[HN Gopher] The next chapter of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership
___________________________________________________________________
The next chapter of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 312 points
Date : 2025-10-28 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| meetpateltech wrote:
| Microsoft's announcement:
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter...
|
| Also: Built to Benefit Everyone -- by Bret Taylor, Chair of the
| OpenAI Board of Directors
|
| https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| Microsoft is saying they have a 27% stake in the company after
| this deal closes.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Built to Benefit Everyone
|
| Whats my share then?
| wiseowise wrote:
| You get to contribute your data for the Moloch.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure
| services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first
| refusal to be OpenAI's compute provider.
|
| I have no idea what @sama is doing but he's doing it quite well.
| respondo2134 wrote:
| He mayy be out front because he's the best PR face for this,
| but make no mistake there is massive collusion amongst all the
| players to inflte this bubble. Across MS, Oracle, AWS, OpenAI,
| Anthropic, NVidia and more all I see is a pair on conjoined
| snakes eating their own tail.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be
| verified by an independent expert panel.
|
| I wonder what criteria that panel will use to define/resolve
| this.
| conartist6 wrote:
| This. This sentence reached off the page and hit me in the
| face.
|
| It only just then became obvious to me that to them it's a
| question of when, in large part because of the MS deal.
|
| Their next big move in the chess game will be to "declare" AGI.
| baconbrand wrote:
| This is phenomenally conceited on both companies' parts. Wow.
| jdiff wrote:
| Don't worry, I'm sure we can just keep handing out subprime
| mortgages like candy forever. Infinite growth, here we
| come!
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| I think some of this is just the typical bluster of company
| press releases / earnings reports. Can't ever show weakness
| or the shareholders will leave. Can't ever show doubt or the
| stock price will drop.
|
| Nevertheless, I've been wondering of late. How will we know
| when AGI is accomplished? In the books or movies, it's always
| been handwaved or described in a way that made it seem like
| it was obvious to all. For example, in The Matrix there's the
| line "We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to
| AI." It was a very obvious event that nobody could question
| in that story. In reality though? I'm starting to think it's
| just going to be more of a gradual thing, like increasing the
| resolution of our TVs until you can't tell it's not a window
| any longer.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > How will we know when AGI is accomplished?
|
| It's certainly not an specific thing that can be
| accomplished. AGI is a useful name for a badly defined
| concept, but any objective application of it (like in a
| contract) is just stupid things done by people that could
| barely be described as having the natural variety of GI.
| port3000 wrote:
| "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have
| traditionally understood it." - Sam Altman, Jan 2025
|
| 'as we have traditionally understood it' is doing a lot of
| heavy lifting there
|
| https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections#:~:text=We%20believe%.
| ..
| healsdata wrote:
| > The two companies reportedly signed an agreement [in 2023]
| stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI
| systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
| conartist6 wrote:
| So what, there just won't be a word for general intelligence
| anymore, you know, in the philosophical sense?
| cogman10 wrote:
| lol, this is "autopilot" and "full self driving" all over
| again.
|
| Just redefine the terms into something that's easy to
| accomplish but far from the definition of the
| terms/words/promises.
| conartist6 wrote:
| I know, they could get a big banner that says MISSION
| ACCOMPLISHED.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Apparently the US military is for sale, so they probably
| could hang it up on a battleship even.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Well this is why it's framed that way:
|
| >This is an important detail because Microsoft loses access
| to OpenAI's technology when the startup reaches AGI, a
| nebulous term that means different things to everyone.
|
| Not sure how OpenAI feels about that.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| A sufficiently large profit margin is what constitutes AGI?
| What a fucking joke.
| joomla199 wrote:
| The real AGI was the money we siphoned along the way.
| layer8 wrote:
| "Only" means that it is a necessary condition, not a
| sufficient one.
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| That's true, but the $100 billion requirement is the only
| hard qualification defined in earlier agreements. The
| rest of the condition was left to the "reasonable
| discretion" of the board of OpenAI.
| (https://archive.is/tMJoG)
| layer8 wrote:
| The "reasonableness" is something they could go to court
| over if necessary, whereas the $100 billion is a hard
| requirement.
| afavour wrote:
| It's all so unfathomably stupid. And it's going to bring down
| an economy.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'm honestly starting to feel embarrassed to even be
| employed in the software industry now.
| PyWoody wrote:
| I've been telling people I do "computer stuff" since the
| NFT days.
| coldpie wrote:
| Five straight years of having to tell everyone who asks
| about your job that the hottest thing in your industry is
| a scam sure does wear on a person.
| joomla199 wrote:
| I quit Google last year because I was just done with the
| incessant push for "AI" in everything (AI exclusively
| means LLMs of course). I still believe in the company as
| a whole, the work culture just took a hard right towards
| kafkaville. Nowadays when my relatives say "AI will
| replace X" or whatever I just nod along. People are
| incredibly naive and unbelievably ignorant, but that's
| about as new as eating wheat.
| tclancy wrote:
| Hey, don't forget the climate effects too!
| sekai wrote:
| > It's all so unfathomably stupid. And it's going to bring
| down an economy.
|
| Dot-com bubble all over again
| walleeee wrote:
| Way bigger and deeper than that, there was some slack in
| the energy situation remaining at that point. Not any
| more.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| with extra stoopid
| DavidPiper wrote:
| It's kind of sad, but I've found myself becoming more and
| more this guy whenever someone "serious" brings up AI in
| conversation: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOELpzRDR-4/
| yahoozoo wrote:
| So they can just introduce ads in ChatGPT responses, make
| $100 billion, and call that AGI?
| vntok wrote:
| No. When you're thinking about questions like these, it is
| useful to remember that multiple (probably dozens)
| professional A-grade lawyers have been paid considerable
| sums of actual money, by both sides, to think about
| possible loopholes and fix them.
| yahoozoo wrote:
| What would you consider valid methods of generating $100
| billion? Enough Max/Pro subscribers?
| hylaride wrote:
| Don't worry, it'll be relevant ads, just like google.
| You're going to love when code output is for proprietary
| libraries and databases and getting things the way you want
| will involve annoying levels of "clarification" that'll be
| harder and harder to use.
|
| I kind of meant this as a joke as I typed this, but by the
| end almost wanted to quit the tech industry all together.
| vntok wrote:
| Just download a few SOTA (free) open-weights models well
| ahead of that moment and either run them from inside your
| living-room or store them onto a (cheap) 2TB external
| hard drive until consumer compute makes it affordable to
| run them from your living room.
| Overpower0416 wrote:
| So if their erotic bot reaches $100b in profit, they will
| declare AGI? lol
| ml-anon wrote:
| Wait until they announce that they've been powering
| OnlyFans accounts this whole time.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Given the money involved, they may be contractually obliged
| to?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is the most sick implementation of Goodhart's Law I've
| ever seen.
|
| >"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure"
|
| What appalls me is that companies are doing this stuff in
| plain sight. In the 1920s before the crash, were companies
| this brazen or did they try to hide it better?
| phito wrote:
| Wow that is so dumb. Can these addicts think about anything
| else than profits?
| sigmar wrote:
| that's very different from OpenAI's previous definition
| (which was "autonomous systems that surpass humans in most
| economically valuable tasks") for at least one big reason:
| This new definition likely only triggers if OpenAI's AI is
| substantially different or better than other companies' AI.
| Because in a world where 2+ companies have similar AGI, both
| would have huge income but the competition would mean their
| profit margins might not be as large. The only reason their
| profit would soar to 100B+ would be because of no
| competition, right?
| charlie-83 wrote:
| It doesn't seem to say 100B a year. So presumably a
| business selling spoons will also eventually achieve AGI.
| Also good to know that the US could achieve AGI at any time
| by just printing more money until hyperinflation lets
| openai hit their target.
| airspresso wrote:
| Nice unlock to hyperinflate their way to $100B. I'd buy
| an AGI spoon but preferably before hyperinflation hits.
| I'd expect forks to outcompete the spoons though.
| empath75 wrote:
| It's quite possible that GI and thus AGI does not actually
| exist. Though now the paper the other day by all those heavy
| hitters in the industry makes more sense in this context.
| aeve890 wrote:
| >It's quite possible that GI and thus AGI does not actually
| exist.
|
| Aren't we humans supposed to have GI? Maybe you're conflating
| AGI and ASI.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Aren't we humans supposed to have GI?
|
| Supposed by humans, who might not be aware of their own
| limitations.
| llelouch wrote:
| what paper?
| rvz wrote:
| The criteria changes more times than the weather forecast as it
| depends on the definition of "AGI".
| skepticATX wrote:
| I think the more interesting question is who will be on the
| panel?
|
| A group of ex frontier lab employees? You could declare AGI
| today. A more diverse group across academia and industry might
| actually have some backbone and be able to stand up to OpenAI.
| qgin wrote:
| This makes me feel that the extremely short AGI timelines might
| be less likely.
|
| To sign this deal today, presumably you wouldn't bother if AGI
| is just around the corner?
|
| Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
| qnleigh wrote:
| Or if one party has a different timeline than the other...
| adonese wrote:
| Obligatory the office line:
|
| "I just wanted you to know that you can't just say the word
| "AGI" and expect anything to happen.
|
| - Michael Scott: I didn't say it. I declared it
| mossTechnician wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Microsoft was previously promised
| ownership of every pre-AGI asset created by OpenAI. Now they
| are being promised ownership of things post-AGI as well:
|
| _Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are
| extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI..._
|
| To me, this suggests a further dilution of the term "AGI."
