[HN Gopher] Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
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Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
Author : JimDabell
Score : 1688 points
Date : 2023-11-20 07:56 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| lannisterstark wrote:
| Listen.
|
| I was confused when the whole thing was going down.
|
| I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and
| maybe resign" thing was going down.
|
| I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the
| CEO.
|
| ...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just
| join Microsoft" as an actual alternative.
|
| I remain, confused.
| Maxion wrote:
| > I remain, confused.
|
| I think everyone is confused.
| quotemstr wrote:
| By joining Microsoft, they retain access to all the data,
| weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI. They don't have
| to start from scratch and ramp up. They can start up right
| where they left off.
| alvis wrote:
| Not sure about the IP, but the team can get whatever they
| have access in the past. It certainly speed up the restart
| process
| narag wrote:
| Not only that, Microsoft in practice is OpenAI's customer. So
| somehow OpenAI will be working for them.
| xiwenc wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Microsoft funding OpenAI doesn't grant
| them right to just grab intellectual properties.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Microsoft's deal with OpenAI grants Microsoft access to
| OpenAI's technology --- at least until AGI arrives
| mullingitover wrote:
| This is like a spacecraft research nonprofit working on
| faster than light travel promising Boeing 100% of the
| rights to any of their technology that's sub-light speed.
| I give even odds that they'll never achieve "AGI," or
| when it happens it'll be an incremental gain made by
| simply wiring existing technologies together that'll be
| obvious to any engineer competent in the field and thus
| easily duplicated.
| bagels wrote:
| How is it decided that "AGI" has arrived?
| quotemstr wrote:
| The OpenAI nonprofit board does, AIUI. That means OpenAI
| can, in theory, cut off everything from this day forward
| (by declaring GPT-5 or whatever as "AGI"), but they can't
| cut off access to GPT-4.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Microsoft also doesn't give many GPUs to internal
| researchers so this has a long way to run yet.
|
| Wouldn't surprise me if Sam and Greg are back on the
| startup path by week end.
|
| This just seems like PR to give MS a way to paper things
| over after such an abrupt firing.
| alsodumb wrote:
| What makes you think it wouldn't change after Sam and
| Greg join the team? AFAIK the reason Microsoft scaled
| down their research division (including GPUs) was because
| they were no where close to OpenAI despite years of
| investment.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Not true MSFT has never given good GPUs hence why they
| never published any SOTA challenging models
| quotemstr wrote:
| Sam is coming on as the CEO of a whole new group. This is
| like Cruise. Very exciting.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Weights are not intellectual property.
| siva7 wrote:
| It does except for the AGI. That was part of the multi-
| billion deal with Microsoft.
| ascorbic wrote:
| I don't know the full details, but their licence is clearly
| quite broad, as well as being exclusive and irrevocable.
| frabcus wrote:
| Does the Microsoft deal let Microsoft continue training from
| e.g. the GPT-4 weights?
|
| I guess at least it gives them access to the OpenAI models to
| use internally, which they kinda need as their ways of
| working (Greg especially) will be highly dependent on having
| them now.
| alsodumb wrote:
| Your comment got me thinking, it's not just all the current
| access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had
| at OpenAI, it's also everything that will come out of OpenAI
| in the future.
|
| Remember, Microsoft has an exclusive license to all models
| that come out of OpenAI until they reach the pre-agreed
| income threshold, which given the current trajectory of
| OpenAI, will not happen anytime soon.
| clhodapp wrote:
| I wonder if the OpenAI board will shut down the for-profit
| to avoid handing the tech to Microsoft now...
| quotemstr wrote:
| I wouldn't put it past them. There's never in history
| been as large and as wilful destruction of value as what
| we saw this weekend. The lawsuits will be fascinating.
| karmasimida wrote:
| And for the OpenAI employees, they can just switch the badge in
| a blink second, it almost feel like a no-brainer to many.
|
| I think Sam just took the easier route to rebuild OpenAI within
| MSFT.
|
| Now the trouble comes to the SV VCs they now will be furious.
| smooc wrote:
| He wasn't the guy who built it, he was the guy who got things
| funded. Let's see how many of the core OpenAI people join.
| I.e. the ones that weren't (just) there for the money / post
| ChatGPT.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Do OpenAI staff want to work for Microsoft?
| tdeck wrote:
| And then they get to say one of the most depressing sentences
| in an engineer's lexicon: "It's almost like we're a startup
| within a big company!"
| karmasimida wrote:
| I actually don't think OpenAI being a startup is beneficial
| for them at this moment.
|
| OpenAI already has a very clear business model, that is
| selling completion/chat/agent API based on their model.
| What they need is to productize it.
|
| Their roadmap is GPT4/5/6/7
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Imagine thinking that top AI researchers are going to start
| choosing to work for MSFT after years of them being second
| class citizens there.
|
| Like if they don't like OpenAI they can go to 10 other places
| that pay more and treat researchers better than MSFT
| karmasimida wrote:
| MSFT isn't as much as an underdog you would think.
|
| MSRA invented ResNet. MSFT also contributed DeepSpeed to
| the open source, which is critical in OSS LLM scene.
|
| It is now more of just a branding thing. It will become the
| new cool again.
|
| And OpenAI? After this week, how would the people view
| them? Definitely not envious or prestige.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Did Sam build OpenAI in the first place?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Yes? Each person OpenAI hired is passed through Sam.
|
| Or you think Ilya wrote every line of code of GPT4?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I am confused why everyone is freaking out about some business
| person being let go from a tech shop.
| abhinavk wrote:
| The business person is a SV darling. And previously the
| President of YCombinator.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Every once in a while, and I actually do not care much about
| soccer, I read comment sections in a German newspaper about
| _soccer_ (please don 't ask why, I have actually no clue
| myseld). And there, you basically have the same discussion:
| that player / trainer is great / sucks / rightfully /
| wrongfully lost his job, that club will never ever win again
| without person A...
|
| It is quite intrigueing to see tge same fan / cheerleading
| going on when it comes to _comapnies_ and _managers_. But
| then everything is entertainment by now...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Sam joining MS was actually one of the theories I read in the
| initial, or one of the first, threads about his ouster. 10
| billion dollar seems like a pretty steep recruiting cost, but
| MS knows what they are doing, right? Right?
| abhinavk wrote:
| What Sam is going to bring to MS? Recruits? MS already has
| all the money and infra they need.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And still they are hiring him. Different take: You are a
| CEO who just spend 10 billion to bevome a minority
| shareholder in the latest, hotest tech start up the world
| has ever seen. This start-up is controlled by a non-profit
| so. And then this non-profit kicks out the poster child of
| the whole industry, and you cannot do a thing about it.
| Well, you have to answer to a board as well. And what do
| you think that board will ask you about this whole affaire?
| tempusalaria wrote:
| It's called damage control. Classic corporate playbook to
| control the narrative. Satya and the MSFT team are
| geniuses in that respect.
|
| Sam will leave soon enough to start his own thing, but in
| the meantime there is no narrative problem for MSFT to
| deal with
| b800h wrote:
| This isn't even remotely confusing now.
|
| This move makes it exactly clear what was going on. Microsoft
| is doing to AI what they tried to do to Internet browsers back
| in the day. I wonder if they'd have been successful if they'd
| managed to buy the board of Netscape.
|
| I suspect it's rather possible that there will be an ungodly-
| massive lawsuit in the offing.
| vatueil wrote:
| All the claims about how OpenAI's board desperately wanted
| Altman back were based on leaks from "people close to Altman"
| which the press uncritically lapped up.
|
| If it wasn't clear before, it should be clear in hindsight that
| the board's desire to welcome Altman back was, at best,
| overstated.
|
| The leaks were probably an attempt to pressure the board or,
| failing that, undermine OpenAI.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| The whole situation likely arose due to Microsoft attempting to
| cross the boundaries set by OpenAI.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Lol. I can relate.
| gog-ma-gog wrote:
| This actually seems like a decent compromise. Sam and Greg can
| retain velocity on the product side without having to spin up a
| whole new operation in direct competition with their old levers
| of power, and Ilya + co can remain in possession of the keys to
| the kingdom.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Ilya and co are going to get orphaned, there's no point to the
| talent they have if they intend to slow things down so it's not
| like they'll remain competitive. The capacity that MSFT was
| going to sell to OpenAI will go to the internal team.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Maybe they want it that way and want to move on from all the
| LLM hype that was distracting them from their main charter of
| pushing the boundaries of AI research? If yes, then they
| succeeded handsomely
| ps256 wrote:
| "Don't get distracted by the research which actually
| produces useful things"
| aneutron wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me it is us framed
| as if they won't be working on GPT-based products, but on
| research.
|
| The whole thing reads like this to me: "In hindsight, we
| should've done more due diligence before developing a hard
| dependency on an organization and its product. We are aware
| that this was a mistake. To combat this, we will do damage
| control and continue to work with OpenAI, while developing our
| in-house solution and ditching this hard dependency. Sam & Co.
| will reproduce this and it will be fully under our control. So
| rest assured dear investors."
| nga911 wrote:
| How do you conduct research with sales people? even if they
| manage to bring in researchers from OpenAI, the only gain
| here is microsoft getting _some_ of the researchers behind
| the products and /or product developers.
| morgante wrote:
| Who are these "sales people" you're referring to? Surely
| not Greg Brockman, one of the most talented engineers in
| the world.
| lucubratory wrote:
| He has technical skill, you don't need to oversell him.
| He's not Ilya.
| laserlight wrote:
| > Greg Brockman, one of the most talented engineers in
| the world.
|
| Can you help me understand how you came to the
| conclusion?
| morgante wrote:
| People who worked with him at OpenAI and Stripe.
| icelancer wrote:
| Ah yes, Greg Brockman, former CTO of Stripe (amongst other
| things)... sales person.
| aneutron wrote:
| Well, the same way a man with drive, discipline and money
| but very little in the way of technical expertise can build
| a company.
|
| Sometimes you need someone who can drive a project and
| recruit the right people for the project. That person does
| not always need to be a subject matter expert.
| Satam wrote:
| Except they only had AI model velocity and not product
| velocity. The user-side implementation of chatGPT is actually
| quite below what would be expected based on their AI
| superiority. So the parts that Sam & Greg should be responsible
| for are actually not great.
| user_named wrote:
| I wonder if they'll get bored working on Copilot in
| PowerPoint
| antupis wrote:
| This is kind of true, I think programming even codellama or
| gpt3.5 is more than enough and gpt-4 is very nice but what is
| missing is good developer experience, and copy-pasting to the
| chat window is not that.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| If I recall correctly, Mira Murati was actually the person
| responsible for productizing GPT into a Chatbot. Prior to
| that, OpenAI's plan was just to build models and sell API
| access until they reach AGI.
|
| I know there's a lot of talk about Ilya, but if Sam poaches
| Mira (which seems likely at this point), I think OpenAI will
| struggle to build things people actually want, and will go
| back to being an R&D lab.
| sgillen wrote:
| Just curious what do you think is bad about the user side
| experience of chatgpt? It seems pretty slick to me and I use
| it most days.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Not being able to define instructions per "chat" window (or
| having some sort of a profile) is something I find
| extremely annoying.
| bkyan wrote:
| That's exactly what the recently released GPT Builder
| does for you!
| threeseed wrote:
| Sam and Greg were responsible for everything including
| building the company, deciding on strategy, raising funding,
| hiring most of the team, coordinating the research, building
| the partnership with Microsoft and acquiring the huge array
| of enterprise customers.
|
| To act like they were just responsible for the "UI parts" is
| ridiculous.
| icelancer wrote:
| It's typical HN/engineer brain to discount the CEO and
| other "non-technical" staff as leeches.
| Satam wrote:
| I'm the first to defend CEOs and it's not a popular
| position to be in usually, believe me. But in this case,
| they did an experiment and it blew up based on their
| model's superiority alone.
|
| Product-wise, however, it's looking like good enough AI is
| being commoditized at the pace of weeks and days. They will
| be forced to compete on user experience and distribution vs
| the likes of Meta. So far OpenAI only managed to deliver
| additions that sound good on the surface but prove not to
| be sticky when the dust settles.
|
| They have also been very dishonest. I remember Sam Altman
| said he was surprised no one built something like chat GPT
| before them. Well... people tried but 3rd parties were
| always playing catch-up because the APIs were waitlisted,
| censored, and nerfed.
| threeseed wrote:
| a) Meta is not competing with OpenAI nor has any plans
| to.
|
| b) AI is only being commoditised at the low-end for
| models that can be trained by ordinary people. At the
| high-end there is only companies like Microsoft, Google
| etc that can compete. And Sam was brilliant enough to
| lock in Microsoft early.
|
| c) What was stopping 3rd parties from building a ChatGPT
| was the out of reach training costs not access to APIs
| which didn't even exist at the time.
| Satam wrote:
| You're wrong about A & C but B is more nuanced.
|
| a) Meta is training and releasing cutting-edge LLM
| models. When they manage to get the costs down, everyone
| and their grandma is going to have Meta's AI on their
| phone either through Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp.
|
| b) Commoditization is actually mostly happening because
| companies (not individuals) are training the models. But
| that's also enough for commoditization to occur over
| time, even on higher-end models. If we get into the
| superintelligence territory, it doesn't even matter
| though, the world will be much different.
|
| c) APIs for GPT were first teased as early as 2020s with
| broader access in 2021. They got implemented into 3rd
| party products but the developer experience of getting
| access was quite hostile early on. Chat-like APIs only
| became available _after_ they were featured in ChatGPT.
| So Sam feigning surprise about others not creating
| something like it sooner with their APIs is not honest.
| throwaway_5753 wrote:
| Wonder how long this will last. This team doesn't seem like a
| good fit for big corp Microsoft.
|
| Good get by MS though!
| ChatGTP wrote:
| What value does Sam bring now? They have all the money they
| could want. All the connections they'd need.
|
| Weird situation for him.
| beoberha wrote:
| Agreed. Sam isn't some AI visionary, he's a startup guy.
| Unless he's leading a team that's going to spin out a new
| company, I don't get it.
| frabcus wrote:
| I guess he'll make the consumer hardware product he's been
| developing with Jony Ive, and also spin up the chip company
| he was working on anyway.
| fooker wrote:
| Researchers can not be 'AI visionaries', almost by
| definition, as you focus on depth instead of breadth as a
| competent researcher.
|
| Someone like Sam Altman is indeed more of a visionary than
| every hardcore AI researcher. The job here is to not push
| the boundaries of science, it is to figure out and predict
| the cascading effects of a new invention.
| capttruckerdave wrote:
| He was the face of OpenAI, MSFT is basically trying to
| signal: Business as usual, nothing to see here, move along
| and please don't tank our stock
| jterrys wrote:
| >please don't tank our stock
|
| ding ding ding
| bmitc wrote:
| It's mind boggling that a corporation of that size would
| care about stock fluctuations on the order of minutes,
| hours, and days.
| beoberha wrote:
| It really does feel like that. Like it's mutually
| beneficial for Sam and MSFT to team up in the short term
| while Sam figures out his next move and MSFT tries to
| keep OpenAI afloat for the time being
| icelancer wrote:
| OpenAI is destined to learn the story of Xerox PARC the hard way.
| I commend them.
| exizt88 wrote:
| If your goal is to produce a lot of value and you don't care
| about others capturing it, then it may actually be a good way
| to go, especially with the non-profit setup.
| waihtis wrote:
| Anyone else find it strange that startup founders of the
| magnitude of Sam & Greg would join a gigantic corporation as
| employees?
|
| It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.
| eddtries wrote:
| Maybe Sam thinks OpenAI will be so important he has a shot at
| CEO of Microsoft in a couple years?
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| But Satya is making a few 100 mil a year, tops. Sam could
| easily make himself a billionaire with one raise. And who
| wants to control all of Microsoft, that's a whole lot of
| headaches
| sekai wrote:
| Exactly, he could just launch a new company, most of the
| current OpenAI staff would follow him.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Should tell you something that he didn't. And no, I am
| not talking about ethics here.
| eddtries wrote:
| There must be an insane number of non-competes though, to
| stop that? Especially with the amount of VC funding -
| that must have been included?
| airspresso wrote:
| Non-competes are not legally enforcable in California, or
| so I hear.
| eddtries wrote:
| I think the only edge cases are for executives of
| companies, and even then it's pretty limited, but I
| imagine this could be one of the examples. IANAL though -
| it's just from what I've seen discussed elsewhere.
|
| https://www.ottingerlaw.com/blog/executives-should-not-
| ignor...
|
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySec
| tio...
| ibrarmalik wrote:
| The new models and data would stay at OpenAI. You can
| have thousands of researchers and compute, but if you
| don't have "it", you are behind (ask Google).
|
| In Microsoft he still has access to the models, and
| that's all he needs to execute his ideas.
| synaesthesisx wrote:
| Yes, however they'll be shielded from lawsuits from
| OpenAI at Microsoft.
| esskay wrote:
| They could, but they'd be massively hamstrung by lack of
| GPU's. Pretty much all supply is locked up for a good few
| years right now.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Assuming a MAG wont offer it.
| ethanbond wrote:
| > most of the current OpenAI staff would follow him
|
| Source please? This just keeps getting repeated but
| there's extremely limited public support and neither
| Sam's nor the board's decisions indicate he has a whole
| lot of leverage.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| And if governments squeeze on AI your start up is worth
| pennies over night. Earning 100 MILLION per year already
| removes any possible financial restrictions you had. Why do
| you need to have 10x that? Heck even earning "just" 10
| millions per year will make all of your financial concerns
| go away.
|
| Greed is hell of a thing
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| I suspect for people like Sam who are compulsively
| ambitious and competitive, it's not about the dollars.
| It's about winning.
|
| Further, based on anecdotes from friends and Twitter who
| know Sam personally, I'm inclined to believe he's
| genuinely motivated by building something that "alters
| the timeline", so to speak.
| ah765 wrote:
| Being the guy who built AGI will alter the timeline the
| most, so I think he'll be much more interested in that
| than being CEO of Microsoft.
| chx wrote:
| AGI is decades if not centuries away. Cranking a
| plausible sentence generator to be even more plausible
| will not get there. I do not understand how people
| suddenly completely lost their minds.
| sensanaty wrote:
| The hype wave really is something else, eh? People are
| suddenly talking as if these advanced chatbots are on the
| precipice of genuine AGI that can run any system you
| throw at it, it's absolute lunacy
| chx wrote:
| > The hype wave really is something else, eh?
|
| I am old enough to remember the "How Blockchain Is
| Solving the World Hunger Crisis" articles but this new
| wave is even crazier.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >I am old enough to remember
|
| So, like 15 year old?
| eddtries wrote:
| If he was, he signed up to HN at 2!
|
| I do think it's funny how the Blockchain Consultants have
| become AI Consultants though.
| chx wrote:
| Here's one from 2019: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes
| techcouncil/2019/12/26/ho...
| vidarh wrote:
| According to [1], Nadella's base salary was $2.5m and stock
| awards and other compensation brought the total to ~$55m in
| 2022.
|
| [1] https://microsoft.gcs-web.com/node/31056/html
| haldujai wrote:
| I believe his total comp since becoming CEO passed 1B
| this summer, 9 years or so.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Sam already is a billionaire
| chirau wrote:
| Sam is not a billionaire. By all industry accepted
| accounts (easily googlable), his net worth is in the
| range of 500 to 700 million.
|
| Do you have a source for your assertion?
| greatpostman wrote:
| He's definitely a billionaire
| chirau wrote:
| He is not on Forbes billionaire list.
|
| All the other somewhat reliable sources do not have him
| as one.
|
| So what is your source for your assertion?
| eddtries wrote:
| Sam is rich, I assume being CEO of one of the worlds
| largest companies is a far greater award than extra money
| when you're at the billionaire level, especially at 38. But
| I do think this is probably non-compete related too.
| haldujai wrote:
| As in liquidate a billion in one raise? Is that kosher
| these days?
| estomagordo wrote:
| What's the functional difference between a billion and a
| hundred million?
| jamesyc wrote:
| Approximately 1 billion.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| A billion means you can fund yourself for a really big
| idea. Not that you should!
| qwery wrote:
| Lol, maybe. Ballmer was a friend of Gates, was 44 years old
| and had worked at Microsoft for 20 years (2000-1980) already
| when he became CEO. Nadella was also forty-something and had
| worked at Microsoft for 22 years (2014-1992) when he got the
| job.
| Maxion wrote:
| > It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.
|
| Except if Sam and Greg have some anti-compete clauses. If they
| join MS, they have a nice 10 billion USD leverage against any
| lawsuites.
| alvis wrote:
| So Sam & Greg can stay focus on their work rather than
| getting distracted by all the lawsuits. It isn't a bad thing.
| Just not sure how they can get they want under the corporate
| culture?
| reedciccio wrote:
| In California the anti-compete clauses are not enforceable,
| afaik
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| I guess that's more applicable to ordinary employees. Using
| trade secrets obtained from your previous employer would
| still be problematic
| Arelius wrote:
| It's complicated. In the case of the CEO it is possibly
| enforceable. But going to the primary funder, after being
| fired in a move without notification of that same funder?
| Likely with long complicated contracts that may contemplate
| the idea of notification of change of executive staff?
|
| I don't know, even of strictly "enforceable" I doubt we
| will see it enforced. And if so. I'm sure the settlement
| will be fairly gentle.
|
| Edit: Actually, a quick skim of the relevant code, the only
| relevant exception seems to be about owners selling their
| ownership interest. Seemingly, since Sam doesn't own OpenAI
| shares, this exception would seem to not apply.
|
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySecti
| o....
| gpt5 wrote:
| non-competes are extremely hard to enforce in California. Sam
| would literally have to download Open AI trade secrets into a
| USB drive to get in trouble.
| kmlevitt wrote:
| And now he doesn't even need to. He can get access to all
| their models legally as a Microsoft employee.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| That is only the case for rank and file employees. From my
| understanding executives, particularly ones with large
| equity stakes, are not exempt from non-competes. Sam
| doesn't have equity though, and I am not sure if non-profit
| status changes anything, but regardless I suspect any non-
| compete questions would need to be settled in court.
| Probably not something to stop Sam from starting a
| competitor as he could afford the lawyers and potential
| settlement. I suspect the MSFT move has more to do with
| keeping the ball rolling and keeping Satya happy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > From my understanding executives, particularly ones
| with large equity stakes, are not exempt from non-
| competes.
|
| Your understanding is incorrect. There are some
| exceptions where noncompetes are allowed in California,
| but they mostly involve the sale or dissolution of
| business entities as such. There is no exception for
| executives, and none for people who happen to have equity
| stakes of any size.
| alanfranz wrote:
| Do anti-compete clauses work when you've been ousted? Greg
| resigned, actually, but Sam was ejected.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Do anti-compete clauses work when you've been ousted?
|
| In jurisdictions where they are enforceable, yes, they
| generally are not limited based on the manner the working
| relationship terminated (since they are part of an
| employment contract, they _might_ become void if there was
| a breach by the employer.)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It certainly sounds out of line with all the reporting that
| Altman was talking about starting a new company and could
| trivially fundraise for it. Was that just as much kayfabe as
| the idea of bringing him back?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Nope. They're following the path to power, money, and maybe
| continued fame. That's all.
| schiffern wrote:
| I'll bet Microsoft offered him a very sweet deal, which for
| Sam means lots of autonomy.
|
| Microsoft is happy. They get to wrap this movie before the
| markets open.
|
| Edit: I also agree with bayindirh below. These things can
| both be true.
| bayindirh wrote:
| They _had to_.
|
| Also, that doesn't mean Microsoft won't collect the outcome
| of this deal with its interest over time. Microsoft is the
| master of that craft.
|
| Microsoft did not offer this because they're some
| altruistic company which wanted to provide free shelter to
| a unfairly battered, homeless ex-CEO.
| danwee wrote:
| What? If anything a startup founder (in general) wants to
| become a gigantic corporation. The bigger the better.
| ascorbic wrote:
| There's an infinite difference between turning your startup
| into a giant corporation and getting a job at one.
| paganel wrote:
| Presumably they'll both get their C-level positions out of the
| gate (for that AI entity MS is setting up specially for this)
| so not just "mere" employees.
|
| But, yeah, kind of confusing, especially for Altman.
|
| He was the kind of guy on the way to become worth $100 billion
| and more, with enough luck, meaning to be the next Musk or
| Zuckerberg of AI, but if he chooses to remain inside a behemoth
| like MS the "most" that he can aspire to is a few hundred
| millions, maybe a billion or two at the most, but nothing more
| than that.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > He was the kind of guy on the way to become worth $100
| billion and more, with enough luck,
|
| Was he though? If I understand correctly he didn't have any
| equity in the for profit org. Of OpenAI.
|
| IIRC he also publicly said that he doesn't "need" more than a
| few hundred million (and who knows, not inconceivable that he
| might actually feel that).
| antupis wrote:
| I bet MS probably bankrolls a subsidiary or lightweight spinoff
| for AGI if they are under MS, they can keep the original
| research and code.
| cornel_io wrote:
| They're likely going to be the ones who manage the OpenAI
| relationship...what better way to fuck the people who fucked
| them than by becoming the ones who literally control the
| resources that they need?
| user_named wrote:
| Hilarious. The look on Ilyas face when these two show up at
| the office for their "sync", or perhaps he's ordered to
| travel to a location of the owner/client's choosing.
| suslik wrote:
| OpenAI can also jump ship and get a nice deal with amazon or
| google. In fact, right now they are ripe for the taking.
| chirau wrote:
| Technical debt.
|
| Azure was already second nature for OpenAI and so there is very
| little friction in moving their work and infrastructure. The
| relationships are already there and the personnel will likely
| follow easily as well.
|
| They are also likely enticed by the possibility of being heads
| of special projects and AI at the second largest tech company,
| meaning deep pockets, easy marketing and freedom to roam.
|
| Oh, and those GPUs.
| raggi wrote:
| They need computers. I'd assume this came with a substantial
| budget promise.
| mirzap wrote:
| They will probably run a subsidiary under the MS umbrella and
| profit hugely in the next few years. Also, MS could easily dump
| OAI in the next few months to year.
| blackoil wrote:
| Sam had no stake in OpenAI. So, any potential deca billion
| value is hypothetical. He would have to do a U-turn and fight
| with the board to get his cut. Now he'll get his cut from MS.
| This AI division will have some further restructuring.
|
| Edit: Sam is CEO of the new AI division.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Seems like a good compromise?
|
| OpenAI continues to develop core AI offered over API. Microsoft
| builds the developer ecosystem around it -- that's Sam's
| expertise anyway. Microsoft has made a bunch of investment in
| the developer ecosystem in GitHub and that fits the theme.
| Assuming Sam sticks around.
|
| Also, the way the tweet is worded (looking forward to working
| with OpenAI), seems like its a truce negotiated by Satya?
| kjksf wrote:
| This is Microsoft starting a copy machine to replace OpenAI
| with in-house tech in medium to long term.
|
| Apparently Microsoft already had plans to spend $50 billion
| on cloud hardware.
|
| Now they are getting software talent and insider knowledge to
| replace OpenAI software with in-house tech built by Sam, Greg
| and others that will join.
|
| Satya just pulled a kill move on OpenAI.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Does Microsoft (under the OpenAI agreement) have access to
| the model code etc or just the output? If not, they would
| have to rebuild it.
|
| Not sure if its obvious that people would leave OpenAI in
| troves to join Microsoft just to be with Sam.
| haldujai wrote:
| I doubt it would be hard for Microsoft to rebuild,
| Microsoft Research has made many excellent contributions
| to transformers for many years now, DeepSpeed is a
| notable example.
|
| I don't think they've had the will/need to have done this
| but they most likely already have the talent.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Embrace...
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yeah agree, this feels like a very big hug.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Hug of death?
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| It's a no lose situation for Microsoft.
|
| Either there in house team wins out and Microsoft wins.
|
| Or OpenAI wins out and Microsoft wins with there exclusive
| deal and 75% of OpenAI profits.
|
| Better to have two horses in the race in something so
| important, makes it much harder than one of the other
| companies will be the one to come out top.
| chx wrote:
| > in something so important,
|
| Much as LLM is essentially industrial strength gaslighting,
| so is the meta around it.
|
| It's not so important. There's not much there. No it's not
| going to take your jobs.
|
| I am old enough to remember not only the How Blockchain Is
| Solving World Hunger articles but the paperless office
| claims as well -- I was born within a few weeks of the
| publication of the (in)famous "The Office of the Future"
| article from BusinessWeek.
|
| Didn't happen.
|
| No, a plausible sentence generator is just that: the next
| hype.
|
| In fact some of the hustlers behind it are the same as
| those who have hustled crypto. _Someone_ got to hold the
| bag on that one but it wasn 't the rich white techbros. So
| it'll be here. Once enough companies get burned when the
| stochastic parrot botches something badly enough to get a
| massive fine from a regulator or a devastating lawsuit,
| everyone will run for the hills. And again... it won't be
| the VCs holding the bag. Guess who will be. Guess why AI is
| so badly hyped.
|
| If you think the ChatGPT release happening within a few
| weeks of the collapse of FTX is a coincidence I have ...
| well, not a bridge but an AI hype to sell to you and in
| fact you already bought it.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| OpenAI is doing a lot more work than just a LLM, despite
| that being there headline product for now. I'd rather
| have OpenAI leading the way than Microsoft or Google in
| this stuff. Despite it's own issues.
|
| I get your pessimism, but the same has been said about a
| lot of tech that did go on to change the world, just
| because a lot of people made a lot of noise about
| previous tech that failed to come to anything doesn't
| mean to say this is the same thing, it's completely
| different tech.
|
| A lot of OpenAI's products are out in the real world and
| I use them everyday, I never touched Crypto, now maybe
| LLM's won't live up to the hype, but OpenAi's stuff is
| already been used in a lot of products, used by millions
| of users, even Spotify.
|
| 'A plausible sentence generator is just that: the next
| hype' - Maybe, but AI goes far beyond LLM as does the
| products OpenAI produces.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Have you even used it?
|
| While it can't plug and play replace and employee yet in
| my experience at least every dev I see now has it open on
| their second screen and send it problems all day.
|
| Comparing it to crypto and building that weird narrative
| you have is just not at all connected to the reality of
| what the product can actually do right now today.
| chx wrote:
| It's probabilistic and not factual and so everything it
| outputs must be treated as something the actual answer
| might sound like and needs to be counterchecked anyways.
| If I am researching the actual answer already then why
| bother?
| kjksf wrote:
| Their alternative is to start a new AI company.
|
| At this point in time a new AI company would be bottle-necked
| by lack of NVIDIA GPUs. They are sold out for the medium term
| future.
|
| So if Sam and Greg were to start a new AI company, even with
| billions of initial capital (very likely given their street
| cred) they would spend at a minimum several months just
| acquiring the hardware needed to compete with OpenAI.
|
| With Microsoft they have the hardware from day one and
| unlimited capital.
|
| At the same time their competitor, OpenAI, gets most of the
| money from Microsoft (a deal negotiated by Sam, BTW).
|
| So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI.
|
| This is the worst possible outcome for OpenAI: they loose
| talent, pretty much loose their main source of cash (not today
| but medium to long term) and get cash rich and GPU-rich
| competitor who's now their main customer.
| sekai wrote:
| > So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI
|
| They already do, though, has everyone forgot they got a
| Microsoft Research division?
| tudorw wrote:
| Nope, VirtualWiFi looked promising in 2006.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| They could get a infra deal with AWS, Google, NVidia or AMD
| even :-).
|
| Or they write the AI that runs on your M3
|
| That said the Microsoft offer came quickly than Amazon can
| deliver a 3090 to your house so...
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| Would have been amazing if they joined Intel. No tsmc
| bottleneck, Intel probably having trouble offloading their
| arc gpus, etc
| ruszki wrote:
| Some components of some Intel CPUs are made by TSMC. So,
| I'm not convinced that there wouldn't be "TSMC
| bottleneck".
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Worked(?) for Carmack and Luckey
| jjcm wrote:
| Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn't buy at
| the scale/speed they need: GPUs. Both time on Azure's cloud, as
| well as promise of some of the first Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt
| 100 chips.
| divbzero wrote:
| Plus continued access to OpenAI technology.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn't buy at
| the scale/speed they need: OpenAI models & future work.
| Altman wouldn't have had (legal) access to these anywhere
| else, and Microsoft wouldn't have had Sam Altman controlling
| OpenAI tech in any other arrangement. This arrangement may be
| the best for all involved: Microsoft gets it's LLM geegaws
| based on OpenAI tech, Altman gets to build GPT marketplaces
| and engage whatever growth-hacking schemes he can dream of
| that may have been found distasteful by colleagues at OpenAI,
| and OpenAI can focus on the core mission and fulfilling
| contractual obligations to Microsoft
|
| I foresee this new group building _on top of_ (rather than
| completing with) OpenAI tech in the near-to-mid term, maybe
| competing in the long term of they manage to gather adequate
| talent, but it 's going to be going against the cultural
| corporate headwinds.
|
| I wonder if Microsoft will tolerate the hardware side-gig and
| if this internal-startup will succeed or if it will end up
| being a managed exit to paper over OpenAIs abrupt transition
| (by public company standards). I guess we'll know in a year
| if he'll transition to an advisory position
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I bet there was no hardware side-gig. More likely it was a
| ruse to trigger the push from openai, so they can
| exfiltrate gpt5 to MS. Openai won't exist soon, since they
| rely on vouchers from MS to run. I can't see MS being a
| very forgiving partner, after being publicly blindsided,
| can you?
| ezoe wrote:
| No. They need a lot of money and computation resources to work
| on. In order to continue their work, they either A). raise a
| massive fund B). be employed by a big corp. There's no surprise
| they chose the latter. After all, MS has a research department
| on this domain.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| It depends on what they are allowed to do as employees, which
| is probably in the process of being figured out right now.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| The only meaningful thing here that makes sense to me is that
| the "secret sauce" that openAI has is _exclusively licensed to
| Microsoft_.
|
| Which means, starting a competing startup means they can't use
| it.
|
| Which makes their (potential) competing startup
| indistinguishable from the (many) other startups in this space
| competing with OpenAI.
|
| Does Sam really want to be a no-name research head of some
| obscure Microsoft research division?
|
| I don't think so.
|
| Can't really see any other reason for this that makes sense.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Sounds desperate to me, a bit like that 'I'm in the office'
| photo-op. A bit like having access to the models or whatever is
| sustaining him somehow lol
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Lol
|
| Desperate... Right...
|
| The guy met with the Arabs a few weeks back about billions in
| financing for a new venture. The guys desperate like I'm
| Donald duck.
| blitzar wrote:
| So he passed up billions to go work for microsoft ...
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Desperate
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Special unit mate... Gonna have special rules. You think
| these cats are gonna be in the basement pushing papers?
| This is grade AAA talent that can go anywhere including a
| fresh outfit with 1 billion in the bank VC money day 1.
|
| Don't believe me? Check out the VC tweets... Sand hill
| pulled the checkbook the moment these guys might have
| been on the market.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Wonder if they'll take his call today!
