There’s not much information about xAI, but diversity is already an issue
Why would they even put him on the list of employees this fucker literally does nothing all day then underpays people smarter than him to enrich himself and take all the credit?
Do you really think he designed Anything of value to any of his companies besidea captial?
The lady im charge of spacex probably hates him
Tesla execs probably hate himElon is an asshole but he isn’t an idiot as some would claim.
There are multiple quotes from aerospace engineers that do and don’t work for him noting he understands and contributes.
John Carmack who is considered a world class coder and also had a rocket company has publicly stated Elon both knows rockets and coding.
Elon does seem to be able to speak at least on some level about rocket design. His statements and very public beefs with his own engineers at Twitter however demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of coding for large scale infrastructure like Twitter.
He has a team of skilled coders. If you follow some of the complaints about twitter you find out the infrastructure is kinda fed up.
Apparently programmers where getting incentives for how many libraries they created and how often they where used.
This lead to reinventing basic things like load balancers and web servers from scratch vs very optimized open source solutions. Essentially reinventing the wheel instead of new features .
George Hotz known for various coding and hacking projects was there and did an interview recently where he discuss how the code base was next to impossible to maintain in its current state at Twitter.
STEM Self-Importance Syndrome, where knowledge in one aspect of STEM leads someone to believe they have knowledge and understanding of EVERYTHING even though there’s actually a lot of big differences between Rocket Science and Computer Programming.
Rocket scientists are pretty susceptible to this because “It’s not rocket science” is an actual phrase used to mean “this job is easy.” Computer science is not rocket science, but it’s not easy either and it’s not something a rocket scientist can just jump in and do.
See also Stockton Rush, who thought because he studied aerospace, he knew what he was doing going into the ocean.
Appropriate that he named the company Oceangate, since that’s what any scandal would be nicknamed.
Didn’t he request that Twitter engineers print out their code for him to read and assess them? lmao
Elon is an asshole but he isn’t an idiot as some would claim.
It’s honestly too difficult to tell since he’s constantly grifting and lying his way through life. For immediate example, he was making some fairly false statements about how rapidly his team “could colonize mars”. To seem impressive and “make the sale”, he threw out some wild number of how many colonists they could get settled by a certain year (number was maybe a million, timeline was maybe 2050, I’m forgetting at this point) but the moment anyone who was actually good at math, astronomy, engineering or rocket science examined that number and timeline it was clearly bull shit with no possible way to accomplish it.
He’s smart enough to be in a room with folks smarter than him, but everyone else is carrying the load while he takes credit.
He’s smart enough to be in a room with folks smarter than him, but everyone else is carrying the load while he takes credit.
Curious if you think the same of Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and many others who clearly have stand out products etc but where not engineering them themselves but maybe solving the supply chain issues, pushing the design etc? Do we get iPhones or Model T without them building the companies, teams and pushing their products to specific goals?
the moment anyone who was actually good at math, astronomy, engineering or rocket science examined that number and timeline it was clearly bull shit with no possible way to accomplish it.
It is absolutely true that ANY time estimate that comes out of his mouth is a hopeless stretch, we all know what everyone through about his plan for reusable rockets a few years back and now SpaceX delivers more cargo to orbit than all other providers on earth, and almost all of them combined even.
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Not defending musk, but it is really difficult to find women in AI. The few that are around are very valuable for tech companies that will pay higher salaries to have “token women”, better if they are from some minority group, to show better diversity statistics. Therefore retention is also difficult. Finding good people in AI is already difficult and expansive, finding women is a real challenge.
I strongly believe that diversity brings a lot of value, and women are important in any team. But the solution unfortunately is not in the current market, but it is at school levels. Culture must change.
Eh, the gender imbalance is bad, but not 0/12 bad… here are some stats
Those stats don’t take into account the number of women that would want to work for Elon Musk.
Isn’t the fact that he’s repulsive sort of the whole complaint?
