[HN Gopher] OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 426 points
Date : 2023-11-20 12:10 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| zone411 wrote:
| The pre-open market doesn't see it as a big win for MSFT. The
| stock is still lower than it was at Friday's open.
| alexb_ wrote:
| If Mr. Market was perfectly rational and correct, profit would
| cease to exist.
| panragon wrote:
| That's not true, Capital would still accumulate returns
| higher than the cost of inventory plus wages, the return
| would just be the same 'everywhere', and you'd have a perfect
| market alpha for all stocks, whether it be 1, 2, 5, or 10%.
| Even perfectly rational markets do not establish socialism
| overnight. Now maybe you could argue under a Marxist lens
| that exploitation would be more 'visible', causing socialism
| to arrive out of social rebellion faster, but that's really
| besides the point.
|
| What would cease to exist would simply be speculation and
| arbitrage. Since all prices are perfect, you simply wouldn't
| be able to make more (or even less, for that matter) money
| than the return on capital everyone gets by buying and
| selling shares quickly.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Why? That is a gigantic statement to make to provide no
| backing for.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It doesn't seem like it is a big win for MSFT. Hard to argue
| that MSFT is now in a better position than they were before
| this happened.
|
| Best case scenario for MSFT probably would have been to
| negotiate Altman et al back to OpenAI with some governance
| changes to boost stability. Keep the OpenAI GPT-N momentum
| going that they have harnessed for themselves.
|
| MSFT have managed to neutralize (for now) the threat of Altman
| et al creating a competitor, but this has come at the cost of
| souring their relationship with OpenAI who they will continue
| to be dependent on for AI for next couple of years.
|
| Big question here is what happens to OpenAI - can they keep the
| momentum going, and how do they deal with their sugar-daddy &
| compute-provider MSFT now also being a competitor? How much of
| the team will leave, and can they recover from that ?
| chucke1992 wrote:
| The thing is Satya has played the best possible hand in the
| current situation. MSFT did not fall much and 1-2% deviation
| does not mean much on the long run.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Agreed - he contained the damage as best as could be done.
| dboreham wrote:
| Unusually well written and apparently well informed article.
| macintux wrote:
| Ben Thompson has been a keen observer of the tech industry for
| quite some time. I recommend browsing the archives, or HN's
| history of submissions.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=stratechery.com
| mandmandam wrote:
| > The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth
| that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to
| organize a company.
|
| > harvesting self-interest has, for good reason, long been the
| best way to align individuals and companies.
|
| What utter nonsense. Dude, the fucking planet is burning; and
| we're in an extinction even unlike any other. The Anthropocene
| Extinction. _That 's_ unregulated capitalism.
|
| We still don't even know why Sam was booted!
|
| Putting the blame for this on OpenAI not being hardcore
| capitalist enough is _beyond_ absurd. No fair-minded reasoning to
| support this conclusion seems to have even been attempted.
| reqo wrote:
| The author is simply stating the facts, not putting the blame
| on anyone! It has historically been extremly hard to motivate
| people with anything other than money, at least at a coporate
| level. Even ideals such as religion where money and power are
| not the focus have been eventually used as a mean to gain money
| and power!
| manyoso wrote:
| This makes it seem like all altruistic non-profit endeavors
| have never worked which is obviously not the case.
| jprete wrote:
| I think most people don't see it that way. Most people, once
| their basic physical needs are met, will look for social
| goods - belonging, relationships, prestige, and sex. Some
| people are unusually motivated by new experiences and
| knowledge as well.
|
| The need for belonging is historically way more powerful than
| the need for money. Belonging can get someone to put
| themselves in harm's way for the group at large. Money
| doesn't do that unless the employee is either desperate or
| confident of their personal survival.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Money IS power. As youtuber Beau puts it, 'power coupons'.
|
| It's a fatal mistake to look at the human species, a fiercely
| competitive killer ape that cooperates on nearly a eusocial
| level, and acknowledge only the competitive side.
|
| It's even worse to look at this killer ape's killer side and
| conclude that THAT is all intelligence is, or ever will be.
|
| You've only got half the facts. Do better. AGI will have to
| do better or we'll be creating paperclip maximizers where the
| paperclips are 'tyranny', on purpose, because we thought we
| had to.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "The Anthropocene Extinction."
|
| Currently I see no downward trend in human population.
| bdsa wrote:
| It's not humans going extinct
| whelp_24 wrote:
| He didn't make it up,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction . The
| extinction (so far) is of other species not humans.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I see, thanks for clearing that up.
| Herring wrote:
| Yeah that sentiment in the article reflects a common mistake in
| America regarding capitalism. Many countries, from Western
| Europe to Japan and New Zealand, already outperform the U.S. in
| key metrics like average lifespans, social mobility, and
| rankings of "happiest countries to live in" (where the U.S.
| often ranks around 15th).
| nimish wrote:
| If the openai board can't get humans to align, what hope do they
| have of "aligning" ml models?
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| people in alignment with each other is agreement.
|
| a language model in alignment is control.
|
| the model does not need to be aligned with the desires of
| people. just person. it could be people, but getting alignment
| with people is...
| manyoso wrote:
| LOL This is more of the Altman based media blitz to drive this in
| his favor. This is nothing short of an unmitigated DISASTER for
| Microsoft and they well know it.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| You keep saying this. Why?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Not them but it's not a good look to spend 10B in a bet for
| zero control. Also to spend months building up to an
| acquisition (there's no way that wasn't what Sam was trying
| for) only for it to result in the firing of the CEO who was
| trying to sell his company to you.
|
| This looks terrible, and all of these "Sam is the real
| winner" posts are cope
| flappyeagle wrote:
| The majority of that money is in the form of Azure credit.
|
| It all pretty much hinges on how much talent you think
| Microsoft can obtain. I'm going to make a bet that
| Microsoft poaches between 30 and 70% of open AI key
| employees.
|
| If they spent $10 billion to achieve this outcome, securing
| the loyalty of the two founders and attracting double digit
| percentage of the employees, then they will have
| conservatively gotten a 5 to 10x return overnight
|
| Edit: I was too conservative, it's looking like 90%
| maxdoop wrote:
| Is there anything that would persuade you this isn't some
| sneaky media frenzy orchestrated by Altman?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It may be OpenAI's loss and Microsoft's gain, but any support
| that AI gets is a tragedy for humanity.
|
| Everything is good in moderation, and with AI we are taking our
| efficiency past that good point. AI not only takes jobs away from
| creatives such as illustrators and can be used for identity
| theft, it also is removing the reliance that people have on each
| other.
|
| Society is held together because people need each other. People
| meet each other through needing each other, and this is what
| makes local communities strong. AI takes that away so that the
| only entities we need are big tech like Microsoft, Google, and
| other soulless organizations.
|
| It is a descent into feudalism, where everyone will pay big tech
| for basic living necessities (first option, later a necessity,
| like the smartphone).
|
| If a man or woman wants to live independently of big tech, it
| will be harder and harder now, and we are losing are sense of
| what it means to be human through the immoral actions of these
| companies.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Yup. The world we are headed into, accelerated by huge leaps in
| technology like AI, will be a sorry, pathetic, unforgiving
| world, that amplifies suffering and nullifies humanity.
|
| Is that image of a child being assaulted by terrorists real or
| fake? To the victims, its real, to political powers it fake, to
| mega corporations, its money.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I can't believe I'm playing devil's advocate here because I'm
| generally a skeptical / pessimistic person, but what?
|
| _The world we are headed into, accelerated by huge leaps in
| technology like AI, will be a sorry, pathetic, unforgiving
| world, that amplifies suffering and nullifies humanity._
|
| Is that what has happened so far in your life? Technology has
| messed it up for you ?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I think technology has messed up a lot of lives. Sure,
| we've got good healthcare and resources in the first-world,
| but smaller communities are eroding to the global force of
| technology.
|
| Don't bully people into not expressing critical thought by
| emphasizing that they have their basic physical needs met.
| We should be critical of society, even if on the surface it
| seems pretty good.
|
| We also have more advanced psychological needs such as the
| need to depend on others, and that is what is at stake
| here.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I see a contradiction in your message here. On the one
| hand you're saying people are worse off because of
| technology, but then you're also saying that people don't
| rely on each other because they have more of their needs
| met. So which is it?
|
| Wouldn't the poverty rebuild these communities ? I mean
| the hardships make people rely on each other right?
|
| I don't entirely doubt what you're saying either, but I'm
| not so sure I see what you see.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| There is no contradiction, because I do not believe that
| having all your physical needs met is necessarily the
| best end for a human being, especially if they have the
| capability to meet a lot of those needs themselves if
| they were given the tools to do so. It's like those
| people in the Matrix pods: they have their needs met, but
| they are being plugged into a machine and are not truly
| human.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Name a single instance or person who has all their
| physical needs met by an LLM?
|
| Seriously, we're a long way off technological utopia.
| Even if we had some type of AGI/ASI that was self-aware
| like in movies ,there's little if any evidence to suggest
| it will just work for us and make sure you're ok.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yes where have you been?
| bamboozled wrote:
| How has it been messed up for you ? Would going back to
| medieval times fix it?
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > Would going back to medieval times fix it?
|
| Going back to the 90s probably would.
| vasco wrote:
| > The decrease in the number of people affected by hunger
| has happened in a period where the world population has
| increased by 2.2 billion - from 5,3 billion in 1990 to
| 7.5 billion in 2018. The share of undernourished people
| in the world has therefore fallen markedly in the past
| three decades. From 19% in 1990 to 10.8% in 2018.
|
| https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-
| poverty...
|
| Why don't you go ask the 189 million people that since
| 1990 have avoided hunger if they agree?