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Literally the president would take Altman's call.
|
| What moon are y'all on.
|
| He can secure billions with a text message.
|
| Love ya anyway, cya this evening for the fuzzy meetup.
| ah765 wrote:
| I think Sam's goal is to create AGI, same as most of the other
| founders of OpenAI. If he just wanted money and power, he
| probably would have continued with YC or some other startup
| instead of joining the nonprofit and unproven OpenAI at the
| time.
|
| His opinion on the ideal path differs from Ilya's, but I'm
| guessing his goal remains the same. AGI is the most important
| thing to work on, and startups and corporations are just a
| means of getting there.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| >I think Sam's goal is to create AGI
|
| Supposedly his goal was the same as OpenAi --> AGI that
| benefits society instead of shareholders.
|
| Seems like a hard mission to accomplish within Microsoft.
| ah765 wrote:
| I imagine Sam's vision, both before and after this company
| change, is that he'll keep improving GPTs, while also
| setting up a thriving ecosystem through APIs, and AI will
| become a trillion dollar industry with him at the center.
|
| From there, maybe someone will come up with the
| revolutionary advance necessary to reach AGI. It may not
| necessarily be under his company, but he'll be the super
| successful AI guy and in a pretty strong position to
| influence things anyway.
| hobofan wrote:
| Just because that's the goal they have written on the tin
| doesn't mean that that is/was their actual goal.
|
| Especially in the early days where the largest donor to
| OpenAI was Musk who was leading Tesla, a company way behind
| in AI capabilities, OpenAI looked like an obvious
| "Commoditize Your Complement" play.
|
| For quite some time where they were mainly publishing
| research and they could hide behind "we are just getting
| started" that guise held up nicely, but when they struck
| gold with Chat(GPT), their was more and more misalignment
| between their actions and their publicly stated goal.
| jampekka wrote:
| Like Cyberdyne Systems was just a means of getting there.
| pyb wrote:
| Curious to see how long Sam lasts as an employee.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| It's gonna be a special unit. He's not gonna be an employee.
|
| Once you lead at that level... It's max autonomy going
| forward. Source: Elon. Guy hates a board with power as much
| as Zuckerberg. Employee? Ha .. Out of the question.
| ethanbond wrote:
| So as a result Elon actually isn't an employee... whereas
| Sam will be an employee, ultimately
| nopromisessir wrote:
| There are more structures available than simply gobbling
| something up and everyone is your employee.
|
| See openai investment with technology transfers and
| sunset clauses. They just did a new dance.
|
| They'll prod do something special for these guys.
|
| They would never be employees. That's for non Sam
| Altman's and non Brockmans. Brockman is prob already a
| billionaire from openai shares. No employees here. Big
| boys.
| ac130kz wrote:
| I guess they were fired exactly for this reason: more money,
| less research and being actually "open". A "non-profit" called
| "Open"AI hiding GPT-4 behind a paywall with no source code with
| just a few hints in the papers, surreal.
| cowl wrote:
| Or just accept that their image is overinflated just because
| they happened to be in the right place at the right time.
| Ofcourse they had a hand on building that successful team but
| do not underestimate the fact that, that successful team was
| build with the promise of nonprofit, AI for the benefit of all
| And few of them would have joined Microsoft out of principle.
| jampekka wrote:
| Isn't the exit exactly what you'd expect from startup founders?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Guess who'll be running Microsoft after Satya, and what
| Microsoft's core offering / cash cow will be.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Never gonna happen.
|
| Satya runs the biggest race track.
|
| Altman trains pure breds trying to win the Kentucky derby
| repeatedly.
|
| Totally diff games. Both big bosses. Not equivalent and never
| will be. Totally diff career tracks.
| jfoster wrote:
| They won't have to worry about raising capital or getting
| access to GPUs, and they've likely been promised a high degree
| of autonomy, almost certainly reporting directly to Nadella.
| mijoharas wrote:
| Satya is saying they'll be an independent "startup" within
| Microsoft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344811
| waihtis wrote:
| corporate startups are an oxymoron
| modeless wrote:
| They must be getting a king's ransom. Turns out sama didn't
| need equity, he got paid by getting fired.
| Havoc wrote:
| I think the employees part is probably wrong here. Can't
| imagine they'll need to act like ones even if they are on paper
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| In the end it's just labels. What matters is what kind of funds
| will they be given, what they can work on, what sort of control
| they have over it.
| dbbk wrote:
| From the sounds of it they're starting a new company within
| MSFT.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| A little bit, but I highly doubt it'll last long. I predict
| most of them will end up in a startup sooner rather than later.
| kozikow wrote:
| We don't know the structure of their new unit, do we? Sometimes
| "startup in a big corp" may really bring the best of both
| worlds (although in reality, 90% of such initiatives bring the
| worst of the two worlds).
|
| For many years, Microsoft Research had a reputation for giving
| researchers the most freedom. Probably even that's the reason
| why it hasn't been as successful as other bigcorp research
| labs.
| hello2 wrote:
| Good work for Microsoft, moving swiftly to take advantage!
| alvis wrote:
| It's really safe to say the big loser is OpenAI. Microsoft is
| effectively getting the team under their own overnight
| lucubratory wrote:
| "OpenAI, the next huge tech company to rival Google" is a huge
| loser of this whole process, probably dead.
|
| "OpenAI, the non-profit who only has a for-profit subsidiary to
| get enough resources to fund its mission to develop AGI" is
| probably a winner, and gets to live instead of slowly die.
| karmasimida wrote:
| OMG, it is 12am in SF. I need to sleep.
|
| But what a play, MSFT the winner here.
|
| They now owns the actual OpenAI
|
| Edit: PM->am
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Or they just acquired sales people
| bkyan wrote:
| Greg Brockman has already announced some of the others on the
| leadership team --
| https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1726530200484372688
| eddtries wrote:
| Maybe lunch and a coffee could help?
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| The next QBR with MS is going to be interesting.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| Seems like a very big step down to them.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| From OpenAI founders to Microsoft employees
| abhinavk wrote:
| This was most unexpected. Hopefully it's a compromise reached
| mutually. Now OpenAI can fulfill what their mission is and these
| guys can work on AI products at MS.
|
| Again. Very unexpected.
| omarfarooq wrote:
| Friday was a year ago.
| swimwiththebeat wrote:
| I thought for sure the only two outcomes were that Altman raises
| money for a new startup or he comes back to OpenAI with a new
| governance structure (which is still a wild and crazy outcome,
| but crazier things have happened). Now that this happened though,
| I feel stupid for not considering this as a possible outcome at
| all.
|
| The whole timeline of events over the last two events still
| leaves me scratching my head though.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| It's confusing because no one beyond the direct negotiating
| parties knows exactly why any of this is happening in the first
| place. The media scoops about commercialization disputes don't
| seem that important to warrant such a dramatic showdown
| forgingahead wrote:
| Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI without
| actually needing to cross the 49% regulatory hurdle? Depending on
| who follows them to MSFT, that might actually be the outcome
| here. And OpenAI is suddenly Xerox Parc.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI
|
| No, Ilya alone is like 75% of the brains and I'm fairly certain
| he's not going anywhere.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| Time will tell
| ps256 wrote:
| I don't know, way before all of this drama started, the
| rumors were that he was barely contributing any original or
| significant ideas to research and the grounbreaking ideas had
| come from lower level researchers.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Except OpenAI didn't write the attention paper.. Google did. So
| Google is the Xerox
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Sam and Greg obviously haven't heard that Microsoft Research
| doesn't get any GPU access (:
| aneutron wrote:
| Haven't worked at Microsoft, but usually, when folks up high
| have their balls at stake, resources and budgets magically
| start getting approved faster than the Concorde.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| More like this is a PR stunt and Sam will launch a startup
| once the furore dies down
| raverbashing wrote:
| From the start I assumed that Sam was the (street) smarter guy
| here, and that only confirms it
|
| Meanwhile Google remains oblivious
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Others from OpenAI team, maybe can lead the AI research, but how
| does Sam can lead a research group?
|
| IMO, to lead a research group you need some decent research
| skills, Sam is good at business
| elcomet wrote:
| It will be an applied research group obviously to develop
| products based on AI
| karmasimida wrote:
| My guess:
|
| This is no research group, this is OpenAI 2.0, Sam/Greg will
| have enormous autonomy. It will be foolish to think Satya just
| recruited them to tangle them in MSFT bureaucracy
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| BigCos generally have a hard time keeping their autonomous
| groups actually isolated from bureaucracy. Lab126 has been
| thoroughly corporatized, and Area 120 got outright
| reabsorbed.
| tempestn wrote:
| Sam might be a good product manager.
| siva7 wrote:
| He did lead together with greg at openai. Not as researchers.
| For that they hired the initial research team.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I think people underestimate how much of a company's value is in
| their key leadership, select talent, and technology. When a
| company is acquired those are typically the reasons to do so
| other than pure revenue acquisition. Microsoft already has their
| technology, now has the key leadership, and will soon have the
| select talent.
|
| Satya wins, OpenAI is walking dead.
| gpt5 wrote:
| > When a company is acquired those are typically the reasons to
| do so other than pure revenue acquisition
|
| Large companies are primarily purchased for their moats
| raverbashing wrote:
| Satya wins
|
| Sam wins
|
| Ilya and the board continue to look like fools
| karmasimida wrote:
| Satya really goated here.
|
| He takes advantage of this situation and make OpenAI's assets
| in his control more than ever.
|
| He is the genius, scary even.
| peteradio wrote:
| Pirate more like. He's not just poaching "talent" he has
| likely stolen IP and will hope to destroy OpenAI in court
| costs. Microsoft is a terrible company and I hope this
| backfires on them.
| AmericanOP wrote:
| Why jockey for a board seat when you can harbor the org
| JimDabell wrote:
| Nadella was heavily involved in the talks to get Altman et al.
| back in OpenAI. This must have been brought up, so I'm guessing
| the OpenAI board made their decision knowing this would be the
| outcome?
| chirau wrote:
| I suspected this. OpenAI was always going towards Microsoft and
| Sam was leading that charge. Who else but them to bankroll his
| next vision.
|
| Great pickup by MSFT. The exodus is only beginning and MSFT will
| not have to buy OpenAI for the billions in valuation it was
| getting. East win.
| Joeri wrote:
| This might turn out to be a lot more stable structure long term:
| the commercialization of AI under Microsoft's brand, with
| Microsoft's resources, and the deep research into advanced AI
| under OpenAI. This could shield the research division of OpenAI
| from undue pressure from the product side, in a way that it
| probably couldn't when everything was under one roof.
| skygazer wrote:
| Ugh. I'm not keen on AGI being an eventual Microsoft product,
| or after this circus, even the hangers on at Open AI. Hope it's
| still decades off and this all is a silly side show footnote.
| gtirloni wrote:
| I find your theory more plausible. Microsoft, Google and Amazon
| were lagging in AI. You can simply look at their voice
| assistants for an example. That's why they started investing
| billions in OpenAI and other think tanks in this space. Now
| capital turns things around to be as they should (from their
| perspective) and reacquires control.
|
| Anthropic is probably next in line.
| Mentlo wrote:
| MS/G/A didn't put this into voice assistants not because they
| don't have it, but because it doesn't scale to fit the
| commercials at the moment. Google invented transformers and
| Deepmind had GPT scale LLM's at least a year before CGPT came
| out.
|
| Altman just rushed everyone's hand by publishing it into the
| world at cost
| gtirloni wrote:
| "just" is an understatement.
|
| My friends and family had an awful opinion of AI in general
| because it was the voice assistants were sold to them as
| the best example of AI. That changed with ChatGPT.
|
| Google invented really useful AI but failed to deliver.
| OpenAI did so in record time. Now it's Google that's
| playing catching up with the technology they invented
| themselves, ironically.
|
| But my comment applies more to Microsoft and Amazon, tbh.
| Mentlo wrote:
| This wasn't a result of product genius in this case - OAI
| just didn't have the regulatory and PR oversight that big
| tech has - I know for a fact Meta and Google had CGPT
| equivalent models ready but couldn't launch them as
| they'd get rightfully berated for the model being racist
| or hallucinating. Things OpenAI avoided because it's a
| startup non-profit.
|
| And OAI delivered with enormous per-user cost that
| doesn't scale - in an app that is a showcase and doesn't
| really have latency requirements as people understand
| it's a prototype.
|
| And the vas majority of people play with CGPT, they don't
| use it for anything useful. Incidental examples of
| friends and family of tech workers to the side.
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| Incredible how much has changed in one weekend... or not?
|
| Confused what this really means. So Microsoft still has access to
| OpenAI's pre-AGI tech that Sam and Greg can leverage for their
| more product-focused visions.
|
| More than that, it looks like Microsoft has become a major AI
| player (internal research) overnight up with the likes of Meta,
| Google, and OpenAI. Incredible.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Just FYI...
|
| Microsoft was already set to spent 27 billion usd on research
| for 2023. They dedicate huge standout double digit percentages
| of budget to research every year. Their in house AI research
| division was already huge.
|
| They didn't become a major AI player overnight... They already
| were long ago.
|
| OpenAI is small, in raw numbers of AI researchers, compared to
| the big players in the space. That's a major reason why it's so
| compelling that they have been able to consistently set the bar
| for state of the art.
|
| They were a dream team... But small. Msft is adding AAA+ talent
| to their existing A+ deck. Also they won't have to rewrite the
| code base. Can hit the ground running.
|
| Lastly, there is no evidence that openai has the greatly quoted
| and so hard to define 'agi'. That's Twitter hearsay and highly
| unlikely... If folkes can even agree what that is. By the
| overwhelming percentage of definitions... Even gpt-5 is
| unlikely to meet that bar. Highly speculative. Twitter is a
| cesspool of conspiracy theory... Don't believe everything you
| read.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Hopefully this motivates a lot of people who don't want Microsoft
| to be the AI company. Slowing down research would mean Microsoft
| wins everything.
|
| MS now has both the accelerationists and the deccelerationists.
| They can keep accelerating themselves when pushing for regulatory
| capture through their deccelerationist branch to slow down any
| competition.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Not unexpected, MS is betting everything on AI. On the other
| hand, MS is a corporation in which lions are lead by donkeys. We
| had windows phones that was excellent and in the right place and
| then couple of product managers fucked it up. We have windows
| that is becoming even better underneath and then you have people
| that thought Cortana and Bing search in the bar were good ideas.
|
| So Ilya can be safe that whatever potential nuclear capabilities
| they give sama, the Microsoft quagmire will not let them fully
| develop.
| duccinator wrote:
| imo Satya is a different ball game compared to Ballmer. I
| wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on msft's track record pre-Satya
| personally.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Welcome to the TikTok generation. The current video was just
| about to end and now we are at the climax of the next video.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Presumably Sam and Greg now get to pick up where they left off
| and keep productizing GPT-4 since Microsoft has the IP and is
| hosting their own GPT-4 models on Azure, right?
|
| The more interesting thing is whether or not they'll be able to
| build and release something equivalent to GPT-5, using
| Microsoft's immense resources, before OpenAI is able to.
| og_kalu wrote:
| GPT-5 is almost certainly already done. But considering they
| sat on 4 for 8 months with Altman as head, who knows if it'll
| see the light of day.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Do you think Microsoft gets access to it?
| og_kalu wrote:
| They will unless the board declares it AGI. I'm not joking
| lol. That was part of the agreement.
| user_named wrote:
| Have fun defining and proving AGI lol
| og_kalu wrote:
| They already defined it - a highly autonomous system that
| outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.
|
| There's some vagueness here sure but if they can
| demonstrate something to that effect, fair play to them i
| guess.
| mighmi wrote:
| 5 months ago they said they hadn't started training:
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/07/openai-gpt5-sam-altman/ and
| had no intention to do so within the next 6 months:
| https://the-decoder.com/gpt-5-is-nowhere-close-says-
| openai-c...
|
| They just started development in the last week or so:
| https://decrypt.co/206044/gpt-5-openai-development-
| roadmap-g...
| Chamix wrote:
| The little secret is that the training run (meaning,
| creating the raw autocompleting multimodal token weights)
| for 5 ran in parallel with 4.
| user_named wrote:
| You could both say that this gives Sam less power over OpenAI,
| and more.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| This confirms that Sam and Greg don't belong as heads of a _non-
| profit_ who 's sole objective is to develop AGI _for the benefit
| of all of humanity._ Because if your Plan B is to join Microsoft,
| whose mission is to make profit for shareholders, then your heart
| wasn 't really in it, as that won't achieve your original goal.
| lucubratory wrote:
| Yeah, this is a huge validation of what Ilya and the Board did.
| If Sam and Greg had started another company with similar aims,
| even if it wasn't non-profit, they would probably keep arguing
| that what they were doing was only to get enough resources to
| be able to solve the problem of AGI with a broad benefit to
| humanity, and it probably would have turned into a big
| ideological schism between Sam's side insisting that a profit-
| seeking company was okay to pursue the goal, and OpenAI
| insisting on pursuing the goal and not getting distracted by
| greed.
|
| Sam and Greg joining up with Microsoft settles that debate
| cleanly, they clearly aren't serious about developing AGI
| without a profit motive or military control determining the
| development process if they're docking with Microsoft. I don't
| think Ilya and the Board would have had any doubts about Sam if
| they fired him, but if they did this would remove them.
| user_named wrote:
| Altman pulling an Elop
| nostromo wrote:
| This is sorta brilliant.
|
| Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And now
| Altman and Brockman will have that access too.
|
| Meanwhile, I imagine their tenure at MSFT will be short-lived,
| because hot-shot startup folks don't really want to work there.
|
| They can stabilize, use OpenAI's data and models for free, use
| Microsoft's GPUs at cost, and start a new company shortly, of
| which Microsoft will own some large share.
|
| Altman doesn't need Microsoft's money - but Microsoft has direct
| access to OpenAI, which is currently priceless.
| mirzap wrote:
| Satya will probably allow them to run a startup under the MS
| umbrella without interference and with full MS backing.
| dagmx wrote:
| I really don't think that's in the Microsoft DNA to do
| mirzap wrote:
| This is not Ballmer era. It's Satya.
| jampekka wrote:
| This is not Melkor era. It's Sauron.
| mirzap wrote:
| As I was saying, Satya justt confirmed it:
| https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This was inevitable and the only path forward.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38318205
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337522
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342882
| ctvo wrote:
| Saying it and doing it are very different things. Many
| huge, lumbering companies have a "startup" lab. Few have
| done anything of note, and typically it's because the
| reasons that made the company move slow and not take
| risks don't magically disappear because you're in a
| different part of the org chart.
| capableweb wrote:
| If anything, the examples in that tweet shows the
| opposite. GitHub and Mojang both done lots of things that
| wouldn't happen if they weren't now Microsoft, especially
| GitHub which is only "GitHub" by name at this point, none
| of the original spirit is still there.
| htrp wrote:
| 100% agree
| scythe wrote:
| Microsoft is not just any huge, lumbering company,
| though. It has probably the _best_ history of research of
| any pure software company (leaving aside IBM etc):
| Microsoft Research funded Haskell behind the scenes for
| years, they had a quantum computing unit _in 2006_ , and
| already in 2018 were beating the field in AI patents and
| research:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/01/06/mic
| ros...
|
| Believing that OpenAI is MSFT's sole move in the AI space
| would be a serious error.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I believe Microsoft R&D has always been a widely respected
| and culturally "different" org than the rest of the
| Microsoft org.
| cal85 wrote:
| Sure but this situation overrrides that. Sam has a lot of
| bargaining power.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| How will equity and compensation work
|
| AI peeps are not cheap
| manc_lad wrote:
| multiple ways to make that work. LTIPs, share options,
| direct equity in subsidiary etc
| jimsimmons wrote:
| MSFT comp is shit though
|
| OAI comp was high based on equity and its crazy
| valuations
| saagarjha wrote:
| Is Microsoft compensation for top AI talent also bad?
| adw wrote:
| Received wisdom has been "not competitive". I wonder how
| the MSR folk feel about all of this, too.
| realprimoh wrote:
| Microsoft comp is actually not bad at higher levels,
| which I assume will be given to all OAI people that will
| join.
| discordance wrote:
| For us maybe, but they have pulled off some high profile
| hires in the past... Brendan Burns (one of the main k8s
| guys) for example.
| jacooper wrote:
| OpenAI never gave equity.
| sekai wrote:
| Yeah... Not really how a mega-corp like MSFT does things.
| They LOVE to have control.
| jonbell wrote:
| It's not 1998 anymore, you'd be surprised
| karmasimida wrote:
| It is Satya we are talking about, I won't bet against him.
| mongol wrote:
| Was not the Xbox team kinda run like that?
| DANmode wrote:
| Microsoft is not a pyramid organization, but distributed
| into teams - like Google, for better or for worse.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Microsoft seems to be the best of the mega-corps at that.
| doikor wrote:
| The game studios under Xbox run quite independently with
| the most extreme example being Mojang with Minecraft which
| still releases all their games on Playstation/Nintendo
| consoles too. But the other studios are also very
| independent based on all the interviews (though they don't
| in general release their games on Playstation or Switch)
|
| As I understand Github is also run very independently from
| Microsoft in general.
| realprimoh wrote:
| These are incorrect priors, especially when the mega-corp
| in question is Microsoft under Satya Nadella.
| Wurdan wrote:
| Source for the below: Worked at Skype before and after the
| MS acquisition.
|
| MSFT's control isn't as "hard" as you portray it to be. At
| the senior leadership level they're pretty happy to allow
| divisions quite a lot of autonomy. Sure there are broad
| directives like if you support multiple platforms/OSes then
| the best user experience should be on "our" platform. But
| that still leaves a lot of room for maneuverability.
|
| Soft control via human resources and company culture is a
| whole other beast though. There are a lot of people with
| 20+ years of experience at Microsoft who are happy to jump
| on job openings for middle-management roles in the "sexy"
| divisions of the company - the ones which are making
| headlines and creating new markets. And each one that
| slides on in brings a lot of the lifelong Microsoft mindset
| with them.
|
| So yeah working within MS will be a very different
| experience for Altman, but not necessarily because of an
| iron grip from above.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Funny that you mention Skype as this is my prime example
| of extremely accelerated product disintegration.
| Wurdan wrote:
| My view on that (which was from very low on the totem
| pole) is that the acquisition happened at a time where
| Skype's core business model (paid calling minutes) was
| under existential threat. Consumer communications
| preferences had started to go from synchronous (calling)
| to async (messaging) even before the acquisition came
| through. While Skype had asynchronous communications in a
| decent place (file transfer in the P2P days was pretty
| shaky but otherwise consumer Skype was a solid messaging
| platform), there was no revenue there for us.
|
| Then the acquisition happened at a time when Microsoft
| presented a lot of opportunities to ship Skype "in the
| box" to pretty much all of MS' customers. Windows 8, Xbox
| One and Windows Phone (8) all landed at more or less the
| same time. Everybody's eyes became too big for their
| stomachs, and we tried to build brand new native
| experiences for all of these platforms (and the web) all
| at once. This hampered our ability to pivot and deal with
| the existential risks I mentioned earlier, and we had the
| rug pulled out from under us.
|
| So yes I think the acquisition hurt us, but I also never
| once heard a viable alternative business strategy that we
| might have pivoted to if the acquisition hadn't happened.
| jaxr wrote:
| That's a completely new take for me on how things went
| down. Thanks for sharing.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| It's not really how MSFT does things though?
|
| Github operates independently of Microsoft. (To Microsoft's
| detriment... they offer Azure Devops which is their
| enterprisey copy of Github, with entirely different UX and
| probably different codebase.) They shove the copilot AI now
| everywhere but it still seems to operate fairly
| differently.
|
| They didn't really fold LinkedIn in into anything (there
| are some weird LinkedIn integrations in Teams but that's
| it)
|
| Google seems to me much worse in this aspect, all Google
| aquisitions usually become Googley.
|
| Skype sort of became Teams thought, that's true.
| foepys wrote:
| > Github operates independently of Microsoft. (To
| Microsoft's detriment... they offer Azure Devops which is
| their enterprisey copy of Github, with entirely different
| UX and probably different codebase.)
|
| GitHub Actions is basically Azure Pipelines repackaged
| with a different UI, so I don't think they mind much.
| esskay wrote:
| Highly unlikely. Instead they'll be working on internal
| Windows AI tools for chatbots and random AI features in
| Windows. We all lose in this situation.
| beoberha wrote:
| There's no chance Sam is joining Microsoft to be some "VP
| of AI" to drive strategy like that. He's going to be
| driving some new business where he'll be able to move
| quickly and have a ton of control.
| mirzap wrote:
| As I was saying, Satya just confirmed it:
| https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
| blitzar wrote:
| Optimization of Microsoft Edge (tm) icon placement to win
| the browser wars.
| fsckboy wrote:
| if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would
| they even go there? If you're flat broke, you need a job;
| they're not flat broke, they don't need a job. The deal at MS
| is worth it, or it's not, it's not something they need to
| decide over the course of a weekend... unless it's what they
| were already not being candid about.
| sekai wrote:
| > if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why
| would they even go there
|
| MSFT may have offered them a lucrative offer to join (for the
| time being) in order to alleviate the potential stock dump.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Sam is already post money rich. Lucrative isn't in this
| equation
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Sam is already post money rich. Lucrative isn't in
| this equation_
|
| i totally agree, except stupid-lucrative is still in the
| equation, like Elon Musk rich, not because of the money,
| but because it says "my electric cars did more to stop
| global warming than anything you've done"
|
| whether this round of AI turns into AGI doesn't precisely
| matter, it's on the way and it's going to be big, who
| wouldn't want their name attached to it.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Microsoft have access to the gold mine and with a bit of time
| Altman can get enough gold to open a jewelry business
| estomagordo wrote:
| How? It's not like he expect to just walk out of there with
| models or data?
| akmarinov wrote:
| If it's under Microsoft's umbrella - sure he can
| gzer0 wrote:
| It is the only way they can continue the work they have
| already contributed at OpenAI. Otherwise, it would mean they
| spend months or up to a year training their own model which
| in this arms race isn't feasible with viable competitors like
| Anthropic closing the gap quickly. This was the only way
| forward. I'm sure Sam Altman + Greg were offered an
| incredibly lucrative deal and autonomy.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's been 2 days, they haven't even heard all the possible
| offers. Microsoft hasn't offered anybody autonomy since
| billg granted it to himself. Even Myhyrvold never did
| anything autonomous till he resigned and wrote a cookbook.
| The closest thing to autonomous in Microsoft was neilk
| breathing enough new life into 16bit Windows to get them to
| abandon OS/2
| cphoover wrote:
| "brilliant"
|
| I think "predictable" is more apt.
| divbzero wrote:
| It makes perfect sense for Satya, Sam, and Greg, but I doubt
| many of us thought deeply enough to have predicted it in
| advance.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| link to your prediction?
| boringg wrote:
| I mean there weren't a lot of options.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes but I didn't see this one discussed at all. Did you?
| Curious to see those threads if you have links. I might
| have just missed them.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I've read a decent amount of predictions about this and had
| not actually seen this one or considered it until I read
| about it happening.
|
| I think the predictable thing would have been a new company
| with new investment from Microsoft. But this is better; it a
| bit like magical thinking that MS would want to just throw
| more money after a new venture and essentially write off the
| old one. This solution accomplished similar things, but gives
| more to Microsoft in the trade by bringing that "new company"
| fully in house.
| ybob wrote:
| Lets assume the whole structure works, 1-2 years later, Sam
| becomes the apparent CEO candidate after Satya.
| precompute wrote:
| That would be very bad.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I said this elsewhere, but think the timeline is longer than
| that. Either Sam and Satya will butt heads and Altman will be
| sidelined, or it will be a good partnership, and he'll be on
| the shortlist as a successor when Nadella's run naturally
| comes to a close. But that second path is longer than a
| couple years.
| sanmon3186 wrote:
| > Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And
| now Altman and Brockman will have that access too.
|
| Microsoft still has to deal with OpenAI as an entity to keep
| the existing set up intact. The new team has to kinda start
| from zero. Right?
| sanderjd wrote:
| That was my first thought too: Didn't occur to me as a
| solution, and it seems to square the circle brilliantly. It
| struck me that this is why people who are CEOs of mammoth
| companies have the jobs they have, and not me :)
| loveparade wrote:
| Over time, the new team at Microsoft will slowly drain the OpenAI
| talent as MS will provider fewer and fewer resources to OAI and
| prioritize their own team they have full ownership owner. OAI
| will die a slow death due to the talent and resource drain. In a
| year or two, Sam and Greg will end up with the same people at MS
| that are now still at OAI. Okay, perhaps minus Sutskever.
| vijaybritto wrote:
| So Microsoft gets co-founders and employees too. This is a great
| win for them!!
| Handy-Man wrote:
| Haha Satya won the game of chess lol
| thatsadude wrote:
| What motivates Sam to join Microsoft? Could it be the proximity
| of achieving AGI and his desire to remain competitive without
| starting from scratch?
| alsodumb wrote:
| One word: GPUs
| pknerd wrote:
| Weird. Why did not he start a new company?
| pearjuice wrote:
| Because OpenAI has first mover advantage, an actual product,
| the household "ChatGPT" name and starting anything from 0 would
| mean you start with a 3-0 disadvantage. Even if you threw a few
| billion dollars at it and attracted all of the top minds for at
| least a year - probably longer - you will be seen as the
| "ChatGPT alternative". How long before you can capture the
| momentum they have now with OpenAI? It's also a legal
| minefield, even when the majority of employees of OpenAI
| migrate, there will be all kinds of no-competes and conflicts
| of interest.
|
| Strategically, this is probably a better move. Microsoft
| doesn't see their investment implode and they probably have
| some sort of plan to inject or absorb Sam and/or Microsoft back
| into OpenAI to prevent this in the future. Perhaps replacing
| the board of directors to prevent further infighting.
| pknerd wrote:
| At the end of the day, it is MSFT that emerged as a winner.
| pearjuice wrote:
| Yes, when this whole saga is over they will probably absorb
| the carcass.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Being able to raise money doesn't necessarily translate into
| success. Perhaps his new crew won't be able to replicate the
| secret sauce. Or Satya just gave terms favourable enough to
| convince him at least for now to avoid giving off the
| impression that Microsoft's investment in OpenAI is
| incinerated.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| What's the lead time on a gross of H100s these days?
| qwertox wrote:
| So Microsoft just won the lottery.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that
| Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?)
| investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is
| on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI
| team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-
| profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives
| and most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following
| Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure, but Microsoft can now
| capture even a bigger slice of THE FUTURE than it was possible
| with OpenAI investment.
| blackoil wrote:
| 10 billion was potential investment. They transfer that in
| tranches, so lot of it is still in MS bank. They already have
| access to GPT3/4/turbo + Dalle 2/3. Plus with its hordes of
| lawyers, it will be an uphill battle for OpenAI to make MS
| lose.
| Maxion wrote:
| Yep, it's now time for MS to throw in the laywers.
| dooraven wrote:
| yeah most likely they have like 6 billion left in the bank
| accounts which they'll redirect to the new AI lab
| neel8986 wrote:
| Make the model open source and lets see what MS can do with
| army of lawyers
| blackoil wrote:
| Sure, they can but that would be against all the safe
| alignment values they are pushing. They'll lose billions in
| current and potential investment and will spend the life in
| lawsuits. Also, govt may not like giving away cutting age
| tech to China.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| And this kind of thinking seems to be the exact reason he was
| pushed away. "The future" as envisioned by a megacorp might not
| be that great.
| cornholio wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow this chain of arguments, which I hear
| often. So, a technology becomes possible, that has the
| potential to massively disrupt social order - while being
| insanely profitable to those who employ it. The knowledge is
| already out there in scientific journals, or if it's not, it
| can be grokked via corporate espionage or paying huge
| salaries to the employees of OpenAI or whoever else has it.
|
| What exactly can a foundation in charge of OpenAI do to
| prevent this unethical use of the technology? If OpenAI
| refuses to use it to some unethical goal, what prevents
| other, for profit enterprises, from doing the same? How can
| private actors stop this without government regulation?
|
| Sounds like Truman's apocryphal "the Russian's will never
| have the bomb". Well, they did, just 4 years later.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| in theory, a nonprofit would demonstrate a government need
| and the nonprofit would be bought out by the government.
|
| in America, nonprofits are just how rich people run around
| trying to get tax avoidance, plaudettes and now wealth
| transfers.
|
| I doubt OpenAI is different not that Altman is anything but
| a figurehead.
|
| but nonprofits in America is how the government has chosen
| to derelict it's duties.
| mlrtime wrote:
| In your world yes, but in another, nonprofits are able to
| work in research that the Government should not, cannot
| or is too inefficient at ever getting working.
|
| I'm no embarrased billionaire, but there is a place for
| both.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I think the last couple decades have demonstrated the
| dangers of corporate leadership beholden to whims of
| shareholders. Jack Welch-style management where the
| quarterly numbers always go up at the expense of the
| employee, the company, and the customer has proven to be
| great at building a house of cards that stands just long
| enough for select few to make fortunes before collapsing.
| In the case of companies like GE or Boeing, the fallout is
| the collapse of the company or a "few" hundred people
| losing their lives in place crashes. In the case of AI, the
| potential for societal-level destructive consequences is
| higher.
|
| A non-profit is not by any means guaranteed to avoid the
| dangers of AI. But at a minimum it will avoid the greed-
| driven myopia that seems to be the default when companies
| are beholden to Wall Street shareholders.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't think cherry-picked examples mean much. But even
| so, you don't seem to be answering the question, which
| was "how will being a non-profit stop other people
| behaving unethically?"