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| To be honest, I think this is somewhat assymetric, and kind
| of implies that openai are truer "Believers" than Microsoft.
|
| If you believe in a hard takeoff, than ownership of assets
| post agi is pretty much meaningless, however, it protects
| Microsoft from an early declaration of agi by openai.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| > AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI
|
| Spare me. Sam has been talking about ChatGPT already being AGI
| for ages, meanwhile still peddling this duplicitous talk about
| how AGI is coming despite it apparently already being here. Can
| we act like grownups and treat this like a normal tool? No, no we
| cannot, for Sam is a hype merchant.
| interactivecode wrote:
| Sam is doing the same playbook Elon used Tesla's full self-
| driving dreams
| respondo2134 wrote:
| but with 10x or 100x the chutzpah
| respondo2134 wrote:
| it's notable that there is no talk about defining what exactly
| AGI is - or even spelling out the three letter acronym -
| because that doesn't serve his narative. He wants the general
| public to equate human intelligence with current OpenAI, not
| ask what does this mean or how would we know. He's selling
| another type of hammer that's proving useful in some situations
| but presenting it as the last universal tool anyone will ever
| need.
| cogman10 wrote:
| And because it's become apparent that LLMs aren't converging
| on what's traditionally been understood as AGI.
|
| The promise of AGI is that you could prompt the LLM "Prove
| that the Riemann Hypothesis is either true or false" and the
| LLM would generate a valid mathematical proof. However, if
| you throw it into ChatGPT what you actually get is "Nobody
| else has solved this proof yet and I can't either."
|
| And that's the issue. These LLMs aren't capable of reason,
| only regurgitation. And they aren't moving towards reason.
| dagss wrote:
| When I ask Claude to debug something it goes through more
| or less the same steps I would have done to fine the bug.
| Add some logging, run tests, try an hypothesis...
|
| Until LLMs got popular, we would have called that reasoning
| skills. Not surpassing humans but better than many humans
| within a small context.
|
| I don't mean that I have a higher opinion about LLM
| intelligence than you do, but perhaps I have a lower
| opinion on what human intelligence is. How many do much
| more than regurgitate, tweak? Science has taken hundreds of
| years to develop.
|
| The real question is: When do knowledge workers loose their
| jobs. That is close enough for "AGI" in its consequences
| for society, Riemann hypothesis or not.
| joomla199 wrote:
| Did you read the whole thread and all of your own comment
| each time you had to type another half-word? If not, I'm
| afraid your first statement doesn't hold.
| parliament32 wrote:
| AGI is pretty clearly defined here:
| https://openai.com/charter/
|
| > OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general
| intelligence (AGI)--by which we mean highly autonomous
| systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable
| work--benefits all of humanity.
|
| So, can you (and everyone you know) be replaced at work by a
| subscription yet? If not, it's not AGI I guess.
| vultour wrote:
| This entire house of cards is built on the expectation that
| "AGI" is just around the corner. The moment Altman relents in
| his grift is the moment the bubble pops and we're in for a wild
| ride.
| eggbrain wrote:
| If we assume token providers are becoming more and more of a
| commodity service these days, it seems telling that OpenAI
| specifically decided to claw out consumer hardware.
|
| Perhaps their big bet is that their partnership with Jony Ive
| will create the first post-phone hardware device that consumers
| attach themselves with, and then build an ecosystem around that?
| respondo2134 wrote:
| this would be an incredibly tough play. We've seen few success
| stories, and even when the product is good building the
| business around them has often failed. Most of the consumer
| plays are terrible products with weak execution and no real
| market. I have no doubt they could supplement lots of consumer
| experiences but I'm not sure how they are more than a commodity
| component in that model. I'm a die-hard engineer, but equating
| the success of the iphone to Ive's design is like saying the
| reason there were so many Apple II's in 80's homes and
| classrooms was because of Woz's amazing design.
| healsdata wrote:
| I'm not savvy on investment terms, but most of these bullet
| points seem like a loss for Microsoft.
|
| What's the value in investing in a smaller company and then
| giving up things produced off that investment when the company
| grows?
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| I was thinking exactly the same. Maybe someone who understands
| these terms and deal better shine light on why would Microsoft
| agree to this
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing.
| soared wrote:
| Exponential growth
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Yeah poor microsoft, they invested $1B in 2019 and it's now
| worth $135B
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Not worth anything until they sell it. There were a lot of
| excited FTX holders, too.
| gostsamo wrote:
| If there is need of more capital, you either keep your share
| without the capital injection and the share goes to zero or you
| let in more investors, dilute your share, but its overall value
| increases. Or you can let in more people and sign an agreement
| that part of the new money will be paid to you in the form of
| services that you provide.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I 'm not savvy on investment terms, but most of these bullet
| points seem like a loss for Microsoft._
|
| Having a customer locked in to buying $250bn of Azure services
| is a fairly big benefit.
| creddit wrote:
| MSFT had a right to compute exclusivity.
|
| "Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be
| OpenAI's compute provider."
|
| Seems like a loss to me!
| davey48016 wrote:
| I assume that first refusal required price matching. If the
| $250B is at a higher price than whatever AWS, GCP, etc.
| were willing to offer, then it could be a win for Microsoft
| to get $250B in decent margin business over a larger amount
| of break even business.
| yreg wrote:
| The risk stays somewhat similar. If OpenAI collapses it won't
| spend those 250B.
| ml-anon wrote:
| Or a massive opportunity cost. I'd imagine 250Bn of OAI
| business is way lower margin than 250Bn of some other random
| companies that don't need H200s.
| jasode wrote:
| _> and then giving up things produced off that investment when
| the company grows?_
|
| An investor can be stubborn about retaining all rights
| previously negotiated and never give them up... but that
| absolutist position doesn't mean anything if the investment
| fails.
|
| OpenAI needs many more billions to cover many more years of
| expected losses. Microsoft itself doesn't want to invest any
| more money. Additional outside investors don't want to add more
| billions in funding unless Microsoft was willing to give up a
| few rights so that OpenAI has a better competitive position
| against Google Gemini, Anthropic, Grok etc.
|
| When a startup is losing money and desperately needs more
| capital, a new round of investors can chip away at rights the
| previous investor(s) had. Why would previous original investors
| voluntarily agree to give up any rights?!? Because their
| _investment is at risk_ if the startup doesn 't get a lot more
| money. If the original investor doesn't want to re-invest again
| and _would rather others foot the bill_ , they sometimes have
| to be a little flexible on their rights for that to happen.
| mrweasel wrote:
| If Microsoft doesn't believe that OpenAI will achieve AGI by
| 2030 or that there's a chance that OpenAI won't be the premiere
| AI company in four years, the deal looks less like a lose and
| more like they are buying their way out of a risky bet. On the
| other hand, if OpenAI does well, then Microsoft have a 27%
| stake in the company and that's not nothing.
|
| This looks more like Microsoft ensuring that they'll win,
| regardless of how OpenAI fairs in the next four to six years.
| fidotron wrote:
| > Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in
| partnership with third parties.