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Was social media required to feed those people? I don't
| think hunger in the 90s was a technology problem.
| j_crick wrote:
| Cars bad, horses good
| yellow_postit wrote:
| This pessimism may play out but I continue to fall on the
| optimist side.
|
| AI tooling seems to be allowing for more time on creativity and
| less on rote work.
|
| If that continues to play out creativity inevitably drives more
| collaboration as creativity cannot thrive only in a silo.
| dartos wrote:
| Genuinely curious.
|
| Except in the shovelware games industry and the instagram ad
| scam industry where is AI actually, currently, threatening to
| take away jobs?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| 1. Illustrators
|
| 2. Photographers (Check out Photo.AI). I know a local
| photographer who takes nice portraits for businesses. Now
| people can use this service for their headshots. (You may
| argue that it's good for people but at which point does it
| remain good if NOBODY can use their creative talents to make
| a living.)
|
| 3. Writing. Many websites are now using writers to write
| their articles. That means they hire less writers. Again, you
| can say that it makes society more efficient and I guess it
| does for consumers, but those people such as copy editors
| will have to find new jobs.
|
| You may say that new jobs will be created but we have not
| seen such a versatile tool that can take away so many jobs at
| such a quick pace before. Moreover, will the world really be
| a nice place to live in if most of the creative jobs or at
| least jobs involved IN producing something nice will be left
| to machines?
|
| What about Hollywood and their desire to replace writers and
| actors? You may say that Hollywood is dead anyway, but I'm
| sure it's about to get a lot worse...
| rvnx wrote:
| 4. Translators
|
| 5. Programmers
| airstrike wrote:
| 6. Voice actors and narrators (eventually news anchors,
| reporters, etc)
|
| 7. Composers, hired musicians, eventually singers,
| producers
| hotnfresh wrote:
| There's a real chance that one thing AI will make better
| --not just cheaper--is original scores for movies. Get us
| out of this "just match the shitty generic placeholder
| music we already edited the movie to" norm we've been in
| for almost two decades (which itself came about due to
| changes in technology!)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Customer service/support. Low-level legal services.
| Copywriting. Commercial music composition. Commercial
| illustration production. Junior-level software development.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Indeed, and these people should be able to do things that
| are useful, not just for themselves, but because
| interacting with humans to get these things is much better
| for society than EVERYONE interacting with a damn computer!
| merelysounds wrote:
| > layoff announcements from U.S.-based employers reached more
| than 80,000 in May -- a 20% jump from the prior month and
| nearly four times the level for the same month last year. Of
| those cuts, AI was responsible for 3,900, or roughly 5% of
| all jobs lost
|
| > The job cuts come as businesses waste no time adopting
| advanced AI technology to automate a range of tasks --
| including creative work, such as writing, as well as
| administrative and clerical work.
|
| Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-job-losses-
| artificial-intell...
| vikramkr wrote:
| Software engineering for sure. Lots of SV types have a very
| distorted view of what the average programmer not in a high
| prestige silicon valley company does. Especially contractors
| and outsourcing firms and the like? Yeah not great for them.
| Also analyst type roles and data science type roles, since
| the level of reasoning plus the ability to parse structured
| data and write code is pretty much there. Medical scribes are
| already being automated, voice to text plus context aware
| parsing. I also think areas of law like patent law (writing
| provisionals etc) are probably in a situation where the tech
| is already better than humans at writing claims that are not
| going to conflict with prior art and the like, though
| there'll be legal barriers there to adoption. But a lot of
| the legal staff involved might be replaced even if the
| lawyers and agents are not. Anyone who writes review
| papers/research summaries like market reports without
| actively doing non-internet research like interviewing people
| are going to struggle against AI written reviews that can
| just pull from more information than humanly possible to
| parse. Accounting, preparing financial statements, etc where
| "creativity" is not necessary a good thing also, though again
| regulations might stop that. And obviously in healthcare,
| doctors like radiologists and surgeons etc which we've been
| talking about as a possibility for a long time but looks more
| possible than ever now.
|
| Also there's areas where it's quickly becoming a required
| skill set, so it's not that it's replacing people but that
| the people there are getting their skills obsoleted. All the
| molecular biologists I know that used to joke about how they
| picked biology since they suck with computers and hate excel
| are at a high risk of getting left behind right now,
| especially with how steep the improvement's been with protein
| design models like RFDiffusion. Though by latest rumors it
| looks like the vast vast majority of biologists involved in
| protein work have already started using tools like alphafold
| and esmfold so it does look like people are adapting.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > AI not only takes jobs away from creatives such as
| illustrators
|
| Why do these people deserve protection from automation any more
| than all the millions of people who worked other jobs tat were
| eliminated by automation up to this point?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > Why do these people deserve protection from automation any
| more than all the millions of people who worked other jobs
| tat were eliminated by automation up to this point?
|
| You got it!!! All those other people DO deserve protection
| from automation! But our society made a mistake and pushed
| them out. Many communities were destroyed by efficient
| automation and guess what, efficient automation via cars and
| vehicles is what caused our most immense disaster now, the
| climate crisis.
|
| We made a mistake by creating so much automation. We should
| strive to recreate smaller communities in which more creative
| AND manual tasks are appreciated.
| anon291 wrote:
| > We made a mistake by creating so much automation. We
| should strive to recreate smaller communities in which more
| creative AND manual tasks are appreciated.
|
| Those exist?
| postexitus wrote:
| Because we don't like white collar people losing their jobs.
| Blue collar on the other hand deserve what's coming to them,
| as they didn't prepare themselves for what the future brings.
|
| /s
| ChatGTP wrote:
| learn to code.
| deagle50 wrote:
| learn to maintain HVAC
| AlexandrB wrote:
| No kidding. It looks like the most secure jobs will be
| "the trades" since the environment these professionals
| work in is the most variable/least structured and thus
| least susceptible to automation by robotics.
|
| My "Plan B" is becoming an electrician.
| lewhoo wrote:
| The answers may or may not have any sense depending whether
| or not you find something in us not worth automating at all.
| Is there such a thing ?
| somestag wrote:
| I agree with your point, but I think the honest answer to
| your question is that people view creative jobs as
| aspirational whereas the other "rote" jobs that were being
| automated away were ones that people would have preferred to
| avoid anyway.
|
| When we're getting rid of assembly line jobs, or checkout
| counter staff, or data entry clerks, or any other job that we
| know is demeaning and boring, we can convince ourselves that
| the thousands/millions put out of work are an unfortunate
| side effect of progress. Oh sure, the loss of jobs sucks, but
| no one should have to do those jobs anyway, right? The next
| generation will be better off, surely. We're just closing the
| door behind us. And maybe if our economic system didn't suck
| so much, we would take care of these people.
|
| But when creatives start getting replaced, well, that's
| different. Many people dream of moving into the creative
| industry, not out of it. Now it feels like the door is
| closing ahead of us, not behind us.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| They don't. But if you look at predictions of the future like
| those in optimistic SciFi, the dream was that automation
| would eliminate repetitive, dirty, and dangerous jobs,
| eliminate scarcity of basic necessities like food, and free
| up every individual to pursue whatever _creative_ endeavours
| they wish.
|
| What we're getting instead is the automation of those
| creative endeavours, while leaving a "gap" of repetitive,
| mind numbing work (like labelling data or doing basic
| physical tasks like "picking" goods in an Amazon warehouse)
| that still has to be done by humans.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I find it amusing that just a few short years ago the idea was
| that automation / ai would replace the truck drivers, factory
| workers, and blue collar jobs where the Developer, the lawyer,
| information worker was safe from this...
|
| It seems the last mile in replacing blue collar jobs may be
| more expensive and more challenging (if not impossible) than
| replacing information workers with AI...
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I actually agree with this. All along, people thought that
| automation would mainly replace manual labor (which I also
| disagree with in many instances -- I believe people should be
| able to make a DECENT wage doing things, even manual things,
| even if other things become more expensive for people "at the
| top").
|
| It seems likely that AI will either replace or augment people
| in the most creative fields, creating a homogeneous MUSH out
| of once interesting things, making us consumerist and
| mindless drones that simply react like amoebas to
| advertising, buying junk we don't need so that the top 0.1%
| rule the world, pushed their by their intense narcissism and
| lack of empathy (like Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Sundar
| Pichai, Satya Nadella who are by definition narcissists for
| doing what they do.)
| Applejinx wrote:
| I emphatically agree, with a caveat: I work in the music
| business. I've seen homogenous mush before. AI and related
| technologies have already augmented people in the
| homogenous mush business, and will most certainly replace
| them, and this will serve a sort of mass market with mass
| distribution that's recognizable as 'creative fields' of a
| sort.
|
| This is self-limiting. It's a sort of built-in plateau. You
| can't serve the whole market with anything: the closest
| you'll get is something like a Heinz Ketchup, a
| miraculously well-balanced creation with something for
| everyone. It's also a relatively small market segment for
| all its accessibility.
|
| We cannot be made 'consumerist and mindless drones that
| simply react like amoebas to advertising' more than we
| already are, which is a LOT: whole populations are poisoned
| by carefully designed unhealthy food, conned by carefully
| designed propaganda in various contradictory directions.
| We're already at saturation point for that, I think. It's
| enough to be a really toxic situation: doesn't have to
| threaten to be far worse.
|
| The backlash always happens, in the form of more
| indigestible things that aren't homogenous mush, whether
| that's the Beatles or the Sex Pistols or, say, Flamin' Hot
| Cheetos. The more homogenous everything is, the more market
| power is behind whatever backlash happens.
