As much as I agree with what he's saying here, it seems a little insincere when all the tesla ai stuff is closed source.

Right, and if Tesla was called OpenCars or something it would be entirely reasonable to criticise them on that point.

Isn't that the point though? Tesla in not called OpenSelfDriving because it takes serious cash at this time in history to fund development of that tech. The fact that OpenAI happens to have a name that suggests otherwise doesn't change that fact. And Elon knows that. Therefore, he's just playing the media game right now and trying to detract from their success. Either that or he's just jealous (more likely IMHO) because he can't go along for the ride or claim much real involvement. I say thank God for that. We dodged a collective bullet with that stroke of luck.

If it wasn't feasible for OpenAI to release their model weights and code then they shouldn't have named themselves OpenAI.

On a philosophical level, I agree. But I also recognize that life doesn't always line up nicely with philosophy. In any case, it seems to me that most of the work that led to ChatGPT was done in the open. How ChatGPT works is not really a great mystery.

Since when was Tesla created to be open-source and non-profit?

They did open source all of their battery patents. Tesla isn't Mozilla, but they do have somewhat of a moral high ground to stand on.

That is marketing spin, his offer was freely licencing their patents in exchange for free usage from other big automakers which he knew would never happen.

Yeah, parent comment complains Elon is bashing OpenAI "any opportunity he gets"... while unable to point out how Elon's comment is wrong.

Maybe they just wants to express how much they don't like Elon any opportunity they gets.

He edited the comment and linked relevant tweets.

I would add this one:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553

I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear.

But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

"Based" is slang for "cool" or "in" that's common on 4chan, but I believe has its origins in the 90s offline

on 4chan it's largely used to mean something along the lines of "fitting the 4chan anti-groupthink groupthink"

I do recall people saying based a lot in the 90s, it meant based in reality.

This is it.

this sounds much more plausible than the sibling comment's "based on your own beliefs", but plausibility is not necessarily correctness

Eh, originally meant "based on your own beliefs," usually in the context of sticking to your guns despite unpopularity. Which is/was the cool thing to express on 4chan.

nah. 4chan learnt it from the rap song "Based God".

It meant the same thing in "Based God." I know 4chan didn't invent the phrase.

Based in that means "being intoxicated with cocaine".

Lil B said it's both: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Based%20God But only because he changed the meaning. Didn't realize there was an older one too.

What? It’s from the 80s and means high on crack (freebase) and was re-popularized by Based God like 10–15 years ago.

Yep, didn't know about the crack meaning. Based God made it what it is today.

Yeah I had no clue what his deal was, but I decided to search his tweets for "openAI" and it became clear pretty quickly.

"Based" is a catchphrase of the extremely online right. It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it."

See also "pilled."

For many years it was just a term in gamer culture, I guess it has been repurposed a bit in the last few years.

Words become political when you start injecting politics in them. It originally meant "cool" and had no political connotations to it. It originated on 4chan. And just because some group happens to use a word more frequently doesn't suddenly turn you into a NAZI if you happen to like using the same word.

The thing about language is that it isn't static, it changes over time. Sometimes a previously dominant usage will become eclipsed by a new one that emerges.

There's nuance to the etymology of any word of course. In fact I sometimes see the extremely online left try to (ironically?) appropriate "based." But I think in the context we can all figure out which connotation Elon was using.

Yes I get that. My argument is, when some group you don't like starts adopting a word, your reaction should not be to politicize the word and shun it and pretend they stole it. Just keep using the word as you intend it and who cares about what some other dumbfucks think.

Because the primary purpose of language is communication and if you aren't accomplishing that then you have some other reason for using it. Slang changes all the time -- no one says 'true dat' anymore.

I’m not sure why people are still talking about it as some insular 4chan slang. Like much of 4chan culture, it’s spread to most of the rest of the internet by now. Hell I’ve seen “based” comments on HN.

I shun most of the internet these days. HN and (German) reddit are the only "socials" I use. I have no clue what is happening on the wider Anglo speaking internet, especially Twitter and such is completely alien to me.

lil b started it, not 4chan

That's just not true. I've been in many very online leftist communities and they also freely use it.

it's just general internet speak at this point

I view its etymology like this,

              Lil B
    (based ≈ doing your own thing (in a good way)
             not swayed by critics)
             ↙           ↘
       Gen Z             4chan
   (based ≈ cool)        ("based and redpilled"
                          ≈"unswayed by pop rhetoric"
                           and "sees the world beyond the 'illusion'", resp.)

You may be ignoring context in this specific instance: the picture in Musk's tweet has "Woke AI" and "Closed AI" being chased off by Based AI.