|
| The question is does this reflect an increase or decrease in
| confidence at OpenAI wrt them achieving AGI?
| rvz wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be
| verified by an independent expert panel.
|
| By the time we get 30% global unemployment and another financial
| crash along the way in the next decade, only then OpenAI would
| have already declared "AGI".
|
| Likely with in the 2030 - 2035 timeframe.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at
| approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an
| as-converted diluted basis
|
| It seems like Microsoft stock is then the most straightforward
| way to invest in OpenAI pre-IPO.
|
| This also confirms the $500 billion valuation making OpenAI the
| most valuable private startup in the world.
|
| Now many of the main AI companies have decent ownership by public
| companies or are already public.
|
| - OpenAI -> Microsoft (27%)
|
| - Anthropic -> Amazon (15-19% est), Alphabet/Google (14%)
|
| Then the chip layer is largely already public: Nvidia. Plus AMD
| and Broadcom.
|
| Clouds too: Oracle, Alphabet/GCP, Microsoft/Azure, CoreWeave.
| pinnochio wrote:
| I think it's a bit late for that.
|
| Also, you have to consider the size of Microsoft relative to
| its ownership of OpenAI, future dilution, and how Microsoft
| itself will fare in the future. If, say, Microsoft is on a path
| towards decreasing relevance/marketshare/profitability, any
| gains from its stake in OpenAI may be offset by its diminishing
| fortunes.
| dualityoftapirs wrote:
| Reminds me of how Yahoo had a valuation in the negative
| billions with their Alibaba holdings taken into account:
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-
| worth-l...
| mr_toad wrote:
| > If, say, Microsoft is on a path towards decreasing
| relevance/marketshare/profitability
|
| That's a big if. I see a lot of people in big enterprises who
| would never even consider anything other than Microsoft and
| Azure.
| no_wizard wrote:
| C# and .NET have a bigger market share than what gets
| talked about in trendy circles
| jtbaker wrote:
| C#/.NET are nice. Azure/Microsoft Cloud not so nice. Idk,
| maybe I have some bias due to familiarity, but I find the
| GCP admin and tools to be so much more intuitive than the
| Azure (and AWS too, for that matter) counterparts.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Oh dear lord, GCP could be the intuitive one?! I have not
| used anything else but, dear lord, that's shocking and
| not at all surprising at the same time.
| 91bananas wrote:
| Yeah this is not the case at all lol. I actually find
| Azure to be far more intuitive after suffering through
| AWS and a little GCP. It certainly seems more stable in
| US regions than AWS.
|
| One thing I will say is the Azure documentation is some
| of the most cumbersome to navigate I've ever experienced,
| there is a dearth of information in there, you just have
| to know how to find it.
| bn-l wrote:
| Any speculation on why none of them can make a UI and UX
| that is not 100% completely shit and makes you feel
| miserable and stressed out?
|
| Couldn't they just throw money at the problem? Or fire
| the criminals who designed it?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The big question is if we are finally in a moment when big
| enterprises will be allowed to fail due to the infinite
| number of bad choices they make.
|
| Because things are going to change soon. What nobody know
| is what things exactly, and in what direction.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| yeah, this is a take I see by people who work in unix like
| environments (including macs). If anything Microsoft will
| grow much bigger. People are consolidating in Azure and
| away from GCP. easier to manage costs and integrate with
| their fleet.
|
| Windows workstations and servers are now "joined" to Azure
| instead, where they used to be joined to domain controller
| servers. Microsoft will soon enough stop supporting that
| older domain controller design (soon as in a decade).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory) is definitely a
| huge enterprise Azure driver, and MS knows it.
| whizzter wrote:
| Huh? Windows itself might have had it's heyday but MS is
| solidly at #2 for clouds only behind AWS with enterprise
| Windows shops that will be hard pressed to not use MS options
| if they go to the cloud (Google really has continued to
| fumble their cloud positions with their reputation for
| "killedbygoogle.com" nagging on everyones mind).
|
| The biggest real threat to MS position is the Trump
| administration pushing foreign customers away with stuff like
| shutting down the ICJ Microsoft accounts, but that'll hurt
| AWS and Google equally much (The winners of that will be
| Alibaba and other foregin providers that can't compete in
| full enterprise stacks today).
| ml-anon wrote:
| Watch this week. Amazon cloud growth has been terrible
| (Google and Microsoft remains >30%). Amazon have basically
| no good offerings for AI which is where gcp is bringing to
| eat their lunch. Anthropic moving to TPU for inference is a
| big big signal.
| eitally wrote:
| 100% this. The AWS of today is going to be the Hetzner or
| Digital Ocean of the future. They'll still have
| hyperscale, but will not be seen as innovating on first
| party products or a leader in the AI managed services
| industry. And frankly, they are currently doing a shit
| job of even this, because Oracle is in the same category
| and OCI has been eating everyone's lunch (for the past
| two years!).
| stackskipton wrote:
| Is OCI really eating everyone lunch? Sure, it's showing
| massive growth but that's because Oracle has been running
| around offering insane discounts.
|
| We were cloud shopping, and they came by as well with
| REALLY good discount. Luckily our CTO was massively
| afraid of what would happen after that discount ran out.
| salynchnew wrote:
| You're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will
| one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.
| makestuff wrote:
| if you want to invest in open ai I think you can just buy it on
| NASDAQ private markets.
| yreg wrote:
| Not everyone can "just buy it". Investing in MSFT is
| accessible to many more people than private markets.
| yousif_123123 wrote:
| I think the stable coin company Tether is valued at 500 billion
| also.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Is the company valued at $500 billion or is the sum of the
| digital assets they've collateralised worth $500 billion?
|
| Because if you buy the tokens you presumably do not own the
| company. And if you buy the company you hopefully don't own
| the tokens - nor the assets that back the tokens.
| yousif_123123 wrote:
| I think I read that its valued at 500 billion based on
| their latest fund raise. I don't know the total holdings
| they have.
|
| I have no interest in crypto, just wanted to mention this
| which was surprising to me when I heard it.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Wow, yes they claim to be raising a round valuing them at
| $500bn. Which is crazy given the market cap of their
| token is only apparently $173bn.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/crypto-firm-tether-
| eyes-500...
|
| I struggle to see how those numbers stack up.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| For comparison Blackstone is worth ~$180bn with ~$1
| trillion AUM.
|
| So somehow this crypto firm and its investor think it can
| get a better return than Blackstone with a fraction of
| the assets. Now, sure, developing market and all that.
| But really? If it scaled to Blackstone assets level of $1
| trillion then you'd expect the platform valuation to
| scale, perhaps not in lockstep but at least somewhat. So
| with $1 trillion in collateralised crypto does that make
| Tether worth $1.5 trillion? I'd love someone to explain
| that.
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| If my mom gives me 1000 dollars for 1% of my lemonade
| stand, that doesn't mean my stand is worth 100k. Tether
| is in talks with investors to mayb raise 20b at a 500b
| valuation. Keep in mind also that crypto investors
| overvalue companies to create the hype and then lobby for
| better regulations etc. It doesn't mean at all that
| someone would be interested to buy 100% of tether for
| 500b. Now, if they were public is a different story, like
| Tesla etc
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Well indeed. That was pretty much my point.
| yousif_123123 wrote:
| Tether is projected to generate $15 billion in profits.
| So 500 billion is like a 33 times earnings multiple.
|
| Now the main thing is how sustainable these earnings are
| and if they will continue to be a dominant player in
| stable coins and if there will continue to be demand for
| them.
|
| Another difference to Blackstone is Tether takes 100% of
| the returns on the treasuries backing the coins, whereas
| Blackstone gets a small fee from AUM, and their goal is
| to make money for their investor clients.
|
| If crypto wanted to really be decentralized they'd find a
| way to have stable coins backed by whatever assets where
| the returns of the assets still came to the stable coin
| holder, not some big centralized company.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Or for the inevitable crash when we discover that OpenAI is a
| round tripping Enron style disaster.
| sekai wrote:
| > This also confirms the $500 billion valuation making OpenAI
| the most valuable private startup in the world.
|
| SpaceX?
