
Ex-Neuralink employees describe rushed timelines clashing with science’s pace - DanielleMolloy
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8662975/Elon-Musks-brain-chip-Neuralink-plagued-turmoil-rushed-timelines-former-employees-claim.html
======
KKKKkkkk1
The bit that caught my attention is that 6 of the 8 founding scientists are
gone. I bet the former and current heads of AutoPilot are shaking their heads
now. Sterling Anderson -> Chris Lattner -> Stuart Bowers -> Milan Kovac. Note
how there was a progression from experienced highly respected scientists and
engineers until Elon finally put in place someone who owes his career to Elon.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
In the real world, the people who get stuff done get replaced with Yes Men who
go "yes, no problem, we can hit that deadline" and end up delivering trash.

Tesla's self driving division will really have to include a beheading life
insurance policy for me to buy their cars after the shit that came out on
Twitter about how things are done in their "move fast, break things, kill
people" organization.

~~~
toomuchtodo
There have been a total of six deaths related to Autopilot misuse over 3
billion Autopilot driven miles by the fleet. Humans are terrible at risk
management.

~~~
jeanvalmarc
> There have been a total of six deaths related to Autopilot misuse over 3
> billion Autopilot driven miles by the fleet. Humans are terrible at risk
> management.

Or, humans rightly assessed that despite marketing to the contrary autopilot
only really works on the _easiest_ part of driving (highway miles) and still
managed to kill 6 people.

~~~
taneq
> despite marketing to the contrary autopilot only really works on the easiest
> part of driving

Is that not what Autopilot is sold as? Does it not make you read and accept a
disclaimer stating exactly this?

~~~
avs733
The things the ceo proclaims on stage and in the press are marketing -what
it’s sold as.

A click wrap legal disclaimer after you already purchased the thing is in no
way what something is sold as. It literally can’t be - because you have
already bought it.

------
DeonPenny
Seems like great thing. The fact is that science may be moving too slow and
given proper motivations could move faster. If it can not move any faster then
you quickly figure that out that you've gotten you answer, and you can circle
back in a few year. But if so you've effectively moved the needle past what
people thought was possible and you have a moat the size of the pacific ocean.

~~~
uniqueid
"...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I invented Thalidomide."

We're talking about a technology with the potential to cause accidental
aneurisms and lobotomies. Maybe some conservatism really _is_ in order?

~~~
DeonPenny
Seems like a better testing suite is in order. How many times since then has
that happened, and have we gotten better at figuring out issues before they
become this big of an issue.

I ask this because we've had everything from chernobyl to the Columbia rocket
explosion. We didn't hamstring those things. We got better at anticipating
them.

~~~
johnnujler
Remember, it doesn't matter if you've survived 100 Chernobyls, 50 Tsunamis or
20 Covids, all it takes is one bad one to wipe you out of the gene pool(kill).
The worse is called worse precisely because it did not happen until then. Yes,
testing helps but only when you know what to test, a hastily designed system
where the workers are put under pressure and made to ssh into a fleet(See:
[https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376](https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376))
to fix bugs, is not a mere matter of testing. It is a matter of culture,
autonomy, prudence, care, and add other things that would help build a well-
designed system from ground up.

------
czbond
The descriptions in the article sound like every early stage startup that has
ever existed (except the monkeys part).

~~~
runawaybottle
_“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”._

Not just startups, any corporation too, or retail, hospital, etc. People have
another thing coming if they think this is not standard life at most
workplaces.

There will always be a tit for tat between labor and employers. It’s a
perpetual conflicted relationship that needs constant maintenance and
compromise to achieve sane productivity.

------
DanielleMolloy
The original article is paywalled. Here is a detailed summary (by Daily Mail
tho):
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8662975/Elon...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8662975/Elon-
Musks-brain-chip-Neuralink-plagued-turmoil-rushed-timelines-former-employees-
claim.html)

~~~
peanutz454
Arghh such mixed emotions... I want to read, but not on Daily Mail. Maybe
there is a browser extension/userscript/css that makes daily mail palatable.

~~~
DanielleMolloy
Exactly, this is why I had avoided posting the Daily Mail article..
Unfortunately their summary seems quite complete.

------
renewiltord
This is typical of Musk companies:

Tesla:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employees-reveal-
th...](https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employees-reveal-the-worst-
parts-of-working-there-2019-9#dealing-with-the-companys-growing-pains-2)

[https://www.ccn.com/tesla-elon-musk-circus/](https://www.ccn.com/tesla-elon-
musk-circus/)

SpaceX:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/former-spacex-employee-
worki...](https://www.businessinsider.com/former-spacex-employee-working-for-
elon-musk-2017-11)

[https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-
to-...](https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-
boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company/)

Well, the cars look great, the rockets look great. Now we wait and see if it
works for the mind-machine interface. I don't think HN is capable of
generating good predictions on this.

~~~
badrabbit
Maybe in 50 years workers will be forced to impant this thing. Imagine your
boss screaming at you literally in your brain because neuralink is telling him
you feel lazy!

What can be abused will be abused!

