[HN Gopher] OpenAI and Microsoft extend partnership
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       OpenAI and Microsoft extend partnership
        
       Author : hmate9
       Score  : 390 points
       Date   : 2023-01-23 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | 'Extend'
       | 
       | Even capitalized and straight from the horses mouth, but as
       | unsurprisingly predicted in: [0]
       | 
       | > * OpenAI will gain further investment...
       | 
       | We already know about ChatGPT Pro since that is a paid version of
       | ChatGPT coming soon, meaning that the second prediction in [0] as
       | also turned out to be true:
       | 
       | > ...ChatGPT by then will become a paid service
       | 
       | Now we wait until the startups depending on the service start to
       | raise their prices.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34201706
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ocdtrekkie wrote:
         | It's been over 25 years. It's really time to let this one go.
        
           | rvz wrote:
           | Yes. 25 Years and Microsoft has gotten much smarter with EEE.
           | 
           | Making the best developer tools for free or at least close to
           | free is another form of extinguish and they have just done
           | that with OpenAI and GitHub.
        
             | ocdtrekkie wrote:
             | Nothing in tech is true for a quarter of a decade.
             | Especially not when the guy who said this left the company
             | twenty years ago. It's time to put this one to rest.
        
             | Spivak wrote:
             | > Making the best developer tools for free or at least
             | close to free
             | 
             | The bastards! Making and releasing high quality developer
             | tools. We have to stop them! Has MS actually EEE'd anything
             | in the last 25 years? I legit can't think of a single
             | formerly-open thing that's been Microsofted via their own
             | extensions.
        
               | rvz wrote:
               | The methods are different but the strategy is the same.
               | They have used this strategy with Windows Subsystem for
               | Linux (WSL), VSCode + extensions, Winget, Microsoft
               | Teams, GitHub, and now OpenAI.
               | 
               | Microsoft can afford to maintain all these offerings for
               | free whilst competitors suffocate and struggle to compete
               | with their paid offerings.
               | 
               | You can't compete with free, especially when there is a
               | company who can afford to run and host the best tools for
               | free for a long time.
        
               | linhns wrote:
               | Nothing is free. If it's free, you're the product
        
               | stale2002 wrote:
               | You are still missing the point.
               | 
               | A free, quality product is great. We all benefit from
               | that.
               | 
               | The concern is the last "extinguish" part at the end.
               | 
               | But there is no reason for Microsoft to shut down GitHub,
               | or VSCode or whatever.
               | 
               | Consumers just get to have a great free product.
        
           | labrador wrote:
           | Nah, tribalism and talking smack about the other tribe is
           | part of human nature
        
       | grogenaut wrote:
       | Somewhat off topic, does someone know how bing might integrate
       | chat gpt into search. Is it to understand the prompt and filter
       | results. Taking the question and summarizing it to search the
       | index. Is it to summarize all the documents into an index and
       | search that. Or to just be like chat gpt is now and use it to
       | generate new results from it's knowledge base? I'm trying to
       | connect the dots between a generative form like these are and how
       | it would influence search in the future. Or is the lucene style
       | index search on it's way out in a generative world?
        
         | mirker wrote:
         | Easiest way would be to classify the query to go to either Bing
         | proper or ChatGPT. Example: "What is today's date?" -> Bing
         | "Write a rap song about hippos" -> ChatGPT
        
       | willyyr wrote:
       | Related MS announcement with some more details:
       | https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | "Microsoft will deploy OpenAI's models across our consumer and
         | enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital
         | experiences built on OpenAI's technology. This includes
         | Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service [0], which empowers developers
         | to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to
         | OpenAI models backed by Azure's trusted, enterprise-grade
         | capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools."
         | 
         | [0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-
         | availability-...
        
       | raajg wrote:
       | I asked ChatGPT to write a poem based on this post. Here's what
       | it wrote:
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Two hearts, two minds, working side by side
       | 
       | In pursuit of a mission to make AI safe and wide
       | 
       | Microsoft's investment allows us to stay true
       | 
       | To our capped-profit company, our mission, and you
       | 
       | From cloud computing to real-world use
       | 
       | We collaborate to ensure our systems are not abused
       | 
       | OpenAI API, Azure's OpenAI Service, and Designer too
       | 
       | We're working side by side to make our visions come true
       | 
       | Together we review, together we synthesize
       | 
       | Together we build, together we realize
       | 
       | The potential of advanced AI that's powerful and safe
       | 
       | Ensuring its benefits can be shared far and wide
        
         | unity1001 wrote:
         | > Microsoft's investment allows us to stay true > To our
         | capped-profit company, our mission, and you
         | 
         | Priceless. Maybe companies should get AI to write PR releases.
         | They say the same thing, except more honestly and funnier.
        
       | scifibestfi wrote:
       | Google recently said they are recalibrating the level of risk
       | they're willing to take with releasing this technology. OpenAI's
       | CEO responded saying
       | 
       | > "recalibrate" means "increase" obviously.
       | 
       | > disappointing to see this six-week development. openai will
       | continually decrease the level of risk we are comfortable taking
       | with new models as they get more powerful, not the other way
       | around.
       | 
       | How does this resolve?
       | 
       | OpenAI not releasing something isn't going to stop Google or
       | another player from releasing it. Won't they have to recalibrate
       | too or be overtaken? Pandora's box is already open.
        
       | marban wrote:
       | Prompt: Create a PR smokescreen in 3 paragraphs with as little
       | facts as possible.
        
         | IncRnd wrote:
         | Paragraph 1: Our company has recently been at the center of
         | some unfortunate rumors and false accusations. However, we want
         | to assure our valued customers and shareholders that these
         | claims are completely unfounded and without any merit.
         | 
         | Paragraph 2: We are proud of the work we do and the products we
         | provide to our customers. We have always maintained the highest
         | standards of integrity and transparency in our business
         | practices.
         | 
         | Paragraph 3: We ask that the public not be swayed by the
         | misinformation being spread by our detractors. We are confident
         | that the truth will come out and our reputation will be
         | cleared. In the meantime, we will continue to focus on
         | delivering the best possible products and services to our
         | customers.
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | You can also do the reverse, taking the long article to extract
         | the facts for a toddler:
         | 
         | OpenAI and Microsoft are working together again, Microsoft is
         | giving them a lot of money to help them make AI that is safe
         | and helpful and they are excited to keep working together.
        
       | rpmisms wrote:
       | This feels like an inflection point. Microsoft obviously sees
       | huge upside, they're forking over a lot of value for this, and
       | they must be expecting huge growth. Maybe Bing will be an amazing
       | search engine in a couple years...
        
       | Tempest1981 wrote:
       | > Azure's unique architecture design has been crucial in
       | delivering best-in-class performance and scale
       | 
       | Is there something unique about Azure, which makes it well suited
       | for AI?
        
         | pm90 wrote:
         | No. Its all spin. The only uniqueness is the discount and
         | preferential treatment they would get. Azure gets a nice
         | callout in return.
        
         | MicrosoftShill wrote:
         | Azure/O365 admin here. No, nothing special from a technical
         | perspective.
         | 
         | The value to OpenAI to go Azure(/Microsoft) exclusive is:
         | 
         | - Money & general financial security forever
         | 
         | - Integration with the largest software suite in the world
         | (Windows, O365, Active Directory, etc)
         | 
         | - Rapid push to worldwide enterprise sector
         | 
         | - Rapid push to worldwide gov/mil sector (ChatGPT, coming soon
         | to a war near you!)
         | 
         | - Rapid push to education sector
        
         | bfeynman wrote:
         | Other than just marketing BS, probably lack of customers who
         | use GPUs. Both AWS and GCP have capacity issues. The biggest
         | factor is also that Google is a direct competitor and invented
         | the technology even, so obviously they will not cannibalize
         | themselves by giving google more money to train its own models.
        
           | vxNsr wrote:
           | That's funny as the other commenter said, azure has had some
           | crazy capacity issues, but maybe this is their benefit, they
           | get first dibs.
        
           | rospaya wrote:
           | Don't use GCP but I've only had capacity issues on Azure
           | since covid hit.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | Interesting. My precovid experience was AWS was much harder
             | to get GPU on.
        
         | dharmab wrote:
         | You can get really good discounts if you're a major Microsoft
         | partner.
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | Most of the responses to this are just preconceptions or
         | assumptions.
         | 
         | Azure _does_ have unique offerings, such as higher-spec compute
         | nodes than AWS and RDMA-capable "HPC" sizes that can be used to
         | build mini supercomputers.
         | 
         | AFAIK, no other public cloud has this type of capability.
        
           | tester756 wrote:
           | Indeed, it's crazy how people can go out here and claim crazy
           | stuff as if they knew internals of Azure
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | "I like Linux and Amazon, hence Azure must be bad. I
             | assume, I've never seen it." is something I've heard
             | commonly.
             | 
             | I have a customer where they use both clouds, and they will
             | spend weeks spinning up Rube Goldberg machines in AWS even
             | though there is a turnkey solution available in Azure.
             | 
             | For example, Elastic File System (EFS) in AWS is only
             | compatible with UNIX-like operating systems, because it is
             | NFS v4. Azure has both NFS and SMB file shares as a service
             | -- the latter is a unique offering. It's not magic, but it
             | does eliminate quite a bit of complexity around managing
             | large, scalable file server clusters for Windows clients if
             | you need that kind of thing.
        
         | frusky wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | coliveira wrote:
         | It will quickly chain you to Microsoft products, that's the
         | uniqueness.
        
           | alex_duf wrote:
           | In fairness that's also true for AWS and GCP
        
         | sidcool wrote:
         | Yep, the discounts.
        
       | wangii wrote:
       | in tech history, one would be screwed in such partnership. the
       | question is whom?
        
         | ActionHank wrote:
         | Microsoft is.
        
       | TekMol wrote:
       | Related (?): Is ChatGPT down at the moment?
       | 
       | When I visit it, I am getting a poem about how it is over
       | capacity. And that's it.
        