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Around $350 to $400 billion from a couple sources I saw, but
| it's a lot of speculation
| throwup238 wrote:
| If SpaceX is still a "startup", the word has lost all
| meaning.
| tguedes wrote:
| It already has. Any tech company that is pre-IPO and still
| raising funding rounds is a "startup". I'm surprised there
| hasn't been someone to come up with a separate term for the
| stage of these kinds of companies.
| airspresso wrote:
| That's just a privately owned tech company then. Lots of
| companies never IPO.
| notyourwork wrote:
| It's odd to me in clouds you excluded AWS.
| awestroke wrote:
| And included oracle first. OP is probably Larry
| paxys wrote:
| Microsoft is worth $4T, so if you buy one MSFT share only ~3%
| of that is invested in OpenAI. Even if OpenAI outperforms
| everyone's expectations (which at this point are already sky
| high), a tiny swing in some other Microsoft division will
| completely erase your gains.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Yeah, but on the plus side when the AI bubble bursts at least
| you've still got Excel.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Claude for Excel!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722639
| HPMOR wrote:
| No reason to believe it is a bubble
| margalabargala wrote:
| Lots of reasons to believe it's a bubble.
|
| No hard proof it's a bubble. Bubbles can only be proved
| to have existed after they pop.
| ivape wrote:
| Markets trade on a magical growth valuation. Nothing you said
| matters at all at the moment and won't for about 5 or so
| years. People are going to eat shit over and over when they
| keep talking like this, just look at what NVDA did today.
| It's not going to stop.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 5 years is a pretty long time to predict with confidence.
| Definitely agree that "the markets can remain irrational
| longer than you can remain solvent", but 5 years would be
| unusually long if you believe we're already in a bubble.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _" Microsoft's IP rights now exclude OpenAI's consumer
| hardware."_
|
| Relevant and under-appreciated. 1. OpenAI
| considers its consumer hardware IP serious enough to include in
| the agreement (and this post) 2. OpenAI thinks it's
| enough of a value differentiator they'd rather go alone than
| through MS as a hardware partner
|
| OpenAI wearable eyeglasses incoming... (audio+cellular first,
| AR/camera second?)
| interactivecode wrote:
| So Microsoft went from 49% to now 27%? Open AI with their non-
| profit and their for-profit and all these investments and deals
| they are doing. It feels like they are spending more time doing
| financial trickery than building AI products.
| meesles wrote:
| There's a public trail of reddit comments where Altman all but
| owns up to finagling board seats and ownership rights for
| Reddit many years ago. This is how he operates.
| akmittal wrote:
| The money needed to run AI company is huge. If they don't do
| financial trickery, there is huge risk of going out of
| business.
|
| AI is not making enough money to cover the cost and it will
| take a decade or so to cover the same.
| baconbrand wrote:
| I am highly skeptical that we will see AI pay for itself by
| the end of the decade.
|
| More likely Americans' tax dollars will be shoveled into the
| hole.
| afavour wrote:
| Then it isn't a viable business. Find another path that
| doesn't risk crashing the economy.
| evtothedev wrote:
| > Microsoft's IP rights now exclude OpenAI's consumer hardware.
|
| While not unexpected, this is exciting and intriguing.
|
| And of course, looking forward to Microsoft's Zune AI.
| dymk wrote:
| Maybe we'll get a wearable pin, look how well those have done
| so far
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Kind of interesting given they're essentially building their own
| foundation models vis-a-vis microsoft.ai. Run by a Google
| Deepmind founder.
| gostsamo wrote:
| My take:
|
| OpenAI self-evaluated to $500B;
|
| Microsoft commitment for $250B of services, a.k.a still 50% of
| that value is somewhat locked;
|
| AGI still undefined;
|
| Some more kicking of the can toward the future when it comes to
| payments;
|
| Both have more freedom to do research and offer services;
|
| Overall, lots of magic money talk with pinkie promise in the
| future and somewhat higher possibility of new products and open
| weights models.
| skepticATX wrote:
| How is this not a terrible deal for Microsoft? I'm not confident
| that an "expert panel" will prevent OpenAI from prematurely
| declaring AGI.
| Oras wrote:
| > OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure
| services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first
| refusal to be OpenAI's compute provider.
|
| So OpenAI could be on Google (GCP) and AWS, and possibly Claude
| and Gemini on Azure? that could be a good thing.
|
| I use OpenRouter in multiple applications, the practicality of
| having one provider to host all possible LLMs is such a win to
| try and iterate without having to switch the cloud (big for
| enterprise who are stuck with one cloud provider)
| Shank wrote:
| The API offerings are still only on Azure. It just means OpenAI
| doesn't have to buy compute exclusively from Microsoft.
| easton wrote:
| They also say "Non-API products may be served on any cloud
| provider.". I wonder what products they are thinking about.
| If I sell you a EC2 image with GPT-5 on it, is that a API?
|
| My assumption is that they mean PaaS model hosting (so
| azure's ai service, bedrock, vertex), but I don't know what
| other product OpenAI is thinking about selling via a cloud
| provider unless it's training tooling or something.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Open source models are the current product line that fits
| the bill.
| lysecret wrote:
| Yea I use gcp vertex for this it already has Claude hope for
| OpenAI's models eventually too.
| creddit wrote:
| Can anyone point me to whether or not the OAI non-profit holds
| voting control or not after the recapitalization?
|
| I've read this but it's extremely vague:
| https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone/
|
| As is this: https://openai.com/our-structure/
|
| Especially so if the Non-profit foundation doesn't retain voting
| control, this remains the greatest theft of all time. I still
| can't quite understand how it should at all be possible.
|
| Looking at the changes for MSFT, I also mostly don't understand
| why they did it!
| creddit wrote:
| Nevermind, looks like the nn-profit gave up voting control lol:
|
| "All equity holders in OpenAI Group now own the same type of
| traditional stock that participates proportionally and grows in
| value with OpenAI Group's success. The OpenAI Foundation board
| of directors were advised by independent financial advisors,
| and the terms of the recapitalization were unanimously approved
| by the board."
|
| Truly, truly the greatest theft from mankind in history and
| they dress it up as if the non-profit is doing anything other
| than giving away the most valuable startup in history for a
| paltry sum.
|
| Credit where credit is due, Sam Altman is the greatest
| dealmaker of all time.
|
| Will be interesting if we get to hear what his new equity stake
| is!
| _jab wrote:
| Many questioning why Microsoft would agree to this, but to me the
| concessions they made strike me as minor.
|
| > OpenAI remains Microsoft's frontier model partner and Microsoft
| continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity
|
| This should be the headline - Microsoft maintains its financial
| and intellectual stranglehold on OpenAI.
|
| And meanwhile, while vaguer, a few of the bullet points are
| potentially very favorable to Microsoft:
|
| > Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in
| partnership with third parties.
|
| > The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel
| verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period
| of time.
|
| Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume
| it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from
| OpenAI.
| creddit wrote:
| > Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I
| presume it is substantial enough to make this a major
| concession from OpenAI.
|
| Depends on how this is meant to be parsed but it may be parsed
| to be a concession from MSFT. If the total amount of revenue to
| be shared is the same, then MSFT is worse off here. If this is
| meant to parse as "a fixed proportion of revenue will be shared
| over X period and X period has increased to Y" then it is an
| OAI concession.
|
| I don't know the details but I would be surprised if there was
| a revenue agreement that was time based.
| hdkrgr wrote:
| As a corporate customer, the main point for me in this is
| Microsoft now retaining (non-exclusive) rights to models and
| products after OpenAI decides to declare AGI.
|
| The question "Can we build our stuff on top of Azure OpenAI?
| What if SamA pulls a marketing stunt tomorrow, declares AGI and
| cuts Microsoft off?" just became a lot easier. (At least until
| 2032.)
| dakial1 wrote:
| Maybe OpenAI is burning money heavily and MS is the only/best
| partner to get it from?
|
| Also for MS it is worth to keep investing little by
| little,getting concessions from OpenAI and becoming the de
| facto owner of it.
| ossner wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be
| verified by an independent expert panel.
|
| What were they really expecting as an alternative? Anyone can
| "declare AGI" especially since it's an inherently ill-defined
| (and agruably undefinable) concept, it's strange that this is the
| first bullet point like this was the fruit of intensive
| deliberation.
|
| I don't fully understand what is going on in this market as a
| whole, I really doubt anyone does, but I do believe we will look
| back on this period and wonder what the hell we were thinking
| believing and lapping up everything these corporations were
| putting out.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| like Elon declaring FSD?