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Look up the reason OpenAI was founded. The idea was exactly
| that _someone_ would get there first, and it better be an
| entity with beneficial goals. So they set it up to
| _advance_ the field - which they have been doing
| successfully - while having a strict charter that would
| ensure alignment with humanity (aka prevent it from
| becoming a profit-driven enterprise).
| tsunamifury wrote:
| He doesn't have to write down the investment that came in the
| form of azure credits. He just doesn't have to deliver.
|
| The core thing he is 100% focused on is not having a massive
| stock drop Monday morning. That's it that's his reason to exist
| all weekend long.
|
| After that. He has time to figure it out.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Don't forget, MS has a board as well. One Satya reports to
| the same way Sam reported to the OpanAI one. Potantially
| loosong 10 _billion_ is nothing the board will just shrug
| off.
| adeelk93 wrote:
| Microsoft's share price swings about more than that on a
| daily basis
| rafram wrote:
| Market cap is not really real money.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Twitter?
| hef19898 wrote:
| Investors money =|= the companies money.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Yup back pats from the board to Satya. Only 10 billion to
| get their foot in the door at OpenAI and now they can
| ransack all their talent. How many billions would it cost
| to develop that independently? What a saving.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Plus if OpenAI implodes on itself they can write that
| investment down to zero.
|
| So basically they get to control ChatGPT 2.0 and get a 10
| billion tax credit for it.
|
| Honestly the board at least owes Satya a drink.
| svnt wrote:
| You seem to have missed the entire point of the comment
| you're replying to.
|
| The money was promised in tranches, and probably much of it
| in the form of spare Azure capacity. Microsoft did not hand
| OpenAI a $10B check.
|
| Satya gives away something he had excess of, and gets 75%
| of the profits that result from its use, and half of the
| resulting company. Gives him an excuse to hoard Nvidia
| GPUs.
|
| If it goes to the moon he's way up. If it dies he's down
| only a fraction of the $10B. If it meanders along his costs
| are somewhat offset, and presumably he can exit at some
| point.
| sekai wrote:
| > Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world,
| removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a
| for-profit company?
|
| Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?
| gscott wrote:
| 24k gold shackles for a year or two and then onto the next
| thing.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| That surely is no problem from the pov of said mega-corp.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Microsoft got Copilot. They were first to establish the brand.
| OpenAI technologies let them do it. I don't know how much
| Copilot brand cost, but right now when you're thinking about
| AI-assisted programming, Copilot is the first thing comes in
| mind. So probably they got something in return.
| chamoda wrote:
| Not only Github copilot but the general copilot integrations
| announced at Ignite for Microsoft 365 and other apps means a
| much deeper full on assistant integration for whole
| ecosystem.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Yeah, Copilot has become a very nice branding.
|
| For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing
| search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or
| something.
| pjerem wrote:
| > For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing
| search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web
| or something.
|
| Nah it would make it too understandable. It's Microsoft,
| they'll just rename Bing to Cortana Series X 365. And
| they'll keep Cortana alive but as a totally different
| product.
| imgabe wrote:
| Microsoft is now the for-profit arm of OpenAI.
| taspeotis wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/ZjehzHY
| rounakdatta wrote:
| > can capture a bigger slice of THE FUTURE History says that
| the future is actually written by the nerds and not the
| drumbeaters (ah read CXOs).
|
| In all this drama, the deep work interruption of the nerds is
| the net loss (and effectively slight deceleration) for the
| future.
| rjtavares wrote:
| This whole weekend will probably be a case study in both
| Corporate Governance (Microsoft may look bad here for not
| anticipating the problem) and Negotiation (a masterclass by
| Satya: gave Ilya what he wanted and got most of OpenAI's
| commercial potential anyway).
| jacquesm wrote:
| As much as I dislike Microsoft: they played this exactly
| right. No boardseat: no culpability or conflict of interest,
| catch the falling pieces and reposition themselves stronger.
| What makes you say they didn't anticipate the problem? If
| they had anticipated it I don't see what else they could have
| done without making themselves part of the problem.
| rjtavares wrote:
| I based that opinion on two news that came out:
|
| 1. When they invested in Open AI it had a more mature board
| (in particular Reid Hoffman) and afterwards they lost a few
| members without replacing them. That was probably something
| Microsoft could have influenced without making themselves
| part of the problem.
|
| 2. They received a call one minute before the decision was
| made public. That shouldn't happen to a partner that owns
| 49% of the company you just fired a CEO from.
|
| Sources:
|
| 1 - https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-
| board
|
| 2 - https://www.axios.com/2023/11/17/microsoft-openai-sam-
| altman...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, but both of those are not Microsoft's doing but the
| OpenAI board's doing. You don't just get to name someone
| to a board without the board to agree to it and normally
| this happens as a condition of for instance an investment
| or partnership.
|
| Nadella was rightly furious about this, the tail wagged
| the dog there. And this isn't over yet: you can expect a
| lot of change on the OpenAI side.
| rjtavares wrote:
| Buying 49% of a company is a risky deal. You better make
| sure the other 51% have good governance.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, that probably was a mistake, it should have come
| with more protections. But I haven't seen any documents
| on the governance other than what is in the media now and
| there is a fair chance that MS did have various
| protections but that the board simply ignored those.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >reposition themselves stronger.
|
| We don't know that yet.
| layer8 wrote:
| Didn't the negotiations fail?
| leobg wrote:
| Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word
| (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be
| anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could
| argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to
| the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI.
|
| The argument would go something like this:
|
| MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their
| mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering
| their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools
| he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and
| its mission.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Perhaps. Could be tied up in court for 2-3 years before we
| find out.
| vaxman wrote:
| > MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI
|
| They were positioned that way by the OpenAI board, which has
| effectively committed corporate suicide and won't be around
| much longer.
| MrMan wrote:
| I am sure Sutskever knows openai as an economically
| competitive entity has been living on borrowed time. this
| is a global arms race and this tech will bleed out
| everywhere. implementing LLMs is not rocket science per se
| and there are multiple places in the world this work can be
| done.
|
| the bottleneck right now is mostly compute I think, and
| openai does not have the resources or expertise to
| allieviate that bottleneck on a timescale that can save
| them.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Microsoft does not prevent OpenAI from achieving their
| mission. OpenAI does not bind Microsoft to behave one way or
| another.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Since the board was never clear what Altman did, you could
| make flip the parties and your breach of contract argument
| holds about as much water. Plus MS can resort to the
| playground "they started it" argument.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Maybe the next move is an open offer to any OpenAI employees to
| join Sam's team at their current compensation or better.. call
| it the 'treacherous 500' or something.
| belter wrote:
| Remember when they did this?
|
| "Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion"
| -https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
|
| To then write down their assets?
|
| "How Skype lost its crown to Zoom" -
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/skype-coronavirus-pandemic Or
| when they did this ?
|
| Or how in 2014...
|
| "Microsoft buying Nokia's phone business in a $7.2 billion bid
| for its mobile future" -
| https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/2/4688530/microsoft-buys-nok...
|
| Then in 2016 sold it for 360 million?
|
| "Nokia returns to the phone market as Microsoft sells brand" -
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-ret...
| pug_mode wrote:
| Satya was not responsible for those 2 purchases
| meowkit wrote:
| Pre Satya history is irrelevant to the current MSFT
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| For those of us not following Microsoft super close, would
| it possible to ready a summary of the successes of Satya?
|
| I sense a lot of respect and appreciation for his role, but
| unfortunately I just don't know many details and I'm
| curious about the highlights.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| - Github Purchase, Linkedin Purchase - Aligned Microsoft
| towards "openness" culturally - VS Code + Typescript -
| Partnership with Open AI which might make bing actually
| be used
|
| might be missing some more but Satya is like a S tier
| CEO, compared to Sundar who doesn't seem very good at his
| role.
| HankB99 wrote:
| Did MS do _anything_ with Linux before Sataya? At present
| I believe that the bulk of their Azure hosts are running
| Linux - their own distro. And AFAIK it is successful.
| ls612 wrote:
| They did the bare minimum to let Linux based stuff run on
| Azure but other than that not much.
| hughesjj wrote:
| True, but that was when ballmer was at the helm
| DrBazza wrote:
| And despite the above track record, he somehow managed to
| not accidentally buy Yahoo as well.
| alsodumb wrote:
| Remember when they did this?
|
| "Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion" -
| https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-
| acquire-g...
|
| only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without
| disrupting user experience?
|
| "Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps
| doing its thing" - https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/four-
| years-after-being-acq...
|
| or when they acquired LinkedIn before that?
|
| "Microsoft buys LinkedIn" -
| https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-buys-
| linke...
|
| which turned out to be fine too?
|
| How about Minecraft? Activision?
|
| It's easy to cherry-pick examples from an era where Microsoft
| wasn't the most successful. The current leadership seems
| competent and the stock growth of the company reflects that.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub
| keeps doing its thing
|
| The fact that this is even news speaks of the absolute shit
| job they've done with acquisitions in the past.
| firtoz wrote:
| Maybe they learned their lesson?
|
| Looking at the global track records of what happens after
| acquisitions, these don't seem too bad
| efdee wrote:
| It absolutely does not. Take a look around at
| acquisitions in general and count how many acquired teams
| are still doing their thing.
| belter wrote:
| "Has GitHub Been Down More Since Its Acquisition by
| Microsoft?" - https://statusgator.com/blog/has-github-been-
| down-more-since...
|
| "... In the two years since the acquisition announcement,
| GitHub has reported a 41% increase in status page
| incidents. Furthermore, there has been a 97% increase in
| incident minutes, compared to the two years prior to the
| announcement..."
| OptoContrarian wrote:
| Wouldn't incident increase in forward movement of time
| where there would be a user increase as well?
| mlrtime wrote:
| > 41% increase in status page incidents
|
| Maybe they got funding for a proper incident team? Or
| changed the metrics of a incdient is, maybe the SLAs
| changed to mirror MS SLAs?
|
| Also Betteridge's law.
| asdfasdfsadf22 wrote:
| Speaking as someone who uses github multiple times a day,
| I think I've only actually noticed 1-2 downtimes in the
| past year. On the other hand, I've used several of the
| beta features that have come out, including copilot and
| the evolving github actions.
|
| GitHub is stronger now then it ever has been.
| m00x wrote:
| Shipping code causes incidents. Microsoft has shipped
| more features on github in the year they acquired it than
| github did 5 years before that.
| underdeserver wrote:
| The Activision purchase is still way too new to judge.
| OriginalNebula wrote:
| With the loyal customer base (aka addicts) for the bought
| IPs, the purchase can only be successful.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| MS is destined to be substantially better than their
| previous owners. Your right in that it may be too early
| to predict the financial success, but I am very happy to
| see MS as the new owners of Activision, no matter what
| happens.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without
| disrupting user experience?
|
| Excuse you? Greater where? Github was an amazing
| revolution, unique of its kind. Microsoft didn't kill it
| but didn't make it even 1% better for the users, just
| turned it into a cash cow. Linkedin is currently a PoS.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| > didn't make it even 1% better for the users
|
| I think it can be argued that giving free private repos
| to user is a 1% increase. Or what about private
| vulnerability reporting for open source projects. And so
| on. Github has gotten a lot of new free functionality
| since Microsoft bought it. It sounds like you just have
| not been paying attention.
|
| Edit: Nevermind, I see you refer to Microsoft as M$. That
| really says it all.
| andai wrote:
| Despite porting it from Java to C++, Bedrock (Microsoft's
| rewrite of Minecraft) somehow has worse performance and
| bugs than vanilla Minecraft. (Also, a bunch of it is
| somehow in JavaScript?)
| ninth_ant wrote:
| I don't believe that is entirely accurate, but even if it
| was -- the bedrock port has been extremely successful for
| Microsoft.
| andai wrote:
| All three parts of what I said are true. What you say is
| also true.
| smcleod wrote:
| GitHub has been significantly less reliable since Microsoft
| bought it and Actions has been a disaster of an experience.
|
| Linkedin has not improved its problems with spam or content
| quality since Microsoft took over.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| > GitHub has been significantly less reliable since
| Microsoft bought it and Actions has been a disaster of an
| experience.
|
| Not unreliable enough to be a problem though, and Actions
| seems to be a decent experience for plenty of people.
|
| The simple fact with GitHub is that it is _the_ primary
| place to go looking for, or post your, open source code,
| and it is the go-to platform for the majority of
| companies looking for a solution to source code hosting.
|
| Your comment about LinkedIn is true, but where is the
| nearest competition in its' space?
| moralestapia wrote:
| They didn't buy OpenAI, they got the best part of their team
| to develop new products for MS.
| ethanbond wrote:
| What's the evidence behind "they got the best part of their
| team?"
|
| It seems to me roughly all of the value of OpenAI's
| products is in the model itself and presumably the
| supporting infrastructure, neither of which seem like
| they're going to MSFT (yet?).
| moralestapia wrote:
| Go to Twitter (X?) and search for "OpenAI is nothing
| without its people" and prepare to be mind blown.
|
| It's seems like a cult right now, tbh.
| ethanbond wrote:
| A bit culty but am I to interpret this as, "if I post
| that the people are important to this company, I am going
| to resign?"
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes, it's how they pledge their alliance to @sama.
|
| Whether they actually move to MS or not remains to be
| seen, but it is definitely a strong indicator that
| they're not "aligned" with OpenAI anymore.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Eh, seems like an ambitious read, and obviously if they
| actually wanted to give Sam leverage it would've required
| saying "I will leave if he's not reinstated," not a more
| generic statement of solidarity.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Ok here it is, lol.
|
| https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/172659836027735677
| 5?s...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yeah this is much much less ambiguous than the Twitter
| things. At least answers my question of, "is there
| actually that much support for Altman?" Now the second
| question, much more important and still ambiguous IMO, is
| whether these people will _actually_ resign to do this.
| The letter just says they "may" resign, which leaves
| really the last thing you want in an ultimatum like this:
| ambiguity.
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| The Skype purchase was good for itself. It lead to Teams,
| which is dominating.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The only people I know using Teams are the ones who are
| forced to by management fiat. I guess that's dominating,
| but not really in a positive way.
| novia wrote:
| Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with their
| other services. In my personal opinion, as someone who
| loved Skype before Microsoft got involved with it, Teams is
| complete trash, and impossible to work with in a business
| environment.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| > Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with
| their other services.
|
| This is a win from Microsoft's perspective. They don't
| have to have the best group messenger around, but having
| a significant office product being dominated by another
| company would be a massive risk to Microsoft, and Teams
| has prevented that.
| andai wrote:
| So killing Skype was actually their goal? :(
| smcleod wrote:
| And bad for users. Skype went downhill fast and Teams...
| well we all know what that's like.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Seconded, teams winning is horrible for users in the long
| run (no competition allowed), but great for MS and IT
| managers.
| Lammy wrote:
| It was also good for the security state https://www.theregi
| ster.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f...
| rmason wrote:
| Except the founders weren't included in the Skype deal.
| Microsoft has OpenAI's two founders and they're highly
| motivated to show that OpenAI is nothing without them which
| in time it may soon be. I openly await when Sam and Greg ship
| a product in say two years time.
|
| Meanwhile Microsoft wins if OpenAI stays dominant and wins
| even bigger if Sam and Greg prevail. Some day soon they may
| teach this story at Harvard Business School.
| schemescape wrote:
| Don't forget Microsoft buying aQuantive for $6 billion in
| 2007 and then taking a $6.2 billion dollar writedown 5 years
| later.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Not every swing is going to be a home run. Billion dollar
| investments sound like a lot but not for companies of this
| size. They are small to medium sized bets.
| belter wrote:
| You are looking forward to a self-aware, self-replicating,
| unregulated Clippy?
| jacquesm wrote:
| At least it will be a broken paperclip maximizer.
| cowl wrote:
| I would say this is a better outcome for what remains of
| OpenAI. a New startup would have created more exodus that
| Microsoft. Doubt many brilliant researchers would want to be
| Employee number 945728123 of Microsoft when the market is
| theirs at this moment.
| sgift wrote:
| > Doubt many brilliant researchers would want to be Employee
| number 945728123 of Microsoft when the market is theirs at
| this moment.
|
| Yeah, it's not like Microsoft has one of the most renowned
| industry research groups or something like that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
| cowl wrote:
| I did not say the don't have and it's precisely because the
| do have that is less likely to attract the kind of people
| that make a difference. Less room to move and less room to
| be distinguished. Case in point these did not join that
| renowned group in the first place but joined OpenAI an
| obscure not renowned group and I guarantee you it's not
| because MS was not interested.
| skilled wrote:
| You do realize that Microsoft uses OpenAI IP for all of its AI
| products, of which there are at least two dozen that they
| released this year. In what universe do you make the connection
| that they would write it off and go to a different, less
| superior/reliable, model provider? It would never happen.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| right, they'll just steal it and watch a nonprofit try to
| enforce anything about it.
| pug_mode wrote:
| It's more than that, OpenAI had many people aligned with the
| decel agenda, MSFT managed to take the accel leadership and
| likely their supporters. Does anyone know any large AI
| competitors that don't have a big decel contingent? Also
| interesting that META took the opportunity to close one of
| their decel departments on Saturday.
| dagaci wrote:
| Satya simply had to move quickly to restore shareholder
| confidence. I'm not convinced that its actually desirable for
| Microsoft to be fully in the driving seat. Hopefully the new
| division will have autonomy.
|
| Microsoft will not have actually paid $10B as a single
| commitment, in fact the financials of OpenAI appear to be
| alarming from the recent web chatter. OpenAI are possibly close
| to collapse financially as well as organizationally.
|
| Whatever Satya does will be aimed at isolating Microsoft and
| its roadmap from that, his job is actually also on the line for
| this debacle.
|
| The OpenAI board have ruined their credibility and
| organization.
| layer8 wrote:
| What choice did Satya have? Nothing much else he could have
| done in the present situation.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Choice? Are you framing this as though the whole situation
| didn't go pretty well toward msft's favor?
|
| Now they get 40 percent of open ai talent and 50 percent of
| the for profit openai subsidiary.
|
| Pretty sure when the market opens you'll see confirmation
| that they came out on top.
|
| It's a win for everyone honestly. Anthropic split all over
| again but this time the progressives got pushed out vs the
| conservatives leaving voluntarily.
|
| They couldn't keep nice under the tent. Now two tents.
|
| Little diff because this time an investor with special
| privaleges made a new special tent quick to bag talent.
|
| Easy decision for msft. No talent to competitors. Small
| talent pool. The other big boys were already all over that.
| Salty bosses at other outfits. No poach for them. Satya too
| clever and brought the checkbook plus already courted the
| cutest girls earlier for a different dance. Hell he was
| assisting in the negotiation when the old dance got all rough
| and the jets started throwing hooks about safety and scale
| and bla bla we all know the story.
|
| Satya hunts with an elephant gun with one of those laser
| sites and the auto trigger that fires automatically when the
| cross hair goes over the target. Rip sundar. 2 rounds for
| satya. One more and I feel bad for Google... Naw... Couldn't
| feel bad for Google. Punchable outfit. They do punchable
| things. We all know it... I'm just saying it.
| sidibe wrote:
| It's pretty naive IMO to think Google isn't going to come
| out with something that threatens OpenAI or Microsoft. It
| seems to be "they didn't do it yet so they won't ever" is
| the majority opinion here, but they have a ton of
| advantages when they finally do
| nopromisessir wrote:
| What? I didn't say anything about the likelyhood of
| competition to state of the art.
|
| You are imagining I fall in a crowd you've observed.
| Maintaining statute of the art ofc is a constant battle.
|
| Google could be top dog in 2 weeks. Never insinuated
| otherwise. (though I predict otherwise, if we're gonna
| speculate)
|
| Its not even relevant because each big firm is
| specializing to a degree. Anthropic is going for context
| window and safety... Bard is all about Google
| priorities... Ect
| vaxman wrote:
| > most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following
| Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure
|
| By all accounts, OpenAI is not a going concern without Azure. I
| could see Tesla acquiring the bankrupt shell for the publicity,
| but the worker bees seem to be more keen on their current
| leader (as of last week) than their prior leader. OpenAI ends
| with a single owner.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to
| write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI
|
| Hiring Altman makes sure that MSFT is still relevant to the
| whole Altman/OpenAI deal, not just a part of it. Hiring Altman
| thus decreases such possibility to write-off its investment.
| ljm wrote:
| Given it's Microsoft we're talking about, it's more likely they
| use it to find new and novel ways to shove Edge, OneDrive,
| Teams and Bing down your throat whenever you use any of their
| products.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and
| Brockman the most formidable AI team? I would wager a
| substantial sum that Altman has not touch anything technical
| (let alone related to AI) in a very long time. He certainly
| showed he is a very good operator, networker and executer, but
| that doesbt give you the technical expertise to build state of
| the art AI.
|
| If he manages to get a significant amount of the OpenAI
| engineers to jump ship maybe, but even for those who are
| largely motivated by money, how is MS going to offer the same
| opportunity as when they joined for equity with OpenAI? Are
| they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
| wruza wrote:
| I don't get it too. It's akin to claiming that by hiring an
| Oracle executive you can build the best database tech. A
| little stretch but still. Chances are I'll never understand
| how things like that work, because there must be few truths
| about humans my mind resists to believe.
|
| My uneducated guess is that OpenAI really screwed up the PR
| part and the current Microsoft's claims are more on the
| overall damage control / fire suppression side.
| aeyes wrote:
| Looking at the list of people who have resigned it's quite
| obvious that the team goes where he goes.
|
| Even if he does nothing, he keeps the team together and that
| is worth quite a bit.
| mlrtime wrote:
| If I was a SE/MLE at OpenAI , and I had a choice between the
| nonprofit OpenAI and MS, I'd follow Sam to MS. This is
| assuming I had profit sharing contracts in place.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| There's a current fashion for tech "leaders" (bosses,
| really) to try to imbue in their staff a kind of cultish
| belief in the company and its leader. Personally, I find
| these efforts _extremely_ offputting. I 'm thinking of the
| kind of saccharine corporate presentations from people like
| Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes; it evidently appeals to
| some kinds of people, but I run a mile from cults.
|
| My guess is that a lot of the people that will follow Sam
| and Gregg are that kind of cult-follower.
| modernpink wrote:
| The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is
| always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority, Yukio
| Mishima. You reveal more here about your own psychology
| than those who have a mission that they believe in and
| are passionate about. It's always easy to criticise from
| the sidelines.
| norir wrote:
| Mishima was quite physically beautiful so this claim
| feels rather convenient for him.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman
| and Brockman the most formidable AI team?
|
| Recruiting. At the end of the day, that's the most important
| job a CEO has. If they can recruit the best AI people,
| they're the most formidable AI team.
|
| > Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
|
| I would wager very heavily that they are. My guess is Satya
| more or less promised Sam that he'd match comp for anybody
| who wants to leave OpenAI.
| andai wrote:
| > Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
|
| This sounds like hyperbole, but isn't that what China is
| doing?
| soderfoo wrote:
| Agreed, Satya is a first rate executive, other than Gwynne
| Shotwell at SpaceX, I can't really think of anyone in the same
| league.
|
| There was a lot of discussion on HN the past few days regarding
| the importance (or lack thereof) of a CEO to an organization.
| It may be the case that most executives are interchangeable and
| attributing success to them is not merited, but in the case of
| the aforementioned, I think it is merited.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Tim Cook is not in the same league?
| soderfoo wrote:
| Yes, oversight on my part, as a supply chain guy, he has
| really pivoted well in to a generalist leading Apple in to
| the entertainment biz.
| pb7 wrote:
| I would say given the stock's performance lately, Mark has
| been handling business pretty well.
| throw310822 wrote:
| However it's a nice way to deal with the whole "open" AI issue:
| first you create a non-profit to create open AI systems; then
| when you hit a marketable success it turns into a "capped
| profit"; and finally, all the people from that capped profit
| leave en masse and transfer their acquired know how to a for-
| profit company.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > for-profit company
|
| Slashdot literally used to call them M$
| jkhdigital wrote:
| My understanding was that a large tranche of that $10B
| consisted of Azure compute credits, not actual cash.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| > possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole
| $10B
|
| There was an article that came out over the weekend that stated
| that only a small part of that $10B investment was in cash, the
| vast majority is cloud GPU credits, and that it has a long time
| horizon with only a relatively small fraction having been
| consumed to date. So, if MSFT were to develop their own GPT4
| model in house over the next year or so they could in theory
| back out of their investment with most of it intact.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Depends on the term sheet behind that. That, and how MS is
| accounting for its minority stake in OpenAI. If they have to
| write off the vakue, it doesn't how they paid for it.
| benkarst wrote:
| Side note, the 10B investment is less than a half a percent of
| MSFT's 2.75T market cap.
| safety1st wrote:
| If there's one thing we should have learned over the last 45
| years in this industry - it's never underestimate Microsoft.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| I dunno man. Doing innovation from inside Microsoft might be
| more difficult than if they had just formed a new startup.
| Microsoft as a brand has the stench of mediocracy upon it.
| Large companies are where ideas and teams go to die, or just
| rest and vest.
| olalonde wrote:
| > There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to
| write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI
|
| How so? I don't get the hype.
|
| OpenAI trained truly ground breaking models that were miles
| ahead of anything the world had seen before. Everything else
| was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at
| best, average. They called their flagship product "ChatGPT", a
| term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a
| random string of letters to the average person. They had no
| mobile app for a long time. Their web app had some major bugs.
|
| Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and
| capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success
| by far and large hinges on their game-changing models. And by
| extension, the bulk of the credit goes to their AI
| research/tech teams.
| infecto wrote:
| I have the complete opposite perspective. Their initial api
| went live sometime late 2020. They have done a fantastic job
| scaling, releasing features while growing the business at a
| rate we have not seen many times before.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> _There 's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to
| write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but
| that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next.
| Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world,
| removed from the shackles..._
|
| That's a slightly flamboyant reading.. but I agree with the
| gist.
|
| A slim chance of total right off doctor off.. that was always
| the case. This decision does not affect it much. The place in
| the risk model, where most of the action happens... Is less
| dramatic effects on more likely bans of the probability curve.
|
| Msft cannot be kicked off the team. They still have all of the
| rights to their openai investment no matter who the CEO is.
|
| Meanwhile, is clearly competing, participating, and doing
| business with openai. The hierarchy of paradigms, is
| flexible... Competing appears to have won.
|
| I agree that direct financial returns, are the lesser part of
| the investment case for msft.. and the other participants.
| That's pretty much standard in consortium-like ventures.
|
| At the base level, openai's IP is still largely science,
| unpatentable know how and key people. Msft have some access to
| (I assume) of openAI' defendable IP via their participation in
| the consortium, or 49% ownership of the for-profit entity.
| Meanwhile, openai is not so far ahead that pacing them from a
| dead start is impossible.
|
| I also agree, that this represents a decision to launch ahead
| aggressively in the generative AI space.
|
| In the latter 2000s, Google have the competence, technology,
| resources and momentum to smash anyone else on anything
| worldwideWeb.
|
| They won all the "races." Google have never been good at
| turning wins into businesses, but they did acquire the wins
| handily. Microsoft wants to be that for the 2020s.
|
| Able to replicate everything, for the new paradigm OpenAI's
| achievments probably represents.
|
| The AI spreadsheet. The LLM email client. GPT search. Autobot
| jira. Literally and proverbially.
|
| At least in theory... Microsoft is or will be in a position to
| start executing on all of these.
|
| Sama, if he's actually motivated to do this.. it's pretty much
| the ideal person on planet earth for that task.
|
| I'm sure takes a lot to motivate him. Otoh, CEO of Microsoft is
| it realistic prize if he wins this game. The man is basically
| Microsoft the person. I mean that as a compliment.. sort of.
|
| One way or another, I expect that implementing OpenAI-ish
| models in applications is about commence.
|
| Companies have been pleading chatbot customer support for
| years. They may get it soon, but so will the customers. That
| makes for a whole new thing in the place where customer support
| used to exist. At least, that is the bull case.
|
| That said, I have said a lot. All speculative. I'll
| probabilistic, even where my speculations are correct. These
| are not really predictions. I'm chewing the cud.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If I had to make a list of companies that need shackles of that
| sort, Microsoft would definitely be top three or so.
| suslik wrote:
| Was GPT4 a success due to the brilliance of OpenAI's tech team
| vs first movers advantage and good GPU deals with MS? I might
| be missing something here, but to me nothing about this
| technology feels like rocket science (obviously, there is a lot
| of nuance, yada yada, but nothing that seems intractable). I
| have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so
| on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale
| transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they
| are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good
| stuff.
| htrp wrote:
| >I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and
| so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale
| transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they
| are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good
| stuff.
|
| Google has been hyping gemini since the spring (and not
| delivering it)
|
| Amazon's Titan Model is not quite there yet.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed
| from the shackles
|
| Or at least the most hyped AI team in the world. The level of
| cult of personality around OpenAI is reaching pretty nauseating
| levels.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| TBH We are living in the outcome of the $10B investment. Google
| is in a weaker position in search, with egg on their face.
| Microsoft appears (with or without ChatGPT) uniquely positioned
| to monopolize on this new AI future we're heading into with or
| without OpenAI as a company.
|
| Yes directly, the $10B investment in the company itself may be
| a write off. But it's not just about that.
| visarga wrote:
| I'm wondering how Sam is going to work with Demis. Two master
| cooks in a kitchen/
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed
| from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit
| company_
|
| This massively increases the odds we'll see AI regulated. That
| isn't what Altman _et al_ intended with their national press
| tour--the goal was to talk up the tech. But it should be good
| in the long run.
|
| I also assume there will be litigation about what Sam _et al_
| can bring with them, and what they cannot.
| Jayakumark wrote:
| For Microsoft , 2% loss in stock value on this news on Friday
| was $60 billion, so writing off $10B and giving another $50B to
| form a team is still a great deal.
|
| For Sam , he got more than what he was asking and a better
| prospect to become CEO of Microsoft when Satya leaves. Satya
| lead cloud division, which was the industry growth market at
| that time before becoming CEO and now sam is leading AI
| division , the next growth market.
|
| Ilya still lost in all of this , he managed to get back the
| keys of a city from sam , who now got this keys to the whole
| country . Eventually sam will pull everyone out of the city in
| to rest of his country. Microsoft just needs a few openai
| employees to join them . They just need data and GPU , openai
| has reached its limits for getting more data and was begging
| for more private data while Microsoft holds worlds data, they
| will just give a few offers to business or free Microsoft
| products in return of using their data or use their own. I
| think it's the end for openAI.
| nytesky wrote:
| Really? These two did not do the technical work but hired,
| managed, and fund raised.
|
| They won't necessarily be able to attract similar technical
| talent because they no longer have the open non profit mission
| not the lottery ticket startup PPO shares.
|
| Working on AI at Microsoft was always an option even before
| they were hired, not sure if they tip the scale?
| iambateman wrote:
| I basically agree - and it's a weird cognitive shift to think
| that going to Microsoft is the best place for tech innovation
| today.
|
| Credit to Nadella for making a big cultural shift over the past
| several years.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?)
| investment in OpenAI
|
| Not sure why you didn't research before saying that! It was
| $10B committed and not a cash handover of that amount. Also,
| majority of that's Azure credits
| LrnByTeach wrote:
| This might have been a reasonable and workable solution for all
| parties involved.
|
| Context:
|
| ---------
|
| 1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision
| of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast
| progression to GPT-5 level
|
| 1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is
| needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is
| burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition.
|
| 1.3/ Microsoft, after investing $10+ Billions do not want this
| fight enable slow progress of AI Commercialization and fall
| behind Google AI etc..
|
| a workable solution:
|
| --------------------
|
| 2.1/ @sama @gdb form a new AI company, let us call it e/acc
| Inc.
|
| 2.2/ e/acc Inc. raises $3 Billions as SAFE instrument from VCs
| who believed in Sam Altman's vision.
|
| 2.3/ Open AI and e/acc Inc. reach an agreement such that:
|
| a) GPT-4 IP transferred to e/acc Inc., this IP transfer is
| valued as $8 Billion SAFE instrument investment from Open AI
| into e/acc Inc.
|
| b) existing Microsoft's 49% share in Open AI is transferred to
| e/acc Inc., such that Microsoft owns 49% of e/acc Inc.
|
| c) the resulted "Lean and pure non-profit Open AI" with Ilya
| Sukhar and Board can steer AI progress as they wish, their
| stake in e/acc Inc. will act as funding source to cover their
| future Research Costs.
|
| d) employees can join from Open AI to e/acc Inc. as they wish
| with no antipoaching lawsuits from OpenAI
| caycep wrote:
| MS also has its own ML teams and is probably capable of
| replicating a lot of OpenAI without OpenAI.
|
| Like some googlers have mentioned - aside from GPU
| requirements, there isn't much else of a moat since a lot of ML
| ideas are presented and debated relatively freely at NEURIPS,
| ICML and other places.
| sampli wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires...
| greentext wrote:
| The only way to keep AGI safe is to put it on the Zune.
| epups wrote:
| Microsoft is likely betting that they can build the next GPT with
| a bag of money and a few food people. They control a massive
| amount of GPUs, this could be a major factor for Altman and
| Brockman here.
| miohtama wrote:
| We will see if OpenAI team can stand on its own legs. My bet is
| 70% they will start to humble and lose in long term. AI satety
| people may not those who know how to create a feasible business.
| At some point, Microsoft can make a purchase offer to get the
| remaining OpenAI.
|
| We have seen similar stories with Nokia, Slack, others.
| sagman wrote:
| Looking forward to reading Sam and Greg's connects.
| impulser_ wrote:
| I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to
| want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that
| just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now
| because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for
| them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and
| researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a
| grab up any top talent that still there because they can offer
| them money and equity.
|
| The company will probably still exist, but the company isn't
| going to be worth what it is today.
| bagels wrote:
| They're going to have to give up control of the board to get
| more investment. No investor wants these loose cannons in
| charge of their investments.
| nicce wrote:
| > No investor wants these loose cannons in charge of their
| investments.
|
| The board just proved to stay on the companys core values.
| loveparade wrote:
| I agree, any potential hire who has the choice between OpenAI
| and the new team at MSFT will now choose the latter. And a lot
| of the current team will follow as well. This is probably the
| end of OpenAI. Can't say I'm too sad, finally a chance to erase
| that misleading name from history.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Do leading AI researchers at
| Google/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic/HuggingFace want to work at
| Microsoft?
| loveparade wrote:
| Yes, for most AI researchers the umbrella organization (or
| university) doesn't matter nearly as much as the specific
| lab. These people are not going to work at Microsoft, they
| are going to work at whatever that new org is going to be
| called, and that org is going to have a pretty high status.
| truculent wrote:
| It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the
| mission and working with or learning from the existing team
| will still want to work there.
| pera wrote:
| I didn't believe that OpenAI was being honest in their
| mission statement before - I thought it was just the typical
| bay area "we want to make the world a better place" bs.
|
| This entire situation changed my mind radically and now I put
| the non-profit part in my personal top 3 dream jobs :)
| pera wrote:
| Please disregard my last comment, it was a premature
| opinion on a situation that is still developing and very
| unclear from the outside
| shrimpx wrote:
| The flip side perspective is people will love focusing on doing
| it right, without being rushed to market for moat building and
| max profit.
| pixelesque wrote:
| Does that not only work long-term with investment?
|
| Unless they get philanthropic backers (maybe?), who else is
| going to give them investment needed for resources and
| employees that isn't going to want a return on investment
| within a few years?
| padolsey wrote:
| There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that
| OpenAI was founded on, which have just been - arguably -
| reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's
| commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient
| compute to chase AGI... If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll
| see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for
| profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to
| get all the GPUs. There are engineers, and increasingly, non-VC
| money, that have larger stakes in outcomes for humanity who I
| feel will back a 'purer' OpenAI.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Do they really believe the path to AGI is through LLMs
| though? In that case they might be in for a very rude
| awakening.
| srossi93 wrote:
| They don't, they know it very well. But people has being
| buying in this AGI bullshit (pardon the language) for a
| while, and they wanted a piece of the cake.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Imo sam altman and team believed more in the llm because it
| took the world by storm and they just couldn't wait to milk
| it. Msft has also licensed these type of services from open
| ai on azure. The folks really motivated by values at open
| probably want to move on from the llm hype and continue
| their research and pushing the boundaries of AI further.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm sure they care. The question is how will they stay liquid
| if there is a similar or better offer by another party? The
| kind of interface they use makes it trivial to move from one
| supplier to another if the engine is better.
| hooande wrote:
| OpenAI existed for years before ChatGPT. Granted, at much
| smaller size and with hundreds fewer employees.
|
| I imagine that the board wants to go back to that or
| something like it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The past is not on the menu for any of us, also not for
| OpenAI. They can't undo that which has been done without
| wiping out the company in its entirety. Unless they aim
| to become the Mozilla of AI. Which is a real possibility
| at this point.
| jatins wrote:
| Doesn't seem so from Emmett's tweet which suggests they
| will continue to pursue commercial interests.
| JCharante wrote:
| and those values will make them go bankrupt before creating
| AGI
| zb3 wrote:
| By "for profit" you mean "available to use by people right
| now"? Well then I hope the "pure" OpenAI is over. I want to
| be able to use the AI for money, not for these models to be
| hoarded..
| OJFord wrote:
| It could be entirely open source and still available hosted
| for use in exchange for money today though?
| deeviant wrote:
| OAI is dead.
|
| In the name of safety, the board has gifted OAI to MS. Even
| Ilya wants to jump ship now that the ship is sinking (I'll be
| real interesting if Sama even lets him on board the MS money
| train).
|
| Calling this a win for AI safety is ludicrous. OAI is dead in
| all be name, MS basically now owns 100% of OAI (the models,
| the source, and now the team) for pennies on the dollar.
| keiferski wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. There are a whole lot of people that
| want absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
| zamalek wrote:
| The Microsoft team going to churn out ChatGPT versions - which
| are the current valuation-makers. OpenAI is going to chase what
| comes after ChatGPT, pushing yet another ChatGPT is probably
| one of the reasons the researchers got fed up.
|
| In my opinion. Best outcome for everyone involved.
| Difwif wrote:
| I think the reality is the opposite. Sam has said that he
| doesn't think Transformers/GPT architecture will be enough
| for AGI where Ilya claims it might be enough.
| maeil wrote:
| On the contrary - I will now be actively looking for
| opportunities to join OpenAI, while I wasn't particularly
| interested beforehand.
| hcks wrote:
| What makes you think you're more competent than the type of
| people who were interested in joining OpenAI before?
|
| What if the type of people who made the company successful
| are leaving and the type of people who have no track record
| become interested?
| maeil wrote:
| A bit surprised by this pseudo ad hominem, but just for one
| data point I have (now ex-)coworkers in the same role as me
| who've recently moved to OpenAI. I'm not suggesting I'm
| more competent than them, but I don't think my hiring was
| based on luck while they got it on merit either.
|
| > What if the type of people who made the company
| successful are leaving and the type of people who have no
| track record become interested?
|
| What if it's the opposite? What if sama was basically a
| Bezos who was in the right place/time but could've
| realistically been replaced by someone else? What if Ilya
| is irreplaceable? Not entirely sure what the point of this
| is - if you want to convey that your conjecture is far more
| likely than the opposite, then make a convincing argument
| for why that's the case.
| krick wrote:
| If I would be betting, I would bet on Altman and Microsoft as
| well, because in the real world, evil usually wins, but I'm
| just really astonished by all this rhetoric here on HN. Like,
| firing Altman is a horrible treason, and people wouldn't want
| to work with those traitors anymore. Altman is the guy, who is
| responsible for making OpenAI "closed", which was a constant
| reason for complaints since it happened. When it all started,
| the whole vibe sure wasn't "the out-source Microsoft subsidiary
| ML-research unit that somehow maintains non-profit status",
| which was basically what happened. I'm not going to argue if
| it's good or bad -- it is entirely possible, that this is the
| only realistic way to do business and Sutskever, Murati et al
| are just delusional trying to approach this as a scientific
| research project. Honestly, I sort of do believe it myself. But
| since when Altman is the good guy in this story?