|
| This is actually one argument for modern democracies and
| their howling levels of cultural tension... it's far more
| difficult to impose homogenity on them, where other systems
| can be more easily forced into sameness, only to snap.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| _it also is removing the reliance that people have on each
| other._
|
| On the other hand access to information has given me more
| independence, and this hasn't been a bad thing. I do rely less
| on others, like my parents, but I still love them and spend
| more time having fun with them rather than relying on them.
|
| I do understand what you mean, it just doesn't like up as all
| negative to me.
|
| I also think open source AI will destroy any feudalistic
| society. These companies like MS are going to have a problem
| when their own technology starts to destroy their value add.
|
| Look ad Adobe and some of the open source video and graphis
| editing AI software, there goes one fiefdom.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| We can say fro big-tech the same for oil, penecilin or gmo's.
| What does it mean to be human when we, all humans, are the sons
| and daughters of big industry for profit ventures? Open AI
| board stopped trusting Altman when he went started pitching the
| Open AI technology elsewhere behind their backs. At least that
| the rumors I read. If OpenAI developers truly believe the AI
| can be weaponized and that they should not be following the
| leadership of for-profit ventures they won't jump ship. We will
| see.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > We can say fro big-tech the same for oil, penecilin or
| gmo's. What does it mean to be human when we, all humans, are
| the sons and daughters of big industry for profit ventures?
|
| That is why we should be cautious about technology instead of
| inviting it with open arms. It is a question we should
| continue to ask ourselves with more wisdom, instead of
| relying on our mass global capitalistic system to deliver
| easy answers for us from the depths of the profit motive.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more. The more wealth is created out of
| thin air by technology, the better we all live, and the better
| our relations with one another. Scarcity creates conflict and
| pain. Prosperity makes good neighbours out of enemies.
|
| I don't care if I have to pay megacorps for a right to my
| modern conveniences, if that means they extend to more and more
| people. Monsanto can take all my money if no one ever dies of
| starvation again. Microsoft can take all my data if we never
| have to do rote tasks again.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| The more wealth is created, the more we abuse wild resources
| and the natural ecosystem as well. If there were only humans
| on the planet, I would not disagree. But it is immoral to
| live better if it comes to destroying out natural connection
| with the biosphere.
|
| I also disagree that scarcity creates conflict and pain.
| Scarcity limits growth, which means it limits our expansion,
| which is good because other creatures have to live here too.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I also disagree that scarcity creates conflict and
| pain._
|
| Every war in human history (and there have been a _lot_ of
| them) was fought over control of scarce resources. Sure
| looks like scarcity creates conflict and pain to me.
| shmatt wrote:
| I can't believe people are cheerleading this move
|
| * Tigris is DOA - If because it would piss off the MSFT board but
| mostly because the SEC would arrest Sam assuming he's an officer
| at MSFT. He could maybe be a passive investor, but that's it
|
| * People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their
| equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at
| Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board
| forced headcount reductions?
|
| * Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3
| trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than
| the OpenAI one
|
| * there was a ton of fan fiction yesterday online about Satya
| forcing a move on the board. This was never really a thing. He
| made one of the worst investments in the history of SV in terms
| of keeping power to make sure your money is used correctly. $10B
| for 0 votes or any power to change votes
| asimovfan wrote:
| Microsoft can offer more if it wishes, no?
| blibble wrote:
| but they can't offer the whole "we are doing this for the
| benefit of humanity" lark
|
| will researchers that were lured into OpenAI under this
| pretense jump ship to explictly work on extending microsoft's
| tendrils into more of people's lives?
|
| (essentially the opposite of "benefit humanity")
|
| no doubt some will
| vikramkr wrote:
| I don't think Microsoft cares about that crowd, since now
| without capital they can't really do anything anyway. The
| rest of the crowd that wants to make bank? Might be more
| appealing
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _without capital they can 't really do anything_
|
| Not a bad moment for a rich patron to swoop in and
| capitalise the non-profit. If only there were a
| billionaire with a grudge against Altman and historic
| link to the organisation...
| edgyquant wrote:
| Why don't they have capital?
| vikramkr wrote:
| I mean if someone else wants to give them billions of
| dollars to make an AGI that they think will extinct
| humanity while not commercializing or open sourcing the
| tech they do have because they're scared of extinction,
| then be my guest. Usually if say I'm happy to be proven
| wrong but in this case I'd just be confused.
| manyoso wrote:
| Driving the narrative doesn't mean driving reality. It is clear
| that Sam and friends are great at manipulating the media. But
| this is a disaster for Microsoft and the CEO damn well knows
| it. It is also a personal disaster for Altman and probably not
| a great move for those who choose to join him.
|
| Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe
| AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it
| really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging
| that _at best_ they were fooling themselves into believing they
| were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit
| seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed
| looks to be dying.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Why is this a disaster? They managed to acquihire the
| founders of a 90B company. Probably the most important
| company in the world until last Friday.
|
| Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire
| investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of
| profit in about a month.
| manyoso wrote:
| They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the
| actual tech. They made a huge bet on OpenAI to produce the
| tech and that relationship is going down the drain. Watch
| the market today, the next week, the next month, the next
| six months and that will tell you what I say: this is a
| disaster for MS and they damn well know it.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Did you even research the basic facts?
|
| Microsoft stock is up in the pre-market, because they
| basically got half of the OpenAI team for free.
|
| The majority of top researchers at OpenAI are expressing
| solidarity for Sam and basically signalling they want to
| move too, just check out twitter. That also includes like
| the majority of the execs tehre.
| dkrich wrote:
| Yes, low volume pre market moves on the back of a nonstop
| news flow always predict how they end up
| tw04 wrote:
| You're making the assumption that the technical folks
| won't follow him, and that's a pretty ridiculous bet at
| this point unless you've got some more data you're just
| not sharing.
|
| Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be
| perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they
| knew all of the tech they were building was going to be
| utilized by MS carte blanche.
|
| So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of
| being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a
| potentially slightly lower but still significant payday
| from MS directly?
| edgyquant wrote:
| The only technically person who matters here, the one who
| came from deepmind and who is the worlds top AI
| researcher, is sure as hell not going to follow him since
| he's the reason Sam is gone.
| tw04 wrote:
| You're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about,
| clearly people aren't going to leave and follow Sam
| instead of Ilya. Nobody at all... just 550 of 700
| employees, nothing to see here.
|
| https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/172659836027735677
| 5
| drewmate wrote:
| > 550 of 700 employees
|
| _Including_ Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the
| posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that
| document.
|
| It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and
| we've only been able to speculate about motivations,
| allegiances, and what's really going on behind the
| scenes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They acquired two of the founders least responsible
| for the actual tech_
|
| Microsoft also "has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP
| (short of artificial general intelligence), including
| source code and model weights."
|
| If you're a scientist, OpenAI is a fine place to be,
| though less differentiated than before. If you're an
| engineer more interested in money and don't want the risk
| of a start-up, Microsoft seems the obvious path forward.
| dkrich wrote:
| You've nailed it. The excitement is going to be short
| lived imo
| fernandotakai wrote:
| given that 500 employees are saying "either give us sama
| and gdb back or we are going to msft", i say nadella won
| hard.
| dkrich wrote:
| That's how it appears currently but experience has taught
| me to be very careful about making snap judgments in
| these types of fast moving situations. Nobody seems to
| know yet why he was actually fired. The popular theory is
| that it was a disagreement about mission but something
| about that narrative just feels off. Also Nadella and
| Altman are both enjoying God-like reputations and the
| OpenAI board totally being dismissed as clueless and
| making a stupid, impulsive decision even though basic
| logic would tell you that a rational acting person would
| not do that. There's a lot of room for the pendulum of
| public opinion to swing back the other way and it's clear
| that most of the most fervent supporters of Altman and
| Microsoft are motivated by money rather than truth.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Most human beings are motivated by money.
| anon291 wrote:
| > a rational acting person would not do that.
|
| Non-profit boards have no incentive to be rational.
| thatsadude wrote:
| Based on credits in Gpt3 and 4 papers, I think the team
| that follows Sam and Greg are the main drivers of the
| tech. Ilya is an advisor more or less.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
|
| Ilya just said he will do everything he can to reunite
| the company. If that's the case the easiest way to do it
| is to resign and join MS
| flappyeagle wrote:
| OAI employees have no equity. They have a profit sharing right.
| The board is clearly not interested in profit.
|
| MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to
| blow up Google. They will set the world on fire to do that.
| shmatt wrote:
| I will admit I haven't seen an OAI contract, but have seen
| articles and multiple Levels.fyi posts for about $600k
| equity/year (worth $0 right now obviously)
|
| So any idea how that translates into the profit sharing? They
| have no profit right now. Curious how employees get to that
| number
| infecto wrote:
| I have not seen any of the employee contracts so this is
| purely an educated guess which might be entirely wrong.
| There is a chart from Fortune[1] that spells out how the
| profit caps work. I have not looked at any of the documents
| myself so I am interpreting only what I have consumed. My
| guess is that the employee equity/contracts spell out the
| cap structure so perhaps the equity value is based off
| those caps. Assuming the profit cap for employees is
| correct I would assume you could not value any "equity"
| based off the last raise value. At best you could perhaps
| value the max cap available for those shares.
|
| [1] https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-
| investment-m...
| dkrich wrote:
| _MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to
| blow up Google._
|
| To me this is exactly why I'm skeptical of Microsoft's
| strategy here. They seem to be convinced that their success
| at unseating Google is assured. Meanwhile, google's share
| price has barely flinched. Also, the way this has played out
| just feels desperate to keep the whole thing going. Wouldn't
| Microsoft want at least some clarity about what actually
| happened by the board up and fired the CEO on the spot before
| doubling down to bring him into a position of power within
| the company?
