Wait - Tesla has an LLM? One that’s a decade ahead of OpenAI’s GPT? Really? I didn’t know that. I thought that Musk’s only LLM was in xAI (and shared with X), and they’re almost certainly behind OpenAI in terms of heading towards AI/AGI. And Tesla has fewer resources to devote to ongoing AI research than the MSFT/OpenAI partnership, because MSFT is a massive cash generator (about 6x the earnings of TSLA) and has massive compute resources on its own.
Seems unlikely that Musk would run his pursuit of AGI parallel in both Tesla and xAI. It’s a conflict of interest to be sure, but also not in Musk’s best financial interests and likely a waste of resources. At some point, he has to decide which of the two (three?) companies is going to be the one to move forward with AI’s like Grok or to power Optimus (which I’m skeptical will happen any time in the next decade or two). Why on earth would he source the AI breakthrough in Tesla, rather than xAI?
The team refused? An entire 500 member team was so insubordinate, that Musk had no choice but to fire them all? If Musk is really that bad at hiring people he should step down. If what you are saying is true that is an astonishing level of incompetence and mismanagement.
If your claims are true, Musk should have fired Tinucci years ago before she created an entire team of insubordinate employees. But according to you, Musk is so completely out of touch he zero clue there is a giant problem in own company that he just let the problems fester until he was forced to start over.
It is hard to imagine a higher level of mismanagement and incompetence than your description of Musk’s management.
Suppose you are the CEO of a company facing daunting competition from government subsidized Chinese companies. You want to take a 500 person unit down to 100 as quickly as possible. You can spend weeks firing four out of every five people or you can fire everyone and then rehire those you need. Why do you believe the first method is so much better than the second? Both are traumatic to the employees, but the second may you to the objective faster.
Your logic makes no sense. Musk created a very successful team that accomplished many of the supercharger objectives. But conditions have changed substantially in the past three years. NACS is now the standard. All chargers will soon be NACS chargers. Big players are rapidly expanding their own NACS charger network, including WalMart who will probably be a lot more competent than VW/Electrify America in establishing dependable chargers. If your company doesn’t change with the times then you risk having a Kodak moment.
Sure, but if I own the patent, I get to decide if you can use it. And if you can use it, how much you will pay for it, which may be in anything from reciprocal rights to cash to a percentage of sales to equity in your company. You, of course, don’t have to agree and you can see if there are other ways to accomplish the same task. BUT You don’t get to just say “well, I’ll just use these 14 of yours over here because you used 1 of mine over there.” That’s not how it works.
I mean…really? It’s better because all of the hundred you want are still working for you. Which means they won’t automatically do the things that a lot of laid off people often do: i) get new jobs; ii) move; or iii) develop resentment towards their employers. Which means you get to have all the hundred you want (they never left!), rather than just settle for the ones who didn’t make any major life choices after you fired them precipitously.
Also…it’s easier to figure out who you want and need if they’re still working for you? Like…you can talk to them? Ask them questions about their skills or projects or whatever? Get opinions from the ones you first identify as critical/awesome employees about which of their co-workers they think are also critical/awesome? Rather than trying to figure that out with everyone gone?
I’m struggling, really really struggling, to figure out why you don’t understand why one method is so much better than the other. I mean, really. Is it really not that obvious to you? Or do you simply not care about how PEOPLE are treated?
I already talked about the situation at AMD, trying to prune down one entire site by flying out engineers to actually interview who we wanted to keep or not. Nobody liked doing it, but we understood why, AND WE ALL INSTINCTIVELY KNEW THIS WAS BETTER THAN LETTING EVERYONE GO.
So I’ll give a second AMD story. Time of quarterly lay-offs during the Great Recession, which was hitting AMD harder than most. One quarter was particularly brutal, and a friend name David was laid off. David had just been told in his review that he will be promoted to Fellow in a few weeks, so very odd they let him go. The very next day another manager heard of this, freaked out, and told HR “you cannot let go of David you morons!”. So they reversed course, called him, asked him to come back. “Oh, and you won’t get your severance either now”. David told them to f*ck off and went and (quickly) found a better job.
If I were that CEO, I would already have a system in place to evaluate my employees. So if I were in that situation, I would lay off everyone except for the top performing 20%. That I’d only have top performers working for me. There’s no reason that should take weeks. That could be done overnight.
But if you lay everyone off, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the top 20% back. Some of them maybe. But you won’t get all of them. And if you lay them off, you have to go through the HR process again. You’ve got to contact them, re-interview (remember, employees are interviewing the company too), assign job responsibilities, renegotiate comp, signing bonuses, the whole nine yards. And that really does take weeks.