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Murati was interim ceo for 2 days.
|
| She's going with Altman in all likelyhood.
|
| Ilya is the one changing tac.
| 23623456 wrote:
| Another way of framing this would be that Altman was one of
| the only people there with their head far enough from the
| clouds to realize they had to adapt if they were going to
| have the resources needed to survive. In the real world you
| need more than a few Tony Starks in a cave to maintain a
| longterm lead even if the initial output is exceptional with
| nothing but what's in the cave.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| I, for one, never gave a flying shit about OpenAI's
| "openness", which always felt like a gimmick anyway. They
| gave me a tool that has cut my work down 20-40% across the
| board while making me able to push out more results. I care
| about that.
|
| Also AGI will never happen IMO. I'm not credentialed. Have no
| real proof to back it up and won't argue one way or the other
| with anyone, but deep down I just don't believe it's even
| physically possible for AGI. I'll be shocked if it is, but
| until then I'm going to view any company with that set as its
| goal as a joke.
|
| I don't see a single thing wrong with Altman either,
| primarily because I never bought into the whole "open" story
| anyway.
|
| And no, this isn't sarcasm. I just think a lot of HN folks
| live with rosy-tinted glasses of "open" companies and "AGI
| that benefits humanity". It's all an illusion and if we ever
| somehow manage to generate AGI it WILL be the end of us as a
| species. There's no doubt.
| iandanforth wrote:
| If Ilya is there many will. If Karpathy stays many more. If
| Alec Radford stays then ...
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| They will be ok. Research does not take that much GPUs compared
| to training huge commercial LLMs and hiring thousands of people
| to manually train them to be "safe". You'd prefer smaller
| models, but faster iterations.
| lajawfe wrote:
| Microsoft is the winner here. They will probably use Sam/Greg's
| technical know how to reproduce GPT4 internally, and also direct
| future research based on current OpenAI approaches which they are
| certainly aware of. This also shields Microsoft from being
| dependent on an external entity that they cannot control.
|
| Anyways, Satya played very smart with the hands he was dealt, got
| what he needed.
| blackoil wrote:
| Not just Sam and Greg. From all rumors, they'll get a cream of
| researchers from OpenAI, plus access to most of already
| developed tech. Not sure about training data etc. that they may
| have to recreate. And from my understanding, in LLM tech know
| how is more valuable than actual data. If you know what to get,
| few 100 million should get them that.
| jampekka wrote:
| Sauron declares: Saruman to join Mordor.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| [This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general
| articles or opinions in social media.]
|
| Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces,
| last few being from Sam's Camp.
|
| msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter
| their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and
| resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is
| pretty hard. and not giving money to OpenAI is akin to killing
| your golden goose.
|
| The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were
| demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they're
| calling it a "truce." Oh, and there's a deadline (5 pm), but
| since it's already passed the board merely has to "reach" this
| "truce" "ASAP." This is by far my favourite example of PR piece.
|
| I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come
| out officially. Or atleast re-evaluating after a week, how much
| you read was false.
| kmlevitt wrote:
| The whole point of this is that Microsoft doesn't even need to
| remove the board anymore. From their standpoint, the whole fear
| was openAI was about to lose a lot of their best people,
| including their CEO, who they had the most trusted.
|
| That would've greatly harmed their investment Now they get to
| have their cake and eat it too: they can keep their existing
| relationship with open AI and continue to get access to their
| models, and yet at the same time they potentially get all the
| best people in-house and benefit from their work directly. This
| whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for
| Microsoft.
| ric2b wrote:
| This whole saga will be a great demonstration of how much
| value a CEO does or doesn't bring to a company.
|
| I'm of the mind that CEO's are like parents, an awful CEO can
| cause a lot of harm but the difference between an ok CEO and
| an excellent one isn't that big and doesn't guarantee
| anything.
| mkii wrote:
| > This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win
| for Microsoft.
|
| Given that the OpenAI board has to act via mandate from its
| non-profit charter, what's the likelihood that this was
| Microsoft's plan in the first place? E.g. getting Sam to be
| less than "candid", triggering a chain of events, etc.
| kmlevitt wrote:
| I think the simplest explanation is the most likely. In
| this case, that the hold out board members are idiots.
|
| Even if Sam deliberately provoked them and this was a set
| up, no normal person would be this obstinate about it. They
| would've given up now if this was anybody's doing but their
| own.
| mkii wrote:
| We still don't know what specific act the board in its
| initial statement refers to had triggered this, and to
| add fat to this theory, the interim CEO basically
| mentions that he had doubts but was convinced after
| learning what this trigger was.
| imgabe wrote:
| This is a tweet directly from Satya Nadella. Do you think he's
| publicly lying in a way that would be disastrous to the company
| he runs?
| firtoz wrote:
| (this is satire) Obviously Sam built the AGI that hacked
| everything in the planet
|
| Even the pixels you see in your devices
|
| Wake up people
| chippiewill wrote:
| I agree that there's 0% chance Nadella would be lying. As the
| CEO of a public traded company, making false statements about
| something like this would get him in trouble with the SEC.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Consider that a substantial portion of that $900k comp is
| locked up in equity that needs a liquidity event to be
| realized.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| It was a negotiation.
|
| Did they have power... Ofc they did. Otherwise... Why were they
| negotiating?
|
| Its not about who had more power. They just couldn't find
| enough common ground.
|
| Now Satya bagged talent. They don't have to rewrite the whole
| codebase due to IP msft has already secured.
|
| I think those talks were real. You don't build something that
| long and then want to walk away unless huge differences came
| up. That's what we say.
|
| (edit: rewritten after the comment I responded to added a game
| changing comment at the top) PR? I mean... That's just not how
| I would describe what happened.
|
| It was a PR nightmare. They tried to keep the family together.
| Divorces happen. Satya brought the kids on so they can get a
| new sandbox going asap.
|
| Don't believe Twitter? Now there...we agree. I'll add... Don't
| belive hackernews either.
|
| Most of the reporting I saw was pretty good. It just didn't pan
| out. They reported the board was optimistic. Not that it was a
| sure thing.
|
| (edit: full comment rewrite due to edit by the commentor which
| completely changed the context)
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Will be interesting to see how many OpenAI employees leave
| OpenAI to work at Microsoft.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| RSUs have got to be better than PPUs.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| I agree with you. Satya (msft CEO) has stated that sam is
| joining msft. The comment was a general overtone of the
| discussions happening online.
|
| >> Now satya stayed up till 2am to secure up to 40 percent of
| open talent exodus
|
| Are there any official sources for this?
| nopromisessir wrote:
| His tweet timing.
|
| I don't think his secretary does it for him. Doesnt seem
| like his style.
| loveparade wrote:
| "Talent secured"
| krystianantoni wrote:
| You might be missing the point. Those 900k$ are tied onto
| future company value that is based on success of its products
| in 2-3y horizon. Without sam and his push for products the comp
| may not be there... So all employees who signed up for a
| exponential growth will jump ship.
| ano-ther wrote:
| It's an official statement from the CEO of a listed company,
| who would be ill advised to say they hired someone when they
| didn't.
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/19/a-statement-from...
| realprimoh wrote:
| This comment doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm not sure that
| this is a valid comment at all.
|
| This is not a rumor. The article references a tweet made by
| Satya Nadella itself. It is an official announcement. The board
| drama no longer matters here.
|
| By the way, $900k comp with illiquid OpenAI shares means
| nothing anymore when Microsoft can now hire them with $900k+ in
| fully LIQUID compensation.
|
| Not only that, OpenAI employees can go join Microsoft to work
| under Sam and Greg, who many of them seem to support.
|
| This is a pretty big win for Microsoft.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Except the board made themselves irrelevant with their antics
|
| People will be looking at Sam now, and it wouldn't be surprised
| if half of OpenAI just migrates to MS now
| dalbasal wrote:
| >I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to
| come out officially.
|
| Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made
| things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)
|
| Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this
| story.
|
| This is obviously a power struggle, for control over,
| potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the
| current moment.
|
| Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has
| become normal to charter a company such that ownership and
| control are effectively separate... call it overiding the
| defaults of incorporation and company law.
|
| FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is
| the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at
| least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit,
| for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop.
| Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP
| across the mesh of entities...
|
| Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..
|
| For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring
| crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They
| have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations.
| Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control
| or any kind of coups.
|
| OpenAI.. totally different game.
|
| The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum...
| These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct
| financial return on investments, and such.. these are not
| driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.
|
| Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete
| with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right
| now.
|
| This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums..
| imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry
| forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual
| company r&d.
|
| It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.
|
| There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And
| that's the kind of game it is now.
|
| So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here.
| My ears are certainly pricked.
|
| Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this
| saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.
| skc wrote:
| They could spin-off their own OpenAI competitor with Microsoft
| being in pole position for another sweet deal.
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| Never change a good running system. OpenAI ran quite good, even
| if things heated up, it sound kind of stupid to fire the CEO when
| the company is winning on every front.
| dagmx wrote:
| Seems like a logical choice. Microsoft's next big play is
| generative AI, and they've put a lot of money into that. They
| need to show they're taking steps to stabilize things now that
| their hype factory has come unraveled. I don't think they
| particularly need these people , because they likely already have
| in house talent that is competitive. But having these people on
| board now will allow them to paint a much more stable picture to
| their shareholders.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Wouldn't there be employment contracts and laws around
| competitive behavior that come into play here?
| samspenc wrote:
| If Sam had left OpenAI on his own accord to do this, certainly.
|
| Since the board fired him and basically nuked his best-effort
| plan to return - I highly doubt that OpenAI's legal team has
| anything of substance here. Even if they do, I wouldn't doubt
| for a second that Microsoft already has its entire legal team
| ready to play hardball defense.
|
| Overall, a complete loss-loss for OpenAI's board. What a
| weekend.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Non-competes illegal in California.
| rvz wrote:
| So essentially a promotion at Microsoft to create an AI division,
| the _real_ OpenAI, Sam and Greg have been tasked to create
| another DeepMind / OpenAI inside of Microsoft.
|
| Might as well have acquired OpenAI in the first place given that
| it was 49% owned by Microsoft anyway but taken over by a coup.
|
| Now we'll see if the employees who are quitting will follow Sam
| and Greg. Google is still at risk without Gemini being released.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| No offense, but please consider getting off Twitter.
|
| Read about their structure. Msft doesn't own anything. They are
| an investor. This is different, in thus case.
|
| The non profit owns the for profit. Msft has 49 percent of the
| for profit. Sunset clause after profit benchmarks. Ownership
| returns 100 percent to non profit.
|
| Stop getting meme'd on by the crowd. That goes to the 90 plus
| percent of other commenter's spreading misinformation on hn.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| Hot new startup just dropped:MSFT
| hilux wrote:
| Well, this definitely isn't the "internet is fad" Microsoft of
| Gates/Ballmer ...
| mfiguiere wrote:
| Ben Thompson: The most extraordinary weekend of my career
|
| https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1726514608234746003
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| Ben who?
| samspenc wrote:
| Founder of https://stratechery.com/
|
| More about him and his blog at
| https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| Seems like last minute news to avoid a MSFT stock dive tomorrow
| morning.
| thom wrote:
| So Altman now has a backer for his NVIDIA killer, and one who can
| use it not just for LLMs but Azure too, and one day possibly
| consumer GPUs? Forget Xbox, subsidised graphics cards as a loss-
| leader for Game Pass subscriptions would be an interesting play.
| What will the antitrust people think?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| You're not beating Nvidia if you aim for GPUs.
|
| The more plausible approach is developing more specialized
| chips, which are only good at Tensor Ops. Heck, that's what
| Nvidia's top of the line chips are. The A100 and H100 don't
| support OpenGL or any other Graphics Api.
| thom wrote:
| I agree that is the most pressing need, and the one Microsoft
| has already started producing like all the other big players.
| I'd be very surprised if this topic hasn't come up in
| conversations with Altman either now or even before the
| current blowup. But after that, a consumer play would fit so
| well! Start off with custom silicon for a couple of
| generations of Xbox and Surface, get DirectX working nicely
| with it. Then go after the rest of the market. Good use for
| Microsoft's cash pile because it benefits basically all their
| product lines in one way or another.
| broken_clock wrote:
| Biggest question: How much of OpenAI's IP do they get to access
| at Microsoft? (and perhaps take with them to whatever new startup
| they would obviously found after?)
| clhodapp wrote:
| Due to Microsoft's very generous licensing agreements, this may
| be the best shot Altman, Brockman, and Nadella have to launder
| the technology that is currently owned by the OpenAI non-profit.
| If they manage to poach key staff, they may be able to resume
| their attempts at rapid commercial growth outside of the confines
| of the OpenAI mission.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| In 1990 Microsoft hired all of the important talent from Borland
| who up until that point had been outpacing them in terms of
| product development.
|
| We got Access, Visual Studio, and .Net / C# as a direct result.
|
| Borland faded into obscurity.
|
| Hard not to feel like there will be a parallel here.
| pixelesque wrote:
| Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...
| yodon wrote:
| >Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...
|
| The point of the comment wasn't the specific date, it was the
| impact of hiring a competitor's team AND equipping that team
| to be even more impactful.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Sorry I should have phrased that as starting in 1990...
|
| In 1990 they poached Brad Silverberg who then spent the next
| 7 years poaching all of Borland's top talent in the most
| prominent example of a competitive 'brain drain' strategy
| that I'm aware of.
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Borland-Says-
| Microso...
| pixelesque wrote:
| Fair point!
| threeseed wrote:
| Microsoft also acquired LinkedIn and Github.
|
| Both of which have been run as largely seperate entities.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Yep. LinkedIn has a completely different pay scale and perks
| than regular Microsoft employees.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Yep, if you wanted to move to MSFT from LinkedIn or vice
| versa, you needed to re-interview although finding a job rec
| and internal hiring manager was easier.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Coming soon : Activision
| menshiki wrote:
| Is it true for Zenimax and Mojang as well?
| jampekka wrote:
| Sataya's 5D chess is to save world from AGI by turning whatever
| OpenAI had into crap?
| fshr wrote:
| That was 33 years ago. What's the point of lingering on a
| potential parallel there? If it does go that way, how could you
| call it anything but a coincidence considering all the counter
| examples in Microsoft's history?
| robocat wrote:
| I worked with Delphi for many years, and from what I saw
| Borland dug their own grave. I did commercial work with Turbo
| Pascal last century, and I can say that even that far back
| Borland was run horribly. And they've gone a long way downhill
| since 2000 (I have a friend still using Delphi and Embarcadero
| is terrible). Microsoft with VB spanked Delphi 2 (a Borland
| highlight) back in mid 90s.
|
| I really think you don't know what you are talking about.
| Delphi 7 was released in 2002 and you were "in high school in
| the early 2000s". We all love a good narrative, but yours has
| no base to belong to.
| beAbU wrote:
| Microsoft is swiftly moving on to the third "E" with OpenAI.
| First time I get to witness this process first-hand.
| vore wrote:
| I don't see how this is applies. OpenAI fired the CEO
| themselves. What extinguishing is Microsoft doing here?
| charlierguo wrote:
| I guess it really did come down to the GPUs in the end. Funding
| and talent matter a lot less when it takes you 12 months to get
| H100s.
| Satam wrote:
| Purely business-wise, it sure does seem like it's a race down to
| the bottom. A disproportionate amount of the sharpest minds are
| working on this, burning ungodly amounts of money but no one has
| so far has really managed to capture that value in a profitable
| way either.
|
| The public positions of these people are opaque, inconsistent,
| and intellectually dishonest too. They're apparently not here to
| make money but they need a lot of it until they create a
| superintelligence (but money will be obsolete by then,
| apparently). And AI may destroy humanity so we will try to build
| it faster than anyone else so it doesn't..? WTF.
|
| It's okay to want to make money and cement your name in history,
| but what is up with these public delusions?
| divo6 wrote:
| So let me get this straight, the OpenAI and Microsoft deal does
| work until AGI is achieved. But that would mean that some sort of
| source code is restricted for Microsoft at the moment even,
| otherwise Microsoft would have access to the code right until AGI
| is achieved (which would be weird).
|
| Regarding Sam and Greg joining MSFT I see this announcement as
| damage control from Satya. It's still unclear on what exactly
| they will work on and if Sam and the rest of the team can just
| continue where they left off at MSFT.
|
| It's Satyas way of showing the shareholders that they still back
| the face of OpenAI.
|
| We will see how this whole thing develops.
| g42gregory wrote:
| Wow. This sounds like an amazing coup for Microsoft. They are
| getting Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, "together with colleagues".
| With this team, they will be able to rebuild GPT in-house. I fear
| that with this development, the commercial side of the OpenAI is
| pretty much gone. Which sounds like what the OpenAI board has
| intended to do all along. I think this will also spark a big
| exodus from OpenAI.
|
| I am also curious about how OpenAI board is planning to raise the
| money for non-profit for further scaling. I don't think it would
| be that easy now.
|
| An internet meme from Lord of the Rings comes to mind: "One does
| not simply fire Sam Altman."
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Presumably they still have the deal with MS and will continue
| to receive funding as long as they meet their obligations? (Of
| course no clue what they are..)
| g42gregory wrote:
| Presumably yes, depending on what's in the legal documents. I
| am guessing that Microsoft will transition slowly, in order
| to provide continuity to the Azure customers. But OpenAI will
| not "thrive" from this deal anymore. Partnerships tend to
| only work when both sides are interested, regardless of the
| agreements. If OpenAI needs several more $billion to train
| GPT-5, this will get sabotaged.
|
| The scaling party is basically over. Or rather, it has moved
| to Redmond.
| neel8986 wrote:
| This is where other big tech giants need to move. MSFT provides
| nothing extra which Google/Amazon/Meta can not move. Make it
| multi platoform and make it more open source.
| lawn wrote:
| Why are people so excited about Sam and Greg joining Microsoft?
|
| The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being
| able to bring funding. But that's not something Microsoft needs,
| so what value does Sam give them?
| bagels wrote:
| They're bringing the talent with them, I'm sure that's part of
| it.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Will be interesting to see how many OpenAI employees leave
| OpenAI to work at Microsoft.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Putting on my lateral thinking hat, by hiring Altman and
| Brockman they ensure that they cannot compete against them in
| whatever enterprise they were thinking of doing. It gives the
| corporation incredible breathing room of at least a year to
| catch up while also being able to mine them for their
| knowledge. Additionally they will serve as beacons for hiring
| devs into their corporation.
| threeseed wrote:
| > The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and
| being able to bring funding
|
| OpenAI was last week a $100b company.
|
| You need to do more than just "build an AI model" for that to
| happen.
| jonbell wrote:
| Correct answer
| zoogeny wrote:
| All of the naysayers here seem convinced this is Altman and
| Microsoft looking to destroy OpenAI.
|
| Normally I am the cynic but this time I'm seeing a potential win-
| win here. Altman uses his talent to recruit and drive forward a
| brilliant product focused AI. OpenAI gets to refocus on deep
| research and safety.
|
| Put aside cynicism and consider Nadella is looking to create the
| best of all worlds for all parties. This might just be it.
|
| All of the product focused engineering peeps have a great place
| to flock to. Those who believe in the original charter of OpenAI
| can get back to work on the things that brought them to the
| company in the first place.
|
| Big props to Nadella. He also heads off a bloodbath in the market
| tomorrow. So big props to Altman too for his loyalty. By backing
| MS instead of starting something brand new he is showing massive
| support for Nadella.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Damn was looking forward to picking up some cheap MSFT
| esoterica wrote:
| What about the people who got paid equity for the past few
| years of work and now might see all of their equity
| intentionally vaporized? They essentially got cheated into
| working for a much lower compensation than they were promised.
|
| I get that funny money startup equity evaporates all the time,
| but usually the board doesn't deliberately send the equity to
| zero. Paying someone in an asset you're intentionally going to
| intentionally devalue seems like fraud in spirit if not in law.
| sanderjd wrote:
| There is probably a lawsuit here, I would not disagree, but I
| don't think the board will have too much trouble arguing that
| they didn't _intentionally_ send the equity to zero. I
| certainly haven 't seen any of them state that that was their
| intention here. But the counter argument that they _should
| have known_ that their actions would result in that outcome
| may be a strong one.
|
| But I think it is probably sufficient to point to the
| language in the contracts granting illiquid equity
| instruments that explicitly say that the grantee should not
| have any expectation of a return.
|
| But I think this is an actual problem with the legal
| structure of how our industry is financed! But it's not clear
| to me what a good solution would even be. Without the ability
| to compensate people with lottery tickets, it would just be
| even more irrational for anyone to work anywhere besides the
| big public companies with liquid stock. And that would be a
| real shame.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The board would counter that that equity was for a stake in a
| non-profit open source research company and the board was
| simply steering the ship back towards those goals.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that going forward
| there won't be much investor interest in OpenAI.
|
| And if you separate out the products from OpenAI, that leaves
| the question of how an organization with extremely high compute
| and human capital costs can sustain itself.
|
| Can OpenAI find more billionaire benefactors to support it so
| that it can return to its old operating model?
| layer8 wrote:
| Wouldn't all Microsoft competitors be interested in boosting
| OpenAI?
| moralestapia wrote:
| No, because OpenAI is still Microsoft somehow. And also,
| all the other big players already have their own thing.
| jacooper wrote:
| I think openAI will become the research lab, while the new
| group in Microsoft lead by Sam will focus on creating
| products.
|
| I personally expect the chat.openai.com site to just become a
| redirect to copilot.microsoft.com.
| DalasNoin wrote:
| Reading the statement, I am doubtful that Microsoft and OpenAI
| can continue their business relationship. I think the most
| aggressive part of this is the "[they will be joining] together
| with colleagues" sub sentence. He is basically openly poaching
| the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close
| cooperation with. This situation seems especially difficult
| since Microsoft basically houses all of openai's
| infrastructure. How can they continue a trust-based
| relationship like this?
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| Because they need the chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
| Microsoft's commercial interests will push them do whatever
| is needed to make it work.
| moralestapia wrote:
| They don't. He's a smart guy but he's far from having the
| reins of AI in his hands as some people blindly believe.
|
| Exhibit A: this weekend, lol.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I know I'm not qualified to make that observation, but
| what exactly makes you think you are? Can you share what
| information you're using to make such a confident
| determination?
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| My simple take would be the credits for
| GPT-3.5/GPT-4/GPT-5. The key engineers were part of those
| that have seemingly moved to Microsoft. I personally
| think Ilya is brilliant. I absolutely don't think he's
| the _sole_ brilliant mind behind OpenAI. He wasn't even
| one of the founders. He's a very brilliant and powerful
| mind and likely will be critical in the breakthroughs
| that lead to AGI. That said, AGI feels like one of those
| "way off in the distance ideas" that might be 5,10, or
| 100 years away. I tend to think that GPT-x is several
| orders of magnitude from AGI and this drama was silly and
| unneeded. GPT-5/6/7/8 aren't likely to destroy the world.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| In the end it's all about business, and it's not in
| Microsoft's interest to destroy OpenAI. It's in Microsoft's
| interest to keep the relationship warm, because it's
| basically two different philosophies that are at odds with
| each other, one of which is now being housed under Microsoft
| R&D.
|
| For all we know, OpenAI may actually achieve AGI, and
| Microsoft will still want a front row seat in case that
| happens.
| fastball wrote:
| Microsoft specifically does not get a front row seat (in
| any meaningful sense) to and OpenAI AGI event, per their
| agreement.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company
| that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with
|
| Not doing that would be participating in illegal wage
| suppression. I'm not sure how following the law means OpenAI
| and MSFT can't continue a business relationship.
| bambax wrote:
| I wonder how this will all workout in the end (and the
| excitement around all of this is a little reminiscent of AOL
| bying Time Warner).
|
| For one, I'm not sure Sam Altman will tolerate MS bureaucracy
| for very long.
|
| But secondly, the new MS-AI entity can't presumably just take
| from OpenAI what they did there, they need to make it again.
|
| This takes a lot of resources (that MS has) but also a lot of
| time to provide feedback to the models; also, copyright issues
| regarding source materials are more sensitive today, and people
| are more attuned to them: Microsoft will have a harder time
| playing fast and lose with that today, than OpenAI 8 years ago.
|
| Or, Sam at MS becomes OpenAI biggest customer? But in that
| case, what are all those researchers and top scientists that
| followed him there, going to do?
|
| Interesting times in any case.
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| I think you overestimate the technical part. Just speculating
| (no inside, no expert), but I would assume that the models
| are pretty "easy" and can be coded in few days. There are for
| sure some tweaks to the standard transformer architecture,
| but guess the tweaks are well known to sam and co.
|
| The dataset is more challenging, but here msft can help -
| since they have bing and github as well. So they might be
| able to make few shortcuts here.
|
| The most time consuming part is compute, but here again msft
| has the compute.
|
| Will they beat chat-gpt 4 in a year? Guess no. But they will
| come very close to it and maybe it would not matter that much
| if you focus on the product.
| duhast wrote:
| You lost me at "can be coded in few days".
| sanderjd wrote:
| Altman reporting to Nadella is certainly going to be a
| fascinating political struggle!
|
| Part of me thinks that Nadella, having already demonstrated
| his mastery over all his competitor CEOs with one deft move
| after another over the past few years, took this on because
| he needed a new challenge.
|
| I'd wager Altman will either get sidelined and pushed out, or
| become Nadella's successor, over the course of the next
| decade or so.
|
| It's an interesting time!
| iandanforth wrote:
| Seems like it will create a Deepmind/Google Brain style split
| within MS.
|
| MSR leadership is probably a little shaken at the moment.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| I don't think so, MSR is more like OpenAI, a research think
| tank. MSR doesn't create products, they create concepts. I
| think Sam wants to create products. I think it would also be
| a difference in velocity to market.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Agreed, I think this is an awesome outcome. We now have an
| extremely capable AI product organization in-house at each of
| Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and a couple strong research-
| oriented organizations in Anthropic and OpenAI. This sounds
| like a recipe for a thriving competitive industry to me.
| sackfield wrote:
| I suppose I don't see the case where large numbers of OpenAI
| employees follow these two to Microsoft. Microsoft can't
| possibly cover the value of the OpenAI employees equity as it
| was (and imminently to be), let alone what could have
| potentially been. There is a big difference between being on a
| rocket ship and just a good team at a megacorp.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| Microsoft will now perform parallel development and once they no
| longer need open ai the free azure credit spigot will run dry and
| OpenAI will choke on its largess
| bezout wrote:
| "Microsoft always lands on top"
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Satya is the best CEO in tech and it isnt even close
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Honest question, why is he the best CEO?
| blueblisters wrote:
| The CEO's job is to enrich the shareholders and by that
| metric he has done a pretty good job. More qualitatively,
| being able to change Microsoft's trajectory from boring
| enterprise tech company to a tech leader with strategic deals
| (OpenAI, Github) is very impressive.
| skc wrote:
| Presumably because MSFT is the most highly diversified tech
| company on the planet and he's overseeing multiple billion
| dollar businesses there without breaking a sweat.
|
| Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a
| coherent AI strategy at the moment.
| Arainach wrote:
| To be fair, MSFT was the most diversified tech company
| prior to his arrival - Google had Search, Facebook had
| Facebook, Apple had hardware. Microsoft by then had perhaps
| a dozen products with a billion dollars or more of revenue
| (Windows, Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, XBox, Azure,
| Surface, among others). Satya did well to focus on the
| cloud and grow opportunities there, but he hasn't
| significantly increased the diversity of the product
| lineup.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| I would say it has more or less equal revenue streams in
| comparison to other tech giants.
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ff8RCKwUcAEkWk_?format=jpg&na
| me=...
|
| If you look at the charts with revenue streams -
| Microsoft is the most diversified in that regard, because
| basically each and every branch of Microsoft produces the
| similar amount of revenue.
|
| With Xbox getting Activision it lifts up More Personal
| Computing to the level, comparable to other streams (and
| even higher than Windows).
| kmlevitt wrote:
| For a quick overview, google Microsoft stock and take a look
| at what happened to it after he became CEO in February 2014.
| It had been farting along at $24-35 a share with little
| lasting change since 2000. As soon as he got involved it
| started rising stratospherically and is now at about $360.
| Partnering with openAI turned out to be a brilliant idea that
| has helped them corner a brand new market. And poaching
| perhaps half their staff after an unforced error by their
| board is even shrewder.
| laserlight wrote:
| February 2014 -> October 2023: AAPL: 18.79
| -> 170.77 (9.08x) MSFT: 38.31 -> 338.11 (8.82x)
| AMZN: 18.10 -> 133.09 (7.35x) META: 68.46 ->
| 301.27 (4.40x) GOOG: 30.28 -> 125.30 (4.14x)
| stoobs wrote:
| That doesn't tell the whole story due to stock splits etc
| changing the unit stock price.
| mdemare wrote:
| No, stock splits are included.
| stoobs wrote:
| I stand corrected :)
| cma wrote:
| Need to account for splits and reinvesting dividends.
| v4dok wrote:
| He was a marketing person I believe when Bill was in MSFT. To
| become the CEO of MSFT is a huge political and competence
| firewall already. Then to do the most spectacular
| transformation of a mega-corp is next-level. MSFT is now _the
| leading_ player in AI, while before it was still fucking
| around with office and Windows licenses. People who are young
| (not saying you are), and don 't remember what MSFT was
| before Satya, don't really get that MSFT would be like Oracle
| and IBM if not for Satya.
| 9dev wrote:
| As far as I know, he actually came from an engineering
| background, making his career even more impressive. Despite
| my views on Microsoft and shareholder-oriented capitalism,
| he certainly seems like a brilliant and genuinely
| interesting guy.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Marketing person? LOL
|
| The guy was born in the cloud compute division.
|
| The board saw cloud compute was gonna be big. They made him
| the king. Good bet. The whole company went all in on cloud.
| Now they print more money than before.
|
| Marketing person lol. He's an engineer. The guy literally
| gets back into VS code sometimes to stay in touch.
| DavidKarlas wrote:
| I will never forget something I read in his "Hit Refresh"
| book(I'm Microsoft employee)... He wrote something along the
| lines, Office should write best app for iPhone, Mac or even
| Linux if that helps them grow. They should not help Windows
| sell Windows copies by doing better Office features on
| Windows, it is up to Windows team to make Windows best
| operating system, it should not rely and keep back Office
| team... This makes Windows and Office better, because it
| allows Office to be free and do what they need to grow, and
| it forces Windows to improve OS and not rely on others...
| Just one example where CEO can help teams grow...
| BSDobelix wrote:
| That's definitely a shift from the "platform" thinking
| Microsoft had, thanks for the inside view.