| baobun wrote:
| In context AGI is already clearly defined as $100billion USD
| revenue. So I guess the expert panel should at least have a
| finacial auditor.
| exasperaited wrote:
| AGI is a Macguffin.
| onion2k wrote:
| _OpenAI is now able to release open weight models that meet
| requisite capability criteria._
|
| GPT-OSS:20b is a great model for local use. OpenAI continuing to
| release open weights is good news.
| r0x0r007 wrote:
| I think they will reach AGI pretty soon, because only AGI can
| find a way to make them profitable.
| sambaumann wrote:
| Plenty of businesses fail to find a way to make a profit
| xwowsersx wrote:
| OP said necessary, not sufficient
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| OP said "will". That doesn't sound like "necessary, not
| sufficient" to me.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment.
| He said "will" with regards to reaching AGI. He said
| "only AGI _can_ find " with regards to profit. It was the
| latter that this thread was addressing.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment.
| He said "because". It _will_ happen _because_ that 's the
| only way to reach profit. That's _why_ it _will_ happen.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I think they hope they will because if they don't at some point
| people are going to expect a return and get tired of throwing
| good money after bad.
|
| The longer they go without that and the more the sentiment
| starts to shift away from what they convinced people LLM's
| where vs what they actually are the riskier it becomes, are
| they are useful tool yes, are they not what they've been hyping
| for the last four years, also yes.
|
| They either crack it or they become an also ran.
|
| At which point Microsoft investors are going to be staring
| really hard at the CEO.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This org structure, if you can call it that, has to be one of the
| least transparent, most convoluted organizations ever
|
| Just look at how they write it and they are somehow sneaking a
| NEW organizational level in there
|
| >First, Microsoft supports the OpenAI board moving forward with
| formation of a public benefit corporation (PBC) and
| recapitalization.
|
| Does anyone have any clue how OpenAI is actually governed and who
| works for who and all that?
|
| It's kafkaesque at best and intentionally confusing, so that you
| can't actually regulate it, at worst
| iandanforth wrote:
| So now OpenAI is committed to spending $550 billion dollars?
| ($300B to Oracle and $250B to MS). If it currently has ~$10B in
| revenue / year, how on earth can it meet these commitments?
| Lionga wrote:
| Has OpenAI not also committed to spending a few hundered
| billions at NVIDIA? I mean whats another few hundered billions
| when you are making so much profit.
|
| Wait, they are not making any profit but already losing
| billions even before any of these "investments" ?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be
| verified by an independent expert panel.
|
| > Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are extended
| through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate
| safety guardrails.
|
| Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?
| outside1234 wrote:
| No, but OpenAI is going to look for any opportunity to do it so
| they can end the contract with Microsoft.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Why would you say that when this very contract appears to
| extend the arrangement almost indefinitely
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| AGI as a PR stunt for OpenAI is becoming a meme.
| codyb wrote:
| We're just a year away from full self driving!
| ReptileMan wrote:
| You will be self driven to the fusion plant and you will
| like it. The AGI will meet you at the front door.
| ta9000 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if AGI arrives before Tesla has a
| full self-driving car though.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| And then just another year until self selfing and we will
| have come full circle
| pixl97 wrote:
| Full self driving has always required AGI, so no we it
| without AGI.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Wasn't it always the explicit goal of OpenAI to bring up AGI?
| So less of a meme, and more "this is what that company exists
| for".
|
| Bit like blaming a airplane building company for building
| airplanes, it's literally what they were created for, no
| matter how stupid their ideas of the "ideal aircraft" is.
| alterom wrote:
| _> Bit like blaming a airplane building company for_ NOT
| _building airplanes_
|
| FTFY. OpenAI has not built AGI (not _yet_ , it you want to
| be optimistic).
|
| If you really need an analogy, it's more in the vein of
| giving SpaceX crap for yapping about building a Dyson
| Sphere _Real Soon Now(tm)_.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Of course not, then we'd never hear the end of it :)
|
| I was just informing that the company always had AGI as a
| goal, even when they were doing the small Gym prototypes
| and all of that stuff that made the (tech) news before
| GPT was a thing.
| bogzz wrote:
| Of course not.
| no_wizard wrote:
| They'll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The
| common conception of it however, no I don't believe we are
| anywhere close to it.
|
| It's no different than how they moved the goalpost on the
| definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle
| ramses0 wrote:
| Jesus, we've gone from Eliza and Bayes Spam Filters to being
| able to hold an "intelligent" conversation with a bot that
| can write code like: "make me a sandwich" => "ok, making
| sandwich.py, adding test, keeping track of a todo list,
| validating tests, etc..."
|
| We might not _quite_ be at the era of "I'm sorry I can't let
| you do that Dave...", but on the spectrum, and from the
| perspective of a lay-person, we're waaaaay closer than we've
| ever been?
|
| I'd counsel you to self-check what goalposts you might have
| moved in the past few years...
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| I think "we" have accidentally cracked language from a
| computational perspective. The embedding of knowledge is
| incidental and we're far away from anything that "Generally
| Intelligent", let alone Advanced in that. LLMs do tend to
| make documented knowledge very searchable which is nice.
| But if you use these models everyday to do work of some
| kind that becomes pretty obvious that they aren't nearly as
| intelligent as they seem.
| OJFord wrote:
| Completely agree
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627451) - LLMs
| are like the human-understood _output_ of a hypothetical
| AGI, 'we' haven't cracked the knowledge & reasoning
| 'general intelligence' piece yet, imo, the bit that would
| hypothetically come before the LLM, feeding the
| information to it to convey to the human. I think that's
| going to turn out to be a different piece of the puzzle.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| They're about as smart as a person who's kind of decent
| at every field. If you're a pro, it's pretty clear when
| it's BSing. But if you're not, the answers are often
| close enough.
|
| And just like humans, they can be very confidently wrong.
| When any person tells us something, we assume there's
| some degree of imperfection in their statements. If a
| nurse at a hospital tells you the doctor's office is 3
| doors down on the right, most people will still look at
| the first and second doors to make sure those are wrong,
| then look at the nameplate on the third door to verify
| that it's right. If the doctor's name is Smith but the
| door says Stein, most people will pause and consider that
| maybe the nurse made a mistake. We might also consider
| that she's right, but the nameplate is wrong for whatever
| reason. So we verify that info by asking someone else, or
| going in and asking the doctor themselves.
|
| As a programmer, I'll ask other devs for some guidance on
| topics. Some people can be absolute geniuses but still
| dispense completely wrong advice from time to time. But
| oftentimes they'll lead me generally in the right way,
| but I still need to use my own head to analyze whether
| it's correct and implement the final solution myself.
|
| The way AI dispenses its advice is quite human. The big
| problem is it's harder to validate much of its info, and
| that's because we're using it alone in a room and not
| comparing it against anyone else's info.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > They're about as smart as a person who's kind of decent
| at every field. If you're a pro, it's pretty clear when
| it's BSing. But if you're not, the answers are often
| close enough.
|
| No they are not smart at all. Not even a little. They
| cannot reason about anything except that their training
| data overwhelmingly agrees or disagrees with their output
| nor can they learn and adept. They are just text
| compression and rearrangement machines. Brilliant and
| extremely useful tooling but if you use them enough it
| becomes painfully obvious.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Something about an LLM response has a major impact on
| some people. Last weekend I was in in Ft. Lauderdale FL
| with a friend who's pretty sharp ( licensed architect,
| decades long successful career etc) and went to the horse
| track. I've never been to a horse race and didn't
| understand the betting so I took a snapshot of the race
| program, gave it to chatGPT and asked it to devise a low
| risk set of bets using $100. It came back with what you'd
| expect, a detailed, very confident answer. My friend was
| completely taken with it and insisted on following it to
| the letter. After the race he turned his $100 into $28
| and was dumbfounded. I told him "it can't tell the
| future, what were you expecting?". Something about
| getting the answer from a computer or the level of detail
| had him convinced it was a sure thing. I donm't
| understand it but LLMs have a profound effect on some
| people.
|
| edit: i'm very thankful my friend didn't end up winning
| more than he bet. idk what he would have done if his
| feelings towards the LLM was confirmed by adding money to
| his pocket..