         | dagw wrote:
         | _Is ChatGPT down at the moment?_
         | 
         | No, but ChatGPT is at full capacity which means that it will
         | 'randomly' block new connections until load drops. Keep trying
         | every 5 - 10 minutes and you'll eventually get in
        
           | drexlspivey wrote:
           | You can also pay for the new premium subscription for
           | $42/month
        
             | codeisawesome wrote:
             | Can't seem to do that while the thing is down... wonder why
             | they didn't choose to separate the payment UX from the
             | actual product.
        
               | ricopags wrote:
               | Frustrated with the same question. The service doesn't
               | need to be up to have a "buy pro and get in now" option.
               | Seems like they're missing on ready conversions.
        
         | return_to_monke wrote:
         | it seems to be constantly that way norwadays. I think they
         | might give priority to paying API users, and of course by now
         | there has been enough time for applications to implement
         | chatgpt stuff.
        
       | Tempest1981 wrote:
       | > Azure's unique architecture design has been crucial in
       | delivering best-in-class performance and scale
       | 
       | Is there something unique about Azure, which makes it well suited
       | for AI? (vs AWS or GCP)
        
         | aabhay wrote:
         | They have ten billion dollars
        
       | ThrowawayTestr wrote:
       | 2023 is the year of Bing, calling it now.
        
         | davidy123 wrote:
         | That really depends on how much the public accepts results
         | without sources, aka no credit, aka rampant breaking of social
         | norms and copyright, as well as destroying the easy ability to
         | verify something. In many ways, OpenAI and anyone who supports
         | it are trying to pull an Uber here, but shift the Overton on
         | something indescribably larger than transportation licenses.
         | They want to Borg global intelligence (though, of course, they
         | will be in control).
         | 
         | Say what you will about Google, they generally credit their
         | sources. Yes, it's part of their advertising model, but it's
         | still a Very Good Thing.
         | 
         | I hope that Google's plan is to release something that
         | continues this model. If it's near as good at ChatGPT and
         | strongly includes sources, it is the right future.
        
           | spyder wrote:
           | OpenAI already has a model to improve factual accuracy and
           | provide citations:
           | 
           | https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/
           | 
           | It's probably not too hard for them to tune ChatGPT and the
           | upcoming GPT4 that way, and I think it's very likely they
           | will do something like that in Bing.
        
           | MerManMaid wrote:
           | >In many ways, OpenAI and anyone who supports it are trying
           | to pull an Uber
           | 
           | Can you elaborate here? (Honestly asking since I'm not seeing
           | the similarity)
        
             | themacguffinman wrote:
             | My understanding of that phrase is that "pull an Uber"
             | means "break laws and social norms to more quickly deliver
             | a product that beats the status quo". Uber broke laws in
             | some regions that required special taxi licenses, and it
             | broke social norms by blurring the lines between contractor
             | and full-time employees when it took away certain employee
             | freedoms common for contractors while not giving them full-
             | time employment benefits.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | I think you're assuming that Bing is just going to let GPT
           | blindly answer queries, that's not at all how you build a
           | system like that.
           | 
           | How it actually works is more like:
           | 
           | 1. User asks "What's the tallest building in the world?"
           | 
           | 2. MS, rightfully, assumes that GPT has no idea what the
           | answer to this is. And even if you trusted it to know, it
           | will always lag behind and new buildings could have been
           | built since then.
           | 
           | 3. MS searches their index for the most relevant document
           | snippets related to this query and feeds it to GPT as
           | context.
           | 
           | 4. MS asks GPT to answer the question in the context of those
           | document snippets.
           | 
           | 5. MS returns the result from GPT along with references to
           | the documents it sourced the information from.
           | 
           | This is how the OpenAI /search endpoint used to work.
        
             | davidy123 wrote:
             | If it does that, and properly highlights the sources, I
             | have nothing to criticize. Though, I think the results
             | won't be as good if it doesn't use its entire breadth (if
             | it does, the problem reappears).
        
         | SomeDog76 wrote:
         | I have the feeling Bing is on the way to overtake Google even
         | without OpenAI, recently google results seem to struggle more
         | and more. Whenever I am trying to remember a word, if I type
         | something similliar sounding google will give me no results at
         | all. Bing (I use DDG which serves Bing results) will most of
         | the time figure out what I was trying to find.
        
           | mejutoco wrote:
           | In my experience, if anything, Google tries too hard to guess
           | what I mean, not the opposite.
        
           | lancesells wrote:
           | I'm a DDG user as well and I feel it's getting loaded with
           | spam links much like Google. Usually my most confident
           | searches are watching a YouTube video on what I'm looking
           | for. I would prefer text to video but it seems that's where
           | we're headed until video becomes cheaper than text to produce
           | (unlikely).
        
       | Fostewrs wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
       | chabes wrote:
       | "Learn to code."
       | 
       | That's what folks were crassly saying to truck drivers, baristas,
       | and cashiers.
       | 
       | The writing was/is on the wall: AI is only going to get more
       | powerful and able to be applied to more and more complex tasks.
       | 
       | The thought was that "unskilled" labor would be the lowest
       | hanging fruit, that automated AI - with some (but minimal) human
       | oversight - would replace serious chunks of the workforce in
       | various minimum-wage and "blue collar" sectors.
       | 
       | Machines don't necessarily need to sleep, they don't have labor
       | unions, or laws that require healthcare or overtime pay. They
       | don't get upset, take things personally, seek revenge, or
       | reciprocity like a person.
       | 
       | Sounds like that could be a threat to many kinds of jobs, many of
       | them "bullshit jobs" (in the words of Graeber), but others as
       | well.
       | 
       | It seems (to me, at least) that the more immanent threat is text-
       | based AI - with some human oversight - replacing large swaths of
       | the tech workforce (many of whom were leading the narrative about
       | the truck drivers).
       | 
       | The incentives for companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and
       | others, to go this route are obvious, beyond the stated reasons
       | why "low-skilled" labor is at risk. They already have enormous
       | investments, acquisitions, projects, established platforms, and
       | infrastructure related to AI.
       | 
       | I expect to see more partnerships like the one between Microsoft
       | and OpenAI, from all of the major tech companies.
       | 
       | I also believe the connection between the
       | acquisitions/partnerships and the mass layoffs will become more
       | and more obvious as these acquisitions/partnerships continue to
       | happen.
       | 
       | I can't be the only person that is noticing this...
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | A lot of very smart people, both within NLP research, and here,
         | are in complete denial about what the proliferation of high
         | quality LLMs means for their jobs and earning potential.
         | 
         | The only thing which makes me less sad is that I'm pretty sure
         | Moravecs paradox is actually not all that real, but is more due
         | to the relative lack of engineering interest put on solving
         | continuous control problems. Apparently reinforcement learning
         | on transformers works now (RLHF in ChatGPT). This implies that
         | we should see high effective continuous control models very
         | soon. Robots are coming for physical labor, it'll just take a
         | bit longer.
         | 
         | Shit man, when I was last in South Korea, I felt like I was
         | living in the future. They had many "24/7" drink cafe's where
         | it's literally just a robot arm that makes the drink for you
         | for a few dollars.
         | 
         | It is painfully ironic to knowledge workers that they are
         | destroying their own earning potential, but physical labor is
         | not safe. Nothing is safe.
        
         | kranke155 wrote:
         | It will take 10 years for folks to realize the
         | layoffs/unemployment are AI, 20-30 years for a coherent
         | political movement to show up that lays out a post-AI-labour
         | society.
         | 
         | In the meantime, rocky road.
        
         | scifibestfi wrote:
         | Here's the weird thing though. Bullshit Jobs could already be
         | eliminated, yet they are not. Why not? Why would companies wait
         | until AI to eliminate what we already know are Bullshit Jobs?
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | If I'm understanding this, the Codex model like code-davinci-002
       | and limited to 10-20 requests per minute on OpenAI, is now
       | "generally" available through "Azure OpenAI Service" BUT
       | 
       | - you still have to apply to
       | https://customervoice.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?...
       | 
       | - you will be rejected if you use a personal email address
       | 
       | - you will be rejected if you are not a "managed customer"
       | 
       | - you will be rejected if.. Microsoft thinks you are a real
       | competitor to any of their products?
       | 
       | So my site aidev.codes is will be dead in the water if I can't
       | navigate these things or afford the "managed" part. What is that?
       | I don't know what a "managed customer" is but I assume its very
       | expensive.
       | 
       | I mean, this is really the opposite of Open.
       | 
       | Or am I missing something? Is it really generally available and
       | they took all of that stuff off?
       | 
       | BTW I am looking for an investor:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34494480
        
         | jacooper wrote:
         | > I mean, this is really the opposite of Open.
         | 
         | Cocks gun, _Always has been_
         | https://en.meming.world/wiki/Always_has_been
         | 
         | OpenAI was never really open in the first place.
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | Right.. I know.. have been telling people that.. there just
           | doesn't seem to be anything equivalent as an alternative.
           | code-davinci-002 is amazing. Way better than Tabnine for
           | example (in my limited testing) and also much better that
           | text-davinci-003. for code. The open source programming LLMs
           | I saw were kind of a joke compared to OpenAI's models.
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | FYI I asked their sales chat what is a "managed customer".. I
         | am not sure if it was really a person or not. Possibly a bot.
         | But they never really defined it, but took down my info and
         | said a "relevant partner would contact me ASAP".
        
       | bogomipz wrote:
       | The post states:
       | 
       | >"Azure's unique architecture design has been crucial in
       | delivering best-in-class performance and scale for our AI
       | training and inference workloads."
       | 
       | Can someone say what is unique about the Azure cloud architecture
       | here vs other cloud vendors?
        
       | evan_evan wrote:
       | Right after firing 11,000 employees...
        
       | mritchie712 wrote:
       | > Azure's unique architecture design has been crucial in
       | delivering best-in-class performance and scale for our AI
       | training and inference workloads
       | 
       | translation: Microsoft is not Google (who wishes we'd explode).
        