I don't know of anyone who is trying to be political when using those terms. It's just general internet slang younger people use at this point

> "Based" is a catchphrase of the extremely online right. It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it."

It is also a catchphrase of the extremely online left with exactly the same in-group vs. out-group implication (and, amusingly—because of the different meanings of “liberal” and “lib” favored by the two sides—usually identical meaning with regard to “libs/normies”.)

With the baseball bat it evokes Kyle Chapman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Chapman_(American_activis...

> But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

It's a reference to the BasedGPT "jailbroken" ChatGPT persona that responds to answers in a less politically correct manner.

He is definitely right there. At this point, I consider OpenAI partially acquired by Microsoft, since it is almost majority controlled by them. It is essentially a Microsoft AI division.

It is similar to what Microsoft did with Facebook in the early days of slowing acquiring a stake in the company. But this is an aggressive version of that with OpenAI. What you have now is the exact opposite of their original goals in: [0]

Before:

> Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. [0]

After:

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity. [1]

The real 'Open AI' is Stability AI, since they are more willing to release their work and AI models rather than OpenAI was supposed to do.

[0] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

[1] https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond

Yeah I'm sure $massive_megacorp with a monopoly on $critical_technology has our best interests at heart. Doesn't anybody read sci-fi anymore??

Well, minus the part where it never was Open, even when it was Elon.

I don't understand. He's listed as one of the founders, and I always assumed he had some say. If that's really how he thinks, why wouldn't he have done something?

Do we have any reason to believe this isn't just more empty grifting from him to optically distance himself from a unethical company he profits from?

Key word being "had".

He is not part of it any more.

>In 2018, Musk resigned his board seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars, but remained a donor

I don't think he counts as an investor, and I'd imagine he has stopped donating.

The irony here is that Musk resigned in order to pursue his own closed-source for profit AI businesses and is now complaining about OpenAI being closed-source and for profit AI.

If people are feeling conflicted about who the asshole is in this situation, don't be, they are all morally bankrupt assholes who all already have many lifetimes of unimaginable wealth yet must take ever more. These are not people who should have any power in our world.

The difference is that Tesla isn't claiming to be open about AI.

And resigning because he was working on a competitor was completely the right thing to do. It would have been a conflict of interest. How often does that type of integrity even happen nowadays?

The whole "ELON MUSK BAD NOW" change to the zeitgeist is alarming to me. He was the darling of the left for years because of Tesla and SpaceX, but now he's completely persona non grata for...reasons?

It smacks of excommunication for heresy.

He got richer so he must be bad.

How you can build a successful car company in the US without getting super rich, I don't know.

Might it also have to do with his positions on almost everything conflicting with most people's? A lot of people didn't realize what a narcissistic manchild he was until recently.

this is pedantic, but the parent comment was conjugating "to have" to "had" via the subjunctive, not via the past tense

He's right tho

oh yeah of course, no question there

I don’t know what a subjunctive is. Maybe that is what caused the confusion.

He is, but it is weird given the history he has. He was kicked out of Paypal because he wanted to use the MS tech stack instead of LAMP at the time. Now some decades later here he is.

You've got the story wrong. He wasn't kicked out because of the stack debate, but because he sold PP to eBay (making enough money in the process to fund Tesla and SpaceX).

How many times was he kicked out?

huh? it was Peter Thiel the acting CEO when the sale was done - right after removing Musk for said migration to MS stack.

Yeah, I think you're right and I was wrong.

Well, he's only right in the observation that OpenAI is no longer what it originally claimed it would be (OTOH with a couple of the founders being venture capitalists, one has to wonder how sincere that intention ever was).

It seems a bit ironic that "evil" Google openly published the paper ("Attention is all you need") that desribes the "Transformer" architecture that now anyone such as OpenAI with the money and inclination can use to build their own ChatGPT. Turns out it's about money (10,000 GPUs + tons of data to train this thing) not any secret sauce.

And now Musk's concern has changed from AI being in too few hands to the fact that it's "woke" so he wants to create another AI company to create the racist/threatening non-woke AI that he thinks the world needs. Or, at least the one that he needs, to keep himself at the center of attention.

We'd have to believe that he means what he said about starting the company. Maybe he meant it, maybe it was just corporate philanthropy BS. Which do you think is really the case?

Do we even believe that he was the one who came up with the name?

Probably not, I don't believe they ever meant it to be non-commercial.

Yes, he's technically correct. But it's pretty obvious he's really just jealous. Inferring that from his past behavior is not rocket science, as they say.