| bambax wrote:
| OpenAI is doomed; in fact, it has ceased to exist; it's an
| empty shell, and its ressources provider is now its biggest
| competitor.
|
| But I doubt MSFT will win this round.
|
| 1/ We still don't know why Sam Altman was fired; does MS
| know? or think they know?
|
| 2/ It will take the new team at MS a long time to recreate
| what they had at OpenAI (what does "MS has a perpetual
| license to all OpenAI IP" actually mean and entails,
| legally speaking?); during that time anything can happen.
| dkrich wrote:
| Exactly. I'm very surprised nadella would take this kind
| of risk. It seems extremely cavalier to not investigate
| what happened before quickly going all in on hiring the
| entire team. You risk having to do a very embarrassing
| about face if something serious comes out and could lead
| to himself having to resign
| kdmccormick wrote:
| I believe OAI Inc employees and board members have no equity,
| but OAI LLC employees can have equity.
| tedmiston wrote:
| > OAI employees have no equity.
|
| OpenAI employees have no equity? Well, then where exactly is
| that $86B of "existing employees' shares" coming from?
|
| > ChatGPT creator OpenAI is in talks to sell existing
| employees' shares at an $86 billion valuation, Bloomberg News
| reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the
| matter.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-talks-sell-
| shares-...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-86-bln-share-
| sale...
|
| A random OpenAI eng job page clearly states: "Total
| compensation also includes generous equity and benefits."
|
| https://openai.com/careers/software-engineer-leverage-
| engine...
| chatmasta wrote:
| > the SEC would arrest Sam
|
| SEC does not have the power to arrest anyone. Their
| investigations are civil.
| objektif wrote:
| Criminal charges can be filed due to SEC investigations. For
| example:
|
| https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/ia-5764.pdf
| mnd999 wrote:
| The cheerleaders are the LLM AI future true believers. I
| imagine they are the same people that were telling us about how
| NFTs will change the world last year.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I really don't get the comparison of nfts to llms. I mean
| yeah some hype cycle idiots have redirected both of their
| brain cells to shilling useless startups that'll get
| obsoleted by minor feature additions to bard or whatever in a
| year, but who cares about them? NFTs didnt do anything but
| enable fraud.
|
| Llms do stuff that has value. I can use Rfdiffusion with
| motif scaffolding to create a fusion protein with units from
| enzymes that have no crystal or cryoem structures with as
| high as a 5-10% success rate!!!!!! That's absolutely insane!
| I only need to print 20 genes to have a chance of getting a
| variant that works. Literal orders of magnitude improvement.
| And if you don't have a good multisequence alignment for
| getting a good folks from alphafold? Pure llm based esmfold
| can fill in the gaps. Evodiff is out here generating
| functional proteins with disordered regions. Also, to bring
| it back to openai, if I ask chatgpt to write some code, it
| writes some pretty decent code. If I give it a bunch of PDFs
| and ask it to give me a summary, it gives me a summary. I
| don't buy the agi end of the world hype so a shift that means
| that we get more focus on d eveloping useful tools that make
| my life easier that I'm totally willing to pay 20 a month
| for? Yeah I'm down. Get this cool tech and product into a
| form that's easy to use and useful and keep improving it!
| icy_deadposts wrote:
| To me, this sounds very similar to the type of over-hyped,
| exaggerated response when someone criticized
| cryptocurrencies by saying they don't do anything. The
| response would be:
|
| -I'm literally drinking a coffee I bought with bit coin
| right now.
|
| -I was able to send large sums of money to my grandma in
| another country while paying a fraction of the fees going
| through banks
|
| -It's a stable store of value for people in volatile
| countries with unstable currency
|
| -It's an investment available to the small timers, normally
| only the wealthy have these opportunities
|
| -It lets me pay artists for their art directly and bypass
| the corrupt middlemen
|
| this is a forum coding so i have no idea what any of that
| biology mumbo jumbo means, but everything you mentiond
| about chatgtp is conveniently missing a lot of details.
|
| >write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. Is it
| trivial code? Is it code that shows up on the first page of
| any search engine with the same terms?
|
| >it gives me a summary. Is it an accurate summary? Is it
| any better than just reading the first and last section of
| the report directly?
| vikramkr wrote:
| Dude I'm talking about it being worth 20 bucks a month
| (which NFTs are not), not the hype cycle nonsense. Just
| because you don't understand the scientific applications
| of protein folding, one of the most important problems in
| biology, doesn't mean that its mumbo jumbo. Ever heard of
| folding at home? Man is silicon valley ridiculous
| sometimes, but since apparently the accomplishments of
| coders don't count on this coding forum if they're in
| fields that web developers don't understand let's focus
| on consumer applications.
|
| In terms of writing code, yeah it's pretty simple code.
| I'm paying 20 bucks a month not 200k a year. I've found
| it really useful to dive into open source code bases for
| papers (just upload the repo and associated paper) -
| academics write pretty garbage code and even worse
| documentation. It's able to easily and correcttly extend
| modules, explain weird uncommented and untyped code (what
| exactly is xyz data structure? Oh it's a tensor with
| shape blah where each dimension represents abc value.
| Great saved me 2 hours of work).
|
| For the summaries - uhh yeah obviously the summaries are
| accurate and better than reading the first and last
| sections. Spend the 20 bucks and try it yourself or
| borrow someone else's account or something. Especially
| useful if you're dealing with nature papers and similar
| from journals that refuse to give proper respect for the
| methods section and shove all the information in a random
| way into supplementary info. Make a knowledgebase on both
| and ask it to connect the dots, saves plenty of time. I
| don't give a damn about the flowery abstract in the first
| part of the report and the tryhard conclusion in the last
| part of the report, I want the details.
|
| It's comical that these useless hype bros can convince
| folks that a genuine computational breakthrough and a
| pretty solid 20 dollar a month consumer product with
| actual users must be bunk because the bros are shilling
| it, but luckily the baker lab doesn't seem to care. Can't
| wait to play around with all atom so I don't have to
| model a zinc atom with a guide potential and can just
| model the heteroatom directly in the functional motif
| instead! Not sure it'll work for the use case I have in
| mind until I try it out and print a gene or two of course
| but I'm glad folks are building these tools to make life
| easier and let me engineer proteins that were out of
| budget 3 years ago.
| anon291 wrote:
| You see no use case for LLMs? I've successfully used GPT4 to
| actually transcribe hundreds of pages of PDF documents with
| actual accuracy. That alone is worth something. Not to
| mention I can now literally ask questions from these pages
| and come up with cited, reasonable answers in a few seconds.
| This is amazing technology. How can you not see the use case?
| mnd999 wrote:
| Wow OCR. How innovative.
| anon291 wrote:
| Accurate OCR that answers questions from source
| documents? Yes... very innovative. As an example, I have
| a real estate data company that provides zoning code
| analysis. Whereas before I would have to manually
| transcribe tables (they come in _many_ different formats,
| with table columns and rows that have no standard
| structure), I can now tell GPT.... Examine these images
| and output in my custom XML format after giving it some
| examples. And ... it does. I 've fed it incredibly obtuse
| codes that took me ages to parse through, and it... does
| it. I'm talking about people using non-standard notation.
| Handwritten codes, anything. It'll crunch it
|
| tell me... how much would it cost to develop a system
| that did this with pre-GPT OCR technologies? I know the
| answer. Do you?
| mnd999 wrote:
| Did you make anything on those NFTs?
| anon291 wrote:
| Nope. Crypto has no value and I've consistently avoided
| it
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If OpenAI is beholden to Microsoft for investment, and OpenAI's
| license is exclusive to Microsoft, OpenAI has nothing to offer
| those who remain except mission and ramen. If OpenAI slows
| their own research, that impairs future profit allocation
| potential to remaining talent. Enterprise customers will run to
| Azure GPT, and Microsoft will carry the research forward with
| their resources.
|
| This morning at OpenAI offices will be talent asking current
| leadership, "What have you done for me lately?"
|
| Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348010 |
| https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775 (505
| of 700 Employees OpenAI tell the board to resign)
| anonylizard wrote:
| OpenAI employees are already quitting en masse in public on
| twitter.
|
| Their pay is majority equity, so its worthless now with a board
| that says it hates profits and money. OpenAI is probably worth
| 80% less than it did a weekend ago, so the equity pay is also
| worth 80% less.
|
| Microsoft is perfectly willing to pay those typical AI
| salaries, because Nvidia and Google are literally doing a
| recruitment drive on twitter right now. Apple and Amazon are
| also probably looking to scoop up the leftovers. So Microsoft
| has to pay properly, and Sam will demand them to, to get the
| OpenAI team moved over intact. There aren't that many core
| engineers at OpenAI, maybe 200-300, so it is trivial for
| Microsoft to afford it.
| vikramkr wrote:
| From satyas tweet Sam's new division/subsidiary is going to run
| more like LinkedIn or GitHub, and openai has pretty explicitly
| just declared that they don't like making money, so I don't
| think the comp is gonna be an issue. And for now, if sam wants
| to make product and money and Microsoft wants the same thing,
| then having power over the board doesn't really matter. And
| Microsoft has all the IP they need. That's a better deal than
| equity given who is in control of openai now. They're actively
| not focused on profit. Whether or not you think this is a good
| outcome for AI or mankind - Microsoft absolutely won. Plus the
| more people they pull from openai the less they have to deal
| with openai, everything is in house.