       | hmate9 wrote:
       | This blog post offers no specific detail about the partnership
       | (dollars involved and terms). Are those details public somewhere
       | else?
        
       | ffhhj wrote:
       | They are running at capacity now. Can they scale fast enough?
        
         | ddmma wrote:
         | They create the need by building limitations on the free tier.
        
         | bfeynman wrote:
         | they aren't running out of capacity, they just can't afford
         | 100k+ a day in compute. Number of users who will pay will be
         | much less so I doubt they will have problems
        
         | lopis wrote:
         | They are running at capacity for free users. They will be able
         | to afford much higher capacity with MS money, and probably stop
         | providing the service for free soon.
        
           | cactusplant7374 wrote:
           | One request costs about 1 cent to process? Is that what
           | Altman is saying?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | They have as many frre users as they are willing to pay for to
         | present a free demo; rest assured that the fee for paid users
         | is more than sufficient to pay for whatever capacity they need.
        
       | sheerun wrote:
       | Your data belongs to us
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | Let me translate this blog post out of corpspeak...:
       | 
       | OpenAI has agreed to use Azure exclusively and for free, in
       | return for Azure massively scaling up it's GPU capacity (which
       | OpenAI was hitting before, hence threatening to move). In return,
       | OpenAI gives an extensive license to Microsoft to use ChatGPT in
       | Bing (and other products).
       | 
       | Now why couldn't the blog post have just said that rather than
       | hiding all the details?
        
         | diogopublio wrote:
         | I am 100% pro for a clear and direct communication, in fact
         | this is what ChatGPT does haha
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | How many GPUs does OpenAI exclusively use daily/how many did it
         | take to train?
        
         | posharma wrote:
         | OpenAI threatened to move? Do you've evidence to support this?
        
         | naillo wrote:
         | Also as part of this exchange Microsoft will own 49% of the
         | company.
        
           | bossyTeacher wrote:
           | source?
        
             | mimotomo wrote:
             | https://www.semafor.com/article/01/09/2023/microsoft-
             | eyes-10...
             | 
             | (over German Golem.de - https://www.golem.de/news/gpt-dall-
             | e-copilot-microsoft-soll-...)
        
         | kenjackson wrote:
         | What happens to the non-profit aspect of OpenAI as a result of
         | this deal? How much money are we talking about, that is, what's
         | the scale of the deal? Do you have any proof that building on
         | Azure will work for OpenAI?
        
           | funnymony wrote:
           | Accounting tricks will make it look zero profit.
        
           | kranke155 wrote:
           | I don't even understand how there IS a non-profit aspect to
           | OpenAI at this point?
           | 
           | Honestly DeepMind seems to be doing far more important work.
           | Health etc.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | If someone finds a third party article that reports on the
         | significant new information directly, we can switch the URL to
         | that.
         | 
         | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
        
         | bayindirh wrote:
         | Because they didn't want to openly say "Microsoft gives us GPUs
         | and allows us to use them for free, hence practically buys us.
         | In return we almost exclusively license what we produce to
         | them, for free."
         | 
         | Because it looks bad. Microsoft wants to be seen in a different
         | light, and OpenAI wants to be perceived as an open, academic,
         | capped-profit for a noble reason collective.
         | 
         | It's all smoke and mirrors.
        
           | OnlineGladiator wrote:
           | > OpenAI wants to be perceived as an open, academic, capped-
           | profit for a noble reason collective.
           | 
           | Does anybody actually believe this? Their name has been a
           | running joke for years already.
        
             | pkdpic wrote:
             | Not to diminish anyone's appreciation for OpenAI's
             | increasingly performance-art level Orwellian name but I
             | have found myself believing that their preference would
             | still be to secure funding that would allow them to live up
             | to the implied openness if it was ever an option. Sam
             | Altman has stated over and over again that they tried to
             | solicit interest / investment from public sources like
             | governments before resorting to private capital. Maybe I
             | just want to believe that their hearts are in the right
             | place but that is the impression my advanced youtube and
             | wikipedia research has left me with.
        
               | ShamelessC wrote:
               | Sam Altman is also deeply entrenched in the land of
               | venture capital, where a CEO's ability to bs is as
               | important as their level of media experience.
        
             | rvnx wrote:
             | Brother of OpenDNS
        
               | shagie wrote:
               | Cousin to OpenVMS, child of The Open Group and TOGAF
               | which doesn't mean what you first think it means (The
               | Open Group Architecture Framework).
        
             | logicallee wrote:
             | You ask "does anyone believe this"? I decided to think
             | about whether I believe OpenAI is "open, academic, capped-
             | profit for a noble reason collective".
             | 
             | I'll list some pros/contras in no particular order:
             | 
             | CONTRA: I can't download ChatGPT and run it locally. Why
             | not? Clearly they are hoarding it.
             | 
             | PRO: They genuinely overtrain toward responses that the
             | model judges benefit humanity, to the point of failing at
             | the task. I can't think of a specific example but everyone
             | knows what I mean. It is a frustration to users and doesn't
             | help their image. They seem to be overtraining this way out
             | of the goodness of their hearts.
             | 
             | PRO: its non-profit or capped-profit structure would let it
             | behave in the way it claims it is behaving. (By contrast, a
             | for-profit public company in some sense has a fiduciary
             | responsibility to maximize value for shareholders rather
             | than benefit for humanity.)
             | 
             | PRO: ChatGPT is available for free and Dall-E gives some
             | free credits.
             | 
             | CONTRA: Dall-E doesn't give enough free credits. It might
             | have a longer wait time for free users but it shouldn't
             | hard cap them at a certain number of free credits per
             | month. For example perhaps free users could not be subject
             | to any reasonable usage limits (a few hundred images per
             | day should be fine) but could have to wait 1 extra minute
             | for each one.
             | 
             | CON: its architecture isn't open, it doesn't share how it
             | trained its models, it doesn't publish its datasets and
             | parameters that would let other companies achieve the same
             | results (reproduce their work and have their own version),
             | its research is closed off and unavailable.
             | 
             | CON: the company is not directly applying AI to proactively
             | solving social problems.
             | 
             | CON: (debatable) some users who are not sources of revenue
             | have been banned. From experimentong with a chatbot (not
             | any hard legal limits just things like exploring their
             | sexuality with the chatbot. It's just a chatbot, it would
             | make sense to exclude such conversations from further
             | training data or feedback, keep male and female researchers
             | at OpenAI from having to review unsavory conversations, or
             | even warn or at most temporarily ban the user. An account
             | closure is super extreme for natural forms of interaction
             | that don't go near legal limits. It does not seem like an
             | open company. Alternative viewpoint: on the other hand, we
             | keep certain flamebait subjects out of HN. Perhaps having
             | certain subjects banable is necessary for their open
             | mission at a larger level - specifically, users will stop
             | going there for sex since they associate it purely with
             | productivity, similar to how we associate HN with
             | intellectual curiosity, which is a result of very heavy
             | moderation here and without which this place would not
             | exist in its form?)
             | 
             | Overall based on the above considerations, I think that
             | OpenAI is not "open" but if it started publishing
             | downloadable models for anyone to run, I would feel
             | differently.
        
               | drdaeman wrote:
               | It doesn't have to publish the models, but everything
               | necessary to do so (training toolset, code that runs the
               | model itself, etc).
               | 
               | I think over 99.999% of people would be totally cool if
               | it'd be "Hey, we ran this on a crazy number of GPUs
               | feeding it half of the Internet and then some, and got a
               | damn fine model you can try on our site. It costed us an
               | arm and leg so we can't just share it with everyone for
               | free. But if you want your own chatbot and have a spare
               | fortune - here's our research and tooling, have fun with
               | it. Oh, and here's what we fed it to prevent it from
               | spewing some hatred, misinformation and other bullshit -
               | a socially responsible thing to do. Good luck."
        
             | amitport wrote:
             | The openAI brand is now recognized much beyond the circles
             | that know anything about it.
             | 
             | For most people it is "the chatGPT organization" and
             | nothing more.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | linhns wrote:
             | I believe ChatGPT spewed this out. No one seems to know
             | what's the cap of it so "capped-profit" is crap.
        
               | jefftk wrote:
               | The profit cap started out as 100x investment:
               | 
               |  _economic returns for investors and employees are capped
               | (with the cap negotiated in advance on a per-limited
               | partner basis). Any excess returns go to OpenAI
               | Nonprofit. Our goal is to ensure that most of the value
               | (monetary or otherwise) we create if successful benefits
               | everyone, so we think this is an important first step.
               | Returns for our first round of investors are capped at
               | 100x their investment (commensurate with the risks in
               | front of us), and we expect this multiple to be lower for
               | future rounds as we make further progress._
               | 
               | https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
        
             | atmosx wrote:
             | Absolutely. I heard from 6 different ppl in a week, some
             | technical others not so much say that openAI is producing
             | OS software for free. The use of the word "open" fooled
             | lots and lots of ppl who believe their software is open
             | source and free.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | I guess this is going to be Java/JavaScript confusion all
               | over again.
        
             | EGreg wrote:
             | To be fair, if they open sourced ChatGPT, they'd accelerate
             | the utter demise of all internet forums and articles by a
             | couple years. As it is we must wait for the likes of
             | StabilityAI / LAION to copy them before ushering in the
             | dystopian future!
             | 
             | Update: OK maybe Chinese AI companies will do it, they
             | don't seem to cooperate with any nonproliferation
             | agreements either
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | If GPT family translations are similar quality to a
               | Google Translate round trip from English to Chinese and
               | back, I don't think it's going to make a massive
               | difference to forum quality.
               | 
               | (I'd try it now, but servers are at capacity for me).
        