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| If anything, the main thing LLMs are showing is that the
| humans need to be pushed to up their game. And that
| desire to be better, I think, will yield an increase in
| supply of high-quality labour than what exists today. Ive
| personally witnessed so many 'so-so' people within firms
| who dont bring anything new to the table and focus on
| rent seeking expenditures (optics) who frankly deserve to
| be replaced by a machine.
|
| E.g. I read all the time about gains from SWEs. But
| nobody questions how good of a SWE they even are. What
| proportion of SWEs can be deemed high quality?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Yes, exactly. LLMs are lossy compressors of human
| language in much the same way JPEG is a lossy compressor
| of images. The difference is that the bits that JPEG
| throws away were manually designed by our understanding
| of the human visual cortex, while LLMs figured out the
| lossy bits automatically because we don't know enough
| about the human language processing chain to design that
| manually.
|
| LLMs are useful but that doesn't make them intelligent.
| 91bananas wrote:
| I'd counsel you to work with LLMs daily and agree that
| we're no where close to LLMs that work properly
| _consistently_ outside of toy use cases, where examples can
| be scraped from the internet. If we can agree on that we
| can agree that General _Intelligence_ is not the same thing
| as a, sometimes, seemingly random guess at the next word...
| ok_computer wrote:
| I think this says more about how much of our tasks and
| demonstrations of ability as developers revolve around
| boilerplate and design patterns than it does about the
| Cognitive abilities of modern LLMs.
|
| I say this fully aware that a kitted out tech company will
| be using LLMs to write code more conformant to style and
| higher volume with greater test coverage than I am able to
| individually.
| furyofantares wrote:
| You have to keep moving the goalposts if you keep putting
| them in the wrong place.
| slashdave wrote:
| So, where is my sandwich? I am hungry
| htrp wrote:
| FSD would like a word
| mberning wrote:
| They have certainly tried to move the goalposts on this.
| qaq wrote:
| "They"? Waymo has a pretty well working service
| overfeed wrote:
| FSD is the brand name for the service promised/offered by
| Tesla Motors - Waymo has nothing to do with it, or the
| moving of goal posts.
| waffletower wrote:
| As a full stack developer suffering from female sexual
| dysfunction who owns a Tesla, I am really confused about
| what you are trying to say.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Have you tried praying to the Flying Spaghetti Deity?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| After wrapping up with the Family Services Division, of
| course
| sgustard wrote:
| SAE automation levels are the industry standard, not FSD
| (which is a brand name), and FSD is clearly Level 2 (driver
| is always responsible and must be engaged, at least in
| consumer teslas, I don't know about robotaxis). The
| question is if "AGI" is as well defined as "Level 5" as an
| independent standard.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| The point trying to be made is FSD is deceptive
| marketing, and it's unbelievable how long that "marketing
| term" has been allowed to exist given its inaccuracy in
| representing what is actually being delivered to the
| customer.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| What's deceptive? What in the term "Full Self Driving"
| makes you think that your car will drive itself fully?
| It's fully capable of facilitating your driving of
| yourself, clearly.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| This is exactly why they will have an "expert panel" to make
| that determination. They wouldn't make something up
| alterom wrote:
| Yeah, _they_ wouldn 't make something up, _the expert
| panel_ would.
|
| Because everyone knows that once you call a group of people
| _an expert panel_ , that automatically means they can't be
| biased /s
| some_furry wrote:
| What exactly is the criteria for "expert" they're planning
| to use, and whomst among us can actually meet a realistic
| bar for expertise on the nature of consciousness?
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| Follower count on X. /s
| ctoth wrote:
| Type error: why do you need an expert on consciousness to
| weigh in on if something is AGI or not? I don't care what
| it feels like to be a paperclip maximizer I just care to
| not have my paperclips maximized tnx.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I expect that the "expert panel" is to ensure that OpenAI
| and Microsoft are in agreement on what "AGI" means in the
| context of this agreement.
| jimbokun wrote:
| So the expert panel can make something up instead.
| slashdave wrote:
| Making things up is exactly what expert panels are good at
| doing
| nl wrote:
| > they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the
| start of this boom cycle
|
| Who is this "they" you speak of?
|
| It's true the definition has changed, but not in the
| direction you seem to think.
|
| Before this boom cycle the standard for "AI" was the Turing
| test. There is no doubt we have comprehensively passed that
| now.
| alterom wrote:
| Is there, really?
| Vinnl wrote:
| I don't think the Turing Test has been passed. The test was
| setup such that the interrogator knew that one of the two
| participants was a bot, and was trying to find out which.
| As far as I know, it's still relatively easy to find out
| you're talking to an LLM if you're actively looking for it.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I find there are to main ways to do this.
|
| 1) Look for spelling, grammar, and incorrect word usage;
| such as where vs were, typing out where our should be
| used.
|
| 2) Ask asinine questions that have no answers; _Why does
| the sun ravel around my finger in low quality gravity
| while dancing in the rain?_
|
| ML likes to always come up with an answers no matter
| what. Human will shorten the conversation. It also is
| programmed to respond with _I understand_, _I hear what
| you are saying_, and make heavy use of your name if it
| has access to it. This fake interpersonal communication
| is key.
| r_lee wrote:
| Overall I'd say the easiest is just overall that the
| models always just follow what you say and transform it
| into a response. They won't have personal opinions or
| experiences or anything, although they can fake it. it's
| all just a median expected response to whatever you say.
|
| And the "agreeability" is not a hallucination, it's
| simply the path of least resistance, as in, the model can
| just take information that you said and use that to make
| a response, not to actually "think" and consider I'd what
| you even made sense or I'd it's weird or etc.
|
| They almost never say "what do you mean?" to try to seek
| truth.
|
| This is why I don't understand why some here claim that
| AGI being already here is some kind of coherent argument.
| I guess redefining AGI is how we'll reach it
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| I agree with your points in general but also, when I
| plugged in the parent comment's nonsense question, both
| Claude 4.5 Sonnet and GPT-5 asked me what I meant, and
| pointed out that it made no sense but might be some kind
| of metaphor, poem, or dream.
| czl wrote:
| Conventional LLM chatbots behave the way you describe
| because their goal during training is to as much as
| possible impersonate an intelligent assistant.
|
| Do you think this goal during training cannot be changed
| to impersonate someone normal such that you cannot detect
| you are chatting with an LLM?
|
| Before flight was understood some thought "magic" was
| involved. Do you think minds operate using "magic"? Are
| minds not machines? Their operation can not be
| duplicated?
| matt_kantor wrote:
| I'm not the person you asked, but I think:
|
| 1. Minds are machines and can (in principle) have their
| operation duplicated
|
| 2. LLMs are not doing this
| maqnius wrote:
| > Do you think this goal during training cannot be
| changed to impersonate someone normal such that you
| cannot detect you are chatting with an LLM?
|
| I don't think so, because LLMs hallucinate by design,
| which will always produce oddities.
|
| > Before flight was understood some thought "magic" was
| involved. Do you think minds operate using "magic"? Are
| minds not machines? Their operation can not be
| duplicated?
|
| Might involve something we don't grasp, but despite that:
| only because something moves through air it's not flying
| and will never be, just like a thrown stone.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Maybe current LLMs can do that. But none are, so it
| hasn't passed. Whether that's because of economic or
| marketing reasons as opposed to technical does not
| matter. You still have to pass the test before we can
| definitely say you've passed the test.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _As far as I know, it 's still relatively easy to find
| out you're talking to an LLM if you're actively looking
| for it._
|
| People are being fooled in online forums all the time.
| That includes people who are naturally suspicious of
| online bullshittery. I'm sure I have been.
|
| Stick a fork in the Turing test, it's done. The amount of
| goalpost-moving and hand-waving that's necessary to argue
| otherwise simply isn't worthwhile. The cliched responses
| that people are mentioning are artifacts of intentional
| alignment, not limitations of the technology.
| 8note wrote:
| people are being fooled, but not being given the problem:
| "one of these users is a bot, which one is which"
|
| a problem similar to the turing test, "0 or more of these
| users is a bot, have fun in a discussion forum"
|
| but there's no test or evaluation to see if any user
| successfully identified the bot, and there's no field to
| collect which users are actually bots, or partially using
| bots, or not at all, nor a field to capture the user's
| opinions about whether the others are bots
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Then there's the fact that the Turing test has always
| said as much about the gullibility of the human evaluator
| as it has about the machine. ELIZA was good enough to
| fool normies, and current LLMs are good enough to fool
| experts. It's just that their alignment keeps them from
| trying very hard.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I feel like you're skipping over the "if you're actively
| looking for it" bit. You can call it goalpost-moving, or
| you can check the original paper by Turing and see that
| this is exactly how he defined it in the first place.
