But Alibaba is real. It's a real company doing real things and delivering real value. It's a giant success.

Now I'm not saying Nikola will be (maybe those shorts for 2022 are pretty cheap) but people speak like complete idiots and still run successful companies that they start.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3lUEnMaiAU

Here's a highlight: https://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU?t=789

It became clear they (+ANT financial) exist only because the CCP allows them to exist with heavy funding.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/can-we-trust-alibabas-numb...

He comes across as a complete idiot.

Maybe you don't need to be that smart to run a company like Alibaba, but I find that hard to believe - I suspect government protection and party favoritism plays a part.

When you are the head of a revolutionary startup that's competing technologically with existing companies, you can't afford to be one.

He was however a massively charismatic individual and an extremely good judge of character, so he was able to use these traits to sweet talk investors and hire people he knew he could trust to get the job done.

Of course you can, you hire people to understand those things for you and make them work. Do you think the bulk of innovation, design and execution comes from the CEO's own head? Not even Elon Musk is that integral to his companies or their output.

Jack Ma is pretty much the useful idiot for the CCP, for most of the history of Alibaba.

EDIT:- to answer your question to the other commenter, take a look at Amazon. Amazon was largely loss-making for most of the history of the shopping portal, and is largely fueled by associated services such as AWS and prime. Considering Alibaba's less than admirable position in those sectors, it's hard to fathom how Baba managed to remain profitable still, without extensive government support.

That doesn't mean that the companies those banks fund are ran by idiots and sock puppets, it doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a CIA-planted useful idiot[1], and it doesn't explain why Google is the most popular search engine in the US.

Just because you've taken government funding, doesn't mean the government does all the hard work of operating you. Just because you need to be in the good graces of the government to run your company doesn't mean some government bureaucrat is going to do all the hard work of building a trillion dollar business for you.

I must also note that I utterly fail to understand how the ideas you express can be reconciled with the success of all these firms, and also the HN zeitgeist of 'government bureaucrats are incapable of doing anything well.' They must truly have a better class of bureaucrat in China, given that they've somehow built a profitable trillion dollar business without anyone noticing. [2]

[1] It also doesn't mean that he's not doing useful work for the three letter agencies.

[2] Given how wildly successful these alleged bureaucrats seem to be, one can only image if the Soviet Union[3] got their hands on those folks. We'd all be driving Ladas, drinking vodka, and speaking Russian.

[3] Which is an actual example of a country where the government did run its businesses. For some reason, though, it didn't spawn any trillion-dollar e-commerce startups...

In fact, it's practically inevitable, regardless of whether or not the government is there to hold your hand, and put a band-aid on any boo-boos you get along the way.

Mind you, 'naive' is the most charitable word I can think of to express myself.

Do you also find it shocking that the largest retailers in India are Indian companies? The largest retailers in France are French companies? The largest retailers in Russia are Russian companies?

"More impressive is that Nikola’s revenue for the second quarter was very small ('immaterial,' Nikola actually calls it), just $36,000. Most impressive, though, is how they earned that revenue:

'During the three months ended June 30, 2020 and 2019 the Company recorded solar revenues of $0.03 million and $0.04 million, respectively, for the provision of solar installation services to the Executive Chairman, which are billed on time and materials basis. During the six months ended June 30, 2020 and 2019 the Company recorded solar revenues of $0.08 million and $0.06 million, respectively, for the provision of solar installation services to the Executive Chairman. As of June 30, 2020 and December 31, 2019, the Company had $3 thousand and $51 thousand, respectively, outstanding in accounts receivable related to solar installation services. The outstanding balance was paid subsequent to period end.'

'Solar installation projects are not related to our primary operations and are expected to be discontinued,' says Nikola, but I guess they are doing one last job, specifically installing solar panels at founder and executive chairman Trevor Milton’s house? It is a $13 billion company whose only business so far is doing odd jobs around its founder’s house."

Edit0: formatting.

There is a metric shit ton of pressure on these legacy automakers to compete with Tesla. Sure, you may think Tesla is a relatively small slice now, but the leaders at these companies are extremely scared of falling behind technologically to the point where they are uncompetitive. I'm quite sure a lot of people at GM were skeptical, but I bet a lot of them also did the subconscious calculation "What's worse for my career, losing out on a deal with an innovator like Nikola and falling even further behind, or going with Nikola, in which case if it fails we're not much worse off then we were originally?" Against this backdrop it's easy to see how a scammer can take advantage of this dynamic and even play legacy players off each other, e.g. "Well, you could choose not to invest in us, but then think how much further behind Tesla you'll be. And you know we're talking to Ford, too."

https://youtu.be/OPhN8saJkAI?t=377

It will really only fail when the money dries up. As long as they can keep raising money, they can keep the fantasy alive long enough to lure in other investors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

It isn't a very profitable market.