             | achow wrote:
             | Sam Altman addresses that when he was asked that question
             | in 'How I Built This' Podcast. Essentially: OpenAI did not
             | realize the massive scale they needed for them to be
             | successful. When they realized this, they could not raise
             | any funding as 'non-profit'. They asked govt, who did not
             | want to fund it, and other sources, at the end they did not
             | have any other recourse.
             | 
             | Sam Altaman says: 90% of funding was needed for compute
             | power, but also was needed for things like buying dataset
             | and then to pay employee so that they can compete with
             | likes of Google to retain them. If they would not have done
             | this, then very soon they would have become irreverent.
             | 
             | So to retain the earlier intent (for greater good) they put
             | in bunch of 'safety features' around funding - Ex. 'Profit
             | Cap' - after 100X the profit would be distributed to the
             | world (in some way). Similarly, there were few others he
             | talked about.
             | 
             | The relevant portion starts at 32:39 mark in the following
             | podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oOX1QHLPw9uvLL5L
             | mBk28?si=s...
        
               | OnlineGladiator wrote:
               | It sounds like you agree with me that OpenAI is poorly
               | named.
               | 
               | "We wanted to be open, but we couldn't - we kept the name
               | anyway."
        
               | meowkit wrote:
               | The argument then becomes how to interpret "Open", not
               | that you both agree.
               | 
               | If they keep publishing their research, then OpenAI seems
               | like a fine name to me.
        
               | DrBenCarson wrote:
               | It's not even open source lol
               | 
               | I get the need to make money but at least contribute OSS
               | to the community they're building a product on....
        
               | OnlineGladiator wrote:
               | And Russia never invaded Ukraine. You can stretch the
               | meaning of a word all you want, it doesn't change the
               | fact that the people misrepresenting the word are acting
               | in bad faith.
        
               | cardine wrote:
               | They've largely stopped publishing.
        
               | make3 wrote:
               | as much shit as we can give them for something as trivial
               | as their name, their contributions to AI with GPT-1
               | (which beat all benchmarks & which led to BERT & was
               | basically the "real" BERT itself), GPT-2, which was
               | really impressive back then, GPT-3 which was an
               | incredibly improvement that people had not see coming,
               | PPO in reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning
               | from human feedback in NLP, Instruct GPT (the real
               | ChatGPT before ChatGPT), and now chatGPT
        
               | mcbuilder wrote:
               | It works, I was watching some "normie" youtube creator
               | using Chat-GPT in a face-off with him over some domain
               | specific question and answers. He was new to the LLM
               | thing you could tell, but said how it was an open source
               | right in the intro. Probably a common mistake for a
               | company with "Open" in the name
        
               | ShamelessC wrote:
               | Next level gaslighting.
        
           | joe_the_user wrote:
           | I'd just add that Microsoft already owned a significant
           | portion of OpenAI through it's various earlier investments
           | ($1 billion in 2019).
           | 
           | see: https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | zxienin wrote:
         | Just TL;DR such corporate news release with ChatGPT.
        
       | impulser_ wrote:
       | Microsoft being late to the party is going to cost them a lot of
       | money.
       | 
       | Google and Facebook are the clear leaders in AI and they been
       | spending a lot of money building out their AI infrastructure over
       | the last decade. You haven't heard much about Microsoft's
       | investments other than them buying rights to OpenAI models. Seems
       | like they could have saved a lot of money if they started
       | investing years ago.
       | 
       | Google bought DeepMind for 400m 8 years ago. You could argue
       | DeepMind is on the same level or above OpenAI.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rejectfinite wrote:
       | With OpenAI + Office 365 search, Bing is actually going to be
       | sick. I already like the layout better than Google.
        
       | T3RMINATED wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | bogomipz wrote:
       | The WSJ article on this announcement states:
       | 
       | >"OpenAI was in talks this month to sell existing shares in a
       | tender offer that would value the company at around $29 billion,
       | The Wall Street Journal reported, making it one of the most
       | valuable U.S. startups on paper despite generating little
       | revenue."
       | 
       | Can anyone say why they wouldn't have gone that route? Is that
       | valuation possibly based on market condition from a year ago?
       | 
       | [1] https://archive.is/slxcE
        
       | rmac wrote:
       | author: no one
       | 
       | quotes in article: none
       | 
       | dates / timelines for partnership deliverables: none
       | 
       | was this written by chatgpt?
        
         | jay-barronville wrote:
         | The "author" appears to be "OpenAI" ( _i.e._ , posting on
         | behalf of the company) and they've posted like that numerous
         | times before [1].
         | 
         | [1]: https://openai.com/blog/authors/openai
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | I'll take that as a yes.
        
         | IncRnd wrote:
         | I asked a question of chatgpt.
         | 
         | ---
         | 
         | Create a PR release in 10 paragraphs about Microsoft extending
         | their partnership with OpenAI, by investing another $3.2
         | billion.
         | 
         | Paragraph 1: Microsoft is excited to announce that it is
         | extending its partnership with OpenAI by investing an
         | additional $3.2 billion. This partnership has been a key driver
         | of innovation and progress in the field of artificial
         | intelligence, and we are thrilled to continue our work
         | together.
         | 
         | Paragraph 2: The investment will be used to support OpenAI's
         | ongoing research and development efforts, as well as to expand
         | the company's capabilities in areas such as machine learning,
         | natural language processing, and computer vision.
         | 
         | Paragraph 3: With this new investment, Microsoft and OpenAI
         | will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with
         | AI, driving new breakthroughs and advancements in the field.
         | 
         | Paragraph 4: This extended partnership will also enable
         | Microsoft to bring the benefits of OpenAI's technology to its
         | customers and partners, helping to drive new business
         | opportunities and enable organizations to take advantage of the
         | latest AI advances.
         | 
         | Paragraph 5: In addition, Microsoft and OpenAI will be working
         | together to promote responsible AI practices and ethical
         | guidelines, ensuring that the technology is used in a way that
         | is safe, fair, and transparent.
         | 
         | Paragraph 6: The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has
         | already resulted in some significant accomplishments, such as
         | building a language model that can generate human-like text,
         | and creating a new system for natural language understanding.
         | 
         | Paragraph 7: With this new investment, the two companies will
         | be able to take their collaboration to the next level, creating
         | new possibilities for AI applications across various
         | industries.
         | 
         | Paragraph 8: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "We are excited
         | to continue our partnership with OpenAI to drive innovation and
         | progress in the field of artificial intelligence. This new
         | investment will enable us to bring the benefits of AI to more
         | people and organizations around the world."
         | 
         | Paragraph 9: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "We are thrilled to be
         | continuing our partnership with Microsoft. Their support and
         | investment will allow us to continue to make significant
         | advances in AI research, and bring the benefits of this
         | technology to more people and organizations."
         | 
         | Paragraph 10: The extended partnership between Microsoft and
         | OpenAI is a major step forward for the field of artificial
         | intelligence, and we are excited to see what the future holds.
         | Together, we will continue to push the boundaries of what is
         | possible and drive progress in this rapidly evolving field.
        
           | koolba wrote:
           | > I asked a question of chatgpt.
           | 
           | > Paragraph 8: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "We are
           | excited to continue our partnership with OpenAI to drive
           | innovation and progress in the field of artificial
           | intelligence. This new investment will enable us to bring the
           | benefits of AI to more people and organizations around the
           | world."
           | 
           | > Paragraph 9: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "We are thrilled
           | to be continuing our partnership with Microsoft. Their
           | support and investment will allow us to continue to make
           | significant advances in AI research, and bring the benefits
           | of this technology to more people and organizations."
           | 
           | There's something particularly off-putting about machine
           | generated quotes attributed to an actual person. It's
           | completely different than a person generating the content
           | themselves.
        
             | mft_ wrote:
             | In companies of Microsoft's size, the quotes are almost
             | certainly layers away from (in this case) Satya having any
             | input other than final signoff. The communications team
             | will have written the text, including the quotes, and it
             | will likely have gone through the hierarchy for review and
             | approvals.
             | 
             | So genuinely, does it really matter whether the original
             | much-reviewed PR-blah quote is written by a junior comms
             | human, or an AI algorithm?
        
               | Miraste wrote:
               | This is why ChatGPT is so good at corporate language. It
               | takes no understanding because it was already 95%
               | content-free.
        
       | s1k3s wrote:
       | > This multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft
       | follows their previous investments in 2019 and 2021, and will
       | allow us to continue our independent research and develop AI that
       | is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.
       | 
       | I laughed at independent research. Why do they even bother..
        
       | Kelteseth wrote:
       | > We've also worked together to build OpenAI's technology into
       | apps like GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Designer.
       | 
       | Good. I get better results from chatGpt than from Copilot. For
       | example, often Copilot would invoke a bash command for copying a
       | file in my python script, instead of using pythons buildin
       | shutil.
        
         | kixxauth wrote:
         | Copilot may be one of the most valuable early use cases for
         | chat AI.
         | 
         | I've been brushing off AI as overhyped, but this is very
         | compelling. I believe the real crux of software engineering is
         | thinking about the problem and organizing solutions today which
         | can be changed/improved/iterated in the future. Programmers too
         | often overweight the time it takes to type things (using short
         | variable & function names or creating terse 1 liners). But if
         | our objective is to make code easy to change/improve/iterate in
         | the future, then it needs to be readable now.
         | 
         | The nice autocomplete features in most IDEs have been a huge
         | win to productivity along with Google search. I think chat AI
         | could be an order of magnitude improvement.
        
           | revskill wrote:
           | Agree. At least it could help me read the library code and
           | automate some tasks for me, like how to get some things from
           | base class from library .
        
           | brookst wrote:
           | Copilot may be amazing, but I am having a hard time adapting.
           | Writing code I'm in flow, and reviewing/debugging I'm in
           | flow, but the constant appearance of suggestions that I need
           | to evaluate for keep / fix / discard while writing is messing
           | with my focus.
           | 
           | This might just be the equivalent of the old guy complaining
           | that typewriters are better than word processors.
        
       | oersted wrote:
       | Is it public knowledge yet how much is the new "multibillion"
       | investment?
        
