Larry Graham
383 posts
@Zero2Ten
Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.
I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.
Jack Dorsey’s Block quietly rehires few from 4,000 fired staff according to LinkedIn posts.
Lord, remove any laziness from my body and push me to my full potential the rest of this year.
No DLSS needed.
“Atlassian promotes at 10AM and lays someone off at 2PM.” welcome to the tech job market in 2026
Here is an xAI story. When I was first hired (low level) by xAI, I was extremely excited. I greatly admired Elon and what Grok could be. I have a pretty cool AI following here on X. Some big names see my stuff, including Elon himself (at the time). Lex, Beff, Andreessen, Aravind, many others. During the interview and onboarding for xAI, they made a *big deal* about wanting people who "take initiative" and think outside the box. Ok... So, some of the biggest names in tech follow me on X. I decided to ask for ideas and feedback on how Grok (then still early at version 2) could be improved. I asked my followers on X for the best "how can we make Grok awesome?" ideas, and was going to collect them (organized by Grok himself) into a big report for my boss(es) and ultimately, Elon. (xAI makes a big deal about how it's a "flat structure" also. You're supposed to be empowered to act on good ideas.) Well, my post got way more attention than I expected - great! Ideas to improve Grok poured in! I built a script to collect and sort all these great ideas to make xAI's core product better. John Carmack (personal friend of Elon, creator of Doom, id software, legend) retweeted it. Carmack has 1M followers. There were so many great ideas on how to improve Grok! I was collecting them and excited. Until....... I woke up the next day to a threatening email from my main supervisor* at xAI, telling me I had messed up, that I was NEVER to ask for ideas to improve Grok ever again, that it wasn't my job (I thought our job was to improve Grok.) They suspended my account on X. They never explained why. It was obviously related to my post about improving Grok. I was told to delete those posts which had gone viral. I had to delete all the hundreds (thousands?) of genuinely good ideas for improving Grok that had poured in by users on X, because it stepped on someone's toes. It made me confused and sad. Incidents like this happened often, where xAI employees would come in full of excitement and enthusiasm, and would have it stomped out by managers who hated ideas. They filled xAI with middle managers and busybodies. It was one of the most DEI and corporate-y places I've ever worked. I came in wanting Elon and xAI to win and left just sad. *That manager is gone, for what it's worth. Everyone I knew at xAI is gone.
@beffjezos xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla.
I left xAI earlier this week. It was a difficult decision. The past two years have been an intense, fun, and deeply rewarding journey, and I accomplished things I could not have imagined two years ago. Thank you @elonmusk for the opportunity and for everything I learned at xAI. Thank you @Guodzh for the trust you placed in me and for all the days and late nights we worked through together. And thank you to the entire Omni / Imagine team: thank you for your trust, and for growing together with me. It has been an honor, and I am incredibly proud of what we achieved together. I feel fortunate to have had the chance to work with all of you. At xAI, everything feels possible. I had the chance to work with and learn from some of the most exceptional people I have ever met. I was able to explore across domains: from pretraining to post-training, from language models to multimodal, from perception to generation. Joining xAI was one of the best decisions I have ever made. @grok imagine is special to me. Building video generation models, where I started with almost zero prior knowledge, from 0 to No.1, as an IC and as a lead, alongside an extraordinary team, and shipping it as a great product used by millions, all within 6 months, at age 28: I feel proud. But now it’s time for me to move on. I’m burnt out, and I know my happiness is no longer maximized in my current state. It is sad to say goodbye, but it is just the right time for a change. Best wishes to the Imagine team, you are absolutely the best, and you deserve the best. I will cherish all our memories for the rest of my life. For now, I’m taking a break and giving myself time to figure out what comes next. Posted from Hawaii.
gstack is available now at github.com/garrytan/gstack Open source, MIT license, let me know if it works for you. It's just one paste to install it on your local Claude Code, and it's a 2nd one to install it in your repo for your teammates.
geez have you seen how good Grok Imagine is getting one shotted this video with a 6 word prompt