|
| Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced he
| wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced
| he wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell
|
| It reads like an orchestrated coup against the other three
| members of the board. Convince the board to do something you
| imagine will get this kind of blowback. Board is forced to
| resign due to their fiduciary obligations to the non-profit.
| And now you control the entire board.
| xdennis wrote:
| > fiduciary obligations to the non-profit
|
| What fiduciary obligations does a non-profit have? Isn't
| the board pretty successful already at not making money?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Fiduciary isn't about money, it's about the best
| interests of the non-profit they are governing. If
| staying on the board means a harm to the goals of the
| non-profit charter, then they have a duty to resign.
| icelancer wrote:
| Fiduciary obligations need not be profit-seeking. They
| often - perhaps especially - involve keeping the lights
| on for the chartered company.
| infecto wrote:
| What equity at OAI? You mean the equity for profit sharing?
| Seems to me anyone who cared about their stake in the profit
| sharing would be fairly pissed off with the move the board
| made.
|
| Investors loved Satya's investment into OAI, not sure how we
| can qualify it as one of the worst investments in the history
| of SV?
|
| How can we even compare the risk concerns of MSFT with OpenAI?
| The impression we have of OpenAI is the risk concerns are
| specifically about the profit drive. From a business
| standpoint, LLMs have huge potential at reducing costs and
| increasing profit in multiples.
| shmatt wrote:
| We went from OAI employees flaunting "$1,000,000 per year
| salaries" to the New York Times to "what equity?" Really fast
|
| This isn't personally against you but they never had the
| $1M/year they flaunted when Sam the savior was their CEO
| infecto wrote:
| I realize you have a bias against Sam Altman but lets dig
| into your current statement. The NYT article you are
| quoting I believe is this one [1], in which it describes
| Ilya Sutskever making $1.8 million in salary. I am not sure
| exactly what you are trying to say but from the beginning
| the equity has not been part of the comp of OpenAI. Salary
| as far as I know is typically just that, the cash
| compensation excluding bonus and stock.
|
| I don't know exactly how employee contracts are drawn up
| there but OpenAI has been pretty vocal that all the for-
| profit sides have caps which eventually lead back to 100%
| going into the non-profit after hitting the cap or the
| initial investment amount. So I am not quite clear what you
| are saying? Salary is cash, equity is stock. There has
| always been profit caps on the stock.
|
| My only point was that you made an argument about employees
| giving up their equity for "mediocre" MSFT stock. It is
| just a misinformed statement that I was clearing up for
| you. 1) MSFT has been doing amazing as a stock 2) Employee
| equity has profit caps. 3) Employees who actually care
| about equity profit would most likely be more interested in
| joining MSFT.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.
| nytim...
| shmatt wrote:
| Im referencing large PPU grants in OpenAI offers, with 4
| year vests, they sure made it feel like regular employees
| are being given a chance to join now and be millionaires
| via theirs PPUs
|
| If this was never true, that's on the OpenAI team that
| misled their engineers
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-recruiters-luring-
| goo...
|
| Their job postings even specifically mention "generous
| equity" - again if there is no equity in the contract -
| that's OpenAI misleading its recruits
|
| https://openai.com/careers/research-engineer-
| superalignment
| mirzap wrote:
| We witnessed the insane value destruction over the weekend.
| Every OpenAI employee is aware that everything they have and
| what is promised to them is whipped out. Their best chance is
| that Sam brings them to that new company within MS. They will
| get the same or better deals as they had. And they will
| probably deliver within 6m what OAI has now, and what spooked
| Ilya to launch this coup.
|
| This was a brilliant power move by Satya. I don't see any hope
| for OpenAI after this brain drainage.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Yeah, just like reuters mentioned
|
| "The OpenAI for-profit subsidiary was about to conduct a
| secondary at a $80 billion+ valuation. These 'Profit
| Participation Units' were going to be worth $10 million+ for
| key employees. Suffice it to say this is not going to happen
| now," chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis said."
|
| Insane self own by OpenAI
| zarzavat wrote:
| That sounds like exactly the kind of thing the board of a
| non-profit should be preventing.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| As an employee of a company, I trade my time and effort
| for some amount of rewards. I enter deals with the
| expectation of stability from the other party.
|
| My unfounded Internet opinion: OpenAI just removed or
| reduced a large source of reward and have shown
| fundamental instability. OpenAIs success is very much
| tied to Employees and Compute.
| leetharris wrote:
| Yeah I mean, who cares if ASI kills us all as long as a
| couple hundred of the most well-paid people on the planet
| get even more rich.
|
| It's insane to see all these takes when we don't even
| know what caused the loss of trust in the first place.
| blibble wrote:
| > Yeah I mean, who cares if ASI kills us all as long as a
| couple hundred of the most well-paid people on the planet
| get even more rich.
|
| creating ASI for money seems particularly asinine as the
| machine overlords won't care terribly much about dollars
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| How do you know what ASI will value?
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| No one sincerely believes they have, or will soon
| achieve, AGI. Neither can they believe that the CEO can
| push them to achieve it and forcefully release it,
| whereas they would responsibly develop it (whatever that
| may mean) without him around.
| gala8y wrote:
| Great summary.
|
| We are very complicated creatures and things get out of
| control, both internally and externally. My armchair
| opinion is that they started to believe that all of it is
| so advanced and important, that they lost a bit of a grip
| on reality. Sutskever imagining planet covered with data
| centers and solar panels shows me that [0]. Every single
| person is limited in his/her view - I get a strange
| feeling when listening to him in this video. Also, they
| are not the only people left on this planet. Fortunately,
| this task of creating AI/AGI is not a task for a pack of
| ten, trying to save us from harm. Still, it may and
| probably will get rough. /rant
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Your second paragraph is pretty ironic given your first.
| city_guy_1 wrote:
| If your goal is to work for a profit-sharing company,
| then don't work for a non-profit.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Plenty of non-profits give a lot of money to employees.
| There is nothing stopping non-profits from paying
| exorbitant sums to their employees, and executives often
| do get paid exorbitant. Non-profits mean they don't pay
| out to investors, but they are usually used as a grift to
| get people to work for less so the top people make more
| money and do fundraising on their pet projects.
| Sevii wrote:
| The employees work for the for-profit part of OpenAI.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| As an employee of a bay area tech company, presumably, in
| which a mid-level IC can make as much money as a C-suite
| executive in some less prominent industry*
| mickdarling wrote:
| Well, they're almost certainly 'not profiting' right now.
| jampekka wrote:
| Value as in money or value as in values? There are people who
| value also other than the former in the deal. Like people who
| are trying to keep OpenAI at least somewhat non-profit.
| bagofsand wrote:
| I agree, Satya is an operator. He translated a mess into a
| historic opportunity for Microsoft. They'll get some
| significant chunk of some of the best AI talent on the
| planet. All the heatseakers will go there. That, plus the IP
| they already have, will turbocharge Microsoft.
|
| OpenAI, in contrast, will become more like an academic
| research unit at some university. Those who prefer life slow
| and steady, will select to stay there, making tech for
| effective altruists.
| gryn wrote:
| they make nothing open source, so I'm not sure why
| effective altruits would join it.
|
| if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their
| own actions, how can they predict and contain their so
| claimed future AGI.
| gryn wrote:
| they make nothing open source, so I'm not sure why
| effective altruists would join it.
|
| if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their
| own actions, how can they predict and contain their so
| claimed future "AGI".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there any reason to assume open source is a
| prerequisite for effective altruism?
|
| Open source doesn't necessarily imply good for humanity,
| for example distributing open source designs for nukes
| would probably be a net negative.
|
| And even if it did, effective altruists wouldn't need to
| prioritize the benefit provided by openness over all
| other possibilities.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Operator?
| zrail wrote:
| Operator in this context refers to someone who
| successfully runs a business that someone else founded.
| Often the visionary founder is not good at the nuts and
| bolts of running and growing a business so they hand off
| the reins to someone who is. Think Steve Jobs vs Tim
| Cook.
| benatkin wrote:
| It doesn't mean that at all, it's slang
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=operator
| yulker wrote:
| It has a meaning in a business context apart from a slang
| term
| mrDmrTmrJ wrote:
| For a decade, "operator" in Silicon Valley as has been
| used exactly as the commentator above describes it.
|
| Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or
| "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has
| to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who
| are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their
| organizations up for unique success.
|
| And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it.
| Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally
| distinct.
| benatkin wrote:
| It seems like underselling the _successful_ part and
| overselling the part about not being the founder, but I
| can see it 's a slang term. Thanks.
|
| And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I
| did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of
| _smooth operator_ , apparently I was unfamiliar with the
| term in tech.
| caycep wrote:
| granted, now MSFT basically has another research arm like
| Google Brain/FAIR, but whether or not their "brain trust" can
| equal Yann Lecun's or whatnot who knows. Altman and Brockman
| are on the MBA side of things. The ML magic was Ilya's. If
| they can recruit a bunch of mini Ilya's over from Open AI,
| maybe they have a chance at regaining the momentum.
| dapearce wrote:
| Ilya has backtracked and signed the letter saying he would
| also leave to Microsoft if the board doesn't resign.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351494
| boppo1 wrote:
| Wtf? Isn't he on the board?
| samspenc wrote:
| Ilya signed a letter asking 4 members of the board to
| resign, including Ilya himself. He even posted a public
| apology for his actions on X
| https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
|
| Yes, this is probably the biggest self-own in corporate
| history.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| In one fell move he demonstrated he had neither
| conviction nor any foresight, ouch. I'm starting to
| believe this was just a unthought out ego emotional
| reaction by Ilya. Dude is like Walter White, he just "had
| to be the man"
| leetharris wrote:
| > And they will probably deliver within 6m what OAI has now,
| and what spooked Ilya to launch this coup.