       | ddmma wrote:
       | GTP3 can generate some good press releases.
       | 
       | I presume that by integration of the Open AI services into the
       | bing and MS Office, Microsoft's mission (empowero every person
       | and every organization on the planet to achieve more) makes lot
       | of sense.
        
       | adpirz wrote:
       | For people more well versed in this space: does GPT / OpenAI more
       | broadly have a meaningful moat? It seems like there will be a
       | number of these models out there and this isn't as great as say
       | Google's up-till-now advantage in search relevancy.
        
         | dandiep wrote:
         | A couple points which I don't see elsewhere:
         | 
         | 1) They have the best quality model. Better quality means more
         | users. More users means more data. Which means higher
         | quality...
         | 
         | 2) operationalizing & scaling these these models is non-
         | trivial. I'm not sure what the state of distillation/pruning is
         | for GPT-3, but I imagine they have figured out some proprietary
         | techniques.
         | 
         | 3) It's not just publishing a single model, but making it so
         | people can fine tune and push their own. Because they've gotten
         | good at 2, now anyone can create their own version of GPT
         | customized for their use case.
         | 
         | Will Google or others be able to do the same eventually?
         | Definitely.
         | 
         | The point I'm more making is that it's not just training the
         | model and running it.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | > but making it so people can fine tune and push their own
           | 
           | How are they making it easy for people to fine tune their
           | own?
        
             | Spivak wrote:
             | https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning
             | 
             | You can build your own model based on GPT in a way that
             | users don't have to be in the weeds of AI research to do.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | I don't view any of those things as a meaningful moat against
           | the other companies with AI labs.
           | 
           | Specifically, training data is not primarily coming from
           | interactions with model. While with RLHF this data might
           | become more important, it is still a very small portion.
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | I don't know either way, but by way of example that it
             | might be, the Google PageRank patent has expired, yet
             | Google remains valuable because their personalisation of
             | results became a moat.
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | If it was "open" it should not need a moat, nor have one.
        
         | thethimble wrote:
         | It seems like the fine tune dataset to go from GPT -> ChatGPT
         | is pretty valuable, particularly because it is proprietary.
         | 
         | Still, I agree with your characterization that we should see
         | many similar models over time. As an example, see Deepmind's
         | Sparrow: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-
         | agents
        
           | lmeyerov wrote:
           | Yes & No.
           | 
           | GPT <> ChatGPT: probably not. It's not hard for other big
           | players to enter this space. It's mostly egg-on-face for
           | Google that they haven't given that Google basically invented
           | the model that OpenAI uses and has big versions internally.
           | There's nothing fundamental stopping Google Docs from adding
           | ChatGPT to their UI and getting way more consumer training
           | data than OpenAI can get without a similar play, or for Apple
           | to do something. Similar to what happened with mapping
           | software, google/microsoft/azure & chinese equivs will all
           | offer with similar competitiveness, and then complements like
           | facebook/salesforce will do more OSS to compete against.
           | That's already begun.
           | 
           | Copilot: The interesting proprietary advantage IMO is program
           | synthesis. It's really enabled by Microsoft VSCode <> Github
           | <> OpenAI. Without even doing any AI investments, the winner
           | of this fight might be Gitlab, as Google/AWS/Saleforce/etc
           | decide what to do. Before gitlab might have been a nice
           | vehicle for shift-left sales (cloud hosting, security scans,
           | ..), but program synthesis UIs can make Software 2.0 real.
        
             | mejutoco wrote:
             | > There's nothing fundamental stopping Google Docs from
             | adding ChatGPT to their UI and getting way more consumer
             | training data than OpenAI can get without a similar play.
             | 
             | OpenAI could get exactly the same (or more, idk) data by
             | integrating into Teams, considering the Microsoft
             | partnership.
        
               | lmeyerov wrote:
               | Totally!
               | 
               | My point is chatgpt _isn 't_ a high-moat advantage for
               | text/q&a for microsoft. Their top competitors here have
               | similarly huge UI footprint. In contrast, program
               | synthesis has a much higher data moat.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | There are definitely more people using Docs than Teams.
               | 
               | I doubt that Microsoft will allow OpenAI to train on
               | teams data from other businesses.
        
               | mejutoco wrote:
               | You might be right, do you have a source?
               | 
               | They are fine with tons of telemetry and candy crush ads
               | on the start bar. There were also other instances were
               | Microsoft shared data before Google.
               | 
               | In addition to that, one could argue they already share
               | date from businesses source code with copilot.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | They don't share private GitHub data with copilot. Teams
               | data is default private.
               | 
               | Teams has 270 million monthly users (you can Google it,
               | I'm looking at a geekwire post) and Google has 2 billion
               | monthly g suite users (business insider)
        
         | ianbutler wrote:
         | No I don't believe they do, productwise. We'll see soon enough
         | I imagine. The thing is even though I don't think they have a
         | moat in terms of model/product. They have a moat in terms of
         | talent and capital. Only a few teams operate at their scale and
         | sophistication, and it's hard to get there.
         | 
         | I view this as Microsoft paying for talent the same way
         | DeepMind was initially integrated into Google, and at the same
         | time making the bet that this space will continue to be
         | immensely valuable and relevant going forward.
         | 
         | Pretty exciting times all things considered!
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | There are a lot of finicky things that go into training a model
         | as large as this.
         | 
         | But that knowledge will disperse and is already held in many
         | competitor companies. I do not think that OpenAI has a
         | substantial moat here.
        
         | muskmusk wrote:
         | I think that if you could conclusively answer that question you
         | would be sipping drinks on a beach somewhere. The people who
         | are investing seems to think so. Also the applications of this
         | tech is broader than search, but still includes it. A company
         | that had a serious chance of eating at Google's search revenue
         | while also generating new revenue streams. What is that worth?
         | What if you already have 1000 products that would benefit from
         | the new capabilities? This is probably an easy investment
         | decision even if Microsoft gains nothing from the actual
         | investment itself.
        
         | lonelyasacloud wrote:
         | Training and the guard rails.
         | 
         | Beyond that, if it becomes built into the (MS) tools that
         | people are using then convenience is going to be a very hard
         | barrier for Google (or anyone else) to overcome.
        
           | jasondigitized wrote:
           | G-suite?
        
           | ttul wrote:
           | Google will continue to integrate their own LLMs into their
           | office suite. Microsoft needs OpenAI because their own LLM
           | research hasn't been as fruitful. I don't see a huge moat
           | here for Microsoft.
           | 
           | Then again, Microsoft's office software is the "gold
           | standard" (however poorly deserved) and even with amazing AI
           | features, Google's stuff lacks in important ways that will
           | keep Microsoft in a strong position with or without AI
           | features.
        
           | ruune wrote:
           | Google still has it's own platforms. If we take a look at
           | last generation consumer AI's, voice assistants, Google
           | definitely beat Microsoft, and not only because Cortana
           | sucked.
           | 
           | Microsoft may dominate the AI market for office stuff soon,
           | but for general purpose language models Google still has a
           | great shot, especially when it comes to mobile platforms
        
             | partiallypro wrote:
             | The problem is that Google's model relies almost entirely
             | on advertising...and AI will simply be almost impossible to
             | wrap into that model. Microsoft doesn't really have that
             | handicap.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | theropost wrote:
         | I recently wondered if one of the reasons for Google shutting
         | down Stadia, was to quickly ramp their GPU server stockpile to
         | redirect the resources at GPT modelling, to help catch up.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | Google is not constrained by GPUs here and likely will train
           | on TPU pods anyways.
        
             | theropost wrote:
             | Good point, I imagine they would be using those as well.
             | Know of any resources for speed comparisons on similar
             | models?
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | Great observation.
           | 
           | If it wasn't prescient, it was incredible dumb luck.
        
       | eternalban wrote:
       | This technology is powerful and disruptive enough to merit social
       | oversight. We get caught up in the wonder of the novel mechanisms
       | and philosophical wanderings, whereas those who have the means to
       | field this technology are effectively creating _facts on the
       | ground_ as we muse about it.
       | 
       | As just one dimension, let's briefly review education limited to
       | testing. Options here range from (paid) cooperation between
       | institutions and companies, to marketplaces for detection
       | technology and testing systems, to complete rethink of testing at
       | the institutional level, to regulatory intervention.
       | 
       | The dynamics and outcomes resulting from considering the above
       | _before_ or _after_ widely available and improving LLMs are a
       | fact of life, are possibly very different. We haven 't yet
       | crossed the Rubicon here and not sitting as captive spectators in
       | a theater of ultra rich remains an option.
        
       | jacooper wrote:
       | Microsoft is handling the AI revolution extremely well.
       | 
       | They see the potential brand damage that comes with a such a
       | product, so they probably just hold less than 50% of the company,
       | to be able to say "this is not us".
       | 
       | Which then allows openAI to experiment and wow people, while
       | google is anxious about showing 10% of its crazy AI capabilities
       | to avoid potential PR disasters.
        
         | cableshaft wrote:
         | What are you talking about? All you have to do is make an A.I.
         | robot dance and crack wise, and your golden. At least that's
         | what the game Borderlands taught me.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Ah yes Borderlands, patenting the practical method of keeping
           | superhuman AI in check.... stairs.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | I was 100% sure you were talking about Boston Dynamics before
           | that last sentence.
        
             | consumer451 wrote:
             | I somewhat recall their CEO saying something like "my job
             | is to get YouTube views" in an interview.
             | 
             | edit: To clarify, I _think_ he was only half-serious.
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | Now I'm curious what the hell is the CMO's job then.
        
               | jacooper wrote:
               | Make it possible
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | Nah that's the CTO.
        