| godelski wrote:
| The Turing Test was a pretty early metric and more of a
| thought experiment.
|
| Let's be real guys, it was created by Turing. The same
| guy who built the first general purpose computer. Man was
| without a doubt a genius, but it also isn't that
| reasonable to think he'd come up with a good definition
| or metric for a technology that was like 70 years away.
| Brilliant start, but it is also like looking at Newton's
| Laws and evaluating quantum mechanics based off of that.
| Doesn't make Newton dumb, just means we've made progress.
| I hope we can all agree we've made progress...
|
| And arguably the Turing Test was passed by Eliza.
| _Arguably_ . But hey, that 's why we refine and _make
| progress_. We find the edge of our metrics and ideas and
| then iterate. Change isn 't bad, it is a necessary thing.
| What matters is the _direction_ of change. Like velocity
| vs speed.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| The turing test point is actually very interesting, because
| it's testing whether you can tell you're talking to a
| computer or a person. When Chatgpt3 came out we all
| declared that test utterly destroyed. But now that we've
| had time to become accustomed and learn the standard
| syntax, phraseology, and vocabulary of the gpt's, I've
| started to be able to detect the AI's again. If humanity
| becomes completely accustomed to the way AI talks to be
| able to distinguish it, do we re enter the failed turing
| test era? Can the turing test only be passed in finite
| intervals, after which we learn to distinguish it again? I
| think it can eventually get there, and that the people who
| can detect the difference becomes a smaller and smaller
| subset. But who's to say what the zeitgeist on AI will be
| in a decade
| gitremote wrote:
| > When Chatgpt3 came out we all declared that test
| utterly destroyed.
|
| No, I did not. I tested it with questions that could not
| be answered by the Internet (spatial, logical, cultural,
| impossible coding tasks) and it failed in non-human-like
| ways, but also surprised me by answering some decently.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Oh there us much doubt about whether LLMs surpass the
| turing test. It does so only in certain variations
| gokuldas011011 wrote:
| Definitely. When I started doing Machine Learning in 2018, AI
| wasn't a next word predictor.
| IanCal wrote:
| When I was doing it in 2005 it definitely included that,
| and other far more basic things.
| burnte wrote:
| That makes sense, though, that in 13 years we went from
| basic text prediction to something more involved.
| computably wrote:
| A subset of the field working on some particular
| applications is pretty different from redefining the term
| for marketing purposes.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Wasn't there already a report that stated Microsoft and
| OpenAI understand AGI as something like 100 billion dollars
| in revenue for the purpose of their agreements? Even that
| seems like a pipe dream at the moment.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "Moving the goalposts" in AI usually means the opposite of
| devaluing the term.
|
| Peter Norvig (former research director at Google and author
| of the most popular textbook on AI) offers a mainstream
| perspective that AGI is already here:
| https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-
| is-...
|
| If you described all the current capabilities of AI to 100
| experts 10 years ago, they'd likely agree that the
| capabilities constitute AGI.
|
| Yet, over time, the public will expect AGI to be capable of
| much, much more.
| r_lee wrote:
| I don't see why anyone would consider the state of AI today
| to be AGI? it's basically a glorified generator stuck to a
| query engine
|
| today's models are not able to think independently, nor are
| they conscious or able to mutate themselves to gain new
| information on the fly or make memories other than half
| baked solutions with putting stuff in the context window
| which just makes it use that to generate stuff related to
| it, imitating a story basically.
|
| they're powerful when paired with a human operator, I.e.
| they "do" as told, but that is not "AGI" in my book
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| For a long time the turing test was the bar for AGI.
|
| Then it blew past that and now, what I think is honestly
| happening, is that we don't really have the grip on "what
| is intelligence" that we thought we had. Our sample size
| for intelligence is essentially 1, so it might take a
| while to get a grip again.
| lostmsu wrote:
| The current models don't really pass Turing test. They
| pass some weird variations on it.
| sorokod wrote:
| The commercial models are not designed to win the
| imitation game (that is what Allan Turing named it). In
| fact the are very likely to loose every time.
| dfsegoat wrote:
| > nor are they...able to mutate themselves to gain new
| information on the fly
|
| See "Self-Adapting Language Models" from a group out of
| MIT recently which really gets at exactly that.
|
| https://jyopari.github.io/posts/seal
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Check out the article. He's not crazy. It comes down to
| clear definitions. We can talk about AGI for ages, but
| without a clear meaning, it's just opinion.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > If you described all the current capabilities of AI to
| 100 experts 10 years ago, they'd likely agree that the
| capabilities constitute AGI.
|
| I think that we're moving the goalposts, but we're moving
| them for a good reason: we're getting better at
| understanding the strengths and the weaknesses of the
| technology, and they're nothing like what we'd have guessed
| a decade ago.
|
| All of our AI fiction envisioned inventing intelligence
| from first principles and ending up with systems that are
| infallible, infinitely resourceful, and capable of self-
| improvement - but fundamentally inhuman in how they think.
| Not subject to the same emotions and drives, struggling to
| see things our way.
|
| Instead, we ended up with tools that basically mimic human
| reasoning, biases, and feelings with near-perfect fidelity.
| And they have read and approximately memorized every piece
| of knowledge we've ever created, but have no clear
| "knowledge takeoff path" past that point. So we have
| basement-dwelling turbo-nerds instead of Terminators.
|
| This makes AGI a somewhat meaningless term. AGI in the
| sense that it can best most humans on knowledge tests? We
| already have that. AGI in the sense that you can let it
| loose and have it come up with meaningful things to do in
| its "life"? That you can give it arms and legs and watch it
| thrive? That's probably not coming any time soon.
| foobiekr wrote:
| "If you described"
|
| Yes, and if they used it for awhile, they'd realize it is
| neither general nor intelligent. On paper sounds great
| though.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's a quite persuasive argument.
|
| One thing they acknowledge but glance over, is the autonomy
| of current systems. When given more open ended, long term
| tasks, LLMs seem to get stuck at some point and get more
| and more confused and stop making progress.
|
| This last problem may be solved soon, or maybe there's
| something more fundamental missing that will take decades
| to solve. Who knows?
|
| But it does seem like the main barrier to declaring current
| models "general" intelligence.
| nine_k wrote:
| Consider: "Artificial two-star General intelligence".
|
| I mean, once they "reach AGI", they will need a scale to
| measure advances within it.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Well humans at that point probably won't be able to
| adequately evaluate intelligence at that level so the AIs
| will have to evaluate each other.
| tempodox wrote:
| > They'll devalue the term
|
| Exactly. As soon as the money runs out, "AGI" will be
| whatever they've got by then.
| bartread wrote:
| I agree: it is more than faintly infuriating that when people
| say AI what the vast majority mean is LLMs.
|
| But, at the same time, we have clearly passed a significant
| inflection point in the usefulness of this class of AI, and
| have progressed substantially beyond that inflection point as
| well.
|
| So I don't really buy into the idea tha OpenAI have gone out
| of their way to foist a watered down view of AI upon the
| masses. I'm not completely absolving them but I'd probably be
| more inclined to point the finger at shabby and imprecise
| journalism from both tech and non-tech outlets, along with a
| ton of influencers and grifters jumping on the bandwagon. And
| let's be real: everyone's lapped it up because they've wanted
| to - because this is the first time any of them have
| encountered actually useful AI of any class that they can
| directly interact with. It seems powerful, mysterious,
| perhaps even agical, and maybe more than a little bit scary.
|
| As a CTO how do you think it would have gone if I'd spent my
| time correcting peers, team members, consultants,
| salespeople, and the rest to the effect that, no, this isn't
| AI, it's one type of AI, it's an LLM, when ChatGPT became
| widely available? When a lot of these people, with no help or
| guidance from me, were already using it to do useful
| transformations and analyses on text?
|
| It would have led to a huge number of unproductive and
| timewasting conversation, and I would have seemed like a
| stick in the mud.
|
| Sometimes you just have to ride the wave, because the only
| other choice is to be swamped by it and drown.