Just saying… if you take that variable into account it probably gets a lot closer to that 0/12
Nice stats, but it isn’t broken down on industry. From experience (I worked in different fields) in some industries such as pharma, people analytics or marketing, women are even likely the majority (they were majority when I worked in pharma, for instance). In more “pure” tech and fintech companies, I do not believe those stats represent the “natural distribution”. I know it’s anecdotal, but trust me, it’s not easy to find woman in AI in some industries. They are highly valued, well paid and have quick career progression because of this, to attract and retain them.
That said, elon is probably “machist” type of guy, I am not defending him. Just trying to give a bit of context
“my anecdotal industry experience trumps your stats” you don’t sound like you have a very unbiased opinion brah
If you read again, you’ll see I am saying that the stat is not complete as it doesn’t drill down to industries brah.
In absence of statistics anecdotal evidence is better than nothing to draw qualitative conclusions brah
If you have different experience, I am happy to discuss
The entire paper is already sub-field (AI) in industry (software engineering) specific. No stats are perfect, but I think these ones are pretty damn good for something where peoples role are pretty poorly determined in the first place. Of course you’re welcome to try and find better ones.
The “pure tech” companies I’ve worked at have been roughly equivalent or better than these stats, but at that point I’m sampling from software engineers in general (not having worked at an AI specific company), and my sample is unlikely to be unbiased anyways.
AI is in all industries, from pharma, insurance, finance. Nowadays it is not even a sub field of software engineering, more of a subfield of data science. If you check the background of those who work in AI, you find the most varied combinations, from maths, to engineering, stats, and physics.
I don’t have better statistics unfortunately. And I don’t even want to be right.
My anecdotal experience is that women cluster in some industries, in other industries they are difficult to find, in AI more than in other subfields of data science such as what is historically defined as “statistical inference”.
Again this is anecdotal, not hard science. But, as we don’t have stats, better than nothing.
Edit. Again, not trying to defend anyone, just adding information for people to draw their own conclusions.
Mine are that elon was trying to save some money, and he doesn’t value diversity to invest on it, and put the extra effort to create it
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Saying “coincidence” is basically claiming there is no reason for an observed pattern. This is really more of a last resort when considering explanations for certain patterns, because it’s probably the weakest claim someone can make.
Generally, patterns are not coincidence because if an outcome is truly a result of randomness, then there is an extremely low chance that there would be a pattern.
Also, 12 is not the whole data set. The whole data set should include the people who weren’t hired during the hiring process. This is unknown to us.
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Taking 89.3% men from your source at face value, and selecting 12 people at random, that gives a 12.2% chance (1 in 8) that the company of that size would be all male.
Add in network effects, risk tolerance for startups, and the hiring practices of larger companies, and that number likely gets even larger.What’s the p-value for a news story? Unless this is some trend from other companies run by Musk, there doesn’t seem to be anything newsworthy here.
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If women only see men or almost only men in jobs they’re going to naturally assume they aren’t wanted in those fields. And let’s face it, as much as diversity is sought after women AREN’T wanted in tech by a really large portion of the gatekeeping dudes pulling the strings.
Like, sure, I believe you about the hiring challenges but this is an Elon Musk company - do you even think he tried? Did you see what happened to Twitter’s personnel diversity when he arrived?
As said, I am not trying to defend him. He behaved extremely unprofessionally at Twitter.
It was just to give a bit of context
But it is a defense. Every unjustifiable hierarchy or segregation has been at one point deemed too difficult to overcome to be worth it.
He can use it as a defense, but trust me, I am not defending him.
What I am trying to say is that in some industries the inequality is in the market. Whoever manage to balance it is doing it by putting down a lot of money and providing extra benefits (such as quick career progression). This means that whoever is not ready to do so will end up with a very imbalanced distribution. Musk has demonstrated that his focus is saving money, which is probably also one of the reasons he is ending up with only men. There are for sure others, but I believe it makes sense to consider the overall market.
To “overcome” the imbalance, you cannot really do it on the current market, because it is already imbalanced. What you have is companies that fight for a small pool of available employees, some will meet a decent diversity (with effort and money) others won’t be able to do so.