And I assume you're referring to the automotive bailouts in 2008 when companies in many industries were falling apart and received bailouts or TARP funds? It was a rather unprecedented situation at the time, not really reflective of overall business viability.

Domestic OEMs have plenty of issues (poor innovation, arguably poor relative quality, unions, etc.) to criticize. Operating margins, which tend to be on par with foreign OEMs, aren't really one of them. And it really depends on what you're comparing it to to make a determination about how profitable the sector is. Pretty much nothing is as profitable as SaaS, but 4-5% is nothing to laugh at.

It's been modern economic theory that has encouraged this stripping of US industry...unfortunately it's a lauded theory.

Before you downvote this, keep in mind that the founder comes from a Mormon background - perfect upbringing to be trained as a salesman

Another example of selling snake-oil ideas comes from the author of the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People":

"According to Clayton Christensen, The Seven Habits was a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint values." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Covey

Imagine being trained like that from youth- you could sell anything. This comes from an anecdote from an ex-Mormon friend.

And yet every Tesla owner tells me that their car is just one update away from driving itself across the country.

Milton stated that using a very secure HTML5 supercomputer that's linked on the data network allows them to build their own chips.

These statements are not equivalent in what they imply about the speaker. It's not subtle.

You can watch that talk and see the approach they're taking. Maybe you're more skeptical than they are about the near term possibility, but you can see that the work and progress is real.

The AGI risk is real too.

What Milton said doesn't make semantic sense, it's not a question of timelines.

https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

AGI is not 50 years away - it is unknowably far in the future. It may be a century, it may be a millenium. We just know far too little about the human mind to make any firm prediction - we're like people in Ancient Greece or 1800s England trying to predict how long it would take to develop technology to reach the moon.

We are at the level where we can't understand how the nervous system of a worm works in terms of computation. Emulating a human-level mind is so far beyond our capabilities that it is absurd to even imagine we know how to do it, "we just need a little more time".

I agree it's not possible to have a good idea to the answer to this question, unless you happen to be involved with a development group that is the first to figure out the critical remaining insights, but it's more in the league of "don't know if it's 5 years or 50" rather than "100 years or 1000".

Predictions are easy when there are no consequences, but I wouldn't make a bet with serious consequences on critical developments for AGI not happening in the next decade. Low probability, probably, but based on history, not impossible.

It seems to me extremely clear that we are attacking the problem from two directions - neuroscience to try to understand how the only example of general intelligence works, and machine learning to try to engineer our way from solving specific problems to creating a generalized problem solver. Both directions are producing some results, but slowly, and with no ability to collaborate for now (no one is taking inspiration from actual neural networks in ML, despite the naming; and there is no insight from ML that could be applicable in formulating hypotheses about living brains).

So I can't imagine how anyone really believes that we are close to AGI. The only way I can see that happen is if the problem turns out to be much, much simpler than we believe - if it turns out that you can actually find a simple mathematical model that works more or less as well as the entire human brain.

I wouldn't hold my breath for this, since evolution has had almost a billion years to arrive at complex brains, while basic computation has started from the first unicellular organisms (even organelles inside the cell and nucleus are implementing simple algorithms to digest and reproduce, and even unicellular organisms tend to have some amount of directed movement and environmental awareness).

This is all not to mention that we have no way right now of tackling the problem of teaching the vast amounts of human common sense knowledge that is likely baked into our genes to an AI, and it's hard to tell how much that will impact true AGI.

And even then, we shouldn't forget that there is no obvious way to go from approximately human-level AGI to the kinds of sci-fi super-super-human AGIs that some AI catastrophists imagine. There isn't even any fundamental reason to assume that it is even possible to be significantly more intelligent than a human, in a general sort of way (there is also no reason to assume that you can't be!).

Check out GPT-3’s performance on arithmetic tasks in the original paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165)

Pages: 21-23, 63

Which shows some generality, the best way to accurately predict an arithmetic answer is to deduce how the mathematical rules work. That paper shows some evidence of that.

> evolution has had almost a billion years to arrive at complex brains

There are brains everywhere and evolution is extremely slow. Maybe the large computational cost of training models is similar to speeding that computation up?

> there is no obvious way to go from approximately human-level AGI to the kinds of sci-fi super-super-human AGIs that some AI catastrophists imagine.

