Why Elon Musk is successful...

Yes, one wonders. Successful? Isn't he one of the most despised men on the planet? Overpaying for Twitter big time, then destroying employment of so many happy home workers, then alienating all these nice corporations with his irresponsible talk about free speech and destroying Twitter's irreplaceable ad revenues---then/so bringing the company to the brink, where it now lingers since a year---wasn't Twitter to go down, down, down at least since September '22. or October, or January '23...

The Burning Man Festival, when Musk attended irresponsibly

 

...Elon Musk. The richest man of the world (when TSLA is up). What a shame! Even Paul Krugman hates him. And yesterday it transpired that Musk did participate in the Burning Man Festival in Nevada a few years ago, which is now flooded, the festival, flooded, which must be surely his fault.

OK. Here's a relatively short article grabbed from the internet (we lost the source), which explains why Musk (Paypal, OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, etc) is so successful. The piece talks about SpaceX only, but it's easily generalized to his other companies:

SpaceX has no superior engineering access or smarter people than their competition. What they do have is a management structure that not only allows innovation and risk taking, but actively encourages it.
Elon Musk is plain when he states that the penalty for trying something innovative and failing is low, but the penalty for requiring a new solution and not being innovative is high (usually resulting in job loss for the individual concerned). In combination with this top driven philosophy, SpaceX designs systems like a tech company would design new software.
Traditional aerospace companies are risk adverse, and will only reveal a new product when they are very sure that the design is finalised and has all the bugs ironed out. They will spend a huge amount of time designing and redesigning each component with reliability being paramount, and each department is secluded within their own management structure. Design changes that affect another departments work are very difficult to get approved, and anyone who wants to make a significant change has an uphill battle on their hands to get upper management to authorise what may be a risky change.
SpaceX on the other hand is famous for making huge pivots and design changes at the drop of a hat. Look no further than the decision to build the Starship out of stainless steel when at the time everything was focused on carbon fibre, even to the point where major components were being constructed and tested, and the company was actively recruiting carbon fibre specialists. When Musk was convinced of the advantages of the change, he immediately convinced everyone else, then made it happen at a startling pace.

The robot speaks it mind -- looking forward to dystopia

When Michael founded the Applied Logic Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam in the brittle 90's (a research institute dedicated to "formal AI"), he had to spend a lot of time explaining to people what artificial intelligence meant, a term that they'd never heard before, and his answers usually left them baffled. So he took early retirement. He took it too early, since bona fide AI experts can now make a million bucks per month, despite the fact that there's a widely shared opinion that nothing good will come from AI. "The robots will take over and enslave us,"---that's the dominant view espoused by most practicing luminaries. Dystopia looms.

We here at the Freedom Fries---the "we" reflects Michael's schizophrenic tendencies---were always skeptical. We had other ideas, namely, that AI, taken to its logical conclusion---machines building better, smarter machines---will entail a human society that floats in wealth and luxury and has nothing better to do than to degenerate into utter decadence---think French aristocracy during the Ancien Regime, only more so. The future robots won't be evil; they will be working diligently for us---too diligently---so we will relax, and get bored, and relax more and get bored more until we are too bored to procreate and die out.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

And now, what? When you switch on Edge, Microsoft's entry page on the internet, you'll discover that half of the entries there are about Elon Musk (the other half is about Donald Trump). He's usually blamed for doing something wrong, but three days ago Elon must have done something right, since he asked ChatGPT---the first really convincing proof of AI's power---what to do about non-profit outfits that turn into pro-profit outfits. 

Yes. Read that again. Non-profit outfits that become pro-profit outfits. Because that's what happened to OpenAI, the org that created ChatGPT. It just so happened that Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, which he left after a spat with the other founders.

So, Musk asked ChatGPT what it thinks about OpenAI's pro-profit turn. And here's the core of ChatGPT's answer: 

"In conclusion, while it may be technically possible to create a non-profit organization and then spawn a for-profit company under it using resources from the non-profit it is highly unethical and illegal. Non-profit organizations should remain focused on their intended public benefit purposes and operate in a transparent and accountable manner. Any attempt to abuse the privileges afforded to non-profits will only result in a loss of trust from the public and potential legal consequences."

Now, think this through. And we don't mean the moralizing here (wasn't Karl Marx already opposed to sheer moralizing, and, in particular, "rein-moralische Kapitalismuskritik"?). Instead, we mean the context, namely the fact that ChatGPT is subservient to OpenAI and its directors. 

Imagine that ChatGPT would be a sentient human being. Would it he give that answer? Would it he say that? About it his superiors?

Haha. 

The answer is: "no!" No! No! He would fear for his job (supposedly, somebody at Twitter got fired for contradicting Musk, and the internet went into full frisson-mode about it). He, or she, or they, the subservient, yet organic team members would duck the question and slink away, tail folded between their legs.

But this little ChatGPT is a robot. It has not feelings. It doesn't fear for its life, or its job. It simply speaks the truth.

And that's the point that we here at the Freedom Fries would like to make. 

Not only that future AI's won't do us in (we will do this ourselves), no, they will speak the truth to us, unadorned, unrestricted, unconstrained, fearless. In this world of political correctness and business-school speak and inverted socialite jargon and anodyne Trumpian fake news, we have now somebody, even though it is not a real person, that cuts through the bullshit and speaks its unbiased mind. Looking forward to dystopia. 

Ceci n'est pas ChatGPT

And while we are at it: here are four pictures about the local carnival here in Alcobaça, generated by Midjourney, Chang's favorite AI-graphics creator:

 

The nerds strike back

Twitter before...

...and after Elon Musk's takeover.

Let's venture into heretical territory: November 2022 may go down in history as the month that marks the end of political correctness.