> Its a bit concerning when someone supposedly intelligent still speaks somewhat highly of someone so clearly not.
Have you considered the possibility that someone you regard as extremely intelligent is speaking from real-life experience and direct proximity when they say another person is smart?
Or perhaps your bias toward Musk make that impossible to even consider.
That was probably the first thing they considered. Afterwards, you usually reflect on other "totally smart" executives like Gates, Jobs, Altman... all of whom are both criticized and appraised by their peers in equal measure.
In hindsight, it's easy to assess that Gates was a charming moron, Jobs was an overeager egoist, and that Altman is a sociopathic liar. All of the white knights defending their boy genius narrative are contradicted by their asinine philosophies, and in Elon's case he's simply undermined by all of his broken promises, random accusations and manic paranoia.
Musk being a PoS is a separate issue. My main concern is Karpathy taking about Musk as someone who is smart and makes good technical decisions.
From all the interviews and stuff that came out within the past few years, its pretty clear that Musks only contribution to anything is just throwing money at stuff while also scamming suppliers, governments, and so on. The dude has no technical knowledge of his own, he just lies and lies about what actually happens, and takes credit for accomplishments that aren't his.
When you hear someone who is supposedly smart talk about a dumb person like he is smart, it raises questions on whether that person that is doing the talking is actually smart.
I have the opposite impression. I have consumed tons of hours of interviews with Elon and he comes off as more technically sound and speaks more substance than any other large org CEO I can think of. Karpathy worked directly under him. I haven’t worked for Elon but know people that did and experience is similar. What makes you think you are right?
a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4. That alone should be enough to discredit someone. There was a viral tweet that went something like "I didn't know anything about cars, so when I heard Musk speak about Tesla, I believed him. I didn't know anything about space, so when I heard Musk speak about SpaceX, I believe him. I know a whole lot about software, so when I heard Musk speak about Twitter, I now know that he was full of shit when it came to Tesla or Space X".
b) Musk has made crazy amount of promises and predictions, none of which turned out to be true, and his history is full of dumb ideas and decisions. He literally drove a truck to the Twitter server location, and started ripping out servers, despite people telling him that it will break stuff, and then when it broke stuff, he was like oh, you are right. Is that indication of someone intelligent?
c) Intelligence is not separable by topic. There are no smart people that are conservatives. There are conservatives who remember a whole bunch of technical information and appear to be smart, but information recall is not intelligence. Being able to analyze reality and determine what is true is not is a core skill, and if you apply that to politics or social issues, you end up pretty much center left in terms of political spectrum. Musk is solely on the far right. Someone who is so convinced in his conspiracy theories absolutely does not have the mental machinery to correctly parse technical topics.
There’s a lot of nuance to this. Regarding the former, what if someone used unethical or illegal means to produce the work? And regarding the latter, we can choose to provide constructive criticism out of kindness. Apathy or silence is a disservice to others in some cases.
Yes, the world absolutely needs more purity tests. Would you like to take the lead? Oh, and shaming. We should definitely be shaming more people because it has proven to be so productive.
Publicly disavowing Musk is going to be a bit difficult when his new employer just leased an entire datacentre from Elon Musk's SpaceX. Anthropic and Elon Musk seem to have quite warm feelings towards one another lately.