It's worth reading more about the topic, it's less that we'll have some human comparable AI and then be stuck with it - more so that things will continue to scale. Stopping at human level might be a harder task (or even getting something that's human like at all).

> This is all not to mention that we have no way right now of tackling the problem of teaching the vast amounts of human common sense knowledge that is likely baked into our genes to an AI, and it's hard to tell how much that will impact true AGI.

This is a good point and basically the 'goal alignment problem' or 'friendly AI' problem. It's the main reason for the risk since you're more likely to get a powerful AGI without these 'common sense' human intuitions of things. I think your mistake is thinking the goal alignment is a prerequisite for AGI - the risk comes from the truth being that it's not. Also humans aren't entirely goal aligned either, but that's a different issue.

I understand the skepticism, I was skeptical too - but if you read more about it (not pop-sci, but the books from the people working on the stuff) it's more solid than you probably think and your positions on it won't hold up.

Getting back to the human bit, I'm using 'human' just as a kind of intelligence level, indicating the only intelligence we know about that can do much of anything in the world.

The paperclip maximizer idea still assumes that the AI has an extremely intricate understanding of the physical and human worlds - much better than any human's. My point was that there is no way at the moment to know if this is possible or not. The whole excersise believes that the AI, in addition to understanding the world so well that it can take over all of our technology, could additionally be so alien in its thinking that it may pursue a goal to this utmost extent. I find this combination of assumptions unconvincing.

Thankfully, the amount of knowledge we have about high level cognition means that I'm confident in saying that I don't know significantly less than, say, Andrew Ng about how to achieve it (though I probably know far less than him about almost any other subject).

I'm not claiming that AGI risk in some far future won't be a real problem. My claim is that it is as silly for us to worry about it as it would have been for Socrates to worry about the effects of 5G antennas.

Did you read what I linked? (I don't intend this to be hostile, but the paper explicitly discusses this.) They control for memorization and the errors are off by one which suggest doing arithmetic poorly (which is pretty nuts for a model designed only to predict the next character).

(pg. 23): ”To spot-check whether the model is simply memorizing specific arithmetic problems, we took the 3-digit arithmetic problems in our test set and searched for them in our training data in both the forms "<NUM1> + <NUM2> =" and "<NUM1> plus <NUM2>". Out of 2,000 addition problems we found only 17 matches (0.8%) and out of 2,000 subtraction problems we found only 2 matches (0.1%), suggesting that only a trivial fraction of the correct answers could have been memorized. In addition, inspection of incorrect answers reveals that the model often makes mistakes such as not carrying a “1”, suggesting it is actually attempting to perform the relevant computation rather than memorizing a table.”

> The paperclip maximizer idea still assumes that the AI has an extremely intricate understanding of the physical and human worlds - much better than any human's. My point was that there is no way at the moment to know if this is possible or not.

It seems less likely to me that biological intelligence (which is bounded by things like head size, energy constraints, and other selective pressures) would happen to be the theoretical max. The paperclip idea is that if you can figure out AGI and it has goals it can scale up in pursuit of those goals.

> I'm not claiming that AGI risk in some far future won't be a real problem. My claim is that it is as silly for us to worry about it as it would have been for Socrates to worry about the effects of 5G antennas.

I think this is a hard claim to make confidently. Maybe it's right, but maybe it's the people saying the heavier than air flight is impossible two years after the Wright brothers flew. I think it's really hard to be confident in this prediction either way, people are famously bad at this.

Would you have predicted gpt-3 kind of success ten years ago? I wouldn't have. Is gpt-3 what you'd expect to see in a world where AGI progress is failing? What would you expect to see?

I do agree that given the lack of clarity of what should be done it makes sense for a core group of people to keep working on it. If it ends up being 100yrs out or more we'll probably need whatever technology is developed in that time to help.

I read about this before. I must confess that I had incorrectly remembered that they had only checked a few of their computations for their presence in the corpus, not all of them. Still, they only check for two possible representations, so there is still a possibility that it picked up other examples (e.g. "adding 10 with 11 results in 21" would not be caught - though it's still somewhat impressive if it recognizes it as 10 + 11 = 21).

> It seems less likely to me that biological intelligence (which is bounded by things like head size, energy constraints, and other selective pressures) would happen to be the theoretical max. The paperclip idea is that if you can figure out AGI and it has goals it can scale up in pursuit of those goals.

