I know you're being sarcastic, but it's shocking how many people think he's actually a genius and all his missteps are really galaxy-brain maneuvers we just don't understand yet. Like, there are millions of them.
I think I'm going to trust Karpathy on this one over random HN commenters, but that's just me:
"Elon also understands deep neural nets a lot more than I think people imagine. He starts with good intuitions and mental models, but also actively asks for technical deep dives, and has very good retention. E.g. I recall teaching him about our use of focal loss in contrast to binary cross-entropy for the object detection neural net (I said it had given us a 5% bump and he asked to know more) and he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are. Just saying because I get triggered reading way off innacurate takes on this topic (original comment)."