|
| Do you realize how hard it is to make something like GPT4? I
| think all the non-AI people posting about this all over X/HN
| have this idea that if you move everyone over you just
| "remake the AI" as if this were a traditional API.
|
| There is no way MS catches up to OAI in a short period of
| time. During that time the rest of the market will be
| pressing the accelerator as hard as possible.
|
| I think MS is in a really, really shit spot right now.
| mattnewton wrote:
| They have access to the weights as per their agreement with
| open ai; idk if that allows them to use it as a starting
| point. They also will have access to several of the people
| who did it. It's insanely hard to do the first time, but
| probably just hard to do the second time after you already
| know what worked before.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I wonder if that agreement also has an insurrection
| clause saying that if you benefit from this, you must
| wipe your memories clean of any of that shared IP.
| 972811 wrote:
| sure but what does "hard to do" entail in terms of
| timeline? in my experience nothing complex can launch in
| 3 months at a big corp. 6 months would be aggressive. a
| year seems the most likely. but where will competitors be
| in a year?
| ketzo wrote:
| I mean, if MS literally gets:
|
| - all the code that created GPT-4
|
| - all the weights for GPT-4
|
| - all the people who created both of those things
|
| then, y'know, I like their odds.
|
| They have access to the first two already, per their
| licensing agreement with OAI; by the end of the week, they
| may very well have the third.
| munchausen42 wrote:
| >more risk averse than the OpenAI one
|
| At least it's not sci-fi-risk averse ;)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3
| trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than
| the OpenAI one_
|
| This is where I see the win. Newcomer's concerns about Altman
| are valid [1]. It is difficult to square the reputation he
| nurtured as OpenAI's CEO with the reckless lawlessness of his
| crypto start-up.
|
| Microsoft knows how to play ball with the big boys. It also
| knows how to constrain big personalities.
|
| [1] https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the
| DeWilde wrote:
| > no bonus some years,
|
| What do you mean? MS employees are getting bonuses on a yearly
| basis, this year included.
| shmatt wrote:
| I'm referring to Satyas email from May saying there will be
| no raises and the bonus pool will be significantly reduced
|
| That's fine for corporate employees, but OAI employees were
| promised mountains of money to leave Google/Meta, they might
| not be as happy
| FireBeyond wrote:
| They don't have to leave OAI.
|
| OAI is a startup. All these OAI employees who were playing
| up their million dollar salaries should know that startups
| come with risk. How many times has it been said that equity
| is worth nothing until (and if) it is?
|
| In the grand scheme of the current IT economy, top of the
| queue for sympathy to me is not "people making seven digit
| salaries at startup who may have to put up with only making
| $500K+ at MSFT".
| stetrain wrote:
| > People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their
| equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at
| Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the
| board forced headcount reductions?
|
| What long term prospects do those employees have of raises,
| profit-sharing, equity, etc. at OAI if the board is willing to
| destroy value to maintain their non-profit goals?
|
| I think the whole point of this piece is that OAI's entire
| organizational structure is built against generating a large
| startup valuation that would provide a large payout to
| employees and investors.
|
| OAI has cash from ChatGPT revenue that it could use to offer
| competitive pay, but also this entire situations is based
| around the board being uncomfortable with the decisions that
| led to this revenue or attempts to expand it.
| yterdy wrote:
| HN is filled with temporarily-embarrassed billionaires (and
| actual billionaires) who would very much like to preserve the
| notion that big corporations can move with impunity and quash
| any threat to investment returns. Reality is not aligning with
| that, so they've entered their mental safe pods (with the rose-
| tinted windshields).
| djmips wrote:
| OMG this ^
| strangattractor wrote:
| Regardless of what anyone thinks about it - M$ was going to pay
| an entity they did not control 18 Billion to be a player. Now
| they don't have to - they get it almost for nothing. Hat's off
| to M$ - this is certainly one of the largest corporate missteps
| by a board in charge of such hot technology that I have ever
| witnessed.
|
| The Open AI board has taken the keys of Paradise and willingly
| handed them directly to the devil;)
| dpflan wrote:
| It really depends what actually happens, on paper OpenAI business
| leadership is now at MSFT. Research leadership seems to be at
| OpenAI. What does OpenAI need to pursue its goal? One may argue
| that hiring developed under ex-OpenAI leadership was to
| facilitate the productization of the models. Does someone know
| the actual engineering/product/research makeup of the OpenAI that
| can provide substance?
| woliveirajr wrote:
| > Two years later, and the commitment to "openly share our plans
| and capabilities along the way" was gone; three years after that
| and the goal of "advanc[ing] digital intelligence" was replaced
| by "build[ing] general-purpose artificial intelligence".
|
| Be no evil, for example. Billions and billions were made when
| that phrase was erased.
| padolsey wrote:
| I'm a bit confused. Does MSFT have a perpetual license to the
| original OpenAI LLC's IP *or* the capped company OpenAI "Global"
| LLC that was specifically created for MSFT's stake? Because, if
| the latter, it seems like the new/abandoned/forsaken OpenAI could
| just fork any new IP back into its original non-microsoft-stained
| LLC and not be mere tools of Microsoft moving forward.
| manyoso wrote:
| Undoubtedly they have a perpet on what they released so far:
| chatgpt4. Not so for new innovations or tech.
| padolsey wrote:
| So when the author states that "Microsoft just acquired
| OpenAI for $0" they mean, effectively, only a fixed-time
| snapshot of code that is likely old news in about 18 months
| by the time other models have caught up. Microsoft still
| needs to execute like mad to make this work out for them.
| Right now the entire thing seems to rest on the hope that
| enough talent bleeds out of OpenAI to make this worthwhile.
| They'll probably get that. But it's still a delicate game. I
| most wonder what breakthrough Ilya has been alluding to
| recently [1] and whether it'll be available under MSFT's
| license.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?si=YaawmLi8zKrFxwue&t=2303
| bamboozled wrote:
| Plenty of them can go to Google, Anthropic, Apple, Tesla,
| Amazon or any other attractive company to work for. By
| attractive I mean they'd be compensated well enough to have
| a nice life there.
|
| There's not a lot to suggest everyone will jut join M$ by
| default.
| Terretta wrote:
| If you have:
|
| - intellectual property as of today
|
| - the servers that run it
|
| - the people that wrote it
|
| - the executive leadership that executed the play so far
| and know the roadmap ahead
|
| What else do you need?
| sp332 wrote:
| Development work on GPT5, curated input datasets, human
| feedback data, archives of all ChatGPT conversations,
| DALL-E, stats on which users are the big spenders,
| contracts with cheap labor to generate data and moderate
| abuse...
| m_ke wrote:
| Just a tip for OpenAI employees that plan on leaving: this is
| probably one of the best opportunities you'll ever get to start
| your own thing. If you're joining a new startup make sure you're
| a founder and have a good chunk of the equity. For the next few
| months there will be a line of investors waiting at your door to
| give you money at a wild valuation, take it and do what you
| always wanted and know that if it doesn't work out there will be
| plenty of large companies ready to acquire you for much more than
| they'd ever be willing to pay you.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| Open AI structured its organization such that there's no boss.
| And even if there is one, it's not about the money.
|
| Reality hits Open AI: There is always a boss and it's always
| about money.
| bigEnotation wrote:
| I feel like I'm missing something about this chatGPT craze... to
| me the product is chatGPT, and it's mostly fleshed out (would
| like to see the ability to upload an image, as part of a
| conversation), I don't see the appeal for paying 100x more for
| every new iteration for a marginal reduction in misinformation.
|
| To me the target user of chatGPT needs to have some level of
| expertise in the domain their asking a question, as based on how
| gpt works, chatGPT will eventually produce an output with
| misinformation, therefore someone familiar with the subject
| matter would have a higher chance at catching the nuance in a
| response and be able to continue their conversation.
| maxdoop wrote:
| You are 100% missing something. You don't see the current value
| nor potential of what these LLMs are capable of.
|
| They are as "dumb" as they will ever be right now. To act like
| it's just a chat bot is the silliest take.
| lysecret wrote:
| Really absolutely fascinating to see this unfold. I believe more
| and more the most realistic explanation is the next GPT will be
| mind-blowing.
| toth wrote:
| The analysis in the article is mostly very good, but I object to
| this observation
|
| `The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth
| that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to
| organize a company.`
|
| I don't see how anything that happened this weekend leads to this
| conclusion. Yes, it seems likely that the board's actions will
| result in an OpenAI with much smaller revenue and consumer
| traction. But the whole reason for setting up OpenAI as a non-
| profit was precisely ensuring that those were not the overriding
| goals of the company.
|
| The only conclusion that seems warranted is that "the myth that
| anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to
| organize a _for-profit_ company. ", but that is pretty obvious.
| anonylizard wrote:
| It means that those 'organisations' can never scale, and
| therefore make the titanic impacts on society they hoped to
| have.
|
| No investors will touch these non-profits with a 10 foot pole
| now. An unaccountable board that can lead the majority of the
| company and investors to revolt is radioactive for investors.
|
| It proves that the shares=votes, standard corporate structure
| is the only way to organize mega scale organizations.
|
| OpenAI will keep its goals, but it'll simply accomplish
| nothing. It'll probably devolve into some niche lab with no
| resources or GPUs to do anything significant.
| BryantD wrote:
| Would you say Wikipedia has had a significant impact on
| society?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Of course it has. Wikipedia is the first (and only) truly
| global source of knowledge, to a depth _no other_
| encyclopedia has ever covered before - and with an
| unmatched capability to react to current events.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Right! The Wikimedia Foundation is dead in the water, and
| everyone except Jimmy knows it. If only it could raise
| hundreds of millions in capital from investors then they
| could actually start delivering value and get significant
| market share.
