[HN Gopher] OpenAI acquires Global Illumination
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OpenAI acquires Global Illumination
Author : davidbarker
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-08-16 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| liminal wrote:
| Reinforcement learning with better graphics?
| gtwomd wrote:
| I guess no one else is allowed to have indirect lighting anymore
| (/s)
|
| As someone not well versed in how startups work, why do they need
| to acquire the entire company to have the team work for them, as
| opposed to negotiating with the employees individually? Is it
| essentially a lump sum payment to stop what they were currently
| working on.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| a quick overview of the startup economy
|
| 1) have an idea, negotiate seed funding. Someone will give you
| a bunch of money to make an MVP. the "angel" or "seeder" will
| exchange money for a percentage of the company. They will have
| a say in how its run
|
| 2) grow the company according to the metrics that make you look
| valuable (market share is normally the common one)
|
| 3) growing costs money, so raise a "series a" same deal as
| before, either seeder/angels are bought out, or their share of
| the company is diluted in exchange for more monoey from the
| funders, typically a VC.
|
| 4) repeat until either bankrupt, IPO, Profitable, or boughtout.
|
| Now. As an early employee, you are given shares in the company.
| Typically <1%. the more rounds you have, the more diluted that
| percentage gets.
|
| when the company is bought out, your shares are exchanged for a
| price. however as you didn't put the money in, you are a way
| down the pecking order for getting the cash. Not only this, but
| a "buyout" price is rarely the headline price. For example
| CTRL-Labs[1] was "bought out" for $500 mill. However thats not
| the price they paid for the company. thats the price paid for
| the company and the "golden handcuffs" to keep employees.
|
| of that 500mill some of is say <75m will go to physically buy
| the company, the rest will go towards golden handcuffs to keep
| the employees working. After all, if you give most of the
| company >$2m upfront, they'll say "work for facebook? fuck
| that, I'm retiring"
|
| So to combat that, you'll get your 0.0001% of $75m, then
| offered a contract with the new company that will give you
| shares that will be released to you gradually after a certain
| cool off period, say one year (Fb and google give you 6.25%
| every 3 months.) That means that to get your $2m you need to
| work for the new company for four years.
|
| [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquired-brain-
| comp...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > As someone not well versed in how startups work, why do they
| need to acquire the entire company to have the team work for
| them, as opposed to negotiating with the employees
| individually?
|
| Because otherwise, the team would have the option of continuing
| their current employment.
|
| Take away the alternative they are demonstrably already
| choosing over you, and you have a better chance of getting and
| keeping them.
| proser wrote:
| It also usually triggers a liquidity event, so the team gets
| paid (or their equity gets transferred to OpenAI) in a way
| that provides a bit of a bonus and incentive to stick around.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Just dropping this here since it looks like a lot of people
| haven't heard of it.
|
| Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16291
| minimaxir wrote:
| Global Illumination appears to have been working on a browser-
| based multiplayer Minecraft clone (https://www.biomes.gg/), not
| anything explicitly related to AI content generation.
|
| Odd acquisition choice unless OpenAI is going to do an unexpected
| pivot.
| bozhark wrote:
| Roblox for AI
| peterhunt wrote:
| I worked with these guys a long time ago at FB.
|
| Their founder and CEO created The Algorithm at Instagram. Rest
| of the team is super strong too. Makes a lot of sense for
| OpenAI to acquire a team at the intersection of AI and consumer
| products.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think they have to decide if they want to be an API
| provider or a product-maker.
|
| Businesses don't tend to do well when they directly compete
| with their clients.
|
| At the very least spin one off into a subsidiary whose
| affiliation isn't widely known.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| > I think they have to decide if they want to be an API
| provider or a product-maker. > Businesses don't tend to do
| well when they directly compete with their clients.
|
| Isn't this what MSFT and GOOG do?
| falcor84 wrote:
| >Businesses don't tend to do well when they directly
| compete with their clients.
|
| True in general, but then we have Amazon.
| londons_explore wrote:
| People like Walmart still refuse to let any customer data
| near AWS.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| you wrote people. did you mean corporations?
|
| don't let those darn things trick you into thinking they
| are people. legally it gets murky, but they aren't
| people. it is all just a ploy for emotional connection
| for the sake of taking advantage of you.
