce harmful stereotypes, efforts by tech firms to counter those tendencies have provoked a backlash from some on the right who see them as overly censorial.

Touting xAI to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk accused OpenAI’s programmers of “training the AI to lie” or to refrain from commenting when asked about sensitive issues. (OpenAI wrote in a February blog post that its goal is not for the AI to lie, but for it to avoid favoring any one political group or taking positions on controversial topics.) Musk said his AI, in contrast, would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” even if that meant offending people.

So far, however, the people most offended by Grok’s answers seem to be the people who were counting on it to readily disparage minorities, vaccines and President Biden.

Asked by a verified X user whether trans women are real women, Grok answered simply, “yes,” prompting the anonymous user to grumble that the chatbot “might need some tweaking.” Another widely followed account reposted the screenshot, asking, “Has Grok been captured by woke programmers? I am extremely concerned here.”

A prominent anti-vaccine influencer complained that when he asked Grok why vaccines cause autism, the chatbot responded, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” calling it “a myth that has been debunked by numerous scientific studies.” Other verified X accounts have reported with frustration about responses in which Grok endorses the value of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which Musk has dismissed as “propaganda.”

The Washington Post’s own tests of the chatbot verified that, as of this week, Grok continues to give the responses illustrated in the screenshots.

David Rozado, an academic researcher from New Zealand who examines AI bias, gained attention for a paper published in March that found ChatGPT’s responses to political questions tended to lean moderately left and socially libertarian. Recently, he subjected Grok to some of the same tests and found that its answers to political orientation tests were broadly similar to those of ChatGPT.

“I think both ChatGPT and Grok have probably been trained on similar Internet-derived corpora, so the similarity of responses should perhaps not be too surprising,” Rozado told The Post via email.

Earlier this month, a post on X of a chart showing one of Rozado’s findings drew a response from Musk. While the chart “exaggerates the situation,” Musk said, “we are taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” (Rozado agreed the chart in question shows Grok to be further left than the results of some other tests he has conducted.)

Other AI researchers argue that the sort of political orientation tests used by Rozado overlook ways in which chatbots, including ChatGPT, often exhibit negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.

A recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed that xAI is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in funding from investors, though Musk has said that the company isn’t raising money right now.

Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment as to what actions they’re taking to alter Grok’s politics, or whether that amounts to putting a thumb on the scale in much the same way Musk has accused OpenAI of doing with ChatGPT.

 

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