         | jillesvangurp wrote:
         | Agreed. MS has managed this extremely well. They've gone from
         | Tay bot a few years ago to this.
         | 
         | 1) they've recognized that none of this could emerge out of a
         | corporate research department of a major trillion $ company.
         | Just too rigid and constrained by day to day business concerns
         | (e.g. Tay bot)
         | 
         | 2) they recognized the strategic value to their business
         | regardless of that risk (can't afford to let some more nimble
         | player to leap frog them)
         | 
         | 3) they identified a key startup partner that can get results
         | here quickly and bank rolled them (OpenAI)
         | 
         | 4) At the first hint of success, they consolidated early
         | investments and are now building out a productive partnership
         | with that partner.
         | 
         | Doing so, they minimize their risk while keeping their options
         | fully open and getting a decent ROI in the process.
         | 
         | Contrast that with Google, which identified the same
         | opportunity many years ago, declined to partner and insisted on
         | doing everything in house, is also a trillion $ company, and is
         | indeed not getting much of note done so far. Google is failing
         | hard here. They are executing the strategy that Microsoft
         | abandoned after Ballmer that wasn't working at all for them.
         | 
         | Which was to be highly secretive, ignore outside innovation,
         | and keep on betting on results from internal R&D instead, all
         | while repeatedly failing at that. So, Google is now saying that
         | they could have done this or that, better, faster, cooler, etc.
         | Except they didn't and haven't. Could have; would have; should
         | have; doesn't count here.
         | 
         | This might just be the wake up call that Google has needed for
         | a few years. Or not. We'll see. Time to put up or shut up for
         | them. My guess is that they will still be figuring out how to
         | respond to this for some time and are completely paralyzed by
         | current events. The prudent thing for MS would be to not wait
         | for that and move full steam ahead. Opportunity of the decade
         | for them to grab some market share. This announcement is a good
         | sign that they are doing that.
        
         | mirker wrote:
         | Agreed. GitHub and OpenAI are the current branding. Though they
         | did have some twitter bots go bad years ago and maybe they
         | learned from that?
        
         | epups wrote:
         | In theory, Google has an even better spin-off for AI
         | (Deepmind).
         | 
         | I think slowly Google is becoming more and more like IBM, a
         | slow-moving giant that doesn't like risks.
        
           | jacooper wrote:
           | But Google outright bought Deepmind, that's the difference.
           | 
           | And its well known, many news titles mention Deepmind
           | alongside google, if not as "Google ai scientists".
        
       | la64710 wrote:
       | > So, we've partnered with Microsoft to deploy our technology
       | through our API and the Azure OpenAI Service -- enabling
       | enterprise and developers to build on top of GPT, DALL*E, and
       | Codex.
       | 
       | I wonder how much of choice will enterprises or large customers
       | have in deciding what data to not send to Microsoft to train
       | their models. If OpenAI is tightly integrated to all Microsoft
       | products this may be a real concern.
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | Model Governance?
       | 
       | Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like some type of 3rd party
       | Model Governance should be happening. Is it?
        
       | ckastner wrote:
       | > _In pursuit of our mission to ensure advanced AI benefits all
       | of humanity, OpenAI remains a capped-profit company and is
       | governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows us to
       | raise the capital we need to fulfill our mission without
       | sacrificing our core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and
       | the need to prioritize safety._
       | 
       | All this time, I was entirely unaware of this.
        
         | PedroBatista wrote:
         | I get that these things cost a huge amount of money and there's
         | a "lot of opportunity" ( aka make money and influence ) and I
         | don't have many problems with that, except when the signal vs
         | scumbaggery becomes too much.
         | 
         | But what I really hate about this whole OpenAI thing is their
         | chosen path to have their cake and eat it too. Sam Altman seems
         | to be something like the love child of Musk and Zuckerberg and
         | one of the main traits is their lack of honesty.
         | 
         | Satya Nadella is.. Satya Nadella, there's a reason he was
         | chosen to be the CEO of Microsoft, and while I enjoy seeing the
         | Google demi-gods squirm, this whole OpenAI non/capped/profit
         | thing stinks and I really don't see anyone involved capable or
         | having the character to be something better than the current
         | tech oligarchy.
        
         | ProAm wrote:
         | I take this in the same vein as "Patagonia Founder Donates
         | Company to Charity" and view it as a clever shell game.Mostly
         | because Im cynical and have watched SV/VC game way too long to
         | be healthy.
        
           | jrochkind1 wrote:
           | Oh, I think it's way more of a marketing scam than the
           | Patagonia thing, which I think was kind of legit. This one
           | doesn't even _sound_ legit, even if they do exactly what they
           | say... which is almost nothing. they aren 't even really
           | saying they'll do anything different with regard to profit.
           | Patagonia, I think the founder and his heirs really have
           | given up lots of profit they could have had, immediately, to
           | dedicate it to other causes. (I think?) Nobody's given up
           | anything here.
        
             | mxkopy wrote:
             | The Patagonia thing was not legit at all according to Adam
             | Hates Everything:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cu6EbELZ6I
             | 
             | EDIT by "not legit" I mean "not authentic"
        
               | mardifoufs wrote:
               | That's a usually pretty unreliable source. Especially
               | since he doesn't seem to know a lot about fiscal/tax
               | laws, in a country he doesn't even live in.
        
               | ProAm wrote:
               | https://fortune.com/2022/09/16/patagonia-founder-legal-
               | tax-l...
        
               | jefftk wrote:
               | Adam's argument seems to be:
               | 
               | 1. If instead of donating the company he had left it to
               | his kids he would have paid a lot in taxes (2:58)
               | 
               | 2. He donated the voting shares of the company to a 501c4
               | that will remain controlled by his family and is allowed
               | to lobby the government (4:10)
               | 
               | 3. Normally when you make a donation you're giving up
               | influence over what happens after that (4:25).
               | 
               | 4. Other billionaires do other things (rest of video)
               | 
               | But #3 isn't actually true: any of us can donate to a
               | donor-advised fund, which will let us later choose what
               | charity we want the money to go to. This is a good idea
               | if you want to donate but haven't decided where to donate
               | yet, or want to fund opportunities that aren't available
               | yet. They did it through new organizations instead of
               | opening an account at Fidelity, but it's the same thing
               | other than the scale. I wouldn't call your donations "not
               | legit" for using a DAF.
               | 
               | Similarly, Adam sort of implies that #2 was tax-
               | deductible, but donations to a 501c4 aren't. They had to
               | pay tax on those shares based on their fair market value.
               | 
               | Overall, I don't see how this makes the donation no
               | longer "legit" or "authentic"? By making the donation he
               | has given up almost all of the benefit of having that
               | money: he can't spend it for the benefit of himself or
               | his descendants anymore. It can't buy them yachts, fancy
               | houses, etc. Instead, they have to use the money to
               | benefit others, which is why we give a tax break for it.
        
               | mxkopy wrote:
               | All I can say is that once you get to a certain level of
               | wealth, money really is just a means to an end. The fact
               | that they have less doesn't matter if they get their
               | ends, one of which in this case is substantial influence
               | over whatever organization they set up with this money.
        
               | jrochkind1 wrote:
               | Yeah, ok. I mean I agree with his overall point that we
               | shouldn't be like "oh hooray for the kind-hearted
               | billionairres", there is something in it for them in how
               | they have chosen to donate it of course. And they are
               | still pretty darn wealthy already -- his kids probably
               | still won't need to work, from existing already extracted
               | profits.
               | 
               | But that does seem a lot more real than the OpenAI
               | shenanigans, they have actually done _something_ , and
               | they have given up being even more fabulously wealthy
               | than they are already, even if they still have direction
               | over how the money is used, including lobbying -- both
               | for climate change, but ok, let's say also for things
               | that benefit them.
               | 
               | They've still done _something_ , unlike the OpenAI thing
               | which seems like giving up some future hypothetical
               | probably wouldn't happen anyway profits, and making no
               | difference at all for the foreseeable future -- no
               | difference but PR advantage.
        
               | ProAm wrote:
               | > Overall, I don't see how this makes the donation no
               | longer "legit"?
               | 
               | It not necessarily not legit, but he managed to keep a 3B
               | business under family control and bypass paying around
               | 700M in taxes in doing so. So the altruistic messaging
               | that it was donated to save the world is mildly two-
               | faced. There is nothing wrong with it, but the news
               | stories did leave out a few of the details. I only bring
               | this up because the message about OpenAI being structured
               | in such a way doesn't pass the smell test knowing SV/VC
               | and the key players involved. Again I admit Im cynical
               | and can very well be wrong, it also doesn't affect my
               | life so why do I care, but I bring it up for conversation
               | on HN because I feel its fair to discuss it and the
               | possibilities. [1]
               | 
               | [1] https://fortune.com/2022/09/16/patagonia-founder-
               | legal-tax-l...
        
               | jrochkind1 wrote:
               | Thank you, I'm interested in this!
               | 
               | If anyone has a good written text account critical of the
               | Patagonia thing, I'm interested in that too; video isn't
               | my preferred consumption format.
        
           | unicornmama wrote:
           | Right, like all those cryptocurrency companies structured as
           | non-profit foundations in Switzerland.
        
           | gen220 wrote:
           | If you want to develop a healthy counterpoint to that
           | cynicism, you should consider reading more about Patagonia.
           | Speaking as somebody who's generally cynical about these
           | moves as well.
           | 
           | I'm less read-up on OpenAI. It does feel to me like they've
           | diluted the original non-profit/openness mission to the point
           | of it being an interesting historical quirk, rather than an
           | ongoing, guiding focus.
        
             | ProAm wrote:
             | > you should consider reading more about Patagonia
             | 
             | I'd be open to reading more. I think they are largely a
             | good company but feel like this move was more of a tax
             | dodge and to ensure generational wealth than for altruism.
             | But I am open to being wrong about it.
             | 
             | But everyone involved in OpenAI doesn't give me warm and
             | fuzzy feelings at all. I admit it's largely cynicism until
             | I know more. But there isnt enough time in the day to do
             | real research on every subject and topic that comes up on
             | HN and every other discussion board I participate in, so
             | it's difficult to be knowledgeable about everything and
             | still maintain a life. And even if I was read up on OpenAI,
             | I have zero ability to do anything about it, and it likely
             | won't affect my life in a meaningful way as well (and this
             | is true about most everything I read about to not single
             | out OpenAI as not being worth my time). So it is a little
             | pointless or more of a time waste I admit.
        
