Idk, I could possibly see it through the lens of “Musk has decided that the future will be owned by those who control the hardware, not those who make the best software (since software stuff is an easier, less bottlenecky, and more easily commoditized task).”
I’m not sure if this hardware focus is correct, but it’s at least plausible, and it must be very tempting for Musk to believe (with so much hardware expertise / experience, a whole career based around winning at hard physical engineering & integration challenges, etc!). No fussy issues with mechahitler or white genocide in south africa, no annoying nuances where you do a bigger training run but end up producing a worse model than your competitors. Just good old-fashioned rapidly ascending the kardashev scale with expanding shells of massive solar-powered orbital datacenters. Hence the “macrohard” jokes, the xAI integration with SpaceX that doesn’t make any sense from a software perspective, etc.
Note this is very different from “dropping out of the AGI race”. If this is indeed Musk’s perspective, he is still hell-bent on racing to AGI (see also the new chip-foundry plans and potential intel partnership, etc). But he might be dropping out of the “frontier AI lab” race, which after all seems so hopelessly competitive (as soon as one lab pulls ahead, the others seem to catch right back up! or at least this has been the case so far). Better, he might be thinking, to focus on a more neglected “vertically integrated, AGI-pilled hardware scaling” strategy that might pay off bigger in the long term.
I agree this sounds plausible and appreciate with the distinction you’re drawing between still competing for the future, but no longer racing for the software intelligence explosion AGI.
Idk, I could possibly see it through the lens of “Musk has decided that the future will be owned by those who control the hardware, not those who make the best software (since software stuff is an easier, less bottlenecky, and more easily commoditized task).”
I’m not sure if this hardware focus is correct, but it’s at least plausible, and it must be very tempting for Musk to believe (with so much hardware expertise / experience, a whole career based around winning at hard physical engineering & integration challenges, etc!). No fussy issues with mechahitler or white genocide in south africa, no annoying nuances where you do a bigger training run but end up producing a worse model than your competitors. Just good old-fashioned rapidly ascending the kardashev scale with expanding shells of massive solar-powered orbital datacenters. Hence the “macrohard” jokes, the xAI integration with SpaceX that doesn’t make any sense from a software perspective, etc.
Note this is very different from “dropping out of the AGI race”. If this is indeed Musk’s perspective, he is still hell-bent on racing to AGI (see also the new chip-foundry plans and potential intel partnership, etc). But he might be dropping out of the “frontier AI lab” race, which after all seems so hopelessly competitive (as soon as one lab pulls ahead, the others seem to catch right back up! or at least this has been the case so far). Better, he might be thinking, to focus on a more neglected “vertically integrated, AGI-pilled hardware scaling” strategy that might pay off bigger in the long term.
I agree this sounds plausible and appreciate with the distinction you’re drawing between still competing for the future, but no longer racing for the software intelligence explosion AGI.