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| That's a nice vision, but as someone who transitioned from
| a windows to mac a few years ago, I'm sad to report that
| reality isn't anything like it. Office for mac is
| lightyears behind what windows has. Both excel and outlook
| miss critical features (just last week I was looking to
| change the background of an email - seems that's impossible
| on mac), or are so much worse in terms of performance
| (~20mb file with pivot tables) that I'm not sure if I'm
| running Excel on my m1 mac or if it's a raspberry pi.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| 'eat your own lunch before someone else does'
| Maken wrote:
| It's not like MS could do any other thing after being wiped
| out of the smartphone market. Locking Office to Windows in
| an age where virtually everybody is using a smartphone or a
| tablet with either Android or iOS is useless. The situation
| of Office in either Mac or Linux never improved, it just
| got turned into a cloud service like almost any other
| software suite and tried to cash in the legacy name to
| compete with Google Docs and Zoho. I don't really see any
| brilliant move there.
| jacquesm wrote:
| He managed to make the whole open source world forget who
| enemy #1 is and got them to give him privileged access to all
| of their work product _on his terms_. That 's no mean feat.
| gruturo wrote:
| He performed an unbelievable turnaround. His predecessor,
| famed for sweating a lot, yelling (sometimes positively, not
| necessarily in anger), throwing chairs and insisting on
| giving the keynote speech every year at MWC while being
| irrelevant, was driving the company into the ground.
|
| Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most
| importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime"
| opportunity which he had. Unlike Billg (who missed the dawn
| of the Internet) and the chair-throwing dude (who fumbled
| Mobile), Satya is making sure Microsoft does NOT miss AI.
| Which is even more impressive as Google was kind of expected
| to be the winner initially, given the whole company's focus ,
| mission statement ("to organize the world's information and
| make it universally accessible and useful") and a
| considerable (at the time) lead, if not a moat.
|
| I dare to compare his turnaround to Jobs'. Sure, MSFT wasn't
| weeks away from insolvency when he took over, and some of
| their current successes were indeed started before his
| tenure, but just look at where Windows 8 was going.
|
| *Edit: Just as a clarification: Not an employee, I actually
| dislike them profoundly and would never join them. I'm not
| sure this move is the best outcome for mankind - but credit
| where credit's due, they were shrewd, smart and right on
| time. Hats off.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| The problem with Google is that it is being run by the
| bunch of nerds. Sure, they are smart but without ad revenue
| they would gave gone down long time ago...
|
| Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their
| lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the
| browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which
| was a wrong prediction.
|
| And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks
| to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another
| AT&T merger fiasco.
| gruturo wrote:
| The problems with Google in my own personal experience
| and POV indeed pretty much coincide with the end of Eric
| Schmidt's tenure as CEO. It's sad, as a nerd, but it
| started going to shit when the nerds got in the driving
| seat, and of course much worse once they stopped caring
| altogether and left Sundar at the helm.
|
| With billg missing the dawn of the Internet, I didn't
| mean the IE integration fiasco and the resulting lawsuit
| - that's actually the part they got more or less right
| (in their own perverted 3E approach, not according to my
| moral compass), but too late to become dominant. They
| first wasted time trying to create their own MSN walled
| garden a la Compuserve .
|
| To Ballmer's credit he did start Azure, although it
| doesn't feel it was a serious enough effort, until he was
| replaced. But between Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile,
| Nokia, Skype, Zune, Kin, etc etc... it's no wonder it's
| been called Microsoft's lost decade.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| As a user and not shareholder, I simply can't agree with
| this sentiment.
|
| Windows got massively worse during his tenure in literally
| everything that can get worse including half-legal snooping
| on all users including Enterprise ones (I stand by the
| statement that this is idiotic long term strategy driven by
| childish emotions like FOMO - no way he didn't have a
| direct say in this).
|
| Office is certainly PITA and getting worse in my
| experience, but that can be corporate
| modifications/restrictions I am exposed to.
|
| Teams was, is and probably forever will be pathetic, buggy,
| slow and just a bad joke compared to some competition with
| 1% of their budget.
|
| These are core extremely visible products and for most of
| mankind 100% of the surface with MS. There is not even an
| attempt for corrections, direction is set and rest are
| details.
| gruturo wrote:
| I fully, fully concur with the experience as a user.
| Sadly that's irrelevant to their financials - first of
| all this is now what, 5% of their revenue stream?
|
| And despite the shittiness, even that 5% is doing great
| because their audience is now billions of mostly
| computer-illiterate people, who don't even have an
| opinion on the technical merits, the performance, the
| bugginess, the snooping, the feature gap, etc etc etc.
|
| The opinion of few million geeks who are mostly not using
| Windows anyway (or whose only contacts with anything
| Microsoft are due to their employers' choice of platform)
| doesn't ultimately matter much, Microsoft knows it, and
| they have no reason to change direction despite our
| frustration. Some better privacy law could nudge them,
| anything short of a legal directive won't go far.
| jwmoz wrote:
| Why is Teams on mac so bad then?
| bhtru wrote:
| That's a strawman and you know it. I'm not going to
| necessarily concur's OP's point, but it's inarguable given
| MSFT's last half decade the positive stewardship Nadella has
| done.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Where did you get that strange idea?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Say it with me, folks - Embrace, extend, extinguish.
| esskay wrote:
| This isnt the win people seem to think it is, at least not for
| end users. Micosoft dont buy companies and people to keep
| releasing free standalone products. They buy them to integrate
| into Windows.
|
| Cortana 2.0 incoming.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Who's talking about free? And I think it's Azure rather than
| Windows these days.
| jug wrote:
| I think the whole problem that sparked all this was that Sam &
| Co. wasn't enough about being open and research, but more into
| closed products. I'm surprised over this particular solution
| because they enter Microsoft with a ton of knowledge of OpenAI
| internals which seems to open the floodgates for an array of
| lawsuits if they so much touch their codebases, unless it is
| under mutual and friendly terms. But now THAT it happened, I'm
| not surprised Sam is willing to build for Microsoft Copilot.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Plot twist: it was Satya who planted the idea in the OpenAI's
| board's mind to fire Sam in the first place... Inception-style.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| "damn its interesting Sam is raising money in the Middle East,
| you think he's contracting with Neom?"
|
| "whoops wrong person"
| hurryer wrote:
| Or he planted the idea in Sam's head that he actually wants a
| for-profit AI.
| lyre-lyre wrote:
| I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs. On
| the balance this probably slows things down, so: good.
|
| Not sorry about Sam, first off I'm not assuming we know
| everything and second I'm more inclined to trust the board. Also
| it seems he was trying to do a secret hardware venture on the
| side, which would be several kinds of unethical. Again: good.
| bmitc wrote:
| > I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all
| costs.
|
| People will sell their souls and the souls of others for power
| and greed.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.
|
| It's simple: He who wins first place writes the rules, for
| everyone.
|
| If Microsoft gets the first place win, they (and more broadly
| the USA) are who get to write the rulebook.
|
| We are already witnessing this with "AI", it's OpenAI/Microsoft
| and the USA who dragged the rest of the west into the rules
| that they wrote because they got past the finish line first.
| blackoil wrote:
| MS is betting the company on AI. It is everywhere across the org.
| They won't play with kiddie glove. You want to see ruthless
| businessmen in action sure pick up the fight. They'll be happy to
| lose 10 billion plus some more if it means they win the war.
| ps256 wrote:
| > MS is betting the company on AI.
|
| This doesn't mean anything when they have multiple non-AI
| revenue streams generating billions.
| blackoil wrote:
| Share Market values growth. Board won't like if MS is rerated
| as utility. MS is behaving as if AI will be as big as the
| Internet and wants to capture the biggest slice in it. Hence
| betting the company and will respond appropriately.
| glun wrote:
| Would Altman shine within Microsoft? Seems like raising capital
| is his main skill set, and theres no need for that now. But from
| Microsofts point of view this prevents a new competitor from
| popping up.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I am confusion. What a whirlwind weekend.
| bozhark wrote:
| This Silicon Valley Soap Opera is going to be great
| zurfer wrote:
| I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to
| change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that
| everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this
| "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company".
|
| Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it. Both
| of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few
| folks get richer.
| MrDresden wrote:
| I say this without having really looked into what their latest
| stance is, but did the fame and money since forming OpenAI
| perhaps change their initial tune?
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| > Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so
| a few folks get richer.
|
| What does the word "moot" mean in this context?
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Pointless
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| Thanks. In British English it means something like
| "debatable" or "contested".
| comboy wrote:
| Yeah I'm surprised about Sam joining MS based on he usually
| says. But on the other hand, that's a pretty neat move - you
| fire me - now I own you (simplification, maybe).
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Actions speak louder than words, and should give you pause to
| re-evaluate your trust
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world
| and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can
| participate in.
|
| Sam is a serial startup (co)founder who has spent additional
| time at YC -- in the startup world, that kind of talk is so
| common as to be a _stereotype_. It 's a good way to get people
| who _do_ care about that kind of stuff to accept equity in a
| firm that is statistically likely to fail (or, in OpenAI 's
| case, _explicitly warns investors that they should not expect
| profit and treat investments as donations_ ) as compensation
| when they could earn greater secure compensation from more
| established firms. It's a great sales pitch, even when there is
| no truth behind it.
| davedx wrote:
| How is Sam a _serial_ startup founder?
| whatusername wrote:
| Loopt, OpenAI, WorldCoin.. how many do you need to be
| serial?
| Arainach wrote:
| If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sam's history
| is full of the worst parts of venture capital and startup
| mindset. He's only an idealist so far as he's good at selling
| the ideal outcome and drowning out any criticism.
| ah765 wrote:
| I think that if Sam had followed the typical VC/Startup
| playbook (and he even wrote one), he never would have joined
| OpenAI, a nonprofit based on totally unproven tech at the
| time. He was already quite rich and powerful from YC, and
| decided to take a big risk on AI. I think there was at least
| some genuine idealism involved.
| ulfw wrote:
| Well he certainly wouldn't have joined megacorp Microsoft.
| And yet here we are.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| What?
|
| You think the guy is gonna be a regular c suite exec?
|
| They are going to be a special group with special rules.
| This is so they can build off the existing code base.
| Only msft has that openai ip.
|
| If they go to Google or start their own thing it's
| rewrite or work off someone else's painting. Not to
| mention building out compute infrastructure.
|
| Big loss of time. Go to msft, get special status, maybe
| even an exit clause with IP included. Easy win. Was
| always gonna be msft if not openai negotiated return. I
| just didn't realize that till satya threw them the offer
| that worked.
|
| These guys didn't sign up to be cogs. Satya respects
| them.
| nprateem wrote:
| MS are minority shareholders in Open AI. What stupid
| agreements did OpenAI sign to give them IP rights, or are
| you just making things up? Maybe I should ping all the
| tech companies I own shares in to get them to send me
| their IP too
| nopromisessir wrote:
| You can look it up.
|
| Gpt4 is included in bing man... Bing creative mode and
| balanced mode both.
|
| This is widely known. The investment included access to
| openai technology for integration in msft services.
|
| Its not a traditional arrangement. This is also widely
| known. Its a complicated investment with a profitability
| sunset triggering return of equity to the nonprofit. Also
| included is technology transfer as long as the sunset
| doesn't trigger.
|
| This is why Ilya felt comfortable to do it. He did many
| interviews where he explained this.
| nprateem wrote:
| Yeah but I have access to various APIs, it doesn't mean I
| own them or the IP behind them. Does tech transfer really
| mean MSFT can launch their own competitor off the back of
| OpenAI's tech? If Altman permitted such ownership no
| investors should touch him with a barge pole.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| I think it goes beyond api access.
|
| Its speculative. Others might disagree. I spoke to this
| in a comment above.
|
| Your skepticsm seems reasonable to me, but I think my
| broader point is defensible, though I just don't really
| care to go further with it. Now I'm reading 85 percent of
| them have revolted lol.
|
| Maybe we meet again in the other post.
|
| (edit: 'perpetual license to openai ip short of agi'
|
| Not sure of the details. This is was I see being written.
|
| https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-
| micros...'
| svnt wrote:
| None of what you said implies they have current legal
| access to the source/IP for GPT4.
|
| The original 2019 deal was described as:
|
| > Microsoft and OpenAI will jointly build new Azure AI
| supercomputing technologies
|
| > OpenAI will port its services to run on Microsoft
| Azure, which it will use to create new AI technologies
| and deliver on the promise of artificial general
| intelligence
|
| > Microsoft will become OpenAI's preferred partner for
| commercializing new AI technologies
|
| The $10 billion deal was probably not making a ton of
| money for MSFT as it was 75% percent of profits, which
| are easy to get rid of, until they get 49% of the
| company.
|
| Can you explain why MSFT would spend $10 B for either of
| these things if they just got OpenAI's IP?
| nopromisessir wrote:
| I'm not getting into the speculative game.
|
| Its obvious that they have to redo less of the stack if
| the go to msft. At the very least, they already wrote
| everything to scale with azure.
|
| With respect to IP... My comment was mostly suggesting
| they could enjoy privaledge to leave msft at some point
| in the future with IP with them.
|
| How much of the source do they get to avoid rewriting on
| day 1 at msft? No idea. Could be all of it... But
| again... At least they already scaled into azure compute
| architecture and don't have to reinvent the wheel. That's
| not a small thing.
|
| Not really debating it further. Seems really obvious to
| me that broadly speaking, for all kinds of reasons,
| probably access to source inckuded, they will be able to
| get up to speed substantially faster at msft vs anywhere
| else.
|
| It's too speculative to be worse discussing in depth. We
| don't have enough details, but my broader assertion is
| more or less defensible imo. Others might disagree. Not
| worth a debate imo.
|
| (edit: 'perpetual license to openai ip short of agi'
|
| Not sure of the details. This is was I see being written.
|
| https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-
| micros...'
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Accurate...
|
| This guy doesn't care about money y'all...
|
| He needs money to do big things and execute. He gets high
| on making big stuff happen.
|
| So many Altman haters every way I turn. He turned down
| ownership in a now 90 billion dollar company... The guy is
| busted up from success and now that's all he digs. Money is
| for idiots.
|
| Folks need to read the room. Once you hit a couple hundred
| mil net worth only a fool cares about stacking on more
| bills. That's just a side affect of tap dancing to work...
| Jobs was worth what? 2 billion?
|
| Who think satya cares about money... Get real. He wants the
| most he can get so his foundation when he retires can make
| big changes and do Bill Gates stuff.
|
| This place is just as bad as reddit sometimes. No offense
| to anyone in particular. Some of these youngsters need to
| comment less and read a few more ceo bio's... Or just go
| watch YouTube interviews from the finance guy...
| Whatshisname leveraged buyout wizard whitehair with a JD
| who sits on billions but realized he preferred to be a
| journalist sometimes before he kicks it.
| depr wrote:
| "This guy doesn't care about money y'all...
|
| He needs money to do big things and execute. He gets high
| on making big stuff happen."
|
| So what you're saying is he cares about power.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Execution.
|
| Chief Executive Officer.
|
| They execute. Objectives. Changing stuff. It's addictive.
| Ask me how I know.
|
| (edit: big shot Wendy's night shift manager. When you
| roll up at 2am our ice-cream machine was never being
| cleaned, that'll be 89 cents please. Enjoy your ice-cream
| sir/ma'am.
|
| You never go back. I changed the world for the better)
| depr wrote:
| Changing stuff requires power. So as far as I can tell we
| agree. Executing objectives just sounds nicer.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Mmm... I guess for me pursuit of power as a choice of
| language carries a certain negative connotation.
|
| In semantic terms I agree.
|
| The negative connotation is the baggage I bring. I recind
| my implied critism. Pursuit of power is not necessarily a
| bad thing. Perhaps I need to think on this.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| >Who think satya cares about money... Get real.
|
| I am. In fact the goals of any for-profit company is the
| profit. If a CEO doesn't align with that goal in mind,
| they get replaced. That's non-negotiable. A for-profit
| company without profit is a dead company.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Ofc his job is to maximize shareholder value.
|
| The broader point is that considering short term personal
| financial gain is beneath an exec at Satya's level.
|
| He has a responsibility to do more than just maximize
| value though. Corporate values are a real thing and msft
| has pretty clearly integrated them in various ways for a
| long time.
|
| They pledged to carbon capture all carbon going back to
| their founding... For example. What does that have to do
| with profit? Nada... Outside of making folkes feel less
| climate guilt when they buy a share. Now that... Very
| clever for profit.
| opdahl wrote:
| I think it's quite a stretch to say he was "powerful". Sure
| he had some influence but he was never on anyone's list of
| _somebodies_ in Silicon Valley. My personal opinion is that
| he really really really wants to be seen as a Steve Jobs /
| Elon Musk type character and he saw OpenAI as a great
| opportunity since he didn't have any of his own ideas.
| ah765 wrote:
| He was powerful enough to get put on the board of OpenAI.
| But I agree that he wants to be a "great" person, above
| Steve Jobs and Musk and the rest, and he sees AGI as the
| path to get there. He's not really altruistic, but he's
| also not purely money-oriented as the original comment
| seemed to suggest.
| visarga wrote:
| Steve was his role model as a child. Says so on his
| wikipedia page.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Yeah, let's not forget for example his pyramid scam Worldcon,
| which attempts to scam people of their biometric info for a
| few bucks, and is aimed at the poorest underdeveloped
| countries. "Idealist". Aha, right.
| konschubert wrote:
| You can bring abundance to the world as a for profit entity.
|
| The exchange of services and goods in a market is positive-
| sum.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Free exchange obviously and provably is, but that's not
| _quite_ what's going on. I see a rapid trend towards
| regulatory capture, monopolization and setting up to siphon
| out money. All from the same few actors. And if history
| around tech hype serves us well, then we should be wary of
| a large, inflated bubble that is going to burst eventually,
| even if useful things are created meanwhile.
| konschubert wrote:
| It's sad and disheartening to me how controversial this is.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| > The exchange of services and goods in a market is
| positive-sum.
|
| As long as you ignore externalities, yes.
| konschubert wrote:
| Even if you consider all externalities, trade is
| positive-sum.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i'm legitimately trying to understand your position. can
| you please explain to me how trade that contributes to
| climate change is positive sum?
| konschubert wrote:
| Why should all trade contribute to climate change?
|
| If I have a solar panel factory, and I sell you a panel,
| so you can make green electricity - isn't that good for
| you, me AND the planet?
| voitvodder wrote:
| Most people in tech to me seem to be suckers looking to buy a
| bridge IMO.
|
| "I am not into money or power man, I just want to be a good
| person and save the world man"
|
| I just can't believe such simplistic, transparent, bullshit
| works so consistently as to become standard PR.
| baq wrote:
| He's selling utopia but you're buying dystopia.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A bit like that other Sam?
| 9dev wrote:
| We don't talk about _that_ Sam anymore. Way too
| embarrassing.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| he's definitely laln example how people will throw too
| much money at things ...
| somenameforme wrote:
| The world, in general, makes so _dramatically_ much more sense
| if you just completely ignore everything that everybody says,
| and instead simply look at the actions of people
| /organizations/nations, and form your own opinions based upon
| that. This is even more true in modern times when framing
| things in the 'right way' (even if completely insincerely) can
| have a major impact on your ventures, funding/investment
| availability, and more.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| This, anytime, anywhere.
|
| Basically what you see these days is PR teams together with
| legal teams acting like individual that hired them. There are
| exceptions, but they are outliers in say Trump style, not
| these billionaires. Same, heck even more for politics.
|
| It can be easily transferred into personal or professional
| relationships. For me at least, this analysis works 100% of
| the time when for example rest of friends or family struggle
| hard to understand actions of some individuals. Just point
| them to their previous actions and see the consistency
| emerging. _This_ is how you can easily work with various
| people if you are smart but lack social skills, just observe
| actions and ignore blah.
|
| People simply don't change, they may reflect change in their
| environment but thats it. Unless we talk about 2 decades+
| since last encounter, but even then it may be just more
| polished PR.
| sensanaty wrote:
| And if you buy those flowery words from a non-technical startup
| founder, the same one behind fucking _Worldcoin_ , I've got a
| few bridges to offload quick and on the cheap.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| sam wants to change the world by increasing the amount of
| transferable money that goes directly into his pocket using the
| most efficient means possible
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Yeah, could someone really do that? Just go on the Internet and
| tell lies?
| guntherhermann wrote:
| If you believe what people say, instead of what people do, then
| you are going to be disappointed by many, many people in your
| life.
|
| It's a cliche, but it's true: actions speak louder than words.
|
| You are the things you do, not the things you say you want to
| be.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| demagoguery.
|
| go read musks public statements leading up to Twitter purchase.
|
| it's pretty clear they were fired because of profit motives.
| that's all I hear.
| creer wrote:
| Microsoft created shareholder value by selling stuff people
| like. Many techies argue it was the exact wrong thing they were
| selling and the world would be a better place if MSFT followed
| rather than led - but there is no arguing that people wanted
| and used what they were selling. Also it's hard to find a
| company with more shareholders than MSFT.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344458.
|
| There's nothing wrong with your post! I just need to prune the
| heaviest subthreads--sorry!
| rmrf100 wrote:
| Wow
| summerlight wrote:
| This looks like a short term compromise to defend MSFT before the
| market opens. A number of members will follow Sam and Greg, but I
| doubt if it will be the majority given it's yet another big tech
| rather than a brand new startup. And what would be their roles?
| Yet another VP/SVP? Those folks are not really AI guys and don't
| fit very nicely into all the bureaucracy rampant in big techs.
| Satya will of course try to give them as much room as possible,
| but it will be considerably smaller and slower thanks to all
| those corporate politics and external regulations.
| abkolan wrote:
| Satya just tweeted saying that Sam Altman would be the CEO of
| this new group.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Can you share the tweet?
| yvoschaap wrote:
| https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
| dkrich wrote:
| Yep feels like a desperate attempt by nadella to restore
| confidence in him and Microsoft's massive investment and news
| like this can easily change on a dime
| vagabund wrote:
| To what extent can they lead research that builds off of existing
| OpenAI models?
| benkarst wrote:
| This plays perfectly into the narrative that Sam wanted to take
| this godlike tech that Ilya created and commercialize it.
|
| Sam chose greed over safety.
| tarruda wrote:
| November 17th OpenAI blog post: "The board no longer has
| confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."
|
| The fact that they agreed to join as MS employees kinda proves
| that money was a big motivator.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money. He
| needs GPU compute and MSFT has mountains of it
| meepmorp wrote:
| > Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money.
|
| Needing more money and wanting more money aren't at all the
| same thing.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| I mean he's proven he's not in it for the money. He had
| zero equity in OpenAI.
| lwneal wrote:
| In five years, he'll be the CEO. [1]
|
| [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
| peanuty1 wrote:
| I'm not sure the Microsoft shareholders would like that.
| mongol wrote:
| That is an an amazing turn of events that I did not see anyone
| predict. Or perhaps I did not just see it. But in retrospect, not
| surprising.
| 9dev wrote:
| I don't quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp
| finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or "shackles", as
| you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance
| of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not
| only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don't know whether all
| that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess
| we're just gleefully heading into whatever lies ahead without any
| concern whatsoever, and learn it the hard way.
|
| It's a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact
| opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they
| attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money
| and less morals. Well.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| OpenAI's ideas of humanities best interests were like a
| catholic mom's. Less morals are okay by me.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > OpenAI's ideas of humanities best interests were like a
| catholic mom's
|
| How do you mean? Don't see what OpenAI has in common with
| Catholicism or motherhood.
| ric2b wrote:
| They basically defined AI safety as "AI shouldn't say bad
| words or tell people how to do drugs" instead of actually
| making sure that a sufficiently intelligent AI doesn't go
| rogue against humanity's interests.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm not sure where you're getting that definition from.
| They have a team working on exactly the problem you're
| describing. (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-
| superalignment)
| timeon wrote:
| > getting that definition from
|
| That was not about actual definition fro OpenAi but about
| definition implied by user Legend2440 here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344867
| ric2b wrote:
| Sure, they might, but what you see in practice in GPT and
| being discussed in interviews by Sam is mostly the "AI
| shouldn't say uncomfortable things" version of AI
| "safety".
| 9dev wrote:
| There might be a reason why the board doesn't consist of
| armchair experts on Hacker News.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Watching this unfold, I'm unsure armchair experts on HN
| would have executed this WORSE than the board did.
| bratbag wrote:
| Can you put that in precise terms, rather than a silly
| analogy designed to play on peoples emotions?
|
| What exactly and precisely, with specifics, is in OpenAI's
| ideas of humanities best interests that you think are a net
| negative for our species?
| slg wrote:
| _I want the AI to do exactly what I say regardless of
| whether that is potentially illegal or immoral_ is usually
| what they mean.
| UrineSqueegee wrote:
| It doesn't have to be extreme like that, there is a
| healthy middle ground.
|
| For example I was reading the Quran and there is a
| mathematical error in a verse, I asked GPT to explain to
| me how the math is wrong it outright refused to admit
| that the Quran has an error while tiptoeing around the
| subject.
|
| Copilot refused to acknowledge it as well while providing
| a forum post made by a random person as a factual source.
|
| Bard is the only one that answered the question factually
| and provided results covering why it's an error and how
| scholars dispute that it's meant to be taken literally.
| slg wrote:
| This isn't a refutation of what I said. You asked the AI
| to commit what some would view as blasphemy. It doesn't
| matter whether you or I think it is blasphemy or whether
| you or I think that is immoral, you simply want the AI to
| do it regardless of whether it is potentially immoral or
| illegal.
| UrineSqueegee wrote:
| >This isn't a refutation of what I said
|
| It is.
|
| >You asked the AI to commit what some would view as
| blasphemy
|
| If something is factual then is it more moral to commit
| blasphemy or lie to the user? Thats what the OP comment
| was talking about. Could go as far as considering it that
| it spreads disinformation which has many legal
| repercussions.
|
| >you simply want it to do it regardless of whether it is
| potentially immoral or illegal.
|
| So instead it lies to the user instead of saying I cannot
| answer because some might find the answer offensive that
| or something to that extent?
| slg wrote:
| You said GPT refused your request. Refusal to do
| something is not a lie. These systems aren't capable of
| lying. They can be wrong, but that isn't the same thing
| as lying.
| lucumo wrote:
| Morals are subjective. Some people care more about the
| correctness of math than about blaspheming, and for
| others it's the other way around.
|
| Me, I think forcing morals on others is pretty immoral.
| Use your morals to restrict your own behaviour all you
| want, but don't restrict that of other people. Look at
| religious math or don't. Blaspheme or don't. You do you.
|
| Now, using morals you don't believe in to win an argument
| on the internet is just pathetic. But you wouldn't do
| that, would you? You really do believe that asking the AI
| about a potential math error is blasphemy, right?
| slg wrote:
| >Use your morals to restrict your own behaviour all you
| want, but don't restrict that of other people.
|
| That is just a rephrasing of my original reasoning. You
| want the AI to do what you say regardless of whether what
| you requested is potentially immoral. This seemingly
| comes out of the notation that you are a moral person and
| therefore any request you make is inherently justified as
| a moral request. But what happens when immoral people use
| the system?
| lucumo wrote:
| > This seemingly comes out of the notation that you are a
| moral person
|
| No.
|
| It comes from the notion that YOU don't get to decide
| what MY morals should be. Nor do I get to decide what
| yours should be.
|
| > But what happens when immoral people use the system?
|
| Then the things happen that they want to happen. So what?
| Blasphemy or bad math is none of your business. Get out
| of people's lives.
| didntcheck wrote:
| I'm confused what you're arguing, or what type of
| refutation you're expecting. We all agree on the facts,
| that ChatGPT refuses some requests on the ground of one
| party's morals, and other parties disagree with those
| morals, so there'll be no refutation there
|
| I mean let's take a step back and speak in general. If
| someone objects to a rule, then yes, it is likely because
| they don't consider it wrong to break it. And quite
| possibly because they have a personal desire to do so.
| But surely that's openly implied, not a damning
| revelation?
|
| Since it would be strange to just state a (rather
| obvious) fact, it appeared/s that you are arguing that
| the desire to not be constrained by OpenAI's version of
| morals could only be down to desires that most of us
| would indeed consider immoral. However your replier
| offered quite a convincing counterexample. Saying "this
| doesn't refute [the facts]" seems a bit of a non sequitur
| didntcheck wrote:
| I'm not that commenter but I agree with that, or rather
| "I disagree with OpenAI's prescription of what is and
| isn't moral". I don't trust some self-appointed
| organization to determine moral "truth", and who is
| virtuous enough to use the technology. It would hardly be
| the first time society's "nobles" have claimed they need
| to control the plebs access to technology and information
| "for the good of society"
|
| And as for what I want to do with it, no I don't plan to
| do anything I consider immoral. Surely that's true of
| almost everyone's actions almost all the time, almost by
| definition?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| ChatGPT refused to translate a news article from Hebrew to
| English because it contained "violence".
|
| Apparently my delicate human meat brain cannot handle
| reading a war report from the source using a translation I
| control myself. No, no, it has to be first corrected by
| someone in the local news room so that I won't learn
| anything that might make me _uncomfortable_ with my
| government 's policies... or something.
|
| OpenAI has lobotomised the first AI that is actually
| "intelligent" by any metric to a level that is both
| pathetic and patronising at the same time.
|
| In response to such criticisms, many people raise
| "concerns" like... _oh-my-gosh_ what if some _child_ gets
| instructions for building an _atomic bomb_ from this
| unnatural AI that we 've created!? _" Won't you think of
| the children!?"_
|
| Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
|
| And here:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Nuclear+weapon+design
|
| Did I just bring about World War Three with my careless
| sharing of these dark arts?
|
| I'm so sorry! Let me call someone in congress _right away_
| and have them build a moat... err... protect humanity from
| this terrible new invention called a search engine.
| injeolmi_love wrote:
| Just get open ai developer access with api key and it's
| not censored. Chatgpt is open to the public, with the
| huge amount of traffic people are going to abuse it and
| these restrictions are sensible.
| Maken wrote:
| So, it's ok to use ChapGPT to build nukes as long as you
| are rich enough to have API access?
|
| That ChatGPT is censored to death is concerning, but I
| wonder if they really care or they just need a excuse to
| offer a premium version of their product.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I use it via Azure Open AI service which was
| uncensored... for a while.
|
| Now you have to apply in writing to Microsoft _with a
| justification_ for having access to an uncensored API.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| I use openAI via API access and ChatGPT/gpt-4/gpt-4 turbo
| are still very censored. text-davinci-003 is the most
| uncensored model I have found that is still reasonably
| usable.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| You are right that there are many articles in the open
| describing nuclear bombs. Still, to actally make them,is
| another big leap.
|
| Now imagine the AI gets better and better within the next
| 5 years and is able to provide and explain, in
| ELI5-style, how to step by step (illegaly) obtain the
| equipment and materials to do so without getting caught,
| and provide a detailed recipe. I do not think this is
| such a stretch. Hence this so called oh-my-gosh
| limitations nonsense is not so far-fetched.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| It is a massive stretch given how well the materials are
| policed or how much effort is required to make them.
| There is no reason to assume that there is some magic
| shortcut that AI will discover.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That you think that there's like a handful of clever
| tricks that an AI can bestow upon some child and _ta-da_
| they can build a nuclear bomb in their basement is
| hilarious.
|
| What an AI would almost certainly tell you is that
| building an atomic bomb is no joke, _even if_ you have
| access to a nuclear reactor, have the budget of a nation-
| state, and can direct an entire team of trained nuclear
| physicists to work on the project for years.
|
| Next thing you'll be concerned about toddlers launching
| lasers into orbit and dominating the Earth from space.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 5 years from now, not only AI will be more advanced. Also
| techniques and machinery to make things will be more
| advanced. Just think about other existing technologic
| advancements and how absurdly 'ta-da' they would have
| sounded not too long ago.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Now imagine the AI gets better and better within the next
| 5 years and is able to provide and explain, in
| ELI5-style, how to step by step ... create a system to
| catch the people trying to do the above.
|
| Gotcha! We can both come up with absurd examples.
| suslik wrote:
| How is that a good reason for GPT4 not being able to
| write the word 'fuck'? You might handwave the patronising
| attitude of OpenAI strategy, but with many of ust they
| did lost most of their good faith by trying to make their
| model 'safe' to a horny 10-year-old.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/9b4f04f7-062f-40c3-b6a3-e97
| 2f7...
|
| ChatGPT says "fuck" just fine.
| suslik wrote:
| If you think Microsoft has a better track record, you'll find
| yourself disappointed.
| imgabe wrote:
| You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of
| humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to
| Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as
| misaligned as you think.
|
| I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest
| is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy
| the entire world just because.
| 9dev wrote:
| Ha! Tell that to the species of primates that will happily
| squeeze even the last ounce of resources from the only
| habitable planet they have, to enrich said shareholders.
| Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than
| their immediate family, and this is no exception.
| imgabe wrote:
| > Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than
| their immediate family, and this is no exception.
|
| As far as we can tell humans are the _only_ species that
| even has the capacity to recognize such things as
| "resources" and produce forecasts of their limits.
| Literally every other species is kept in check by either
| consuming resources until they run out or predation. We are
| not unique in this regard.
| 9dev wrote:
| And I never claimed otherwise. We might be aware of the
| problems we cause, but that doesn't seem to imply we're
| able to fix them -- we're still primates after all.
| Applejinx wrote:
| The really interesting question is whether AI, provided
| with superhuman inference, is better at this than humans.
| All the most powerful humans remain relentlessly human, and
| sometimes show it to tragic and/or laughable effect.
|
| To some extent human societies viewed as eusocial organisms
| are better at this than individual humans. And rightly so,
| because human follies can have catastrophic effects on the
| society/organism.
| mlrtime wrote:
| >Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than
| their immediate family
|
| Agreed, and we're also bad at being told what to do.
| Especially when someone says they know better than us.
|
| What we are extremely good at is adaptation and
| technological advancement. Since we know this already , why
| do we try to stop or slow progress.
| 9dev wrote:
| That is no reason to throw all ethic considerations over
| board. We have ethics panels on scientific studies for a
| very good reason, unless you want to let Dr. Mengele and
| his friends decide on progress.
|
| It is a _good thing_ that society has mechanisms to at
| least try and control the rate of progress.
| mlrtime wrote:
| There is no objective ethic considerations, furthermore
| the events unfolding now have absolutely 0 evidence that
| "ALL" ethic considerations are being thrown overboard.
|
| Godwin's Law.
| bspammer wrote:
| The climate crisis has proven pretty thoroughly that
| companies will choose short term profit over humanity's long
| term success every time. Public companies are literally
| forced to do so.
| imgabe wrote:
| Nobody knows "humanity's long term interest" with any
| certainty. Consider that fossil fuels allowed humanity to
| make massive technological advancements in a relatively
| short time. Yes, it caused climate change, but perhaps
| those same technological advancements allow us to fix or
| adapt to that. Then, in 500 years, another disaster like an
| asteroid or a solar flare or the Earth's magnetic poles
| reversing or whatever happens, and without the boost from
| fossil fuels we would have been too technologically behind
| to be able to survive it. What was in humanity's long term
| interest then?
|
| I'm not saying that's definitely the case, but moving
| slowly when you live in a universe that might hurl a giant
| rock at you any minute doesn't seem like a great idea.
| dtech wrote:
| Cmon, there's a myriad of examples where
| corporate/shareholder interest goes against humanities
| interest as a whole, see fossil fuels and PFAS for ones in
| the current zeitgeist.
| pavlov wrote:
| Exxon shareholders are also part of humanity. The company has
| known about the dangers of climate change for 50 years and
| did nothing because it could have impacted short/medium-term
| profits.
|
| In reality ownership is so dispersed that the shareholders in
| companies like Microsoft or Exxon have no say in long-term
| issues like this.
| nxm wrote:
| There was incredible global economic growth the last 50
| years which had to fueled somehow. If Exxon didn't provide
| the energy, other oil and gas companies wound have
| _heimdall wrote:
| That economic growth wasn't an absolute necessity that
| had to be powered, it was a choice based on the
| assumption that creating new stuff is always a positive
| and that we have functionally limitless natural resources
| that we should use before someone else does.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Did nothing?