The problem has to be solved before, at a cultural level. As I said in another comment, for instance this imbalance is not a problem in pharma, where data science is probably majority women (I don’t know the stats, but this is my anecdotal experience). There is a cultural issue with women in tech that can be solved only with cultural changes and with generational change. Already z gen is in a better position than millennials or x gen. But more needs to be done
Retention is indeed a problem. I don’t think I qualify as a “woman in AI,” but I am a cis woman who has trained (well, fine-tuned) my own models on my gaming PC at home as a hobby. Several years ago, I fucked off and became a professional photographer after working for a Fortune 50 for a decade; I loved my job but hated the sexism. There’s almost no amount of money that could get me back to working in tech.
(Incidentally, a bunch of my images were scraped and used in the training data set for Stable Diffusion. I’m mad about this and have no desire to help corporations profit off others’ art.)
From my experience ML and data science in general are very welcoming to women and people with very different backgrounds. Also the way of working is very different. Agile doesn’t really work, because is a non-deterministic world, you have relatively “long” projects, no PM chasing burndown (burnout) story points (or whatever those silly metrics are called), curious and interesting colleagues that are there for passion. You can give it a try. As said, in many industries, women in data science and ML are highly valued and unfortunately there are not enough of them.
half the machine learning people at my company are women, and while we’ve had more men in the past than women, women are far from vanishingly rare in the field. and none of them are “token women” who got their position through gender; they’ve all been intelligent and effective engineers who are good at their job.
What? That bastion of diversity and inclusion has a company that lacks diversity?
I would have thought it was all white men except for his love of people who desperately need to keep their work visas.
I would have thought it was all white men
Musk is going to hire people he feels “comfortable” around.
Musk was born and raised a rich male in apartheid South Africa, and he hasn’t matured since leaving - 42069 amirite? tesla fart noises hahaha! tesla models S3XY!
He has been repeatedly accused of both racist and misogynistic behavior, of course he’s going to “feel most comfortable” with white males. This is literally how glass ceilings are made.
Maybe he has been accused of racist and misogynistic behavior because he is racist and misogynistic. I sure as hell have seen him share antisemitic, transphobic, misogynistic, and racist content on his personal Twitter account. He offered to buy an employee a horse if she would sleep with him, for fuck’s sake.
Glass ceilings are not made because a person is actually a victim of a smear campaign, they’re made because a person wants to hold onto power without being held accountable for the shitty things they do.
Don’t be an apologist for racists and sexists. You know why Musk is most comfortable around white men. It’s because he’s an insecure racist and sexist piece of shit.
I think you have entirely misinterpreted my comment.
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Given the gender distribution of the software and ai fields it could be a coincidence however given elons track record it seems like a fair concern to raise. Often the beginning of an enterprise sets the tone of a companies culture and if it’s a toxic environment right now there’s little hope to change it in the future
Given Musk’s track record with sexual harassment, it is for the better.
Betcha the AI product never actually comes out.
Won’t stop him from charging for it, if Tesla is any guide lol.
Maybe this says more about women than Elon Musk? Given a choice many women might not want to work for him…
What’s really funny is, all of those profiles only have links to their Twitter accounts, but you can’t see them unless you make a Twitter account yourself.
/
More about xAI in general than the diversity thing. Maybe both.
Reminds me of this that was posted a couple days ago. Seems kind of relevant.
Not only is Musk’s new AI company staffed by all men, it also gets free publicity from qz.com!
No surprise to anyone.
If “man” is the right word for Elon Musk.
I’m pretty sure he’s way too stupid to be a woman.
I was thinking “thing” or “abomination,” myself. Perhaps “manchild” if I were being generous.
Well, we know Zuckerberg is an android but Musk is not close enough to human to be one. I wanna say he’s one of those goblin things that faeries leave in place of a child they stole.
X-men
Wasn’t this gonna be the “anti woke” ai anyways? everyone knows women are woke