And in tech, after layoffs it is customary to give the remaining employees a higher than normal stock refresh to keep up morale, and discourage them for looking for greener pastures.
So if I needed to reduce headcount quickly, the absolute dumbest, least productive, and most expensive way I can think of to do it is lay everyone off and then scramble to get them back. I don’t believe Elon is nearly that dumb.
Now, if I wanted to send a message to my underlings that anyone questioning my decisions will be fired along with all the people they’ve developed and their efforts will be burnt to the ground, then I’d do what Musk did. And in fact Musk sent emails to his top people saying exactly that. That explanation makes waaaaaaaaaaay more sense than yours and there’s evidence for it too.
I have no problem with changing a business strategy. But you claimed the reason was that the Supercharger team was insubordinate. If your claims are true, then the only explanation that fits your story is that Musk is incompetent personnel manager. Again, I disagree with your assessment. That’s not why he fired the Supercharger team.
Yes, I do. So are you arguing that Tesla is ahead only for FSD, and not for AI or AGI more generally? Because I can’t see how they’re ahead for the latter ones. Or for robotics, since they’ve only been messing around with that for a few years, and there’s lots of robotics shops and AI-robot shop partnerships out there…
No. The models need to work in coordination with hardware.
Anyone that owns the end to end system will win out. Tesla does and is far ahead and accelerating.
Yes, partnerships and joint ventures are good but they rarely work out. They always are great when they launch and look good on paper.
If all those things happen to the extent that the supercharger network ends up being worse off than before, then you all are right, Musk made a huge mistake.
But it sounds like Tesla is able to rehire the people it needs. If the supercharger network continues to improve but more efficiently with a smaller head count then what can you say?
This isn’t really a coherent statement in an AI conversation. Apple abandoned plans to produce a car. Apple did not abandon plans to incorporate AI into its products. And there is reasonably strong evidence that Apple abandoned the car mainly because it wouldn’t produce enough gross margin. And perhaps (even likely) Tesla did play a role in this by exhibiting that initially high margins can be attained, but then as always, autos become a commodity of sorts and margins decline.
I claimed the supercharger team was laid off because the team was not willing to make the personnel cuts Musk requested. I think that is consistent with most news stories on the topic.
Whether that is incompetent or not is a matter of opinion. It certainly indicates he is a harda$$. But Musk’s job is not to be popular. It is to make sure the company achieves its business objectives. I stick with him despite his negative qualities because his business objectives coincide with the hard realities of what is required for climate change mitigation.
I believe that we cannot escape the really bad consequences of global warming without electrifying transportation in a timely fashion. From what I can see, Elon Musk is the most important business person driving car electrification in countries not named China.
If one cares about climate change then one has to hope that Elon Musk is successful. It requires a harda$$ to take on the entrenched auto OEMs who are desperate to continue selling ICE/hybrid SUVs, the auto dealers who want to continue servicing ICE/hybrid vehicles, and the gasoline refineries who want to keep selling gas.
That simply makes no sense. The MANAGER was unwilling to make the cuts requested. There was ZERO reason to lay off the entire team based on the insubordination of that manager. The lowest rung peon on the supercharger team was in no way responsible for the decision of the team manager and would have no means by which to increase the layoffs of the rest of the team.
That would make as much sense as a District Manager of Walmart firing the entire store because the store manager refused to layoff more people - only to hire many of them back two weeks later. Get rid of the manager and then have the Asst Store Manager perform the requested layoffs. If they refuse, terminate them too until you get to the person that will.
I mean, the mistake might be fixable - but you don’t know the cost of fixing it. You don’t know if they had to offer people some additional compensation to get them to break commitments to new employers they made when they needed a place to land, or to get them to accept coming back after being summarily fired for no reason. Or whether they hired back the less-than-best people (the best people perhaps having found new jobs most quickly), so that the observed improvement is much smaller than it could have been had the exercised some care in pruning the department.
But just because you can fix a mistake by throwing money at it, or trudge along with a still improving but less-than-ideal team, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake.
I do not disagree with Elon but what you just stated is a nonissue.
People here have hired and fired. Or laid off. Most of those folks are defending the workers. The workers are valuable people who deserve better treatment. Where I agree with Elon people like to ride a gravy train. I have been on the receiving end of lazy coworkers.
No one here has problems with layoffs. They have problems with just tossing the entire department. People have spouses and mortgages. Lazy people can go home and figure out when they want to work. But honest workers need dependable bosses.