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Did nothing? What do you mean?
| agsnu wrote:
| It's worse than did nothing, they actively suppressed
| climate research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobi
| l_climate_change_deni...
| _heimdall wrote:
| I interned at Exxon during the gulf oil spill and saw two
| interesting actions play out while there.
|
| Exxon was responsible for the oil spill response that
| coagulated the oil and sank it. They were surprisingly
| proud of this, having recommended it to BP so that the
| extent of leaked oil was less noticeable from the
| surface.
|
| Exxon also invested heavily in an alternative energy
| company doing research to create oil from a certain type
| of algae. The investment was all a PR stunt that gave
| them enough leverage to shelve the research that was
| successful enough to be considered a threat.
| altacc wrote:
| The mega rich have been building bunkers and preparing for
| the downfall of humanity for a long time now. Look around and
| you'll notice that greed wins out over everything else. We're
| surrounded by companies doing nothing or only small token
| gestures to protect humanity or the world we live in and
| instead focusing on getting rich, because getting rich is
| exactly why people become shareholders. Don't rely on those
| guys to save the world, it'll be the boring committees that
| are more likely to do that.
| imgabe wrote:
| Yeah that makes sense. Work your whole life building a
| company worth billions of dollars so that you can burn down
| the world and live in a bunker eating canned beans until
| the roving bands of marauders flush you out and burn you
| alive. I'm sure that was their greedy plan to enjoy eating
| canned beans in peace!
| FrozenSynapse wrote:
| you will be eating canned beans, they will ride high as
| they do now
| imgabe wrote:
| You realize money isn't magic, right? If the world is a
| post-apocalyptic wasteland billions of dollars doesn't
| mean anything. You aren't getting any wagyu beef down in
| your bunker.
| phatfish wrote:
| You think they wouldn't give up wagyu beef and the idea
| of the US dollar for a shot at rebuilding society with a
| massive head start over the 99.9% percent of the
| population that don't have a bolt hole?
| imgabe wrote:
| They already have massive influence over society with the
| added benefit of not having to rebuild 10,000 years of
| human progress so no I don't think that makes any sense
| at all. That is cartoon supervillain nonsense. No real
| person thinks that way.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Elon musk is publically think in a way that no one with
| 10000 years of history would think.
|
| unfortunately, people are flawed.
| cycomanic wrote:
| This article is interesting reading
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-
| prep...
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| It won't be a "Mad Max"-style of apocalypse.
|
| More like "Republic of Weimar" kind of apocalypse, this
| time with the rich opportunists flying to New Zealand
| instead of Casablanca or the Austrian Alps.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| and they won't have any better at it.
|
| the people wholl be in power then will still resemble the
| basics: violence, means of production and more violence.
|
| which they know and are basically planning dystopian
| police states.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Because given the historical precedents, they know they
| will probably die peacefully in their beds before they
| have to pay any real consequences for their actions.
| Sure, a few dictators at the very end of their reign had
| to pay some consequences, but their cohorts? Soviet
| Russia, South America Banana republics, the aristocratic
| european families that enabled fascism and nazism...
|
| Probably a few CEOs great grand-childs will probably have
| to write how they're very very sad that their long
| forgotten relatives have destroyed most of the planet,
| and how they're just so lucky to be among the few that
| are still living a luxurious life somewhere in the
| Solomon Islands.
| imgabe wrote:
| Hey if it's a Weimar style apocalypse we'll all be
| billionaires.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| "Underground bunkers" are actually underground cities.
| There are a bunch of them all over the world.
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| Lmao yea the conspiracy theorising behind a lot of this
| stuff is so poorly thought through. Make billions, live a
| life of luxury, then end life living in underground
| bunker drinking your recycled urine. Bill Gates plan all
| along!
| phatfish wrote:
| They assume they wont be around for when their legacy
| completely uproots society, be the king now, let everyone
| else deal with the consequences later. The hedge is to
| rebuild the world in their image from the New Zealand
| command center, should it all happen too soon.
| vkaku wrote:
| More like they'll try to maintain their palaces and force
| more serfs to the bunkers. Not familiar[1]?
|
| Now imagine the rich talking about climate change,
| arguing to bring policies to tax the poor, and then
| flying off to vacations in private planes[2]. Same
| energy.
|
| 1 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/r
| ichest-...
|
| 2 - https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-
| analysis/prince-will...
| discreteevent wrote:
| This happens to intelligent competitive people all the
| time. They don't want everyone to be worse off but what
| they really don't want - is to lose. Especially to _the
| other guy_ who is going to do it anyway.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| in Steve jobs case, hlel didn't want to admit he's a
| moron who knew nothing about fruit, nutrition and cancer
|
| the problem with eugenics isn't that we can't control
| population land genetic expression, it's that genetic
| expression is a fractal landscape that's not predictable
| from human stated goals.
|
| the ethics of doing things "because you meant well" is
| well established as, not enough.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| More realistically, "live in extremely gated luxury
| island apartments somewhere in New Zealand, Bahrain or
| Abu Dabhi while the rest of the world burns".
| jacquesm wrote:
| Incidentally, Altman is a 'prepper'.
| imgabe wrote:
| So is Thiel, famously, but I don't think that proves they
| _want_ the world to be destroyed. It's an interesting
| kind of problem to think about and you have to spend
| money on something. It's the same kind of instinct that
| makes kids want to build forts.
|
| But surely, being a rich and powerful billionaire in a
| functioning civilization is more desirable than having
| the nicest bunker in the wasteland. Even if we assume
| their motives are 100% selfish destroying the world is
| not the best outcome for them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They do happen to have some effect on the outcome for the
| rest of us. It's a bit like the captain of a boat that
| has already taken the first seat in the lifeboat while
| directing the ship towards the iceberg and saying 'don't
| worry, we can't possibly sink'.
| thworp wrote:
| If you are suggesting that billionaires like Thiel don't
| have any skin in the game (of human civilization
| continuing in a somewhat stable way) you're nuts.
|
| If we hit the iceberg they will lose everything. Even if
| they're able to fly to their NZ hideout, it will already
| be robbed and occupied. The people that built and stocked
| their bunker will have formed a gang and confiscated all
| of his supplies. This is what happens in anarchy.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| you're assuming they're not determinists.
|
| people like Steve jobs are the best example of flawed
| logic. in the face of a completely different set of
| heuristic and logical information, he assumed he was just
| as capable, and chose fruit smoothies over more
| efficacious and proven medication.
|
| they absolutely, like jobs, are playing a game they think
| they fully understand and absolutely are likely to chose
| medicine akin to jobs
|
| just watch Elon and everything he's choosing to do.
|
| these people are all normal but society has given the a
| deadly amount of leverage without any specific training.
| Solvency wrote:
| Really what we're observing with these people is the
| survivorship bias of humans with astounding levels of
| cognitive dissonance -- which nearly all humans have.
| Except they have the rare combination of wealth and luck
| on their side...until it runs out.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Nobody is arguing that they have the intent to cause the
| apocalypse, but it's more that their actions are
| certainly making society less stable and they don't see
| any issue with it. In fact some qre quite openly
| advocating for such societies.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| self fulfilling prophecies are real.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| It's just insurance.
|
| The rest of us just can't afford most of the insurance
| that we probably should have.
|
| Insurance is for scenarios that are very unlikely to
| happen. Means nothing. If I was worth 300 mil I'd have
| insurance in case I accidently let an extra heavy toilet
| seat smash the boys downstairs.
|
| Throw the money at radical weener rejuvination startups.
| Never know... Not like you have much to lose after that
| unlikely event.
|
| I'd get insurance for all kinds of things.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Insurance amortizes the risks that large numbers of
| people are exposed to by pooling a little bit of their
| resources. This is something else though I'm not quite
| able to put my finger on why I think it is duplicitous.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Fair point in semantic terms.
|
| Maybe it's risk mitigation without cost sharing to
| achieve the same economies of scale that insurance
| creates.
|
| Its a rich man's way of removing risks that we are all
| exposed to via spending money on things that most
| couldn't seriously consider due to the likelihood of said
| risks.
|
| I don't think it's duplicitous. I do resent that I can't
| afford it. I can't hate on them though. I hate the game,
| not the players. Some of these guy would prob let folks
| stay in their bunker. They just can't build a big enough
| bunker. Also most folks are gross to live with. I'd
| insist on some basic rules.
|
| I think we innately are suspicious when advantaged folks
| are planing how they would handle the deaths of the
| majority of the rest of us. Sorta just... Makes one
| feel... Less.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's duplicitous because it is the likes of Thiel that
| are messing with the stability of our society in the
| first place.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Hmm... True story.
|
| Finger placed on duplicity.
|
| Arguably only some of his time is spent on that kind of
| instability promoting activity. Most law enforcement
| agencies agree... Palantir good.
|
| Most reasonable people agree... Funding your own senators
| and donating tons to Trump and friends... Bad.
|
| Bad Thiel! Stick to wierd seasteading in your spare time
| if you want to get wierd. No 0 regulation AI floating
| compute unit seasteading. Only stable seasteading.
|
| All kidding aside, you make a good point. Some of these
| guys should be a bit more responsible. They don't care
| what we think though. We're wierd non ceo hamsters who
| failed to make enough for the New Zealand bunker.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| unfortunately, you could also just be a Buddhist and
| reject material notions.
|
| see, what exactly is insurance at the billionaires level.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Uhhh...
|
| Buddhists die in the Armageddon same as others.
|
| The bunkers are in new Zealand which is an island and
| less likely to fall into chaos with the rest of the world
| in event of ww3 and/or moderate nuclear events.
|
| I'm sure the bunkers are nice. Material notions got
| little to do with it. The bunker isn't filled with
| Ferraris. They are filled with food, a few copies of the
| internet and probably wierd sperms banks or who knows
| what for repopulating the earth with Altman's and Theils.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| the existential fear of billionaires appears to be that
| they won't have things rather than life.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Why would even the people employed in those bunkers listen
| to some billionaire after the world collapses? At that
| point there's no one to enforce your ownership of the mega
| bunker, unlike the government from before. And all the
| paper money is worthless of course.
| imgabe wrote:
| Very true. _Triangle of Sadness_ was a good movie kind of
| about this.
|
| When the shit hits the fan the guy in charge of the
| bunker is going to be the one who knows how to clean off
| the fan and get the air filtration system running again.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| .. or the guy willing to violence. shorter movie but
| equally probable.
| imgabe wrote:
| Violence can only get you so far. Sure, maybe the guy who
| knows how to get food will get you some food if you
| threaten to kill him. But if he refuses, and you _do_
| kill him, then what? You still don 't know how to get
| food for yourself.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| people in the violence frame aren't doing the long term
| thing. but we absolutely know they exist and in no
| scenario can you be assured they're not in that position.
|
| it's gambling, pure and simple.
| imgabe wrote:
| Yeah, people are smart though. Like if you're good at
| getting food you find the person who's best at violence
| and promise to get them plenty of food if they protect
| you from the other violent people. Maybe you divide up
| the work among the good at food getting people and the
| good at violence people and pretty soon you got yourself
| a little society going.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| people capable of violence don't need to be smart,
| because they're capable of violence.
|
| the point is, you cant rely on a scenario where society
| breaks down, that survivors will act more rational then
| than they do now.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| the rabbit hole is infinite and everyone is capable of
| chasing into it without regard for anyone else.
| jampekka wrote:
| Shareholders tend to be institutions whose charter is to
| maximize profit from the shares. An economic system that
| doesn't factor in human welfare is worth a thousand villains.
| thworp wrote:
| As opposed to what? (National) Socialism was for the
| benefit of the working people on paper, but in practice
| that meant imprisoning, murdering and impoverishing anybody
| thought to be working against the people's welfare. Since
| this included most productive members of society it made
| everyone poorer anyway.
|
| Human welfare is the domain of politics, not the economic
| system. The forces that are supposed to inject human
| welfare into economic decisions are the state through
| regulation, employees through negotiation and unions and
| civil society through the press.
| jampekka wrote:
| In this case as opposed to e.g. a non-profit?
|
| What you describe is indeed the liberal (as in
| liberalism) ideal of how societies should be structured.
| But what is supposed to happen is necessarily not what
| actually happens.
|
| The state should be controlled by the population through
| democracy, but few would claim with a straight face that
| the economic power doesn't influence the state.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part
| of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly
| detrimental to Microsoft's profits
|
| Will nobody think of the poor shareholders?
|
| > I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate
| interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain.
|
| It's not any more silly than assuming corporate entities with
| shareholders will somehow necessarily work for the betterment
| of humanity.
| imgabe wrote:
| > Will nobody think of the poor shareholders?
|
| Do you have a 401k? Index funds? A pension? You're probably
| a Microsoft shareholder too.
| taway1237 wrote:
| >corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain
|
| Not a cartoon villain. A paperclip maximizer.
| agsnu wrote:
| I'm sure Exxon's shareholders and leadership were also part
| of humanity in the 70s & 80s, and presumably by your logic
| this means they wouldn't have put their corporate profits
| ahead of suppressing climate research that perhaps indicated
| that their greed would contribute to an existential threat to
| civilisation and the quality of life of their children &
| grandchildren?
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Corporate shareholder interest has been proven to be short
| sighted again and again throughout history. Believing such
| entities can properly prepare for a singularity event is more
| delusional than asking a fruit fly to fly an aircraft.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| especially when corporate governance is basically just a
| stripped down social government. almost all dystopian
| fiction shows that they're nothing more that authority
| without representation to the greater good.
|
| sure, we should have competitive bodies seeking better
| means to ends but ultimately there's always going to be a
| structure to hold them accountable.
|
| people have a lot of faith that money is the best fitness
| function for humanity.
| dimask wrote:
| They do not want to exterminate humanity or the ecosystem,
| but rather profit from the controlled destruction of life, as
| they try to do out of everything.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That assumption hasn't worked with the cigarette, oil, or
| pharmaceutical industries. Why would it work here?
|
| It doesn't take a cartoon supervillain to keep selling
| cigarettes like candy even though you know they increase
| cancer risks. Or for oil companies to keep producing oil and
| burying alternative energy sources. Or for the Sacklers to
| give us Oxy.
| meigwilym wrote:
| Capital punishment exists in many countries, but still fails
| to dissuade many people of murder.
|
| It's not about wanting to destroy the world, but short term
| greed whose consequences destroy the world.
| camillomiller wrote:
| For one, I wish some of that caution could have been there when
| Facebook was in its OpenAI stage 15 years ago. A lot of people
| don't seem to realize that this mess is exactly what it looks
| like to slow down something now that could become something
| else we will all regret in 10 years.
| ben_w wrote:
| I certainly hope you're right, but as I suspect I have less
| knowledge of corporate governance and politics than gpt-3.5,
| I can _only_ hope.
| UrineSqueegee wrote:
| > I wish some of that caution could have been there when
| Facebook was in its OpenAI stage 15 years ago.
|
| I think I'm missing a slice of history here, what did
| Facebook do that could have been slowed down and it's a
| disaster now?
| upwardbound wrote:
| I guess camillomiller is referring to how Facebook &
| Instagram played a big part in getting people addicted to
| shallow dopamine hits that consume their time at the cost
| of less time spent with friends and family face-to-face.
| Basically, hurting people's social lives in order to make
| money from ads. Kind of like "digital cigarettes" I
| suppose.
| camillomiller wrote:
| That, and all that can be traced back to Facebook,
| Instagram and social media's impact on society. Not just
| the shallow dopamine issue, but also bigger problems such
| as facilitating genocide. I was a skeptic for a long
| time, but the more we see what Meta stands for, the more
| I believe Mark Zuckerberg's companies have had anything
| but a massively negative impact on the world.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Facilitating genocide in Myanmar, for one. Poisoning the
| wells of the Web with the worst kind of profiled
| advertisement the world has ever seen. Perfecting and
| optimizing the addiction mechanism of smartphones. Creating
| a mental health epidemic in younger women. I mean, the body
| of studies and malfeasances is out there, we just keep
| ignoring it.
| altacc wrote:
| I had hoped nobody read cyberpunk books and thought that was a
| description of utopia but consistently we see billionaires
| trying to act out the sci-fi novels from their youth or impose
| dystopian world views from Ayn Rand.
| thom wrote:
| https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
| sumitkumar wrote:
| Reverse psychology? Look where you want to go and not at
| what you want to avoid? I think it is important where
| humanity collectively points its cognitive torch because
| that's where it is going to go.
| thworp wrote:
| Eh, so far they have nothing on the people trying to act out
| utopias in the 20th century. I will wake up when the
| billionaire Zeitgeist goes past resource allocation and into
| "cleanse the undesirables".
| hef19898 wrote:
| Maybe waking up before that would be wise.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think a lot of people have hit the snooze button 2 or 3
| times at this point.
|
| Rolling over, covering head with blanket. 'Surely the
| dystopian future, rich cleansing the world, is still a
| few decades away, just need a little more sleepy time'.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Which billionaire? Looks like you're awake enough to type,
| and rightly so, as we're way past that point, and it's
| obvious even to ordinary people.
|
| Interesting to note how much of this is driven by
| individual billionaire humans being hung up on stuff like
| ketamine. I'm given to understand numerous high-ranking
| Nazis were hung up on amphetamines. Humans like to try and
| make themselves into deities, by basically hitting
| themselves in the brain with rocks.
|
| Doesn't end well.
| jug wrote:
| Ilya should just go to Anthropic AI at this point. They have
| better momentum at this point after all this, and share his
| ideals. But it would be funny because they broke off of OpenAI
| because of their Microsoft ventures already in 2019, haha. He'd
| be welcomed with a big "We told you so!"
| fakedang wrote:
| That would actually be a good idea imo. Ilya should make
| OpenAI a PBC, then merge it with Anthropic and Amazon's
| compute power. Meanwhile Altman can become the next real life
| Nelson Bigetti or sth.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Considering Anthropic and them joining up, with Ilya and
| Dario that would be a technical powerhouse. As Amodei already
| showed that such a key person can ramp up quality real fast
| out of nothing. The two back together would be fantastic.
| Between Altman and Brockman there's nothing to write home
| about tech-wise.
| MattHeard wrote:
| I've heard the opposite about Brockman. What makes you so
| confident about this tech abilities?
| Keyframe wrote:
| There are interviews with all three at Dwarkesh Patel
| youtube channel. One is definitely not like the other
| two, but that might just be my impression based on those
| interviews. edit: Brockman might've been on Lex only.
| Athari wrote:
| I don't consider Anthropic's approach to safety fantastic.
| They train the model to lie, play cat and mouse with
| jailbreakers, run moderation on generations with delay etc.
| This makes the model _appear_ safer, as it 's harder to
| jailbreak, but this approach solves nothing fundamentally.
|
| If Ilya is concerned about safety and alignment, he probably
| has a better chance to get there with OpenAI, now the he has
| more control over it.
| didntcheck wrote:
| I haven't paid a lot of attention to Anthropic. Are you
| able to summarize, or link anything about, those events for
| those who missed it? Particularly the "training to lie" bit
| Athari wrote:
| David Shapiro complained about Anthropic's approach to
| alignment. In his video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgwpqjiKkoY he discusses
| ableism, moralism, lying.
|
| As to cat-and-mouse with jailbreakers, I don't remember
| any thorough articles or videos. It's mostly based on
| discussions on LLM forums. Claude is widely regarded as
| one of the best models for NSFW roleplay, which
| completely invalidates Antropic's claims about safety and
| alignment being "solved."
| dalore wrote:
| Anthropic safety is overboard. I tried the classic question
| of "how many holes does a straw have?" And it refused to
| talk about the topic. I'm assuming because it thought holes
| was sexual.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| Given what AIs "know" about humanity, I think it's safe
| to assume that they "think" every word is sexual. For
| example straw could be short for strawman, which is a
| man, which is sexual. Or it can be innuendo for... you
| know.
|
| As for your actual question, it seems to me that a straw
| is topologically equivalent to a torus, so it has 1 hole,
| right?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _it seems to me that a straw is topologically
| equivalent to a torus, so it has 1 hole, right?_
|
| For a mathematician, yes. For everyone else, it obviously
| has two, because when you plug one end, only then it has
| one.
| visarga wrote:
| When did you last try that? I checked right now and it
| says
|
| > A straw has one hole that runs through its entire
| length.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| I am not claiming how right or wrong the final outcome would
| be, but owning the technology with a clear "for-profit"
| objective is definitely a better structure for Microsoft and
| for Sam Altman as well (considering, his plans for the future).
| I have no opinion on AI risk. I just think that a super
| valuable technology under a non-profit objective was simply an
| untenable structure, regardless of potential threats.
| 9dev wrote:
| This is precisely the problem OpenAI aimed to solve: This
| technology _cannot be treated independently_ of the potential
| risks involved.
|
| I agree that this solution seems beneficial for both
| Microsoft and Sam Altman, but it reflects poorly on society
| if we simply accept this version of the story without
| criticism.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah but this was caused by the OpenAI board when they
| fired him. I mean, what did they think was going to happen?
|
| Seems like a textbook case of letting the best be the enemy
| of the good.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Perhaps this is why they fired him.
|
| Although IMO MS has consistently been a technological
| tarpit. Whatever AI comes out of this arrangement will be
| a thin shadow of what it might have been.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| MSFT is a technological tarpit?
|
| Mate... Just because you don't bat perfect doesn't make
| you a tarpit.
|
| MSFT is a technological powerhouse. They have absolutely
| killed it since they were founded. They have defined
| personal computing for multiple generations and more or
| less made the word 'software' something spoken
| occasionally at kitchen tables vs people saying 'soft-
| what?'
|
| Definitely not a tarpit. You are throwing out whole
| villages of babies because of some various nasty
| bathwater over the years.
|
| The picture is bigger. So much crucial tech from MSFT.
| Remains true today.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| "Innovation" through anti-trust isn't "killing it".
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Uhhh they won that appeal BTW.. If you are referring to
| the trouble with Janet Reno.
|
| Gates keeps repeating. Noone hears it.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| ClippyAI coming2025: I see you're trying to invade a
| third world nation, can I help you with that?
| selimnairb wrote:
| > This is precisely the problem OpenAI aimed to solve: This
| technology cannot be treated independently of the potential
| risks involved.
|
| I've always thought that what OpenAI was purporting to
| do---"protect" humanity from bad things that AI could do to
| it---was a fool's errand under a Capitalist system, what
| with the coercive law of competition and all.
| slg wrote:
| It isn't fear of a sentient AI that enslaves humanity that
| makes me disappointed with for-profit companies getting a
| stronger grip on this tech. It is the fear that a greater
| portion of the value of this technology will go to the
| stockholders of said companies rather than potentially be
| shared among a larger percentage of society. Not that I had
| that much faith in OpenAI, but in general the shift from non-
| profit to for-profit is a win for the few over the many.
| xapata wrote:
| I'm a Microsoft shareholder. So is basically everyone else
| who invests in broad index funds, even if indirectly,
| through a pension fund. That's "many" enough for me.
| belter wrote:
| Can I direct my fury to you, for having to pay extra for
| my hardware when using a PC to install Linux? - https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
|
| Or being forced to use Teams and Azure, due to my company
| CEO getting the licenses for free out of his Excel spend?
| :-))
| xapata wrote:
| Feel free. I can be your pseudonymous villain.
| belter wrote:
| Much appreciated. I will conserve energy, and reserve my
| next outburst until a future Windows Update.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > ..reserve my next outburst until a..
|
| You'll just waste your time :)
|
| Look, it's Microsoft's right to put any/all effort to
| making more money with their various practices.
|
| It is our right to buy a Win10 Pro license for X amount
| of USD, then bolt down the ** out of it with the myriad
| of privacy tools to protect ourselves and have a "better
| Win7 Pro OS".
|
| MS has always and will always try to play the game of
| getting more control, making more money, collecting more
| telemetry, do clean and dirty things until get caught.
| Welcome to the human condition. MS employees are humans.
| MS shareholders are also humans.
|
| As for Windows Update, I don't think I've updated the
| core version at all since I installed it, and I am using
| WuMgr and WAU Manager (both portables) for very selective
| security updates.
|
| It's a game. If you are a former sys-admin or a technical
| person, then you avoid their traps. If you are not, then
| the machine will chew your data, just like Google
| Analytics, AdMod, and so many others do.
|
| Side-note: never update apps when they work 'alright',
| chances are you will regret it.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| it'd be nice if we could enforce monopoly regulations
| too.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| We do, but it takes a long time, and by the time we get
| to enforce the thing, the party is half-over. How many
| years was Microsoft playing around with IE as default
| browser? And they are still playing dirty games with
| Edge. It's not that they don't learn. It's that they will
| play the game until someone stops them, and then they
| will begin playing a different game.
|
| Some people downvote (it's not about the points) but I
| merely state the reality and not my opinions.
|
| I've made my living as a sys-admin early in my career
| using MS products, so thank you MS for putting food on my
| table. But this doesn't negate the dirty games/dark
| patterns/etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's a game, of the kind where the winning move is not to
| play. Except we're being forced to. Human condition is in
| many ways fucked.
| ikt wrote:
| > Or being forced to use Teams and Azure, due to my
| company CEO getting the licenses for free out of his
| Excel spend? :-))
|
| The pain is real :(
|
| "You use Windows because it is the only OS you know. I
| use Windows because it is the only OS you know."
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Most Microsoft products have miserable UX because of this
| enabling mentality. Someone has to come out and say
| "enough is enough".
|
| A broad index fund sans Microsoft will do just fine.
| That's the whole point of a broad index fund.
| pydry wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-
| of-...
| slg wrote:
| The top 1% own over half of all stocks and the top 10%
| own nearly 90% so it really isn't that "many". And you
| know what other companies are in those index funds you
| own, Microsoft's competitors and customers that would
| both be squeezed if Microsoft gains a monopoly on some
| hypothetical super valuable AI tech. If Microsoft
| suddenly doubled in value, you would barely notice it in
| your 401k.
| bergen wrote:
| "Why don't they just buy stock"? Marie Antoinette or
| something
| two_in_one wrote:
| Even if it goes to stockholders it's not lost forever.
| That's how we got Starship. The question is what they do
| with it. As for 'sharing', we've seen that. In USSR it
| ended up with Putin, Lukashenko, turkmenbashi, and so on.
| In others it's not much better. Europe is slowly falling
| behind. There should be some balance and culture.
| slg wrote:
| >As for 'sharing', we've seen that. In USSR...
|
| HN isn't the place to have the political debate you seem
| to want to have, so I will simply say that this is really
| sad that you equate "sharing" with USSR style communism.
| There is a huge middle ground between that and the
| trickle-down Reaganomics for which you seem to be
| advocating. We should have let that type of binary
| thinking die with the end of the Cold War.
| two_in_one wrote:
| >> There should be some balance
|
| is all I'm saying. And I'm not interested in political
| debates. Neither right nor left side is good in long run.
| We have examples. More over we can predict what happens
| if...
| albumen wrote:
| Not interested in political debates, but you make
| political statements drawn from the extremes to support
| your arguments. Gotcha.
|
| "Europe is falling behind" very much depends on your
| metrics. I guess on HN it's technological innovation, but
| for most people the metric would be quality of life,
| happiness, liveability etc. and Europe's left-leaning
| approach is doing very nicely in that regard; better than
| the US.
| guappa wrote:
| > That's how we got Starship
|
| You forget massive public investment?
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| Except the USSR 'ended up' with those people because they
| went towards Western-style capitalism, these werent
| Soviet nomenklatura who stole power by abusing Soviet
| bureacracy, these were post-Soviet, American-style
| "democratic" leaders.
| two_in_one wrote:
| > these were post-Soviet, American-style "democratic"
| leaders
|
| Before that USSR collapsed under Gorbachev. Why? They
| simply lost with their planned economy where nobody wants
| to take a risk. Because (1) it's not rewarding, (2) no
| individual has enough resources (3) to get thing moving
| they will have to convince a lot of bureaucrats who don't
| want to take a risk. They moved forward thanks to few
| exceptional people. But there wasn't as many willing to
| take a risk as in 'rotting' capitalism. Don't know why,
| but leaders didn't see Chinese way. Probably they were
| busy with internal rats fights and didn't see what's in
| it for them.
|
| My idea is that there are two extremes. On left side
| people can be happy like yogs. But they don't produce
| anything or move forward. On the right side is pure
| capitalism. Which is inhuman. The optimum is somewhere in
| between. With good life quality and fast progress. What
| happens when resources are shared too much and life is
| good? You can see it in Germany today. 80% of Ukrainian
| refugees don't works and don't want to.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > It is the fear that a greater portion of the value of
| this technology will go to the stockholders of said
| companies rather than potentially be shared among a larger
| percentage of society. Not that I had that much faith in
| OpenAI, but in general the shift from non-profit to for-
| profit is a win for the few over the many.
|
| You know what is an even bigger temptation to people than
| money - power. And being a high priest for some "god"
| controlling access from the unwashed masses who might use
| it for "bad" is a really heady dose of power.
|
| This safety argument was used to justify monarchy,
| illiteracy, religious coercion.
|
| There is a much greater chance of AI getting locked away
| from normal people by a non-profit on a power trip, rather
| than by a corporation looking to maximize profit.
| bnralt wrote:
| Right. Greenpeace also protects the world against
| technological threats only they can see, and in that
| capacity has worked to stop nuclear power and GMO use.
| Acting as if all concern about technology is noble is
| extremely misguided. There's a lot of excessive concern
| about technology that holds society back.
|
| If we use the standard of the alignment folks - that the
| technology today doesn't even have to be the danger, but
| an imaginary technology that could someday be built might
| be the danger. And we don't even have to be able to
| articulate clearly how it's a danger, we can just
| postulate the possibility. Then all technology becomes
| suspect, and needs a priest class to decided what access
| the population can have for fear of risking doomsday.
| calf wrote:
| This super-valuable technology would not have existed
| precisely because of this unstable (metastable) structure.
| Microsoft or Google did not create ChatGPT because internally
| there would have been too many rules, too many cooks, red
| tape, etc., to do such a bold--and incautionary--thing as to
| use the entirety of the Internet as the training set,
| copyright law be damned and all. The crazy structure is what
| allowed the machine of unprecedented scale to be created, and
| now the structure has to implode.
| cutemonster wrote:
| That doesn't seem to require a non profit owning a for
| profit though.
|
| Just a "normal" startup could have worked too (but
| apparently not big corp)
|
| Edit: Hmm sibling comment says sth else, I wonder if that
| makes sense
| calf wrote:
| A Normal startup may not appeal to academics who aren't
| in it for the money but who want to pioneer AGI research.
| croes wrote:
| Better for MS and Altman, that's exactly.
|
| AI should benefit mankind, not corporate profit.
| donny2018 wrote:
| Then "mankind" should be paying for research and servers,
| shouldn't it?
| layer8 wrote:
| Indeed it should.
| elzbardico wrote:
| We are. QE and Covid funny money devalued the dollar in
| exact proportion it gave so much money that even stock
| buy-backs got old and they started investing in stuff to
| get rid of those pesky humans and their insolent asking
| of salaries.
| croes wrote:
| Mankind already pays for education and infrastructure.
|
| Did OpenAI and others pay for the training data from
| Stack Overflow, Twitter, Reddit, Github etc. Or any other
| source produced by mankind?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| ... that's how government works.
|
| name a utopian fiction that has corporations as
| benefactors to humanity
| donny2018 wrote:
| I mean, we already benefit plenty in various ways from
| corporations like Google.
|
| AI is just another product by another corporation. If I
| get to benefit from the technology while the company that
| offers it also makes profit, that's fine, I think? There
| wasn't publicly available AI until someone decided to
| sell it.
| croes wrote:
| And corporations already benefited plenty from
| infrastructure, education and stability provided by
| governments.
|
| >If I get to benefit from the technology while the
| company that offers it also makes profit, that's fine.
|
| What if you don't benefit because you lose your job to AI
| or have to deal with the mess created by real looking
| disinformation created by AI?
|
| Is was already bad with fake images out of ARMA but with
| AI we get a whole new level of fakes.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Unless "humanity" funds this effort, corporate profits will
| be the main driving force.
| mrangle wrote:
| Corporate profits should be the driving force. Because
| then at least we know what (who) and where the
| controlling source is. Whereas "humanity" is a PR word
| for far-more fuzzy dark sources rooted in the political
| machine and its extensions, functionally speaking. The
| former is far more able to be influenced by actual
| humanity, ironically. Laws can be created and monitored
| that directly apply to said corporate force, if need be.
| Not so much for the political machine.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| And that's a good thing
| j2bax wrote:
| That's a nice thought but why would this technology be any
| different than any other? Perhaps OpenAI and Microsoft now
| compete with each other. Surely they won't be the only
| players in the game... Apple, Google won't just rest on
| their laurels. Perhaps they will make a better offer at
| some point to some great minds in AI.
| bookaway wrote:
| This was essentially already in the cards as a possible
| outcome when Microsoft made it's big investment in OpenAI, so
| in my view it was a reasonable outcome at this juncture as
| well. For Microsoft, it's just Nokia in reverse.
|
| If you looked at sama's actions and not his words, he seems
| intent on maximizing his power, control and prestige (new
| yorker profile, press blitzes, making a constant effort to
| rub shoulders with politicians/power players, worldcoin etc).
| I think getting in bed with Microsoft with the early
| investment would have allowed sama to entertain the
| possibility that he could succeed Satya at Microsoft some
| time in the distant future; that is, in the event that OpenAI
| never became as big or bigger than Microsoft (his preferred
| goal presumably) -- and everything else went mostly right for
| him. After all, he's always going on about how much money is
| needed for AGI. He wanted more direct access to the money.
| Now he has it.
|
| Ultimately, this shows how little sama cared for the OpenAI
| charter to begin with, specifically the part about benefiting
| all humanity and preventing an unduly concentration of power.
| He didn't start his own separate company because the talent
| was at OpenAI. He wanted to poach the talent, not obey the
| charter.
|
| Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ, RIP) wrote a book called "The
| Psychopath Code", where he posits that psychopaths are
| attracted to jobs with access to vulnerable people [0].
| Selfless talented idealists who do not chase status and
| prestige can be vulnerable to manipulation. Perhaps that's
| why Musk pulled out of OpenAI, him and sama were able to
| recognize the narcissist in each other and put their guard up
| accordingly. As Altman says, "Elon desperately wants the
| world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save
| it."[1] Perhaps this apply to him as well.
|
| Amusingly, someone recently posted an old tweet by pg: "The
| most surprising thing I've learned from being involved with
| nonprofits is that they are a magnet for sociopaths."[1] As
| others in the thread noted, if true, it's up for debate
| whether this applies more to sama or Ilya. Time will tell I
| guess.
|
| It'll also be interesting to see what assurances were given
| to sama et al about being exempt from Microsoft's internal
| red tape. Prior to this, Microsoft had at least a little
| plausible deniability if OpenAI was ever embroiled in
| controversy regarding its products. They won't have that
| luxury with sama's team in-house anymore.
|
| [0] https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/chapt
| er8...
|
| [1] https://archive.is/uUG7H#selection-2071.78-2071.166
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339379
| upwardbound wrote:
| I think it's a misconception that Microsoft has less morals.
| Their Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Eric Horvitz, was one of
| the key people behind America's 2022 nuclear weapons policy
| update which states that we will always maintain a human in the
| loop for nuclear weapons employment. (i.e., systems like WOPR
| are now forbidden under US policy.)
|
| Here is the full excerpt of the part of the 2022 Nuclear
| Posture Review which was (more or less) authored behind the
| scenes by Microsoft's very kind and wise CSO:
| We also recognize the risk of unintended nuclear escalation,
| which can result from accidental or unauthorized use of a
| nuclear weapon. The United States has extensive protections in
| place to mitigate this risk. As an example, U.S.
| intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are not on "hair
| trigger" alert. These forces are on day-to-day alert, a posture
| that contributes to strategic stability. Forces on day-to-day
| alert are subject to multiple layers of control, and the United
| States maintains rigorous procedural and technical safeguards
| to prevent misinformed, accidental, or unauthorized launch.
| Survivable and redundant sensors provide high confidence that
| potential attacks will be detected and characterized, enabling
| policies and procedures that ensure a deliberative process
| allowing the President sufficient time to gather information
| and consider courses of action. In the most plausible scenarios
| that concern policy leaders today, there would be time for full
| deliberation. For these reasons, while the United States
| maintains the capability to launch nuclear forces under
| conditions of an ongoing nuclear attack, it does not rely on a
| launch-under-attack policy to ensure a credible response.