~~~
aerovistae
Nah. I don't buy it. I don't think that future will ever come to pass in any
democratic country, even a sham democracy like the US. The evil forces haven't
even managed to get an encryption-backdoor law passed, and most policymakers
don't even understand that issue.

What you're describing is so far beyond any social issue of today in terms of
egregious and horrifying threats to society that it would just get voted out
of existence so hard you'd barely know it was ever a risk.

Nobody will ever let thought intrusion come to pass.

~~~
gpm
On the flip side, everyone is now walking around with an internet connected
camera, microphone, and location tracker in their pocket. Most of us are
livestreaming their location to cloud services.

I don't think this will come to pass as a mandate from on high, but it might
come to pass as a practical device that everyone needs to function in modern
society.

------
throwaway316943
Good?

Quality, cost, speed; I’d pick quality and speed.

~~~
hehebbssjj
There's diminishing returns along all those axes, suddenly throwing billions
of dollars at a problem doesn't automatically yield a fast, high quality
result.

~~~
throwaway316943
But there is a sweet spot. Musk seems to be good at finding it.

~~~
manicdee
There are many sweet spots, Musk is good at targeting the “deliver quickly,
fix the glaring problems later if at all” sweet spot.

~~~
throwaway316943
I still don’t understand all the negging, Musk has done more for mankind than
most people on here combined. Must be jealousy.

~~~
manicdee
Part of the culture of "move fast and break things" is that sometimes the
things you think are "broken" are going to end up not being included in the
final product, or will be better optimised later, once you understand the
process better.

It's like spending time developing a sprue-cutting process is going to be
wasted when in the next iteration you refine the manufacturing process to no
longer leave sprues connecting moulded parts.

------
jariel
Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink are very different companies, different kinds of
products, different markets with different dynamics. So it's hard to compare.

------
zalkota
I would not bet against Elon musk. He has the ability to recruit the best
people in the world and has a near unlimited supply of funding.

------
ponker
Elon Musk leaves a trail of destruction with the early employees of his
companies but the results are tremendous and have huge implications for
humanity. I'll give Musk the benefit of the doubt at this point.

~~~
Robotbeat
I’m not sure that the high churn rate at the high end is really in Musk’s
interest, but it MIGHT be in society’s interest. Instead of sucking up a bunch
of highly skilled and driven people indefinitely, the few who are able to work
well in that environment stay and are able to get stuff done while the others
leave and spread the knowledge elsewhere, perhaps starting up competing
efforts that either complement Musk’s efforts or give Musk a run for his
money. This is a strong argument against Non-Competes.

~~~
ponker
It probably is in Musk's interest too. Musk has earned the benefit of the
doubt in trusting his decision as to "should Very Smart Person X be employed
by Neuralink" or not. There's a lot more to making a company successful than
being competent and as much as I find Musk personally distasteful there is
nobody with his track record at building transformative private sector
companies.

------
throwaway_1512
I have personally come to a conclusion that people like Elon will always have
disgruntled employees around him, and the bar for expressing dissent with Elon
should be high and responsibility should be on them to express the dissent and
not for us to read between the lines.

Unless every employee who has quit documents convincing literature they don’t
get any of my attention.

------
WrtCdEvrydy
This is very surprising as this an Elon Musk company and he has never in the
history of his companies every tried to rush a timeline of a product.

~~~
salawat
Given Tesla's track record, I find that statement hard to agree with. I have
no qualms necessarily with most nuts and bolts part of it, but the entire self
driving division reeks of rushed compared to what the project actually
requires.

~~~
lowdose
What feels rushed about a custom ML chip an order of magnitude better than
NVIDIA?

~~~
fwip
It's cool that Tesla made an ASIC, I guess.

I think more relevant though, would be Tesla's hype around "Autopilot" when
they still can't reliably avoid parked cars.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
Ok the freeway, my Model 3’s autopilot is amazing. It’s not 100% on surface
streets, but it’s impressive given all the edge cases and the scale of the
problem.

~~~
IncRnd
They get around that by saying that autopilot is not meant to pilot the car
automatically.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
It’s clearly marked as in development. What’s impressive to me is just how
good the 80% solution they have is, even without the additional FSD package.