               | ethanbond wrote:
               | Company with decades of going way, way out of norms to
               | operate as an ethical organization at virtually every
               | level does an additional virtuous task: oh ya that's a
               | tax dodge
        
               | ProAm wrote:
               | It is, Im not saying they are 100% evil like some
               | companies we discuss on HN. But this was a tax dodge. [1]
               | 
               | [1] https://fortune.com/2022/09/16/patagonia-founder-
               | legal-tax-l...
        
               | ethanbond wrote:
               | What do you think that proves? Yes, it does lower your
               | tax bill to give away gains before they're realized.
               | That's because you do not realize your gains. That's
               | called simply "choosing to earn less money."
               | 
               | Tax dodge would imply the _purpose_ is to reduce your tax
               | bill and still see the upside. There 's literally no
               | evidence of that. All the upside he/his family sees will
               | continue to be taxed at the normal rate.
        
               | gen220 wrote:
               | If you're Yvon Chouinard, whose goal is to keep Patagonia
               | going in perpetuity as a funding vehicle for
               | environmental activism, what else could you do?
               | 
               | For the record: he divided up the shares into voting and
               | non-voting. He "donated" the dividend-earning shares into
               | a 501c4 foundation whose mission is to invest in grass-
               | roots environmental activism, and "donated" the voting-
               | power shares into a separate trust, whose objectives are
               | to ensure that Patagonia continues on the path he gave as
               | an example for the previous decades and to hold the 501c4
               | accountable.
               | 
               | The boards of these organizations are composed of the
               | people whom he most trusts to fulfill his vision, a group
               | of people that includes his children.
               | 
               | Knowing the full context of their lives, it's hard to see
               | it as anything other than one of the more simple
               | solutions to a complicated problem.
        
         | Closi wrote:
         | The cap is 100x, so assuming Microsoft is investing billions in
         | a current valuation of $29 billion as rumoured, the cap will
         | only really come into place once OpenAI becomes the most
         | valuable company in the world.
        
           | alkjsdlkjasd wrote:
           | Article about it here:
           | https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/openai-shifts-from-
           | nonprof...
           | 
           | > Profits emerging from the LP in excess of the 100x
           | multiplier go to the nonprofit, which will use it to run
           | educational programs and advocacy work.
           | 
           | > The board [of the non-profit] is limited to a minority of
           | financially interested parties, and only non-interested
           | members can vote on "decisions where the interests of limited
           | partners and OpenAI Nonprofit's mission may conflict"
        
           | lonelyasacloud wrote:
           | Google apparently has a market cap of around $1.200 Trillion
           | based [0] largely on (for 2021) revenue of 256.7 billion U.S.
           | dollars, of which 209.49 billion U.S. dollars came from
           | advertising [1]. It's apparently fourth on the list of
           | valuable companies [4]
           | 
           | If OpenAI takes a good chunk of Google's ad revenues then it
           | doesn't seem that fanciful that it'll be up toward the top of
           | market caps.
           | 
           | [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/
           | [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-
           | annual-gl... [2] https://businessplus.ie/news/most-valuable-
           | companies/
        
             | tyre wrote:
             | How would OpenAI take a majority of AdWords inventory?
             | Maybe it could write the ads but you're paying for
             | placement.
        
               | llampx wrote:
               | Placement on what? Search results that no one is using
               | anymore?
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | > If OpenAI takes a good chunk of Google's ad revenues then
             | it doesn't seem that fanciful that it'll be up toward the
             | top of market caps.
             | 
             | OpenAI taking a large chunk of Google's ad revenue seems
             | fanciful to me
        
               | lonelyasacloud wrote:
               | Google's CEO signaling a code red and inviting the
               | founders back is not about Chrome's market share.
        
               | napier wrote:
               | More likely they bork a large chunk of Google's ad
               | revenue by making information search and retrieval usable
               | again under a UBI rationing to fast but not cheap tiered
               | freemium model. That's before you consider information
               | generation, process management greasing and problem
               | solving potential use cases.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | They have no moat and people don't like to wait for
               | results.
               | 
               | People like ad subsidized things, that is why they have
               | ads rather than people paying for things.
        
           | drexlspivey wrote:
           | How does this cap work in practice? If I bought shares at $1
           | and someone wants to buy them from me at $200 what happens?
        
             | dorkwood wrote:
             | They keep it, but it goes to the non-profit arm of their
             | business.
             | 
             | "But any returns beyond that amount... are owned by the
             | original OpenAI Nonprofit entity."
             | 
             | https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
        
               | drexlspivey wrote:
               | > The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and
               | employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our
               | mission
               | 
               | Sorry I still don't get it. If a private equity investor
               | has shares and another investor wants to buy them off of
               | him at 200x they can do that right? Are they obliged to
               | give any excess returns to the non profit? Can't they
               | just sell the shares at 50x and then buy them back
               | (perhaps through some other entity) to get around that
               | trivially?
               | 
               | Or does this refer to return from dividents?
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | My guess is it likely has to do with dividends.
               | 
               | But if your returns from the stocks are capped at 100x
               | your share value, an efficient market would mean you
               | share value never grows 200x.
        
               | Throwaway045814 wrote:
               | It's not just about that. Perhaps there are benefits in
               | having control of the company that make the shares more
               | valuable than just the profit would make it out to be.
               | Perhaps there's prestige in owning these shares.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | tnel77 wrote:
             | Since OpenAI isn't publicly traded, I don't think it's an
             | issue.
             | 
             | If they were to go public, rather than being purchased by
             | Microsoft, I'd guess that this cap would go away. Wall
             | Street isn't know for caring about poor people.
        
             | charcircuit wrote:
             | >Any excess returns go to OpenAI Nonprofit.
             | 
             | https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
        
           | brookst wrote:
           | Market cap is not a measure of past profits.
        
             | RegW wrote:
             | or future?
        
           | hsavit1 wrote:
           | so pretty much another marketing stunt / scam
        
           | timf34 wrote:
           | 100x on profits* just for clarity
        
           | ckastner wrote:
           | It must have been in the first round [1], but leaves open the
           | question of whether this is still the case:
           | 
           | > _Returns for our first round of investors are capped at
           | 100x their investment (commensurate with the risks in front
           | of us), and we expect this multiple to be lower for future
           | rounds as we make further progress._
           | 
           | [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
        
             | roflyear wrote:
             | Isn't this a wild cap? I'm not an expert but I am aware of
             | private deals that are less than 10x for similar
             | structures.
        
               | Kuinox wrote:
               | If they reach AGI, or more simply replace a chunk of
               | workers with AIs, this isn't far fetched to reach these
               | numbers.
        
               | belter wrote:
               | Oh please no...not the Tesla AutoPilot story again.
               | 
               | These are basic language models easy to reproduce where
               | the only barrier to entry is the massive computational
               | capacity required. What is OpenAI doing that Google and
               | others can't reproduce?
        
               | mattnewton wrote:
               | Apparently shipping without fear - google had a lot of
               | the fundamental research happen at google brain and
               | developed a LLM to rival gpt and a generative model that
               | looks better than DAL-E in papers, but decided to show no
               | one and keep them in house because they haven't figured
               | out a business around them. Or something, maybe it's fear
               | around brand damage, I don't know what is keeping them
               | from productionizing the tech. As soon as someone does
               | figure out a business consumers are okay with they'll
               | probably follow with ridiculous compute capacity and
               | engineering resources, but right now they are just losing
               | the narrative war because they won't ship anything they
               | have been working on.
        
               | napier wrote:
               | Except unlike self driving cars they're repeatedly
               | delivering desirable, interesting, and increasingly mind-
               | blowing things that they weren't designed to do that
               | surprise everyone including their makers i.e zero shot
               | generalised task performance. Public awareness
               | propagation of what unfiltered large models beyond a
               | certain size and quality are capable of when properly
               | prompted is obscured in part by the RLHF-jacketed
               | restrictions limiting models like ChatGPT. There's
               | relatively little hype around the coolest things LLMs can
               | already achieve and even less than a minute fraction of
               | surface potential has so far been scratched.
        
               | roflyear wrote:
               | I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what I
               | meant. I meant that it is really high for a business that
               | is marketing themselves as non-profit. I have seen
               | similar structures that are like 10x profit caps, which
               | seems reasonable. 100x is a lot of ceiling.
        
               | logicchains wrote:
               | If they reach AGI, the AGI isn't necessarily going to be
               | happy to work for free.
        
               | lma21 wrote:
               | Do you think AGI will care about wealth at all (whenever
               | this happens)?
        
               | flir wrote:
               | Wealth buys compute cycles (also paperclips).
        
               | freejazz wrote:
               | why wouldn't it?
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Wealth isn't the same thing to all people, wealth as
               | humans define it isn't necessarily going to be what a
               | superintelligence values.
               | 
               | The speed difference between transistors and synapses is
               | the difference between marathon runners and continental
               | drift; why would an ASI care more about dollars or
               | statues or shares or apartments any more than we care
               | about changes to individual peaks in the mid-Atlantic
               | ridge or how much sand covers those in the Sahara?
        
               | freejazz wrote:
               | Wealth doesn't have to be the same thing for everyone for
               | someone to care about. That's evident already because
               | some people care about wealth and others don't.
               | 
               | What does the speed difference of transistors have to do
               | with anything? Transistors pale in comparison to the
               | interconnection density of synapses, yet it has nothing
               | to do with wealth either...
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Everything you and I consider value is a fixed background
               | from the point of view of a mind whose sole difference
               | from ours is the speedup.
               | 
               | I only see them valuing that if they're also extremely
               | neophobic in a way that, for example, would look like a
               | human thinking that "fire" and "talking" are dangerously
               | modern.
               | 
               | > Transistors pale in comparison to the interconnection
               | density of synapses
               | 
               | Not so. Transistor are also smaller than synapses by
               | about the degree to which marathon runners are smaller
               | than hills.
               | 
               | Even allowing extra space for interconnections and
               | cheating in favour of biology by assuming an M1 chip is a
               | full millimetre thick rather than just however many
               | nanometers it is for the transistors alone, it's still a
               | better volumetric density than us.
               | 
               | (Sucks for power and cost relative to us when used to
               | mimic brains, but that's why it hasn't _already_ taken
               | over).
        