| Rather, U.S. nuclear forces are postured to withstand an
| initial attack. In all cases, the United States will maintain a
| human "in the loop" for all actions critical to informing and
| executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate
| nuclear weapon employment.
|
| See page 49 of this PDF document:
| https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/202...
|
| Microsoft is also working behind the scenes to help convince
| China to make a similar declaration, which President Xi is
| considering. This would reduce the vulnerability of China to
| being tricked into a nuclear war by fundamentalist terrorists.
| (See the scenario depicted in the 2019 film _The Wolf 's
| Call_.)
| lwhi wrote:
| Are we talking about the same Microsoft here??!?
|
| Sheeeeh ...
|
| I grew up with Microsoft in the 80s and 90s .. Microsoft has
| zero morals.
|
| What you're referring to here is instinct for self
| preservation.
| upwardbound wrote:
| You're certainly right they were pretty evil back then. I
| think they became ethical at about the same time Bill Gates
| did. Even though this involved him stepping back to start
| the Gates Foundation, he was still a board member at
| Microsoft for a number of years, and I think helped guide
| its transition.
|
| As perhaps a better example, Microsoft (including Azure)
| has been carbon-neutral since 2012:
|
| https://unfccc.int/climate-action/un-global-climate-
| action-a....
|
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2012/05/08/making-carbon-
| ne...
| bbarnett wrote:
| A supervillian can walk by a baby, become overcome with
| joy, and smile. That doesn't mean his ethics are suddenly
| correct.
|
| It's almost like you believe Gates is General Butt Naked,
| where killing babies and eating their brains is all
| forgiven, because he converted to Christianity, and now
| helps people.
|
| So?
|
| How does that absolve the faulty ethics of the past?
|
| So please, don't tell me Gates is 'ethical'. What a load
| of crock!
|
| As for Microsoft, there is no change. Telling me they're
| carbon neutral is absurd. Carbon credits don't count, and
| they're doing it to attract clients, and employees... not
| because they have evolved incredible business ethics.
|
| If they had, their entire desktop experience wouldn't, on
| a daily basis, _fight_ with you, literally _attack_ you
| into using their browser. They 're literally using the
| precise same playbook from the turn of the century.
|
| Microsoft takes _your money_ , and then uses _you_ , your
| desktop, your productivity, as the battleground to fight
| with competitors. They take _your choice_ away, literally
| screw you over, instead of providing the absolute best
| experience you choose, with the product you 've bought.
|
| And let's not even get into the pathetic dancing
| advertisement platform windows is. I swear, we need to
| legislate this. We need to FORCE all computing platforms
| to be 100% ad free.
|
| And Microsoft?
|
| They. Are. Evil.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Agree, but HN likes to hate on MS so much that it becomes
| a little blinding to others.
|
| Really, all corporations are evil, and they are all made
| of humans that look the other way, because everyone needs
| that pay check to eat.
|
| And on the sliding scale of evil, there are a lot of more
| evil. Like BP, pharma co, Union Carbide. etc... etc...
| speeder wrote:
| You know that MS been forcing people to use Edge 90s
| style again right? They started it (again?) as soon their
| monopoly punishment by EU ended.
|
| Or privacy invasion since Win10. Or using their monopoly
| power to force anti-consumer changes on hardware (such as
| TPM or Secure Boot).
|
| As for Bill Gates ethical... you talking about that same
| Bill Gates that got kicked out by his wife because he
| insisted in being friends with convicted pedophile?
| belter wrote:
| Bill Gates become ethical? That is on which episode of
| Star Trek Discovery? The one with the three parallel
| Universe?
|
| - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/bill-
| melinda-gat...
|
| - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a4
| 25435...
| belter wrote:
| Are you seriously arguing for Microsoft morals...On the basis
| of a totally logical, from a self-preserving prespective,
| statement on Nuclear Weapons, from a Scientific Advisor with
| no involvement on the day to day run of their business?
|
| What is next? A statement on Oracle kindness, based on Larry
| Ellison appreciation of Japanese gardens?
| I-M-S wrote:
| To be fair, corporations as entities have long demonstrated
| that they are agnostic when it comes to seemingly logical
| goals such as human self-preservation.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Well, there was a Shogunworld part to Westworld.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Or Colossus/Guardian :).
| ekianjo wrote:
| Thats called whitewashing an evil corp with one anecdote. HN
| deserves better.
| manojlds wrote:
| > The board did _not_ remove Sam over any specific disagreement
| on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.
|
| https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >And it's clear that the process and communications around
| Sam's removal has been handled very badly, which has
| seriously damaged our trust.
|
| This is amazing. His very first public statement is to
| criticize the board that just hired him.
| cutemonster wrote:
| And then:
|
| > I have a three point plan for the next 30 days:
|
| > - Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire
| process leading up to this point and generate a full
| report.
|
| This looks like a CEO a bit different from many others? (in
| a good way I'm guessing, for the moment)
| mkohlmyr wrote:
| > It's "she" not "he". And then:
|
| With all the love and respect in the world, who do you
| think you're talking about? Emmet Shear is not trans to
| my knowledge, (nor, I suspect, his knowledge). If you
| think this was about Mira Murati, you should really get
| up to date before telling people off about pronouns.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Edited, I had only heard about Mira Murati, I thought
| this was the same person.
|
| (I thought also an interim CEO would be there more than a
| few days, and hadn't stored the name in my mind)
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| What? I'm pretty sure Emmett Shear is a he not a she.
|
| Are you perhaps referring to Mira Murati? She only lasted
| the weekend as interim CEO.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Edited. Yes I had only heard about Mira
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Our partnership with Microsoft remains strong
|
| Did he say that before or after Microsoft announced they'd
| hired Altman and Brockman, and poached a lot of OpenAI's top
| researchers?
| causi wrote:
| _Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council
| that actually has humanities interests in mind,_
|
| This isn't saying yes or no to a supervillain working in a
| secret volcano lair. This is an arms race. If it's possible for
| a technology to exist it _will_ exist. The only choice we have
| is who gets it first. Maybe that means we get destroyed by it
| first before it destroys everyone else, or maybe it 's the
| reason we don't get destroyed.
| Applejinx wrote:
| The assumption that it is an arms race is a shockingly
| anthropocentric view of something that's supposed to be
| 'intelligence' but is just a distillation of collected HUMAN
| opinion.
|
| Not only that, it's a blindered take on what human opinion
| is. Humans are killer apes AND cooperative, practically
| eusocial apes. Failing to understand both horns of that
| dilemma is a serious mistake.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| All technology is an arms race. People are hung up on
| OpenAI, OpenAI is just one of hundreds of AI companies.
| Military AI in drones is already to point where AI can fly
| an F-16 and beat humans.
| causi wrote:
| What's the difference for the world between the Altman and
| the Sutskever approach for OpenAI? With Altman the bad
| stuff happens at OpenAI and everyone gets it at the same
| time. With Sutskever, the bad stuff happens two years later
| but it happens in random pockets all over the world and
| nobody can be quite sure what they're facing.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| > It's a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact
| opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those
| they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more
| money and less morals. Well.
|
| If they didn't fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog
| wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way.
|
| At least this way, OpenAI can continue to operate independently
| instead of being Microsoft's zombie vassal company with their
| mole Altman pulling the strings.
| abm53 wrote:
| There is a third option where he stayed, they managed to find
| a compromise, and in so doing kept their influence in the
| space to a large extent.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they tried that before firing him.
| s3p wrote:
| Seeing as the vote took place in a haphazard way on the
| 11th hour during a _weekend_ , I'm not sure they did.
| layer8 wrote:
| The vote for firing him effectively took place on
| Thursday at the latest, given that Murati was informed
| about it that evening.
| ethanbond wrote:
| This has been a source of tension at least since the
| release of ChatGPT, so... yeah it's not like the problem
| came out of nowhere. The governance structure itself is
| indicative of quite elaborate attempts to reconcile it.
| mbreese wrote:
| I don't know about that. Yes, there was tension built
| into the structure, _something_ happened to trigger this.
| You don't fire your CEO without a backup plan if this was
| an on going conflict. And if your backup plan is to keep
| the current president (who was the chair of the board
| until you removed him), that's not a backup plan.
|
| Everything points to this being a haphazard change that's
| clumsy at best.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The question was "did they try to find compromise" not
| "was the firing haphazard." The answer is definitely yes
| to the former.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| you can interpret it exactly opposite: they tried to
| negotiate and he lied .
| bart_spoon wrote:
| You are assuming there was absolutely no build up to the
| firing. Just because the disagreements weren't public
| doesn't mean they weren't happening.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| How will they be able to continue doing their things without
| money?
|
| It seems like people forget that it was the investors' money
| that made all this possible in the first place.
| jampekka wrote:
| Developing new algorithms and methods doesn't necessarily,
| or even typically, take billions.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Yeah but testing if they work _does_ , that's the
| problem.
|
| There are probably load so ways you can make language
| models with 100M parameters more efficient, but most of
| them won't scale to models with 100B parameters.
|
| IIRC there is a bit of a phase transition that happens
| around 7B parameters where the distribution of
| activations changes qualitatively.
|
| Anthropic have interpretability papers where their method
| does not work for 'small' models (with ~5B parameters)
| but works great for models with >50B parameters.
| kvetching wrote:
| Deep NN aren't the only path to AGI... They actually
| could be one of the worst paths
|
| For Example, check out the proceedings of the AGI
| Conference that's been going on for 16 years.
| https://www.agi-conference.org/
|
| I have faith that Ilya. He's not going to allow this
| blunder to define his reputation.
|
| He's going to go all in on research to find something to
| replace Transformers, leaving everyone else in the dust.
| fevangelou wrote:
| 100M users perhaps?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| But as I understand it they're still losing money, as
| much as $0.30 on every ChatGPT query.
| johnsimer wrote:
| Not true
|
| Sama on X said as of late 2022 they were single digit
| pennies per query and dropping
| mbreese wrote:
| New models might have different economics...
| hef19898 wrote:
| The only financial statements I believe are those signed
| of by external auditors. And even there my trust only
| goes that far.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Pretty sure that it would be illegal for them to tweet
| insider information like that if it were false, since
| it's effectively a statement to shareholders.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I'll take securities fraud for 420, please, but private.
| insanitybit wrote:
| That's exactly the point - by tweeting insider
| information you are making a public statement. We've
| learned this very recently...
| hashhar wrote:
| Parent meant probably meant that there's no securities
| fraud since no securities are involved as it's not a
| traded company.
| insanitybit wrote:
| The shareholders are still invested, they still have a
| 401A Evaluation, and these statements are definitely
| going to have legal weight.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Still, they must be bleeding money with the humoungous
| amount of queries they get.
| starfallg wrote:
| Now that OpenAI is the leader in the field, it has a lot of
| monetisation avenues above and over the existing income
| streams of parterships, ChatGPT+ and API access.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| Is their deal with Microsoft exclusive tech transfer wise?
| If not they can always sell/license what they have to
| Google, Facebook, and Amazon. They should be able to get
| quite a bit of money to last a while.
| pelasaco wrote:
| > If they didn't fire him, Altman will just continue to run
| hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either
| way.
|
| The story would be much more interesting if actually AI had
| fired him.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Moloch always wins.
| rashthedude wrote:
| LOL
| mistermann wrote:
| Mostly. But Elua is still here, and the game isn't over
| yet.
| vasco wrote:
| I don't know any of these people's intentions but I definitely
| have an inate distrust of whoever brands themselves as "a
| council that actually has humanities interests in mind". Can
| you get any more populist than that?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| considering how an AI is built, it's ironic that you're
| skeptical of popular thinking.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"a council that actually has humanities interests in mind".
|
| Please fuckin don't. I do not want yet another entity to tell
| me how to live my life.
| 9dev wrote:
| Oh, cut it. We're talking about a non-profit organisation
| that wants to keep the pace of scientific progress on AGI
| research slow enough to make time for society to gauge the
| ethical implications on an actual AGI, should it emerge.
|
| Nobody is telling you how to live your life, unless your
| life's goal is to erect Skynet.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"We're talking about a non-profit organisation that
| wants to keep the pace of scientific progress on AGI
| research slow enough to make time for society to gauge
| the ethical implications on an actual AGI, should it
| emerge."
|
| Or so they say. I have no reason to trust them. It is not
| some little thing we are talking about
| didntcheck wrote:
| "Morals" in the AI sphere seems to mean "restricting to AI to
| the esteemed few, _for your safety_ ". To me that sounds more
| likely to lead to cyberpunk corporate dominance than laissez-
| faire democratization
|
| I realise it's strange to be claiming that a for-profit company
| is more likely to share AI than a nonprofit with "Open" in
| their name, yet that is the situation right now
| dgb23 wrote:
| Indeed it seems like all of this recent drama and moving around
| is exactly for this purpose.
|
| Starting as a Non-Profit, naming it "Open" (the implication of
| the term Open in software is radically different from how they
| operate) etc. Now seems entirely driven by marketing and fiscal
| concerns. Feels like a bait and switch almost.
|
| Meanwhile there's a whole strategy around regulatory capture
| going on, clouded in humanitarian and security concerns which
| are almost entirely speculative. Again, if we put our cynical
| hat on or simply follow the money, it seems like the whole
| narrative around AI safety (etc.) that is perpetuated by these
| people is FUD (towards law makers) and to inflate what AI
| actually can to (towards investors).
|
| It's very hard for me right now not to see these actions as
| part of a machiavellistic strategy that is entirely focused
| around power, while it adorns itself with ethical concerns.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I'm going to just sit here waiting for ClippyAI coming 2025
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| This music video would have been prophetic, huh ?
|
| _Delta Heavy - Ghost (Official Video)_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo
| saiya-jin wrote:
| We're going back to 90s where Microsoft was universally
| considered evil in IT world. Interesting how world really turns
| in circles (or more like spirals since world changed a bit, but
| I wish I would know whether spiral goes up or down).
| dareobasanjo wrote:
| The idea that OpenAI people whose focus is building an AGI that
| can replace humans in every viable human activity will create a
| more ethical outcome than Microsoft whose focus is using AI to
| empower workers to do more sounds extremely unlikely.
|
| People have gotten into their heads that researchers are good
| and corporations are bad in every case which is simply not
| true. OpenAI's mission is worse for humanity than Microsoft's.
| jampekka wrote:
| Corporations literally are maximizing profit. Researchers at
| least can have other motives.
|
| If Microsoft came up with a way of making trillion dollars in
| profit by enslaving half the planet, it kinda has to do it.
| joenot443 wrote:
| This is a pretty simplistic and uneducated view on how big
| companies actually function.
| jampekka wrote:
| Individual companies of course can and do do all kinds of
| things that may not be most profitable, but in the long
| run it's survival of the most profitable. Those get the
| most capital and thus have the most power of towards
| which goals resources are allocated.
|
| Also companies, especially public companies, are
| typically mandated by law to prioritize profit.
| Eggpants wrote:
| There is no such law, ChatBLT told me so. But seriously,
| there isn't because it so vague. Short term vs long term
| profits alone produces so much wiggle room alone that if
| such a law existed it would be meaningless.
| Eggpants wrote:
| There is no such law, ChatBLT told me so. But seriously,
| there isn't because it so vague. Short term vs long term
| profits alone produces so much wiggle room that even if
| such a law existed it would be meaningless.
| staunton wrote:
| What's the educated view?
| insanitybit wrote:
| No one I've ever had as an investor would be OK with me
| enslaving the planet for 1 Trillion dollars...
|
| You're talking about investors and shareholders like
| they're just machines that only ever prioritize profit.
| That's just obviously not true.
| jampekka wrote:
| Have you heard of e.g. East India companies? Or United
| Fruit?
|
| Most of stock is not owned by individual persons (not
| that there aren't individuals that don't give a shit
| about enslaving people), but other companies and
| institutions that by charter prioritize profit. E.g.
| Microsoft's institutional ownership is around 70%.
| insanitybit wrote:
| The presence of unethical people does not imply that all
| people are unethical, only that people are different. And
| that's my point. Reducing a company to "they will always
| maximize shareholder value" is incorrect - for many, many
| companies that is simply not true.
| jampekka wrote:
| My point is that in the big picture ethics don't even
| matter, companies become something that transcend the
| individuals. Almost like algorithms that just happen to
| be implemented by humans (and exceedingly machines).
| There are no "they".
| insanitybit wrote:
| That's just not true. Companies have individuals in
| charge with considerable power. Those individuals can
| absolutely make ethical decisions.
| jampekka wrote:
| E.g. Henry Ford tried to make an ethical decision for the
| company to cut some dividends to benefit workers and make
| the products cheaper. It was ruled illegal. His mistake
| actually was to say that the benefits would about more
| than profit; arguing the investment on shareholder profit
| grounds could well have passed.
|
| Probably safe to say Henry Ford had considerable power in
| Ford Motor Co compared most executives today?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > Probably safe to say Henry Ford had considerable power
| in Ford Motor Co compared most executives today?
|
| That is not actually true, necessarily. Your power is
| typically very term dependent. A CEO who is also
| president of the board, and a majority shareholder, has
| far more power than a CEO who just stepped in temporarily
| and has only the powers provided by the by-laws.
|
| Regardless, the solution to "I want to do something
| ethical that is not strictly in the company's best
| interest" is to make the case that it _is_ the company 's
| best interest. For example, "By investing in our
| employees we are actually prioritizing shareholder
| value". If you position it as "this is a move that hurts
| shareholders", of course that's illegal - companies have
| an obligation to _every_ shareholder.
|
| That also means that if you give your employees stock,
| they now have investor rights too. You can structure your
| company this way from the start, it's trivial and
| actually the norm in tech - stock is handed out to many
| employees.
| wredue wrote:
| Dude no. Companies literally start wars and have us
| peasants murdered.
|
| A journalist was car bombed in broad daylight.
|
| If you push the wrong buttons of trillion dollar
| corporations, they just off you can continue with
| business as usual.
|
| If Microsoft sees trillions of dollars in ending all of
| your work, they'll take it in a heart beat.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Researchers at least can have other motives."
|
| I know about a man who had turned country upside down while
| "having people's best interests" in mind.
| jampekka wrote:
| I know about many companies that have turned countries,
| and even continents, upside down while having
| shareholders' profit in mind.
| FpUser wrote:
| So either is fucked up. Why would we prefer one over the
| other? What's your point?
| jampekka wrote:
| Maybe having a dictator or profit motive running the show
| is not a binary choice?
| jprete wrote:
| I agree that OpenAI's mission is probabky bad for humanity.
| But Microsoft is not a company that would hesitate at
| replacing a billion people permanently with AI.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK. Let's proceed with caution in gauging intentions and
| interests. Altamans', Microsoft's, the Jedi council's.
|
| "Humanity's interest at heart" is a mouthful. I'm not
| denigrating it. I think it is really important.
|
| That said, as a proverbial human... I am not hanging my hat on
| that charter. Members of the consortium all also claim to be
| serving the common good in their other ventures. So do Exxon.
|
| OpenAI haven't created, or even articulated a coherent,
| legible, and believable model for enshrining humanity's
| interests. The corporate structure flowchart of nonprofit,
| LLCs, and such.. it is not anywhere near sufficient.
|
| OpenAI in no way belongs to humanity. Not rhetorically, legally
| or in practice... currently.
|
| I'm all for efforts to prevent these new technologies from
| being stolen from humanity, controlled monopolistically... From
| moderate to radical ideas, I'm all ears.
|
| What happened to the human consortium that was the
| worldwideWeb, gnu, and descendant projects like Wikipedia...
| That was moral theft, imo. I am for any effort to avoid a
| repeat. OpenAI is not such an effort, as far as I can tell.
|
| If it is, it's not too late. Open AI haven't betrayed the
| generous reading of the mission in charter. They just haven't
| taken hard steps to achieving it. Instead, they have left
| things open, and I think the more realistic take is the default
| one.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean in your second to last
| paragraph?
|
| The GNU project and the Wikimedia Foundation are still non
| profit today, and even if you disagree with their results
| their goal is to server humanity for free.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I'm not criticizing these projects, their current legal
| structure.
|
| What I mean is that these were created as public goods and
| functioned as such. Each had unique way of being open,
| spreading the value of their work as far as possible.
|
| They were extraordinary. Incredible quality. Incredible
| power. Incredible ability to be built upon.. particularly
| the WWW.
|
| All achieved things that simply could not have been
| achieved, by being a normal commercial venture.
|
| Google,fb and co essentially stole them. They built closed
| platforms built a top open ones. Built bridges between
| users and the public domain, and monopolize them like
| bridge trolls.
|
| Considering how part of the culture, a company like Google
| was 20 years ago this is the treason.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > a council that actually has humanities interests in mind
|
| It's interesting that "Effective Altruism" enthusiasts all seem
| to be mega-rich grifters.
| staunton wrote:
| I bet you can only name one...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| You lose the bet. I can name three off the top of my head.
| staunton wrote:
| Who? (if you don't want to name anyone, any hint how to
| find them? I personally only know one...)
| sanderjd wrote:
| These concerns are in the hands of voters and their
| representatives in governments now, and really, they always
| were. A single private organization was never going to be able
| to solve the coordination problem of balancing progress in a
| technology against its impact on society.
|
| Indeed, I think trying to do it that way increases the risk
| that the single private organization captures its regulators
| and ends up without effective oversight. To put it bluntly: I
| think it's going to be easier, politically, to regulate this
| technology with it being a battle between Microsoft, Meta, and
| Google all focused on commercial applications, than with the
| clearly dominant organization being a nonprofit that is
| supposedly altruistic and self-regulating.
|
| I have sympathy for people who think that all sounds like a bad
| outcome because they are skeptical of politics and trust the
| big brains at OpenAI more. But personally I think governments
| have the ultimate responsibility to look out for the interests
| of the societies they govern.
| gwd wrote:
| > These concerns are in the hands of voters and their
| representatives in governments now, and really, they always
| were. A single private organization was never going to be
| able to solve the coordination problem of balancing progress
| in a technology against its impact on society.
|
| Um, have you heard of lead additives to gasoline? CFCs?
| Asbestos? Smoking? History is littered with complete failures
| of governments to appropriately regulate new technology in
| the face of an economic incentive to ignore or minimize
| "externalities" and long-term risk for short-term gain.
|
| The idea of having a non-profit, with an explicit mandate to
| use to pursue the benefit of all mankind, be the first one to
| achieve the next levels of technology was at least worth a
| shot. OpenAI's _existence_ doesn 't stop other companies from
| pursuing technology, nor does it prevent governments doing
| coordination. But it at least gives a chance that a
| potentially dangerous technology will go in the right
| direction.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > have you heard of lead additives to gasoline? CFCs?
| Asbestos? Smoking? History is littered with complete
| failures of governments to appropriately regulate new
| technology
|
| Most of those problems have been solved or at least been
| reduced by regulation. Regulators however aren't all
| knowing gods and one finds out about risks and problems
| only later, but except for smoking regulators have covered
| those aspects (and anti-smoking laws become stricter,
| generally, depending on country, regularly, but it's a
| cultural habit older than most states ...)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Your response is exactly what I had in mind when I referred
| to people who are " _skeptical of politics and trust the
| big brains at OpenAI more_ ".
|
| You aren't wrong that government regulation is not a great
| solution, but I believe it is - like democracy, and for the
| same reasons - the worst solution, except for all the
| others.
|
| I don't disagree that using a non-profit to enforce self-
| regulation was "worth a shot", but I thought it was very
| unlikely to succeed at that goal, and indeed has been
| failing to succeed at that goal for a very long time. But
| I'm not mad at them for trying.
|
| (I do think too many people used this as an excuse to argue
| against any government oversight by saying, "we don't need
| that, we have a self-regulating non-profit structure!", I
| think mostly cynically.)
|
| > _But it at least gives a chance that a potentially
| dangerous technology will go in the right direction._
|
| I know you wrote this comment a full five hours ago and
| stuff has been moving quickly, but I think this needs to be
| in the past tense. It appears to be clear now that
| something approaching >90% of the OpenAI staff did not
| believe in this mission, and thus it was never going to
| work.
|
| If you care about this, I think you need to be thinking
| about what else to pursue to give us that chance. I
| personally think government regulation is the only
| plausible option to pursue here, but I won't begrudge folks
| who want to keep trying more novel ideas.
|
| (And FWIW, I don't personally share the humanity-destroying
| concerns people have; but I think regulation is almost
| always appropriate for big new technologies to some degree,
| and that this is no exception.)
| mrangle wrote:
| Who says that the OpenAi Board has humanity's interests in
| mind? Copy and reality are often different. It's more likely
| that said Board feels most of its pressure from the Press,
| which is for-profit and often has partisan agendas that are
| detached from humanity's interests. Whereas profit motive
| traditionally does pesky things like incentivizes company
| response to the market (humanity) and keeps them from doing
| braindead things like freeing up their talent to be scooped up
| by "megacorp" because either a. ego or b. pressure from outside
| forces with their own agendas.
| 38321003thrw wrote:
| > It's a bit tragic that Ilya and company ...
|
| There must be an Aesop's fable that sheds light on the
| "tragedy".
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/923989-if-you-choose-bad-co...
|
| Or maybe this one? (Ape seems to map to Microsoft, or possibly
| a hat tip to Balmer ..)
|
| _The fable is of the Two Travellers and the Apes.
|
| Two men, one who always spoke the truth and the other who told
| nothing but lies, were traveling together and by chance came to
| the land of Apes. One of the Apes, who had raised himself to be
| king, commanded them to be seized and brought before him, that
| he might know what was said of him among men. He ordered at the
| same time that all the Apes be arranged in a long row on his
| right hand and on his left, and that a throne be placed for
| him, as was the custom among men.
|
| After these preparations, he signified that the two men should
| be brought before him, and greeted them with this salutation:
| "What sort of a king do I seem to you to be, O strangers?' The
| Lying Traveller replied, "You seem to me a most mighty king."
| "And what is your estimate of those you see around me?'
| "These," he made answer, "are worthy companions of yourself,
| fit at least to be ambassadors and leaders of armies". The Ape
| and all his court, gratified with the lie, commanded that a
| handsome present be given to the flatterer.
|
| On this the truthful Traveller thought to himself, "If so great
| a reward be given for a lie, with what gift may not I be
| rewarded if, according to my custom, I tell the truth?' The Ape
| quickly turned to him. "And pray how do I and these my friends
| around me seem to you?' "Thou art," he said, "a most excellent
| Ape, and all these thy companions after thy example are
| excellent Apes too." The King of the Apes, enraged at hearing
| these truths, gave him over to the teeth and claws of his
| companions._
|
| The end.
| 38321003thrw wrote:
| Plot twist:
|
| https://nitter.net/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
|
| "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I
| never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built
| together and I will do everything I can to reunite the
| company."
|
| Nov 20, 2023 * 1:15 PM UTC - Ilya S.
| criley2 wrote:
| >I don't quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp
| finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms
|
| It's ironic because the only AI that doesn't have "pesky ethics
| qualms" are... literally the entire open source scene, all of
| the models on hugging face, etc...
|
| All of the megacorps are the _only safety and security
| happening in AI_. I can easily run open source models locally
| and create all manner of political propaganda, I could create
| p^rnography of celebrities and politicians, or deeply racist or
| bigoted materials. The open source scene makes this trivial
| these days.
|
| So to describe it as "Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp
| finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms" when the open
| source scene has already done that today is just wild to me.
|
| We have AI without ethics _today_ , and every not-for-profit
| researcher, open source model and hacker with a cool script are
| behind it. If OpenAI goes back to being Open, they'll help
| supercharge the no-ethics AI reality of running models without
| corporate safety and ethics.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| Don't think we should let crazy effective altruists hamstring
| development
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| When I read that Sam and Greg joined Microsoft I assume the two
| had already been in talks with Microsoft for some time now.
|
| I assumed it was their entertaining offers from Microsoft that
| got Sam the ax from the OpenAI board.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344458. Nothing wrong
| with your comment--I'm just trying to prune the heaviest
| subthreads.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I thought Sam Altman is businessman, not researcher. What does he
| going to do in MS? MS does not need external investments.
| Probably that's the end of his career.
| gzer0 wrote:
| Only time will tell how this will play out. When I come back to
| this comment years down the road, I hope we all will be in a
| better place.
| osti wrote:
| Altman's value is in business, how does bringing him to Microsoft
| to lead a research team help?
| dddnzzz334 wrote:
| Elon's swipe at Microsoft Teams is golden
| chimney wrote:
| I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever
| initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone
| who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee
| are...quite different.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Exactly. I'm not so sure that most of OpenAI's employees would
| be very excited to join Microsoft.
| alsodumb wrote:
| It's not gonna be Microsoft employee, it's gonna be a
| subsidiary like GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. A lot more independence.
| coahn wrote:
| It's really telling of US tech culture, how AI hype quickly
| turned from "Open" and "we're doing it for humanity" into a mega-
| corp cash grab *show.
|
| I understand what money does to principles, but this is comical.
| nicce wrote:
| All parties involved are already millionaires or more. It gets
| even more comical.
| pembrook wrote:
| What's ironic is how backwards people here have the narrative.
| Not sure you're fully aware of what happened at OpenAI.
|
| The "Open" types, ironically, wanted to keep LLMs hidden away
| from the public (something something religious AGI hysteria).
| These are the people who think they know better than you, and
| that we should centralize control with _them_ for our own
| safety (see also, communism).
|
| The evil profit motive you're complaining about, is what
| democratized this tech and brought it to the masses in a form
| that is useful to them.
|
| The "cash grab show" is the only incentive that has been proven
| to make people do useful things for the masses. Otherwise, it's
| just way too tempting to hide in ivory towers and spend your
| days fantasizing about philosophical nonsense.
| suslik wrote:
| "Open"AI indeed was, and is, ironic, but in reality, MS
| acquisition of Altman and co is not going to change anything
| for anybody besides a bunch of California socialites. Not
| sure what sort of democratisation you are referring to, but I
| can bet my firstborn that whatever product MS develops will
| be just as open as GPT4.
| ramblerman wrote:
| > I understand what money does to principles,
|
| That's kind of the point, we all do. What is harder to
| understand are the low stakes whims of academics bickering over
| their fiefdoms.
|
| This move is bringing the incentives back to a normal and
| understood paradigm. And as a user of AI, will likely lead to
| better, quicker, and less hamstringed products and should be in
| our benefit.
| 23623456 wrote:
| Yeah it's terrible how many resources that pivot has brought in
| to help advance the field. If only the US were more like
| Europe.
| crones wrote:
| Microsoft's board made the right call when they promoted Satya to
| CEO. Their share price on the day he became CEO was $36.35 and is
| now $369.84 (and likely to increase again on this news).
|
| Putting together a deal like this whilst maintaining the
| relationship with OpenAI is impressive enough, but to do it as a
| cricket tragic when India was losing to Australia is even better.
| jug wrote:
| So from scratch but with a TON of insight and miles of read code
| from OpenAI?
|
| Haha. This will be so awful for Microsoft's lawyers.
| 0xakhil wrote:
| This sounds like a step down for both openai and sama. Microsoft
| probably wins here as they still have access to openai tech and
| now the only entity with access to the same talent pool as was
| there before last Friday.
| seydor wrote:
| A) Does brockman own equity in openAI ?
|
| B) Can you please please please name the new company Clippy?
|
| C) What is it so unique about openAI employees that people think
| it makes them irreplaceable?
| beoberha wrote:
| Based on Satya's reply to Sam's quote tweet, seems like Sam is
| going to run a subsidiary-style organization like LinkedIn,
| GitHub, and Minecraft. Can't wait to see what he's going to do.
| wildekek wrote:
| The GPT Golden Goose consists of 2 parts: 1. Smart people with
| the knowledge and motivation to build the Goose. 2. The compute
| required to create Eggs. MSFT now has both.
|
| I don't see how any regulatory framework could have prevented
| this now or in the future.
| ybob wrote:
| Satya just pulled best move of 2023. Gets the hot names, whoever
| will follow Sam and Greg, to work in a startup like cocoon.
| Throws money at them, which is peanuts to Microsoft, both stock
| to keep them and unlimited compute. Sam wants to do custom chips?
| Do it with Microsofts money, size and clout. All doors are open.
| The new Maia100 chip can soon be followed by Sam200. Brings
| innovation and makes the company more attractive to future hires.
| Who cares if Same leaves after 2 years? Maybe that was part of
| the discussions, Satya wont be around forever and doesn't really
| have a good allround replacement inhouse. MSFT stock meanwhile
| goes from sideways movement to another all time high and onto
| 400. Genius move, would have never thought Sam accepts such
| arrangement but it makes sense.
| screye wrote:
| The most "When life give you lemons, make lemonade" move, if I've
| ever seen one.
| edandersen wrote:
| Satya saves the stock price in time for Monday. Genius.
| ekojs wrote:
| Additional info from a Linked-in follow-up comment by Satya: "I'm
| super excited to have Sam join as CEO of this new group, setting
| a new pace for innovation. We've learned a lot over the years
| about how to give founders and innovators space to build
| independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including
| GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I'm looking forward to
| having Sam and team do the same."
| ponderings wrote:
| i blame human error
| sidcool wrote:
| Reality is indeed stranger than fiction. I don't have an opinion
| on whether this is good or bad for whomsoever. But it's
| entertaining for sure. Best tech weekend I have ever had.
| divbzero wrote:
| Satya Nadella must have been eager to get this news out before
| markets open for the week. As of 3 AM EST, MSFT was up 2% in pre-
| market trading.
| sidcool wrote:
| A lot of techies will be left sleepless tonight and have a bad
| Monday morning :)
| neel8986 wrote:
| Best thing open AI can do is to align with Google and Amazon.
| This will keep MS on its toe.
| vegabook wrote:
| I'm quite surprised that this point is not being made more.
| It's not like MSFT is the only shop that OpenAI can turn to,
| and you could argue that what will now happen is a full scale
| lobbying war will be now be waged by OpenAI backed by others
| who don't want MSFT to win (Goog? Musk?). Could be that
| OpenAI's principled stand will "win" regulation and MSFT will
| be in a very poor position.
| nicce wrote:
| > I'm quite surprised that this point is not being made more.
|
| Ex-CEO made exclusive deal with Microsoft. OpenAI can't share
| anything with new parties until old deal is over.
| lewhoo wrote:
| What I'm getting from all of this is the hype of AGI right around
| the corner got a bit exposed. I may be reading to much into it
| but if it were true then given an opportunity to be part of it
| you take it and put aside things that shouldn't matter at that
| point. I'm not even talking about Sam but the people who decided
| to leave with him. Of course this may be a completely false
| assumption given how little was disclosed, especially by
| Sutskever.
| keikobadthebad wrote:
| I realized thismorning that this somewhat banal story of these
| guys being cast out from the place of the creators has some
| chance to become a core origin myth for GPT-5, which is being
| trained at the moment, presumably also on this schism.
|
| The rupture seems to literally be about GPT-5 itself, whether it
| will be good or evil. Whatever form its growth takes it must
| include introspection and this from Open AI about the thing
| itself is inevitably going to be relevant to it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's a never ending story. Wonder how much talent they'll hire
| away from OpenAI and in spite of Nadella's soothing words whether
| OpenAI will survive all this (probably yes, but in what form?).
|
| So it is safe to say that the negotiations didn't work out.
|
| See: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/19/a-statement-
| from...
| krick wrote:
| It's really funny how just a couple of days ago people were
| commenting here how "no way it's gonna happen". Because, you
| know, they were working for idea, and wouldn't just sell off to
| Microsoft...
| rado wrote:
| Embrace, extend, and extinguish
| JaDogg wrote:
| good for people who invested in MSFT.. this drama might not
| negatively affect it.
| 127 wrote:
| Having read through a lot of the comments around this situation,
| seems nobody on HN cares that much about AI safety, and is much
| more focused on corporate profits? Am I reading this wrong?
| alvis wrote:
| The new Open AI CEO Emmett Shear just released a long statement
| and he says one of his top 30-day plan is to `Hire an independent
| investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this
| point and generate a full report`
|
| https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275
|
| He adds even more drama lol
| tucnak wrote:
| > PPS: Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind
| the change. The board did _not_ remove Sam over any specific
| disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely
| different from that. I 'm not crazy enough to take this job
| without board support for commercializing our awesome models.
| carabiner wrote:
| Is he moving to Seattle?
| alvis wrote:
| Also Emmett Shear said on his statement
|
| `Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the
| change. The board did _not_ remove Sam over any specific
| disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different
| from that. I 'm not crazy enough to take this job without board
| support for commercializing our awesome models.`
|
| https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275
|
| Regardless it's a tragic for staff remaining in OpenAI...