|
| like cats.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 100% Yep. I like OpenAI but I think their peril will be due
| to lack of vision more than anything else. Other players
| are catching up. IMHO they should stick to providing AI
| infrastructure.
|
| That being said, considering Microsoft's investment, the
| most likely outcome is that OpenAI will move into the
| consumer business while being the research arm for Azure.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Seems pretty obvious they decided to be a product maker.
| This is them doubling down.
|
| They started out obviously doing API stuff. chatGPT was
| some sort of proof-of-concept or whatever but once it went
| viral, the obvious pivot is to be a product maker. The
| margins on ChatGPT+ is way better than an API, as every
| ChatGPT clone will tell you. A viral product is really hard
| to make, never mind make and throw away to focus on lower
| margin corporate customers.
|
| They seem to have a great vision now - make a good product
| (WIP, but rapidly iterating), and sell the underlying
| models to Microsoft to offer as an API for the residual
| value they can't capture directly. This should make it
| clear that if you're selling a Chatbot off of their APIs,
| they're planning to compete with you.
| burcs wrote:
| There was that Sims post the other day from a16z as well. Seems
| like a plausible next area for them to take on.
|
| Was it them or someone else who trained their bots on Dota a
| few years back?
| minimaxir wrote:
| It was them. https://openai.com/research/openai-five
|
| They've since abandoned _all_ their reinforcement learning
| projects. (aside from RLHF for training ChatGPT)
| burcs wrote:
| Thanks for the link!
|
| That's a shame, I was really impressed with their research
| in that space.
| uoaei wrote:
| Did they make a public announcement to that effect? Or do
| you have insider knowledge?
| minimaxir wrote:
| A co-founder announced they disbanded their robotics team
| a couple years ago:
| https://venturebeat.com/business/openai-disbands-its-
| robotic...
|
| That was the same time they depreciated OpenAI Gym:
| https://github.com/openai/gym
| paxys wrote:
| Their statement is pretty clear about what they see as the
| value add:
|
| > OpenAI has acquired the team at Global Illumination, a
| company founded by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey
| Flynn. The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on our core
| products including ChatGPT. Global Illumination is a company
| that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools,
| infrastructure, and digital experiences. The team previously
| designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook
| and have also made significant contributions at YouTube,
| Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies. We're
| very excited for the impact they'll have here at OpenAI.
|
| Seems like a very standard acquihire. There's no indication
| that any of Global Illumination's projects will continue, or
| that OpenAI will get into the gaming business.
| echelon wrote:
| > Seems like a very standard acquihire. There's no indication
| that any of Global Illumination's projects will continue, or
| that OpenAI will get into the gaming business.
|
| Deploying AI agents to 3D worlds seems like a huge potential
| market. Not just for gaming, but as a test bed for real world
| 3D SLAM.
|
| Rendering scenes in 3D with AI seems like another huge
| potential market, at the intersection of movies and gaming.
|
| This is both at once. I think it'd be a mistake to put them
| to work on ChatGPT.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I saw a demo of a Skyrim mod on Youtube [1], where they
| wired the dialog screen with NPCs in the town of Windhelm
| up with the OpenAI API.
|
| Each character had all their Bethesda-written dialog fed to
| the LLM as a starting prompt, so each one communicated with
| the player within the bounds of their authored identity,
| and knew what that character was written to know.
|
| The human player used freeform in-game text-to-LLM as input
| to talk to the people in the town square. The latency was
| large, but not more than a few seconds.
|
| He was able to walk up to someone and say things like
| "Where do you live? Who is your father?" .... latency pause
| ... "Oh me? I live in the Cloud District. It's where all of
| us Battleborn clan live, of course!"
|
| The real kicker of this demo was that they passed the LLM-
| generated response dialog in to a deep-fake model trained
| on each character's original voice actors (since the corpus
| in Skyrim is vast, this ended up quite accurate).
|
| All of this was a major generational shift for gaming as a
| whole. I had just witnessed the first time a video game
| player could actually TALK to an NPC, in a fully
| unstructured and unscripted fashion, while each character
| remained as in-character as the original game's authors
| intended.