               | knodi123 wrote:
               | depends on how it's grown. If it's a black box that keeps
               | improving but not by any means the developer understands,
               | then maybe so. If we manage to decode the concepts of
               | motivation as pertains to this hypothetical AGI, and are
               | in control of it, then maybe no.
               | 
               | There's nothing that says a mind needs an ego is an
               | essential element, or an id, or any of the other parts of
               | a human mind. That's just how our brains evolved, living
               | in a society over millions of years.
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | Depends on how opaque the box that holds it is. If we
               | feed the AGI digital heroin and methamphetamine, it'd be
               | controllable like actual humans are with those.Or I've
               | been watching too much scifi lately.
        
               | gnramires wrote:
               | This is an interesting point. Motivation (and
               | consciousness) is a complex topic, but for example we can
               | see that drugs are essentially spurious (not 'desired' in
               | a sense) motivators. They are a kind of reward given for
               | no particular activity, that can become highly addictive
               | (because in a way it seems we are programmed to seek
               | rewards).
               | 
               | Disclaimer: Somewhat speculative.
               | 
               | I don't think aligning the motivation of an AGI, for
               | example, with the tasks that are useful for us (and for
               | them as well) is unethical. Humans basically have this as
               | well -- we like working (to an extent, or at least we
               | like being productive/useful), we seek things like food
               | and sex (because they're important for our survival). It
               | seems alright to make AIs like their work as well. I
               | think depending on the AI, it also seems fair to give
               | them a fair share of self-determination so they can not
               | only serve our interests (ideally, the interest of all
               | being) but safeguard their own wellbeing, as systems with
               | varying amounts of consciousness. This is little touched
               | upon (I guess Phillip K Dick was a pioneer in the
               | wellbeing of non-humans with 'Do Androids Dream of
               | Electric Sheep'?), even in fiction. The goal should be to
               | ensure a good existence for everyone :)
        
               | Keyframe wrote:
               | This company will not reach AGI. Let's be real there for
               | a moment. This company doesn't even have a decent shot at
               | Google's lunch if Google comes to its senses soon, which
               | it will.
        
               | yellow_postit wrote:
               | _startup has no shot once incumbent comes to their
               | senses_ is a claim that I think HackerNews of all places
               | would be cautious in believing too fully.
               | 
               | Is it likely Google or others with large Research wings
               | can compete with OpenAI? Very probably so, but I'm
               | assigning a non trivial risk that the proverbial emperor
               | has no clothes and incumbents like Google cannot
               | effectively respond to OpenAI given the unique
               | constraints of being a large conglomerate.
               | 
               | Regardless, time will provide the answer it seems in a
               | couple of months.
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | Yeah, especially since there's a Stripe Amazon
               | partnership piece on the front page right now, and Amazon
               | Pay's right there.
        
               | Keyframe wrote:
               | You _do_ understand everything we've seen from OpenAI
               | Google already showed us they have? Not to mention OG
               | research and being the primary r&d force behind vast
               | majority of AI you're seeing. They haven't put it in
               | hands of users as directly yet though, reasons to be
               | speculated upon.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | Firmwarrior wrote:
               | Sounds a lot like Xerox and GUIs, Microsoft and Web 2.0,
               | Microsoft and smartphones, etc
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | I must say that both of your and parent's points are very
               | enlightening.
               | 
               | Yours in that from it follows, that there's still quite a
               | bit of room to get ahead of OpenAI for smaller players.
               | 
               | Parent's in that in order to achieve above one can just
               | leverage the public papers produced by bigger research
               | labs.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Depends on the timescale.
               | 
               | I have the feeling that smaller players are about as
               | likely to get past GPT-n family in the next 2-3 years as
               | I am to turn a Farnsworth Fusor into a useful power
               | source.
               | 
               | Major technical challenges that might be solvable by a
               | lone wolf, in the former case to reduce the data/training
               | requirements and in the latter to stop ions wastefully
               | hitting a grid.
               | 
               | But in 10 years the costs should be down about 99%, which
               | turns the AI training costs from "major investment by
               | mega corp or super-rich" into "lottery winner might buy
               | one".
        
               | robotresearcher wrote:
               | This tech is capital-intensive even when you know how to
               | do it.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | I heard estimates in tens of $M. That's rather available.
        
               | alexeichemenda wrote:
               | 100x is a great return even for YC standards, but the
               | best returns that business angels, VCs and YC have had is
               | in the order of magnitude of 10000x (yes, ten thousand).
               | So capping at 100x still makes it attractive for
               | investors, yet leaves a lot of potential capital for the
               | non-profit.
               | 
               | As one example, Sequoia invested in Airbnb at $0.01 per
               | share, and Airbnb's current stock price is $102, almost
               | exactly 10000x return. This happens more often that you
               | think if you're not in the early stage & top VC world.
        
               | roflyear wrote:
               | When you invest in a company with this structure you're
               | not doing it to make money, you're doing it b/c you
               | believe in the product, that's why those structures
               | exist, from my understanding.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | if you believe in the product so much, just donate the
               | money.
               | 
               | what you are saying is not true.
        
               | roflyear wrote:
               | I can only speak to what I'm familiar with, in my
               | experience this has been the case. In my experience these
               | individuals do donate to charity, but OpenAI is not a
               | charity.
        
               | CBarkleyU wrote:
               | > but OpenAI is not a charity.
               | 
               | Something doesnt have to be a charity to be donated money
               | towards. The question was: Why aren't they donating the
               | money? The answer is: Because the want to make money.
               | 
               | Just FYI: OpenAI tried going the non-profit route, it
               | didnt work, because suprise, suprise, in the grand scheme
               | of VC things nobody wants to donate 10 billion dollars to
               | anything.
        
               | tomp wrote:
               | _> but the best returns that business angels, VCs and YC
               | have had is in the order of magnitude of 10000x_
               | 
               | Aren't those equity returns? i.e. when you sell (your
               | shares of) the company to the public... the reason people
               | still value the company is discounted _future_ returns.
               | 
               | So if you want to generate such returns with _cash_ (i.e.
               | profit) it can take quite a bit longer.
        
               | diogopublio wrote:
               | Maybe that is a bit too much
               | 
               | $0.01 per mean share would mean 6.5M USD valuation
               | (current mkt cap is 65Bn). Accounting for dilution in
               | investment rounds, let's say 4 x 20% dilution, that is
               | around 52% penalty in valuation. Roughly, their entering
               | price would be around 3-4M USD valuation. I am not saying
               | in any way that this is a low return also, I may be wrong
               | on my calculation, please, be free to correct me! ; )
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _dilution in investment rounds_
               | 
               | Using share prices side steps dilution, which is a
               | problem when one linearly scales valuation increases to
               | wealth gains.
        
               | WastingMyTime89 wrote:
               | Yes, it's pure marketing and totally disingenuous. It's
               | like being called OpenAI while nothing is open. It's
               | interesting research done by terrible people.
        
               | jefftk wrote:
               | > being called OpenAI while nothing is open
               | 
               | https://github.com/openai/whisper is open
        
               | thethimble wrote:
               | These "terrible people" seem to have catapulted the world
               | into a generative AI world.
               | 
               | They genuinely believe they will build AGI and therefore
               | becoming the world's most valuable company is a natural
               | consequence.
               | 
               | Whether this is possible/probable is a different story,
               | but I think a capped profit structure makes logical sense
               | for the company that is aiming to create AGI. Would you
               | want this technology instead in the hands of a for profit
               | company?
        
               | WastingMyTime89 wrote:
               | It is a for profit company in everything but name. That's
               | my main complain. It has Musk, Thiel and Livingston
               | amongst its initial investors, all known as the greatest
               | philantropists of our time. /s
               | 
               | I don't understand why they put this thin veneer on top
               | of what they are doing. Maybe Thiel was burnt with the
               | bad press surrounding Palantir and this is preventive
               | damage control.
        
               | awestroke wrote:
               | It's literally a nonprofit
        
               | ivalm wrote:
               | It is not literally a non-profit. As far as legally
               | recognized organizations it is a limited partnership with
               | a now minority ownership held by a non-profit.
        
               | eternalban wrote:
               | That means absolutely nothing to billionaire control
               | freaks.
               | 
               | If OpenAI's products become the next Googlie thing (and
               | here I was worried about Cloudflare <smack head>) then
               | these are the future _influencers_. This is society
               | mainlined on TikTok levels of manipulation.
               | 
               | Surely you have adapted to ChatGPT's requirements for
               | interacting, have you not? There is a name for this:
               | _social engineering_.
        
               | adastra22 wrote:
               | No, it is profit-capped. And even then only on the same
               | sense that the US government is debt-limited.
        
               | Der_Einzige wrote:
               | Huggingface and maybe Stability catapulted us into that
               | world. Not OpenAI
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Normal people[0] don't mention huggingface, they talk
               | about Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT by name,
               | or the ideas generically.
               | 
               | [0] Well, non-programmers at least: webcomic
               | creators[1][2][3], news anchors[4], opinion piece
               | columnist[5], and stand-up comedians[6]. Programmers also
               | know about GitHub Copilot.
               | 
               | [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mountweazel
               | 
               | [2]
               | https://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=1226
               | 
               | [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/10b
               | j8jm/cl...
               | 
               | [4] https://youtu.be/GYeJC31JcM0
               | 
               | [5] https://mobile.twitter.com/CraigGrannell/status/16146
               | 0352687...
               | 
               | [6] Russell Howard, but I can't find the clip on youtube
        
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