| ketzo wrote:
| Pithy response but poor comparison -- Wikipedia's startup
| costs were in, what, the tens of thousands of dollars?
| Less?
|
| OAI is burning _billions_ in compute /salary to create
| their thing, and will spend billions more before truly
| massive value to society could ever be wrought.
|
| I can't think of a nonprofit structure that has ever
| effectively allocated that much capital aside from, like, a
| government.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The parent criticism was that non-profits cannot scale.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| For-profit vs. non-profit is an increasingly meaningless
| distinction in today's business/legal environment. It seems
| like more of a marketing ploy than anything else. For example,
| one can set up a 'socially responsible do-gooder' non-profit
| with the left hand, and a for-profit corporation with the right
| hand, and then funnel all the money that goes into the non-
| profit into the for-profit by making that the sole supplier to
| the non-profit, thus avoiding many taxes and generating robust
| profits. These schemes are legion - there are hundreds of
| examples if you go looking.
|
| The real issue with LLMs is open-source vs. proprietary.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Hundreds of examples? Can you name one?
|
| As someone who works at a non-profit that partners with
| various for-profits, I'm skeptical that the IRS would allow
| such sort of large-scale tax fraud to happen.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "In this scenario, I set up my non-profit school-- and
| then I hire a profitable management company to run the
| school for me. The examples of this dodge are nearly
| endless... consider North Carolina businessman Baker
| Mitchell, who set up some non-profit charter schools and
| promptly had them buy and lease everything - from desks to
| computers to teacher training to the buildings and the land
| - from companies belonging to Baker Mitchell."
|
| https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/07/for-hrc-
| profit-v...
|
| As far as the IRS, this may be entirely legal due to tax
| loopholes pushed through by lobbyists and bought
| politicians, or it may take so many IRS resources to
| unravel that it tends to go ignored.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > I don't see how anything that happened this weekend leads to
| this conclusion.
|
| They seem to need additional investments, but their goals are
| not aligned with most of their would-be investors.
|
| If their goal really is the 'safe' development of AI, they are
| now in an objectively weaker position to pursue that goal, even
| if the actions of this weekend were otherwise justified.
| motoxpro wrote:
| This non-profit structure means that 4 people can decide to do
| whatever they want, with no consequences, putting 100s of jobs
| in danger, 1000s of companies futures on the line and
| disrupting millions of people who rely on the service.
|
| Because they had a difference in opinion about a devday
| presentation...?
|
| Just confusing to me why so many people are thinking the board
| is so altruistic here. That kind of unchecked power is insane
| to me.
| gsuuon wrote:
| If Altman goes back it could potentially salvage the model he
| helped create - maybe there needed to be some mechanisms in
| place to validate decisions like firing the CEO. This drama was
| made all the more intense because no one still _really_ knows
| why they made the call. As a non-profit, some level of
| transparency for decisions like this seems like a super
| reasonable demand.
| mymusewww wrote:
| People are thinking this guy is rich. He's a pawn like anyone
| else without a billion dollars. This means nothing for tech.
| superultra wrote:
| Anyone here that has worked with a non-profit can recognize the
| scenario of boards operating untethered by the sometimes more
| relatable profit motive.
|
| I think what remains to be seen is who is on the right side of
| history. The real loser here is probably ethical AI. I know this
| won't be a popular opinion around here, but it's clear to me that
| with computing and AI, we may be in an echo of the Industrial
| Revolution where the profit motive of the 19th century led to
| deep human injustices like child labor and unsafe and inhumane
| working conditions.
|
| Except of course that AI could have even more impact - both
| positive and negative, in the same way socmed has.
| artisin wrote:
| It does lend credence to an emerging landscape trend that
| suggests large companies, not disruptive startups, will dominate
| AI development due to high costs and infrastructure needs.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I really see no reason that LLMs can't go the way of operating
| systems when it comes to the success of the open-source approach
| vs. the proprietary closed-source approach.
|
| The argument over for-profit vs. non-profit is largely
| meaningless, as anyone who is paying attention knows that 'non-
| profits' just use different methods to distribute the revenue
| than for-profits do, using various smoke-and-mirrors approaches
| to retain their legal status. Arguably a non-profit might put
| more revenue back into R & D and less into kickbacks to VC
| investors but that's not always the case.
|
| Additionally, given all the concerns about "AI safety" open-
| source seems like the better approach, as this is a much better
| framework for exposing biases, whether intentional or accidental.
| There are many successful models for financing the open-source
| approach, as Linux has shown.
| akamaka wrote:
| This article is missing the point that, for decades, Microsoft
| has been trying and failing to hire the best AI researchers. They
| might succeed at commercializing the current generation of LLMs,
| but the revolutionary breakthroughs will still happen elsewhere,
| in an organization that is built for researchers.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Given Microsoft is an apparatus of the US federal government and
| globalization in general, I suspect TPTB are pretty content with
| this outcome.
| asb wrote:
| > Here's the reality of the matter, though: whether or not you
| agree with the Sutskever/Shear tribe, the board's charter and
| responsibility is not to make money. This is not a for-profit
| corporation with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders; [...] to
| the extent the board believes that Altman and his tribe were not
| "build[ing] general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits
| humanity" it is empowered to fire him; they do, and so they did.
|
| I would quibble with this slightly. They do have a right to fire,
| but they're doing a poor job of working in the not-for-profit's
| interests if they do so in a way that collapses the value of
| their biggest asset (the for-profit), especially when other
| options are potentially available. e.g. a negotiated exit,
| providing proper warning to their investors etc etc.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Interesting and insightful read - definitely seems like someone
| has been paying attention throughout.
|
| I can't get past this snippet:
|
| > they ultimately had no leverage because they weren't a for-
| profit company with the capital to be truly independent.
|
| Maybe I don't understand non-profits, but.. they're allowed to
| amass a war chest for expansion and to pay for dependencies,
| right? They're not compelled by charter to have no capital like
| some sort of a corporate equivalent of a monk -- it's just OpenAI
| that did not have enough capital to grant them better negotiating
| terms. How is that different from any other startup that gives up
| ownership of its IP in exchange for investment?
| pgsandstrom wrote:
| This article read to me like someone tryint to shoehorn "non-
| profits sucks" into an otherwise interesting narrative.
| asimovfan wrote:
| I think this mainly means they dont pay out dividends to
| shareholders
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It's different from other startups, because other startups can
| promise potentially infinite returns in exchange for
| investments, while Open AI had capped returns.
| btbuildem wrote:
| That sounds like the very likely most notable difference.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Well written. Well done. Early hn vibes.
|
| A lot more in here, that actually helps to understand what's
| going on with openai, and what might happen next in the space.
|
| I think the last paragraph is a key point/question.
|
| "Ultimately, though, one could make the argument that not much
| has changed at all: it has been apparent for a while that AI was,
| at least in the short to medium-term, a sustaining innovation,
| not a disruptive one, which is to say it would primarily benefit
| and be deployed by the biggest companies. The costs are so high
| that it's hard for anyone else to get the money... ..This, in the
| end, was Nadella's insight: the key to winning if you are big is
| not to invent like a startup, but to leverage your size to
| acquire or fast-follow them."
|
| Use models like innovative disruption with caution. Look to their
| assumptions.
|
| How this plays out is not going to follow the pattern of web 2.0
| or Kodak digitization.
|
| The road to AGI is one thing. The road to 1 billion market caps..
| not necessarily that same thing.
|
| The road to victory, or definition of victory, are very vague
| still.
| pklhr wrote:
| Drama continues.
|
| I think he might regret publishing this a wee bit early :)
| floor_ wrote:
| Shengjia Zhao's deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/yrpXvt9.png
| neilv wrote:
| > _This is, quite obviously, a phenomenal outcome for Microsoft._
|
| I don't know whether that's true, nor do I know went on, but it
| seems interesting to consider...
|
| If OpenAI were government, and the history involved awarding a
| contract, or administering regulations, we have the concept of a
| revolving door.
| kbknapp wrote:
| Seems the author is expecting OAI to continue merrily along its
| way working towards AGI (albeit at a stated slower pace) while
| MSFT is able to take Altman et al and circle the wagons on what
| already exists (GPT4) squeezing it for all its worth. While
| that's entirely possible, there are other outcomes not nearly as
| positive that would put MSFT at a disadvantage. It's like saying
| MSFT's AI hedge is built on what appears like sand; maybe it's
| stable, maybe it's not.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Don't think they can just outright steal GPT4 and they
| definitely won't be taking the world class data set with them
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| The biggest problem of Artificial Intelligence are the humans
| running it
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I can't imagine what it will be like to work at OpenAI over the
| next few months. A massive load of talent has just left, the
| primary source of investment has just taken exactly what you do
| and brought it in house. Even if you wanted to stay at OpenAI how
| can you reasonably believe that MS will continue providing the
| compute and investment necessary for you to retain leadership? It
| just seems impossible. It may be that in the medium term this
| move means OpenAI is going to back to more research focus,
| because I just don't see how the MS partnership strategy makes
| any sense as a long term strategy now.
| chasd00 wrote:
| " Finally, late Sunday night, Satya Nadella announced via tweet
| that Altman and Brockman, "together with colleagues", would be
| joining Microsoft"
|
| Called it, EEE is complete. This is old Microsoft magic. I hope
| younger people starting their careers are taking note. All that
| money gates is giving away to buy his way into heaven came from
| the same tactics.
| ajryan wrote:
| Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish for those unfamiliar.
