FaceDeer

Elon Musk started his companies in America.

If you want to judge Americans by global standards, then basically every single one of them is "born into wealth" because most of the people in the world live below the American poverty line.

After reading the book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer I came away with the feeling he really wasn't a pretty good self-made businessman.

Going from a $30,000 seed investment to $400 billion dollars would tend to suggest otherwise.

Call him a terrible person, sure. You can't buy a good personality. But as a businessman the numbers seem pretty clear.

The references there talk about them having tens of thousands of dollars to spend on things. That matches with what I linked above.

Prove it

...

I don't feel the need to prove musk was born into wealth.

I hardly need to point out the double standard here.

Certainly he was above average. But that's not "born into wealth." $28,000 is the price of a modest new car. There are huge numbers of people who are able to get seed money like that from friends and relatives to start a business, but clearly Elon did something more than those people to grow that to the $400 billion his current net wealth stands at.

The problem is that Musk has become such an intensely politically and culturally polarizing figure that saying even the remotely "positive" thing about him - such as "he's actually a pretty good self-made businessman" - gets interpreted as "boy howdy do I ever love Trump and misogyny!"

This article on the company describes his funding sources, with citations for each claim.

Can you prove the contrary, that he was "born into wealth?"

The seed money he got from his father for his first business - split between him and his brother Kimbal, whom his father liked much better than him - was $28,000. After Elon and Kimbal had already raised some funds from other investors, too. Everyone seems to think Musk was born in a vast emerald-encrusted mansion. His family were by no means poor but he's not "old money."

Hate Elon Musk for real reasons, not made up ones.

Are we, though? Newer models almost universally perform better than older ones, adjusted for scale. What signs are you seeing?

You are speaking of "model collapse", I take it? That doesn't happen in the real world with properly generated and curated synthetic data. Model collapse has only been demonstrated in highly artificial circumstances where many generations of model were "bred" exclusively on the outputs of previous generations, without the sort of curation and blend of additional new data that real-world models are trained with.

There is no sign that we are at "the peak" of AI development yet.

Except it's not denying service, so it's just a D.

Yeah, AI has become good enough at this point that you can provide it with a large blob of context material - such as API documentation, source code, etc. - and then have it come up with its own questions and answers about it to create a corpus of "synthetic data" to train on. And you can fine-tune the synthetic data to fit the format and style that you want, such as telling it not to be snarky or passive-aggressive or whatever.

Stack Overflow has been toxic for a long time already. It's one of the things that a lot of people seem pleased to see AI devour.