Well, intelligence doesn't seem to be so clearly correlated with some of those things - for example, crows seem to have significantly more advanced capabilities than elephants, whales or lions (tool use, human face memorization). Regardless, I agree that it is unlikely that humans are a theoretical maximum. However, I also believe that the distribution of animal intelligence to brain size may suggest that intelligence is not simply dependent on the amount of computing power available, but on other properties of the computing system. So perhaps "scaling up" is not going to be a massive growth in the amount of intelligence - that you need entirely different architectures for that.

> Would you have predicted gpt-3 kind of success ten years ago? I wouldn't have. Is gpt-3 what you'd expect to see in a world where AGI progress is failing? What would you expect to see?

I don't think GPT-3 is particularly impressive. I can't claim that I would have predicted it specifically, but the idea that we could ape human writing significantly better wouldn't have seemed that alien to me I think. GPT-3 is still extremely limited in what it can actually "say", I'm even curious if it will find any real uses that we don't already outsource as brain-dead jobs (such as writing fluff pieces).

And yes, I do agree that this is a problem worth pursuing, don't get me wrong. I don't think lots of AI research is going in the right way necessarily, but some is, and some neuroscience is also making advances in this area.

I'm not claiming that the Head of AI Research at Tesla has said stupid things (I don't think he has), I'm saying that Musk has said stupid and nonsensical things that don't make semantic or scientific sense, and in comparison to Milton their hucksterism is just a difference of degrees.

It's not a matter of degree, but one of kind.

What's the over/under on cold fusion before self-driving?

It used to be more fun before the search engines start pushing age over relevance, but searching for 'elon musk claims' is entertaining.

I appreciate that what I just said comes with a huge caveat - and that probably 80% of the work will be hammering-down everything else - but consider that Google’s Waymo is already well-past that already.

I just drove my Tesla half way across the country and back last week. And based on the performance of Autosteer and the neighboring car visualizations they're nowhere close to Level 5 self driving.

Love the car and am a big Tesla/SpaceX fanboy. But I won't believe it'll achieve Level 5 until I see it.

Should have added some blockchain while he was at it.

BTW, they sound like idiots to the people that understand the technology but that's a small subset of all people. Most people have even less understanding than the CEO. So they get influence by his charm and finesse. What most people would call BS around here.

Most people do not really know how HTML works, and nobody but technical people should really.

Or at least - they could make major mistakes in communication.

If he was 'my CEO' I would understand that he was trying to say 'Infotainment is a platform, built on extensible tech that everyone knows how to use' - this is fair.

It seems like Nikola is a fraud, but this isn't the red flag actually. This is standard miscommunication.

what is the connection between HTML5 and building your own chips?

The "build our own chips" could be like when people call entire computer towers "CPUs" and really just mean build the infotainment boards how they like. HTML 5 gives them easy portability in the case they want to change things out.

Security would probably refer to embedding something like Chromium and taking advantage of their sandbox

And "data network instead of stuff just working" could mean something like local network RPC/REST over HTTPS instead of CAN which is much more general purpose

-

This is all a lot of stretching... but sometimes non-technical people try to very confidently regurgitate technical things they hear while filling in the gaps

Especially because they don't realize how small changes in terms have such outsized changes in meaning (hence the calling a computer tower a CPU)

stock goes up 10%

If he could talk lucidly about things like HTML I'd think that lent more credence to the possibility he didn't have a clue about hydrogen

edit: for the downvoters, if you haven't seen one of these "bear thesis" articles before, understand you must do at least as much homework as the bear claims to have done before accepting anything you read. Of course Nikola is a dodgy company, but it's also a social phenomenon. That's the value in it for the likes of GM, and also for the average investor -- including the professionals. At one stage YouTube was the largest video piracy company on the planet before a larger company swallowed them up and cut deals to legitimize what they'd done. Meanwhile, everyone knew the brand. You can consider what's happening here to be something roughly comparable

Why should we not assume his HTML5 knowledge is roughly equivalent to his hydrogen car knowledge?

2. It’s not the lack of understanding that’s concerning. It’s the confident wrongness.

Lying with confidence is, after all, where the "con" in con man comes from.

> Trevor claimed that Nikola’s headquarters has 3.5 megawatts of solar panels on its roof producing energy. Aerial photos of the roof and later media reports show that the supposed panels don’t exist.

Elon loves the former. Trevor appears to love the latter.

It seems like you're trying to say that because Elon does it and has been successful, it's okay for Trevor to do it in his own pursuit of success. Which is a big nope nope nope. It just means both of them are doing shady things.

Forward thinking, speculative claims aren’t the same as fraud.

nothing about his background or experience gives any legitimacy to him being in a position of "electric truck CEO and mogul"