| boringg wrote:
| All the shade going the board (legit) - that said Altman and
| Brockman just lost so much of their independence its
| unbelievable - sad state of affairs that its being described as
| a win for them (or a good salvage). Also - everyone is pinning
| the board for all the problems ... everybody's hands are dirty
| here that it even got to this point. What a mess.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| ... What? How is this in any way related to EEE? The OpenAI
| board did this to themselves.
| debacle wrote:
| We can't know that - this may have been orchestrated.
| simiones wrote:
| By someone on the board, with the approval and
| participation of the rest of the board. So, the board did
| it to themselves.
|
| Or do you think MS fabricated evidence to falsely convince
| the board Sam Altman was lying to them?
| debacle wrote:
| It's possible that Sam was given clear parameters for
| removal, there was a discussion with Microsoft about what
| would happen after removal, and then a decision was made
| to fulfill those parameters for removal to move things
| forward.
| cm277 wrote:
| Disagree. Satya's Microsoft is more like Embrace-Extend-Share:
| he's running it more like an old-school conglomerate --not
| BillG's "one company to rule them all".
|
| AFAICT, New Microsoft is a platform of platforms with profit
| flowing down to lower-level platforms (Windows, Azure) but
| being made in all levels (Office, Xbox, LinkedIn) and shared
| with others (employees / partners) at some levels.
|
| Satya has basically taken the Bezos insight --use your scale to
| build platforms that you also sell to outsiders-- and inverted
| it: use as many platforms as possible to build and sustain
| scale. This is not new, this is exactly what a conglomerate
| would have done 100+ years ago. But he's doing it methodically
| and while breaking fewer rules than Amazon or Google. Mad
| respect.
| jebarker wrote:
| > What gives me pause is that the goal is not an IPO, retiring to
| a yacht, and giving money to causes that do a better job of
| soothing the guilt of being fabulously rich than actually making
| the world a better place.
|
| Ouch. Is that really the ideal vision of founding a SV startup?
| nemo44x wrote:
| The best part of Satya's tweet is that he opens it with "we're
| committed to our partnership with OpenAI" and then mentions that
| he's hiring Sam and Greg and "colleagues". Nearly spat my tea out
| laughing at that one. Well played.
| burntalmonds wrote:
| I don't think MS expects this to really happen. It's negotiation,
| designed to make OAI's board come to their senses and reinstate
| Altman.
| lightedman wrote:
| I wonder if MS is aware of the allegations against Sam Altman,
| which were put forth by his sister, of sexual, financial, and
| other abuse.
| leoc wrote:
| > The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth
| that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to
| organize a company.
|
| Hmmmh?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_Stiftung
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Sons
|
| If anything it seems like the more likely lesson is that Altman
| manoeuvred OpenAI into a situation which was incompatible with
| its non-profit objectives.
| xxpor wrote:
| The Bosche example doesn't really match:
|
| >Although the charity is funded by owning the vast majority of
| shares, it has no voting rights and is involved in health and
| social causes unrelated to Bosch's business
|
| There's also the example of Ikea's ownership structure, but
| that's just a giant tax dodge.
| leoc wrote:
| > The Bosch example doesn't really match
|
| Yes, I think you're right there.
| airstrike wrote:
| I'd retitle this as "OpenAI's blunder and Microsoft's excellent
| damage control"
|
| I don't think Microsoft is necessarily in a better position than
| it was on Thursday. If we're tallying up points:
| + More control over the full AI stack + Effectively they
| will own what was once OpenAI, but is now really OpenAI 2.0
| - OpenAI 2.0 is probably a worse business than OpenAI 1.0, which
| was, prior to the coup, a well-oiled machine + Control
| over OpenAI 2.0 operations, which can lead to better execution in
| the long term - Higher wage costs - Business
| disruption at OpenAI, delaying projects - Potential
| OpenAI departures to competitors like Google, Meta, Anthropic,
| Amazon, Apple (?) - Risk that OpenAI 1.0 (what's left of
| it) either sells to any of those competitors - Risk that
| OpenAI 1.0 actually goes open source and releases GPT-4 weights
| oakashes wrote:
| Seems like a pretty good list, but I think a lot depends on how
| much you weight each item _and_ how many of the negatives were
| already "priced in" to the status quo ante when Microsoft was
| strategically linked to OpenAI without any formal control.
| codeisawesome wrote:
| GPT-4 weights, the RLHF s/w & logs, data sources ... if all of
| that were truly _open_ , it would be incredible.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| >Risk that OpenAI 1.0 (what's left of it) either sells to any
| of those competitors
|
| Who else is positioned that they could possibly do anything
| with it commercially? Even Microsoft is supposedly renting GPUs
| from Oracle (deals with the devil!) to keep up with demand.
|
| Amazon is the only other company with the potential
| computational power + business acumen to strike, but they
| already have their own ventures. Google could, but not sure
| they would willingly take the reputation hit to use a non-
| Google model.
| firexcy wrote:
| I can never understand Stratechery's obsession with overquoting,
| and it just becomes more unhinged over the years. Every weekly
| post comes down to something like: hey, have you heard of the
| latest tech news X, as I wrote long before (super long quotes),
| and as I read somewhere else (super long quotes), (some
| piggybacked observations).
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| A thought experiment to illustrate the incoherence of OpenAI's
| structure. Imagine a company called ProfitAI, a company without
| any limits on profit and returns, and thus able to raise much
| more money then OpenAI and using that money to license the base
| models from OpenAI. Microsoft played the role of ProfitAI here.
| The non-profit structure only served to ensure that someone else
| would make the profits.
| rekuber wrote:
| The real loser in this chaos is Microsoft.
|
| Remember skype? Microsoft had to buy it twice to gain usable
| access to IP.
| charles_f wrote:
| > you can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for
| $0.
|
| You would first have to make the case that those $11B that gave
| them the perpetual access to IP are worth $0. Probably not the
| market cap of OpenAI, but also not 0.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth
| that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to
| organize a company.
|
| This is a big picture idea that we should examine more closely.
| Right now, in the heat of the chaotic collapse, it's easy to
| conclude that for-proft corp structure is the only way to go. But
| I think we should take a "proof is in the pudding" approach and
| remember all the amazing things that OpenAI accomplished under
| it's non-conventional org structure. Maybe that non-conventional
| org structure was a key ingredient in OpenAI's success? Sure, we
| now know that "long-term stability" does not seem to be a quality
| of this org structure, but nonetheless it seemed to have lots of
| other desirable qualities.
| typon wrote:
| Why does it have to be all or nothing? Why not non-profit in
| the start when you need to attract scientists and engineers who
| are in it for the challenge, and then change to for profit when
| you need to attract product managers and people who will scale
| the company and make it sustainable.
| leetharris wrote:
| It's so weird that people think a bunch of personnel moving to MS
| is a win for MS.
|
| They can't just magically recreate what OpenAI has done. The data
| sets, the tooling, the models, the everything around it. It will
| take so long for MS to catch up even if they had 100% of their
| people working on it tomorrow.
|
| The rest of the market is going to benefit more than MS.
| tedivm wrote:
| Their contract with OpenAI gives them unlimited access to the
| data sets, the tooling (which is all on Azure and was built out
| with the help of Azure engineers), the models and their
| weights, and basically everything around it.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| OpenAI's co-founder Ilya Sutskever and more than 500 other
| employees have threatened to quit the embattled company after its
| board dramatically fired CEO Sam Altman. In an open letter to the
| company's board, which voted to oust Altman on Friday, the group
| said it is obvious 'that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI'.
| Sutskever is a member of the board and backed the decision to
| fire Altman, before tweeting his 'regret' on Monday and adding
| his name to the letter. Employees who signed the letter said that
| if the board does not step down, they 'may choose to resign' en
| masse and join 'the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by
| Sam Altman'.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Sutskever is a member of the board and backed the decision to
| fire Altman, before tweeting his 'regret' on Monday and adding
| his name to the letter. Employees who signed the letter said
| that if the board does not step down,
|
| This reads like a disingenuous strategy to get rid of the other
| three members (one half) of the board. A real coup, not a fake
| one. I know nothing about any of these people, but it seems
| possible Sutskever convinced the board to make a decision that
| he knew would have an outcome that would end in them being
| fiduciarily obliged to resign so that he, Altman, and Brockman
| could come back as the entirety of the board. And if the hiring
| by MS is involved, then MS would then control the board of the
| non-profit.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| OpenAI was non-profit to begin with. Their shenanigans to tip-
| toeing the line between charity and commercialization were, as it
| seems, doomed to fail.
| Futurebot wrote:
| "The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth
| that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to
| organize a company."
|
| Alternatively, we could have these companies turned into research
| organizations run by the government and funded by taxes they way
| most research (e.g. pharmaceuticals) should be. There's more than
| one way to get good research done, and having it public removes
| many strange incentives and conflicts of interest.
| xxpor wrote:
| Compare OpenAI's funding to the national labs.
|
| Sandia and Los Alamos both receive about $4.5 billion per
| fiscal year. OpenAI is likely spending an order of magnitude
| more than that.
| specificcndtion wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38350637 :
|
| "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, [or to
| China or Russia through 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...
| ecshafer wrote:
| So? What does it matter if China is blocked?
| cleandreams wrote:
| I worked for a startup acquired by Microsoft and suffice to say,
| MS is a culture killer. Our open dynamism and free discussion
| withered under a blanket of MS management.
|
| I don't think it's possible that the cultures of OpenAI and MS
| can be made compatible. MS is dreary. Highly effective at
| productizing, yes. But the culture that propels deep innovation
| -- that is not going to last.
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