|
| So maybe this purchase by OpenAI is about something like
| that. Building NPCs for Biomes.gg that you can actually
| talk to.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6sVWEu9HWU
| samstave wrote:
| yEAH THIS IS A 5 YEAR PLAY.
|
| They are going to put AI to voxel 3d spatial dev...
| "EnvironGPT" '3DGPT'
| moralestapia wrote:
| ???
|
| Sorry, I don't see any of that written there, not "pretty
| clear" to me.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Scroll down.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Scroll down to where? It's a 4 line comment.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Scroll down on the post, not the comments, and you'll see
| where the parent pulled their quote from, which you said
| you "don't see any of that written there," well, it's
| written there.
| samstave wrote:
| Open AI voxel-based AI dynamic navigable 3d environs.
| serjester wrote:
| They are devoting enormous resources to studying LLM safety -
| my assumption is they're trying to push the limits of what's
| possible with autonomous agents before someone else does.
|
| If you can build a bot to beat an open world game as complex as
| Minecraft, you're pretty close to automating an enormous amount
| of jobs and potentially doing some destructive stuff. This
| seems like an aquihire to kickstart that initiative.
|
| Full disclosure this is a complete assumption, could just as
| well be on the whims of Sama. I'm skeptical of the other
| answers here - OpenAI is perfectly capable of hiring some of
| the best PM's in the world without having to buy a company.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Part of Minecraft is gathering resources, building weapons,
| and out-manoeuvering and killing enemies. Forget jobs, those
| implications keep me up.
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| seems like they gunning for deepmind rl based ideas.
| uoaei wrote:
| People have been training ML to play Minecraft via text
| commands for a while. Having access to the guts of a clone
| makes perfect sense given their past and present projects.
| 93po wrote:
| I'd be really curious how this training works. Is it done on
| a real-time minecraft application, or did they build a custom
| game engine that mimics minecraft but without any movement
| delay and without any graphics so the speed of training could
| be thousands of times faster?
| gaudystead wrote:
| Just speculating here but... More than just _playing_ a game,
| I could see OpenAI wanting to go after the 3D assets market
| by letting players generate levels, items, and perhaps even
| NPCs, simply by describing them. It might be easier to
| generate voxel-based assets first though, which would make
| Minecraft-esque games a logical first target (perhaps just
| behind 2D games, but I suspect the market isn't as big
| there).
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Maybe...if they didn't already have direct access to the
| original via Microsoft.
| uoaei wrote:
| That's a good point. Looks like there's more to the story
| in the announcement.
| rvnx wrote:
| "Conspiracy" theory:
|
| Couldn't it be the opposite ?
|
| Let's imagine, that Microsoft, one of the main investor
| of OpenAI, wants to get rid of a solid open-source
| Minecraft clone before it gets popular ?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPHEtewFm3M
|
| Not saying it's true, but that's totally reasonable to
| spend xxM USD if you have to defend your multi-billion
| game license.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I would totally buy this. This way Microsoft doesn't look
| bad in an era where big tech is coming under scrutiny for
| acquisitions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The market is littered with clones of minecraft and has
| been since before it was even done being made. None of
| them have even been remotely a threat to Minecraft. Turns
| out you need way more than just a bunch of blocks.
| rvnx wrote:
| If it is the people but not the company that were interesting,
| OpenAI could make an offer to each of the persons working
| there.
|
| So obviously yes it's an odd decision to buy an open-source
| MMORPG, but there are tons of possibilities.
|
| Plenty of times, you can see large companies buying non-sense,
| or companies at outrageous price (we just don't know the price
| in the case here).
|
| Sometimes even to fire the people behind, and throw away the
| product.
|
| It can be for many reasons:
|
| - Either they really have a solid business use which justifies
| the acquisition
|
| or
|
| - Perhaps they have a common investor/VC, and that investor is
| influent enough in OpenAI to "convince" the board to buy the
| company.
|
| or
|
| - Some investors give a kickback on the acquisition (I don't
| think so)
|
| or
|
| - Microsoft wanted to early kill a competitor to Minecraft.
|
| etc.
|
| Probably it'll be difficult to know.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Well a metaverse or character.ai like product is an obvious
| application.
| kitanata wrote:
| [flagged]
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