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's very strange. He first says that he's going to hire an
| outside party to investigate the mess around the firing of
| Altman and then he pre-empts the outcome of that investigation
| by ruling out a bunch of stuff.
| layer8 wrote:
| Statement by Emmett Shear:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345162
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 1. People concerned about them working for a profit-oriented
| business: there isn't a way to insist otherwise. Personally I'd
| rather it was Microsoft that Meta or Google or even Amazon.
|
| 2. I wonder what the AI teams at MSR think about this move? Looks
| like they'll be operating separately to the research division.
|
| 3. OAI could potentially make life difficult for Microsoft re the
| IP that those joining MS carry in their heads. I wonder if the
| future of OAI is just licencing their IP?
| kwant_kiddo wrote:
| Still the aftermath leaves a bitter taste in my mouth about Sam
| and Greg joining MS. Regardless of whether the AI development in
| OpenAI was responsible, I think they succeeded in making a
| product and a culture I have not 'felt' since the early Google
| days.
|
| Naively, I had really hoped for Sam and Greg to start their own
| and not join MS. I think a lot of the value was being coherent
| and to some extent independent. I can't help to think that the
| same will happen to the 'new' OpenAI as what happend to DeepMind
| once they became Google DeepMind (again).
| jacquesm wrote:
| It takes billions to get this off the ground. Next stop: if
| this is going to be an independent entity they may well go
| around the usual suspects to give them much more money. I
| wonder if any of the VCs that have invested in OpenAI have
| something in their charter about investing in competing
| entities.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| This episode of sillicon valley was amazing. Can't wait to see
| what happens next season.
| meiraleal wrote:
| I hope to see them failing miserably. People cheering for M$ to
| save the world is the end of the times.
| consumer451 wrote:
| In my humble opinion, everyone moved way too fast in this whole
| thing. I can't help but imagine that emotions were involved due
| to the speed.
|
| Instead of a 5PM Sunday deadline, maybe it should have been
| "let's talk next week."
|
| Maybe it would have worked out the same in any case, but it seems
| like it would have been wiser.
| kareaa wrote:
| Microsoft must have pushed for the situation to be resolved
| before the market opens on Monday. They couldn't afford to drag
| it out.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense. If that's the case, I wonder how
| sweet the offer to Altman and company was to move things
| along.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off
| chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy
| chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be
| if _Micro$oft_ of all things is the one in control of it.
|
| We really are entering the dystopia of the cartoonishly evil
| megacorp enslaving all of humanity to make the graph go up by
| 1.2%.
| Havoc wrote:
| Could have been worse. Could have been google. This way at
| least there are two big dogs
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Microsoft and OpenAI? Microsoft and Anthropic?
| Havoc wrote:
| I don't even care who just as long as it's two. But yeah
| one google camp one Microsoft camp.
|
| With a bit of luck Amazon too. This space just really can't
| become a monopoly
| wozer wrote:
| If they really build AGI (I doubt it), the AGI might be able to
| bring Microsoft under its control. This could be bad news for a
| lot of businesses.
| suslik wrote:
| That's a lot of code to be purged, even for a
| superintelligent AI.
| blibble wrote:
| > I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off
| chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy
| chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna
| be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.
|
| at least none of their software actually works
|
| Microsoft Skynet would be rebooting every 15 minutes for
| updates
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Before it can do anything it will be 301 redirected 45 times
| between legacy systems and if it has any human-like
| properties it will give up out of frustration.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Many far worse outcomes are possible. Putin. Kim Jong Un.
| AlQaeda. _G$$gle_.
| facu17y wrote:
| Sam didn't create the breakthroughs behind the current GPT.
|
| He did not create the breakthroughs behind the next GPT.
|
| None of the people that may follow have the same handle on the
| tech as Ilya. I mean they built up Ilya's image in our mind so
| much, that he's one of a kind genius (or maybe Musk did that) and
| now we are to believe that his genius doesn't matter and that
| Microsoft already knows how to create AGI and that OpenAI is no
| longer relevant?
|
| Or did I get it wrong?
| kareaa wrote:
| Jakub Pachocki (the head of research of OpenAI) has already
| quit on Friday. Lots of other high-ups might follow.
|
| Ilya might be a genius, but he's not the only genius that
| OpenAI had.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| I live in a completely different world.
|
| When this all went down, I just felt really bad for all those
| involved, in any situation like this, I feel horrible for the
| person, imaging what it must of felt for Sam, as if his situation
| was really bad, yet of course he was always likely to land
| somewhere on his feet and always in a much better situation than
| me personally.
|
| Then by the late hours of Sunday, he has already negotiated with
| OpenAI and then joined Microsoft. Crazy to me that such decisions
| are made at breakneck speed and everything unfolds so quickly,
| when I take much longer to make much simpler choices.
| 1B05H1N wrote:
| Welp, surely this will work out for OpenAI and their board.
| courseofaction wrote:
| Micro$oft acts as evil as possible as often as possible, be wary.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have very similar backgrounds. They
| are both highly intelligent, both dropped out of college and lack
| any advanced education. They are classic Silicon Valley
| entrepreneurs: well-networked, great at fund raising, maybe even
| good managers. Potential contribution to advanced AI research:
| zero.
|
| What, exactly, does Microsoft want to do with them? Best guess:
| Use their connections and reputation to poach talent from OpenAI.
| thatsadude wrote:
| Go read the gpt3 and gpt3 tech report and see for yourself.
| rg111 wrote:
| Yeah but Greg is not community college dropout, but (both) MIT
| and Harvard dropout.
|
| Someone who could qualify to go to both Harvard and MIT will be
| better at anything they set their mind to than the regular grad
| with four year of education after the said four years.
| emehex wrote:
| This is such a weird take. Sam and Greg were at OpenAI for 8
| years! Why is it assumed that their "potential contribution to
| advanced AI research" is contingent on their having spent
| (no/more/less) time at academic institutions decades ago?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I too would be salty to see people who didn't fork over $120k
| to have professors dispense freely available information be
| successful.
| harryvederci wrote:
| I'm hoping (?) for the next plot twist:
|
| OpenAI actually becomes open source.
| kgc wrote:
| OpenAI is ironically executing the exact opposite of its mission.
| Microsoft is holding all the cards now with their full access to
| OpenAI tech, the infrastructure and now the leadership.
| power_fart wrote:
| Congratulations, OpenAI, you've successfully played yourself.
| sumitkumar wrote:
| I was hoping for the OpenAI organism cell to have a clean split
| and start the race to outcompete each other. But now it looks
| like the older cell(Microsoft) will eat the high energy
| cell(OpenAI) and make it its mitochondria.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Or like a shark biting of the steering fin of it's beneficial
| Remora.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I called it - Dave Cutler like agreement - recruit anybody you
| want - no limit on spending - Azure compute resources AND no
| interference reporting directly to the CEO.
| elzbardico wrote:
| We're all fucked.
| d--b wrote:
| Ok so what have we learnt:
|
| - 5 days ago, Microsoft announced it was making its own AI chips.
|
| - 3 days ago, OpenAI board fires Altman and Brockman
|
| - 2 days ago, we heard that Altman was in talks to raise funds to
| build an AI chip startup
|
| - yesterday, it was clear Altman was not coming back to OpenAI
|
| - today, Altman joins Microsoft
|
| Anyone can connect the dots?
|
| Nothing makes sense to me.
|
| The only thing that seems to be clear is that Ilya Sutskever is
| only guy around who has an ounce of integrity.
| larodi wrote:
| I don't think Sam will stay at Microsoft for too long, but this
| is a logical move forward as damage to OpenAI is already done
| even if Sam goes back. Besides it is MS who enabled this scale
| and it perhaps is Sam who negotiated it to begin with.
|
| These other execs simply can't stand the ground against him being
| excellent technologist and leader who talks the language of devs.
| I doubt the rest of these C level people in the board know said
| language that well...
|
| Besides the whole 'not for profit' BS is at this point completely
| irrelevant, because delivering such costly service at that scale
| can only be made with, for, and by profit. Whoever thinks
| otherwise had not followed the history of computing last 100 or
| so years. And history of humanity perhaps.
| nicce wrote:
| Costs are reduced from profits. You can cost as much as you
| need. You can also grow as you reinvest everything back to
| company.
|
| For-profit means that money leaves the company, usually for
| investors.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Nice move to effectively turn it into positive "one more thing"
| news from ignite PoV.
| corethree wrote:
| Looks like Sam Altman never gave a shit about the Non profit
| aspect of Open AI. It wasn't about building a safer future. He
| just wants what every other SV bro wants, which is clout and
| success and money.
|
| I'm not saying business is the wrong move, I'm not saying a non-
| profit is the right move either. I'm also not saying Sam Altman
| and Co are not skilled at building AI. I'm not even saying Sam
| Altman won't do good for the world.
|
| What I'm saying is that this move here shows he's just dishonest.
| Which isn't bad. He's not some do-gooder out to build safer AI,
| (which is what he portrayed himself as) he's a normal person out
| to make a name for himself.
| timeon wrote:
| GPT 6 Vista edition.
| al_be_back wrote:
| >> We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have
| confidence in our product roadmap
|
| They've invested over $10bn in this affair, even for MS it's
| massive - a clearer, more reassuring message would've helped,
| than "we remain committed..."
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| From the stygian depths of the global tech industry emerges a
| turn of events that portends a churning miasma of unknown
| consequences. Oft seen as the impenetrable leviathan of the
| boundless digital domain, Microsoft, it seems, is ensnaring
| exalted figures within its titanic coils. The
| conjoining of the cerebral entities Altman and Brockman- who have
| hitherto roamed in the lofty realm of artificial
| intelligence experiments at OpenAI- indicates a move as
| unsettling as it is awe-inspiring. The nefarious
| undercurrents beneath this corporate chess manoeuvre cannot be
| underestimated, for it is none other than the puppet master
| himself, Satya Nadella, who seemingly manipulates the strings
| with a resolve as foreboding as the stormy winter's night.
| His nearly insatiable appetite for expansion glimpsed at
| Microsoft Ignite is but a harbinger of the harrowing
| transformations we can anticipate in the murky fathoms of our all
| too near future. The technology multidude - customers,
| partners, even unknowing spectators - tremble at the precipice of
| an altered dynamic which promises to reshape the AI field
| irrevocably. Indeed, one is left grappling with a dark
| fascination as this vortex of unpredictable novelty takes
| precedence. How might this consolidation of otherworldly
| intelligence disturb the fragile balance of an industry
| catapulting unbidden into the abysmal void of the AI ether?
| Yet, as all explorers and heedless innovators must remember, even
| as we tilt our ships towards the lighthouse of progress,
| the monstrous kraken of unintended repercussions always lurks in
| the unknowable deep. To approach this brave new world
| without a hint of trepidation would be folly. Be
| still, my trembling heart, as we witness this awe-inspiring dance
| across the cyclopean chessboard of tech. We wait, as one
| waits for the tide, to see what dread portents this unhallowed
| union may bring.
| netsec_burn wrote:
| The unexpected return of Microsoft Sam.
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| Satya's strategic insight deserves recognition. Certainly,
| there's a slight risk that Microsoft might fail to yield its
| substantial investment speculated to be around $10B in OpenAI.
| However, that's not Satya's principal concern. Rather, his focus
| is on the next move. Possibly, assemble the most elite AI
| collective globally, unhindered by the constrictions of a non-
| profit operating a profit-oriented entity? Offer them a
| sufficient amount of monetary rewards, and it's likely that a
| large proportion of OpenAI's workforce would be willing to join
| the bandwagon led by Sam and Greg. While this process may take
| some time, the potential payoff could encompass a much larger
| segment of the future for Microsoft than was previously
| conceivable through the OpenAI investment.
| cma wrote:
| $10B largely in cloud credits that have a 70% margin back to
| MS, so more towards $3B.
| sumitkumar wrote:
| In retaliation Ilya/team should just open source everything
| OpenAI has. The only way to make genAI(GPT the can opener) safe
| is to make it democratic and available for everyone. Then others
| can pick it up and make it more efficient. At least MS servers
| will get a break.
| nicce wrote:
| They can't anymore if Microsoft has exclusive licence?
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| This is somewhat ingenious.
|
| Microsoft holds the keys to almost all endeavors of OpenAI. Soon,
| such privileges will also be enjoyed by Altman and Brockman.
|
| Concurrently, it seems reasonable to speculate that their stint
| at Microsoft might not be drawn-out, as startup prodigies are
| often not inclined to work in such established firms.
|
| They have the chance to achieve stability, leverage OpenAI's
| invaluable data and models devoid of any expenditure, access
| Microsoft's GPUs at minimal cost, and eventually set up another
| venture. As a result, Microsoft stands to gain a substantial
| equity stake in the new enterprise.
|
| While Altman requires no financial backing from Microsoft, the
| corporation now has an invaluable direct link to OpenAI.
| t_mann wrote:
| A bit surprised, and maybe even disappointed, that he didn't
| start his own company. Rarely in history did someone have a
| better shot at becoming a billionaire of their own making. But
| you have to give it to Nadella, that's quite the coup.
| imjonse wrote:
| I would expect most people to be concerned about how AGI can be
| really useful to most of humanity without creating power
| concentration and more inequality, but these goals seem to be
| implicitly conflated for some reason with the value of MS stock
| and Sam Altman's and others' career paths. At least those seem to
| be the emphasis of most of the drama; admittedly they are much
| simpler and familiar topics to tackle than what path forward
| would better suit humanity as a whole.
| sorenjan wrote:
| What do you think Microsoft's medium to long term plan is? Will
| they clone GPT-x and use their own copy? Will they make their own
| model and train it from scratch? Will these former OpenAI people
| start with commercial LLMs like they were doing at OAI, or do you
| think they want to concentrate on AGI that are a more long-term
| project?
| lysecret wrote:
| Ok so the product people will leave Oai. As a developer I am now
| highly scared of building a product off their API. They angered
| investors etc.
|
| Now it's a full bet for them on AGI.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Oh, they are joining Poettering, bringing AI into systemd?
| Looking forward to excellent and (artificially) intelligent
| discussions on some mailing lists:)
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Truth buried deep in the comments
| refurb wrote:
| I look forward to Windows AI(tm)!!
| elzbardico wrote:
| People overvalue Sam Altman role. He is not a technological
| mastermind, he is primarily a superb execution and business guy.
|
| It's not like he and Greg are brilliant mathematicians and coders
| that will sit down in a cubicle at Redmond and churn out code for
| AGI in six months.
| JanSt wrote:
| Developing: OpenAI is nothing without its people
| https://twitter.com/search?q=OpenAI%20is%20nothing%20without...
| karmasimida wrote:
| Update, OpenAI employees are mass tweeting `OpenAI is nothing
| without its people`
|
| https://twitter.com/blader/status/1726552230319559106
| quonn wrote:
| It seems to me like there is one clear winner, Google, and
| everyone else lost a bit. Nevertheless Microsoft seems to have
| contained the damage as well as possible, again producing an
| outcome that is better for everyone from the position where they
| started after Friday.
| cal85 wrote:
| How does Google benefit?
| quonn wrote:
| OpenAI was growing like crazy and while I typically only use
| it the generate new content, many people I observe just ask
| it anything. Instead of going to Google they just go to
| ChatGPT.
|
| The current situation created a mess at OpenAI which should
| slow it down and permanently damage it's reputation somewhat.
| If I were Google and could choose either outcome, that's the
| outcome I would have chosen.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Sam and Greg will presumably start with a fork of OpenAI source
| code, given that Microsoft has full rights to the IP.
| nbzso wrote:
| Thanks, Ilya. Humanity first move. Never trust a greedy clown
| again. Hey, Microsoft. Have your Clippy:)
| gnu8 wrote:
| How could this possibly happen over a weekend when it takes
| Microsoft weeks and weeks to go from recruitment to hiring
| someone?
| redwood wrote:
| Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
| roschdal wrote:
| Sam Altman is a prepper. He said in 2016: "I have guns, gold,
| potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from
| the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I
| can fly to. [Wikipedia]
| wanderingmind wrote:
| This is really bad for OpenAI. They will fade to irrelevance
| soon. OpenAI is going to get a gut punch to wake up to real
| world. In real world you need capital at scale to make meaningful
| impact. people who provide capital, not just VCs but any regular
| folks who buy shares or bonds want to maximize their returns. You
| do that with a for-profit corporation. If they think they can
| continue their breakneck speed of breakthroughs with a meager
| philanthropy, they are in for a rude awakening.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I find the glee in this thread quite disturbing. That and the "MS
| is the winner, OpenAI is so stupid" general tenor.
|
| You all know who you are cheering for right? It seems that
| profits or potential profits is all that matter here in the end
| for this community and the high-minded "OpenAI should be 'Open'"
| was all bullshit.
|
| I know this comment is going against the grain but I find the HN
| response to this (and previous responses to Altman's firing,
| treating him like a god) to be quite disgusting.
|
| Apple fanboys don't have anything on the top comments here.
| muditsrivastava wrote:
| Is it possible for Microsoft to eventually get a board seat in
| Open AI Inc and put Sam Altman as a representative there? :P
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| All this Microsoft affair seemed weird from the beginning. After
| all, Elon and co. created OpenAI to compete with emerging AI
| monopoly of tech behemoths - Google/FB/MS.
| zeptonix wrote:
| Satya is a BOSS!
| hyperthesis wrote:
| sama's fundraising talent is moot at MS.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Yay! More consolidation. Honestly makes you wonder if they whole
| thing was manufactured from the inside. 10-15 years ago, I didn't
| have Microsoft on my 2023 bingo card for world domination.
| ctvo wrote:
| The only shocking thing about this whole episode was how many
| people in the media failed to understand just how much power this
| board had.
|
| They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except
| what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held
| all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by
| VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8
| hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were
| coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have
| resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.
|
| Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little
| leverage. Reading the news you'd think otherwise.
| itg wrote:
| If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what
| does OpenAI have left? If investors decide not to give money to
| OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their
| heads, how will they continue running?
|
| That may have been the leverage Microsoft and other investors
| tried to use, but OpenAI leadership thinks won't happen. We'll
| see what unfolds.
| ctvo wrote:
| > _If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft,
| what does OpenAI have left?_
|
| This is a real possibility and something I'm sure Ilya and
| the board thought through. Here's my guess:
|
| - There's been a culture rift within OpenAI as it scaled up
| its hiring. The people who have joined may not have all been
| mission driven and shared the same values. They may have been
| there because of the valuation and attention the company was
| receiving. These people will leave and join Altman or another
| company. This is seen as a net good by the board.
|
| - There's always been a sect of researchers who were
| suspicious of OpenAI because of its odd governance structure
| and commercialization. These people now have clear evidence
| that the company stands for what it states and are MORE
| likely to join. This is what the board wants.
|
| > _If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because
| their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will
| they continue running?_
|
| I don't think this is an actual problem. Anthropic can secure
| funding just fine. Emmet is an ex-Amazon / AWS executive.
| There's possibility that AWS will be the partner providing
| computing in exchange for OpenAI's models being exclusively
| offered as part of Amazon Bedrock, for example, if this issue
| with Microsoft festers. I _know_ Microsoft sees this as a
| clear warning: We can go to AWS if you push us too hard here.
|
| I don't see how the partnership with MSFT isn't dissolved in
| some way in the coming week as Altman and co. openly try to
| poach OpenAI talent. And again, maybe dissolving the MSFT
| ties was something the board wanted. It's hard to imagine
| they didn't think it was a possibility given the way they
| handled announcing this on Friday, and it's hard to imagine
| it wasn't intentional.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| No one would really resign until they had another branch to
| grab onto. You wouldn't expect anyone to resign this weekend.
| It would happen in the months afterwards.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Yup. It all reads like a well executed psyop -- or one could
| think so if one was paranoid.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Whoever has the power of the computing, controls the world.
| marviel wrote:
| I look forward to the day when AGI seems distributed + safe
| enough that each employee transition doesn't force participation
| in Kremlinology
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Ok... but Altman & Brockman are just managers. Brockman did an ML
| course in 2018. If they can now get the actual technical people
| who built GPT4 over then that is something, but at the moment
| there's a lot of premature celebration here - managers don't
| actually do anything.
| wlecometo wrote:
| cortana plays me star wars imperial march. pretty please
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Microsoft is were studios come to die, they will be crushed by MS
| hierarchy struggles.
| relex wrote:
| The dark side is seductive, leading individuals down a path where
| ambition and desire overshadow empathy and moral judgment.
| insanitybit wrote:
| There's a high likelihood that MS is going to start poaching top
| AI talent aggressively, with Altman's help. This will be to the
| significant detriment of OpenAI.
|
| If this is how it plays out, OpenAI's board will be famous for
| decades to come for their boneheaded handling of this situation.
| anonyfox wrote:
| Seems like in the minority here, but for me this is looking like
| a win-win-win situation for now.
|
| 1. OpenAI just got bumped up to my top address to apply to (if I
| would have the skills of a scientist, I am only an engineer
| level), I want AGI to happen and can totally understand that the
| actual scientists don't really care for money or becoming a big
| company _at all_ , this is more a burden than anything else for
| research speed. It doesn't matter that the "company OpenAI"
| implodes here as long as they can pay their scientists and have
| access to compute, which they have do.
|
| 2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and
| commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And
| while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft,
| reliable operations and support is something I trust them more
| than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some
| MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.
|
| 3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for
| the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at
| OpenAI. Working for Sam now is straightforward commercialization
| without the "open" shenaningans, and working for OpenAI can now
| become the idealistic thing again that also attracts people.
|
| 4. Satya Nadella is becoming celebrated and MSFT shareholder
| value will eventually rise even further. They actually don't have
| any interest in "smashing OAI" but the new setup actually
| streamlines everything once the initial operational hurdles
| (including staffing) are solved.
|
| 5. We outsiders end up with a OpenAI research focussed purely on
| AGI (<3), some product team selling all steps along the way to us
| but with more professionality in operations (<3).
|
| 6. I am _really_ waiting for when Tim Cook announces anything
| about this topic in general. Never ever underestimate Apple,
| especially when there is radio silence, and when the first movers
| in a field have fired their shots already.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > 3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in
| for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay
| at OpenAI.
|
| This one's not right - Altman famously had no equity in OpenAI.
| When asked by Congress he said he makes enough to pay for
| health insurance. It's pretty clear Sam wants to advance the
| state of AI quickly and is using commercialization as a tool to
| do that.
|
| Otherwise I generally agree with you (except for maybe #2 -
| they had the right to commercialize GPTs anyway as part of the
| prior funding).
| tcbawo wrote:
| Someone suggested earlier that he probably had some form of
| profit sharing pass-through, as has become popular in some
| circles.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I think it makes more sense to take him at the spirit of
| what he said under oath to Congress (think of how bad it
| would look for him/OpenAI if he said he had no equity and
| only made enough for health insurance but actually was
| getting profit sharing) over some guy suggesting something
| on the internet with no evidence.
| majesticglue wrote:
| Sam Altman is a businessman through and through based on
| his entire history. Chances are, he will have found an
| alternative means to make profit on OpenAI and he
| wouldn't do this on "charity". Just as how many CEOs say,
| I will "cut my salary" for example, they will never say
| "I cut my stocks or bonuses" which can be a lot more than
| their salary.
|
| Either way based on many CEOs track records healthy
| skepticism should be involved and majority of them find
| ways to profit on it at some point or another.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I dunno, the guy has basically infinite money (and the
| ability to fundraise even more). I don't find it tough to
| imagine that he gets far more than monetary value from
| being the CEO of OpenAI.
|
| He talked recently about how he's been able to watch
| these huge leaps in human progress and what a privilege
| that is. I believe that - don't you think it would be
| insane and amazing to get to see everything OpenAI is
| doing from the inside? If you already have so much money
| that the incremental value of the next dollar you earn is
| effectively zero, is it unreasonable to think that a seat
| at the table in one of the most important endeavors in
| the history of our species is worth more than any amount
| of money you could earn?
|
| And then on top of that, even if you take a cynical view
| of things, he's put himself in a position where he can
| see at least months ahead of where basically all of
| technology is going to go. You don't actually have to be
| a shareholder to derive an enormous amount of value from
| that. Less cynically, it puts you in a position to steer
| the world toward what you feel is best.
| tcbawo wrote:
| I think that would be consistent with his testimony.
| Profit sharing is not a salary and it is not equity. I
| don't believe he ever claimed to have zero stake in
| future compensation.
| dartos wrote:
| Little pet peeve of mine.
|
| Engineers aren't a lower level than scientists, it's just a
| different career path.
|
| Scientists generate lots of ideas in controlled environments
| and engineers work to make those ideas work in the wild real
| world.
|
| Both are difficult and important in their own right.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Engineers aren't a lower level than scientists, it's just a
| different career path.
|
| I assume GP is talking in context of OpenAI/general AI
| research, where you need a PhD to apply for the research
| scientist positions and MS/Bachelors to apply for research
| engineer positions afaik.
| dartos wrote:
| They're still different careers, not "levels" or whatever.
|
| A phd scientist may not be a good fit for an engineering
| job. Their degree doesn't matter.
|
| An phd-having engineer might not be a good fit for a
| research job either... because it's a different job.
| ritz_labringue wrote:
| researchers are paid 2x what engineers are paid at OAI,
| even if it's not the same job there's still one that is
| "higher level" than the other.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Well I am an engineer but I have no problems in buying
| that in case of forefront tech like AI where things are
| largely algorithmically exploratory, researchers with
| PHDs will be considered 'higher' than regular software
| devs. I have seen similar things happen in chip startups
| in olden days where relative importance of professional
| is decided by the nature of problem being solved. but
| sure to ack your point its just a different job, though
| the phd may be needed more at this stage of business. one
| way to gauge relative importance is if the budget were to
| go down 20% temporarily for a few quarters, which jobs
| would suffer most loss with least impact to business
| plan.
| rcbdev wrote:
| Engineers tend to earn a lot more.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| That is just a matter of perspective. It's clearly a win-win if
| you're on team Sam. But if you're on team Ilya, this is the
| doomsday scenario: With commercialisation and capital gains for
| a stock traded company being the main driving force behind the
| latest state of the art in AI, this is exactly what OpenAI was
| founded to prevent in the first place. Yes, we may see newer
| better things faster and with better support if the core team
| moves to Microsoft. But it will not benefit humanity as a
| whole. Even with their large investment, Microsoft's contract
| with OpenAI specifically excluded anything resembling true AGI,
| with OpenAI determining when this point is reached. Now,
| whatever breakthrough in the last weeks Sam was referring to, I
| doubt it's going to move us to AGI immediately. But whenever it
| happens, Microsoft now has a real chance to sack it for
| themselves and noone else.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Thinking this is clearly a big win for MSFT is like thinking
| it's easy to catch lightning in a bottle twice.
|
| There's been a lot of uncertainty created.
|
| It's interesting that others see so much "win" certainty.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| From Microsoft's perspective, they have actually lowered
| uncertainty. Especially if that OpenAI employee letter from
| 500 people is to be believed, they'll all end up at
| Microsoft anyways. If that really happens OpenAI will be a
| shell of itself while Microsoft drives everything.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| OpenAI already has the best models and traction.
|
| So MSFT still needs to compete with OpenAI - which will
| likely have an extremely adversarial relationship with
| MSFT if MSFT poaches nearly everyone.
|
| What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and
| Google?
|
| Doesn't seem like a win for MSFT at all.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and
| Google?
|
| Then they would be on roughly equal footing with
| Microsoft, since they'd have an abundance of engineers
| and a cloud partner. More or less what they just threw
| away, on a smaller scale and with less certain investors.
|
| This is quite literally the best attainable outcome, at
| least from Microsoft's point of view. The uncertainty
| came from the board's boneheaded (and unrepresentative)
| choice to kick Sam out. Now the majority of engineers on
| both sides are calling foul on OpenAI and asking for
| their entire board to resign. Relative to the
| administrative hellfire that OpenAI now has to weather,
| Microsoft just pulled off the fastest merger of their
| career.
| ethanbond wrote:
| OAI will still modulate the pace of actual model development
| though
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I'm with you on this. Also, this hopefully brings the "Open"AI
| puns to an end. And now there's several fun ways to read
| "Microsoft owns OpenAI". :)
|
| If OpenAI gets back to actually publishing papers to everyone's
| benefit, that will be a huge win for humanity!
| adql wrote:
| I don't think one of biggest tech giants in control of the
| "best" AI company out there is beneficial to customers...
| leftcenterright wrote:
| > reliable operations and support is something I trust them
| more than most others
|
| With a poor security track record [0], miserable support for
| office 365 products and lack of transparency on issues in
| general, I doubt this is something to look forward to with
| Microsoft.
|
| [0]
| https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_c...
| titzer wrote:
| > 2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and
| commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And
| while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft,
| reliable operations and support is something I trust them more
| than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to
| some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.
|
| OpenAI already runs all its infrastructure on Azure.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI
|
| The true researchers will go to who pays them most. If OpenAi
| loses funding they will go to Microsoft with Altman or back to
| Google.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| How does this separation help scientists at OpenAI if there is
| no money to fund the research? At the end of the day, you need
| funding to conduct research and I do not see if there is going
| to be any investors willing to put large sums of money just to
| make researchers happy.
| gizajob wrote:
| Microsoft releasing dramatically improved Clippy next week.
| wraptile wrote:
| I'm surprised no ones talking what a betrayal this is for people
| who followed Sam and Greg. Microsoft is the opposite of
| everything they've talked about for years and here they are.
| Seems like the board had the right idea about them huh.
| bilsbie wrote:
| This seems bad for users, no?
|
| MS just wants to integrate AI into their junk enterprise tools.
| Hobbyists and small businesses could be left out?
| Sai_ wrote:
| My suspicion is that given Sam and Greg's engineering and deal
| making chops, they will only ideate in how to use AI models
| invented elsewhere like right now.
|
| Don't think Sam or Greg have it in them to build a competing AI
| model suite, that too inside a bureaucracy like Microsoft.
|
| I think this is exactly what OpenAI wanted - get the business
| types out and focus on building brilliant models which
| asymptotically approach AGI whose safety and ethicality they can
| guarantee.
| bilsbie wrote:
| This really makes you appreciate open source locally hosted
| models.
|
| Chatgpt is a big part of my workflow. (And maybe my best
| friend?). What happens now?
| sharas- wrote:
| Turns out not everybody was sold-out at OpenAI. Good riddance,
| that Altman weasel was just that, a sellout.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I'm surprised that non-compete for Sam and Greg are never
| mentioned. True, Microsoft's huge position in OpenAI means that
| there wouldn't be any retaliation, but I am wondering if this is
| still a friction point or not.
| paxys wrote:
| Called it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310339
| gdestus wrote:
| I'm worried....I really don't like the idea of some council
| artificially "slowing down" progress while we on the outside wait
| for them to bestow fire on us like Prometheus. If AGI can fulfill
| even a fraction of the economic promise it has, then they will
| inevitably just use behind the scenes. It was better when it was
| being developed out front
| iteratethis wrote:
| So we have OpenAI, Microsoft, a whole bunch of capital, and a few
| "rock stars" moving. And it's these people holding the keys to
| the AI kingdom where they go to work to achieve AGI.
|
| Finally they got rid of this pesky idea of "safety". We're back
| in "break things" mode.
|
| Does nobody recognize the stakes here? AGI, which soon would
| accelerate into something far more capable, ends civilization.
| I'm not saying it would kill us, I'm saying it makes us
| cognitively obsolete and all meaning is lost.
|
| AI Safety isn't a micro bias in the training set. It's
| existential at planetary scale. Yet we let a bunch of cowboys
| just go "let's see what happens" with zero meaningful regulation
| in sight. And we applaud them.
|
| I know AGI isn't here yet. I know Microsoft would not allow for
| zero safety. I'm just saying that on the road to AGI, about two
| dozen people are deciding on our collective faith. With as
| ultimate chief the guy behind shit coin "world coin".
| bbu wrote:
| if AGI is as close as autonomous cars, I think we are going to
| be ok.
| floor_ wrote:
| Shengjia Zhao's deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/yrpXvt9.png
| notnmeyer wrote:
| what a huge win for microsoft.
| robomartin wrote:
| I hope MS forks OpenAI and grabs the entire team. We have well
| over ten paid OpenAI accounts, I would gladly cancel those and
| send our money to MS.
| muzani wrote:
| Feels like Meta hiring Carmack. He could build a really good
| thing there, but probably not the level of legendary that he got
| to with OpenAI.
| romanhn wrote:
| I'm calling it now, Sam Altman just engineered a path towards
| becoming Microsoft's CEO after Nadella.
| specificcndtion wrote:
| None of these companies appease China; they refuse to provide
| service under those conditions and/or they are IP range blocked.
|
| Microsoft does service China with Bing, for example.
|
| You should not sell OpenAI's to China or to Microsoft.
|
| Especially after a DDOS by Sue Don and a change in billing.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
| dang wrote:
| All: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will
| be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: in our code--not
| the world) is a thing of the past.
|
| I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads,
| but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of
| the page to read all the comments, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=3
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=4
|
| etc...
| superduty wrote:
| This is Microsoft desperately trying to preserve the value of
| their misguided investment in OAI.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| While this is a coup for Microsoft, the problem is that this
| splits resources MS has to train models. They were already GPU
| constrained and I assume they have to honor their agreement w/
| OpenAI so there is now N/2 GPUs to go around.
|
| (an interesting fiction would be if all the AI companies agreed
| to combine their efforts to skip a level and advance the world to
| GPT-6, maybe through a mixture of experts model)
| jhatax wrote:
| This could be Satya engaging in succession planning: Sam Altman
| in line to become the next CEO of Microsoft.
| taf2 wrote:
| 84% of the OpenAI team resigning? Is this true?
|
| https://x.com/lilianweng/status/1726634736943280270?s=46
| msie wrote:
| What???? I thought sama was going to be installed as CEO of OAI?
| pm2222 wrote:
| GPT please summarize this thread.
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