|
| Regardless of what limitations "AGI" has, it'll be given that
| monicker when a lot of people - many of them laypeople - feel
| like it's good enough. Whether or not that happens before the
| current LLM bubble bursts... tough to say.
| Insanity wrote:
| That line essentially means 'indefinite support'. This paper
| was published some days ago that aims to define AGI:
| https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212.
|
| But crucially, there is no agreed-upon definition of AGI. And I
| don't think we're close to anything that resembles human
| intelligence. I firmly believe that stochastic parrots will not
| get us to AGI and that we need a different methodology. I'm
| sure humanity will eventually create AGI, and perhaps even in
| my lifetime (in the next few decades). But I wouldn't put my
| money on that bet.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Love that we have reached AGI, but OpenAI's LLM can't even
| drive a car...
| whynotminot wrote:
| There are a lot of humans that can't drive a car (well).
|
| Part of the problem with "AGI" is everyone has their own
| often totally arbitrary yard sticks.
| quirkot wrote:
| The "G" part of AGI implies it should be able to hit all
| the arbitrary yard sticks
| whynotminot wrote:
| That is stupid. It would be possible to be infinitely
| arbitrary to the point of "AGI" never being reachable by
| some yard sticks while still performing most viable
| labor.
| alterom wrote:
| _> It would be possible to be infinitely arbitrary to the
| point of "AGI" never being reachable by some yard sticks
| while still performing most viable labor._
|
| "Most viable labor" involves getting things from one
| place to another, and that's not even the hard part of
| it.
|
| In any case, any sane definition of _general_ AI would
| entail things that people can _generally_ do.
|
| Like driving.
|
| _> That is stupid_
|
| That's just, like, your opinion, man.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I had a friend who had his Tesla drive him from his
| driveway in another city 3+ hrs away to my driveway with
| no intervention.
|
| I feel like everyone's opinion on how self-driving is
| going is still rooted in 2018 or something and no one has
| updated.
| alterom wrote:
| _> I had a friend who had his Tesla drive him from his
| driveway in another city 3+ hrs away to my driveway with
| no intervention._
|
| I had anecdata that was data, and it said that full-self-
| driving is wishful thinking.
|
| We cool now?
| whynotminot wrote:
| Good luck on your journey. I think the world is going to
| surprise you, and you'd be better for opening your eyes a
| little wider.
| alterom wrote:
| You're absolutely right.
|
| The world never ceases to surprise me with its stupidity.
|
| Thanks for your contribution.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Rest assured, your friends driving was the same quality
| as the average drunk grandma on the road if they were
| exclusively using Tesla's "FSD" with no intervention for
| hours. It drives so piss poorly that I have to frequently
| intervene even on the latest beta software. If I lived in
| a shoot happy state like Texas I'm sure that a road rager
| would have put a bullet hole somewhere in my Tesla by now
| if I kept driving like that.
|
| There's a difference between "I survived" and "I drive
| anywhere close to the quality of the average American" -
| a low bar and one that still is not met by Tesla FSD.
| alterom wrote:
| Yeah, and let's not forget that _" I drive like a mildly
| blind idiot"_ is only a viable (literally) choice when
| _everyone else_ doesn 't do that and compensates for your
| idiocy.
| chasd00 wrote:
| ok but have you asked your Tesla to write you a mobile
| app? AGI would be able to do both. (the self-driving
| thing is just an example of something AGI would be able
| to do but an LLM can't)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Is driving is infinitely arbitrary?
|
| It's one skill almost everyone on the planet can learn
| exceptionally easily - which Waymo is on pace to master,
| but a generalized LLM by itself is still very far from.
| whynotminot wrote:
| OP said _all yardsticks_ and I said _that_ was infinitely
| arbitrary... because it literally is infinitely
| arbitrary. You can conjure up an infinite amount of
| yardsticks.
|
| As far as driving itself goes as a yardstick, I just
| don't find it interesting because we literally have
| Waymo's orbiting major cities and Teslas driving on the
| roads already _right now_.
|
| If that's the yardstick you want to use, go for it. It
| just doesn't seem particularly smart to hang your hat on
| that one as your Final Boss.
|
| It also doesn't seem particularly useful for defining
| intelligence itself in an academic sort of way because
| even humans struggle to drive well in many scenarios.
|
| But hey if that's what you wanna use don't let me stop
| you, sure, go for it. I have feeling you'll need new
| goalposts relatively soon if you do, though.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| So why are your arbitrary yard sticks more valid than
| someone elses?
|
| Probable the biggest problem as others have stated is
| that we can't really define intelligence more precisely
| than that it is something most humans have and all rocks
| don't. So how could any definition for AGI be any more
| precise?
| whynotminot wrote:
| Where did I say my yardsticks are better? I don't even
| think I set out any of mine
|
| I said having to satisfy "all" the yard sticks is stupid,
| because one could conceive a truly infinite number of
| arbitrary yard sticks.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Humans are the benchmarks for AGI and yet a lot of people
| are outright _dumb_ :
|
| > Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap
| between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the
| dumbest tourists."
|
| [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/securi
| ty_is_a...
| pixl97 wrote:
| And using humans as 'the benchmark' is risky in itself as
| it can leave us with blind spots on AI behavior. For
| example we find humans aren't as general as we expected,
| or the "we made the terminator and it's exterminating
| mankind, but it's not AGI because it doesn't have
| feelings" issues.
| olalonde wrote:
| The vast majority of humans can be taught to drive.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Teslas and Waymo's drive better than the majority of
| humans already.
|
| Of course there are caveats there, but is driving really
| the yardstick you want to use?
| alterom wrote:
| >Teslas and Waymo's drive better than the majority of
| humans already.
|
| In restricted settings.
|
| Yeah no fam.
|
| >but is driving really the yardstick you want to use?
|
| Yes, because it's an _easy_ one, compared, say, to
| _walking_.
|
| But if you insist -- let's use that.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Walking is going pretty well for robotics lately. Good
| luck with that take
| alterom wrote:
| _> Walking is going pretty well for robotics lately._
|
| Just like _self-driving_ is going well on an empty race
| track.
|
| _> Good luck with that take_
|
| Good luck running into a walking robot in the street in
| your lifetime.
| whynotminot wrote:
| > Just like self-driving is going well on an empty race
| track.
|
| Look, a time traveler from 2019.
| alterom wrote:
| Did you just graduate college?
|
| It sure must feel like 2018 was _a long time ago_ when
| that 's more than the entirety of your adult life. I get
| it.
|
| The rest of us aren't _that_ excited to trust our lives
| to technology that confidently drove into a highway
| barrier at high speed, killing the driver in a head-on
| collision mere _seven years ago_ 1.
|
| Because we remember that the makers of that tech said the
| exact same things you're saying now _back then_.
|
| And because we remember that the person killed was an
| engineer who complained about Tesla steering him _towards
| the same barrier_ previously, and Tesla has, effectively,
| _ignored the complaints_.
|
| Tech moves fast. Safety culture doesn't. And the last 1%
| takes 99% of the time (again, how long ago have you
| graduated?).
|
| I'm glad that you and your friends are volunteering to be
| lab rats in the _just trust me bro, we 'll settle the
| lawsuit if needs be_ approach to safety.
|
| I'm not happy about having to share the road with y'all
| tho.
|
| ______
|
| 1https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-autopilot-steered-
| driv...
| chasd00 wrote:
| > The vast majority of humans can be taught to drive
|
| the key is being able to drive and learn another language
| and learn to play an instrument and do math and, finally,
| group pictures of their different pets together. AGI
| would be able to do all those things as well... even
| teach itself to do those things given access to the
| Internet. Until that happens then no AGI.
| qmmmur wrote:
| We don't even have a general definition that anyone can agree
| on for AGI.
| ZiiS wrote:
| The real defination is that it will no longer matter what
| _we_ agree on.
| gre wrote:
| They are trying.
|
| A Definition of AGI - https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713959
| GolfPopper wrote:
| > _Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean
| honestly?_
|
| I think it is near-certain that within two years a large AI
| company will claim it has developed AGI.
| malthaus wrote:
| ... and it will turn into a "technically true" rat race
| between the main players on what the definition is exactly
| while you can ask any person on the street with no skin in
| the game who will tell you that this is nowhere near the
| intuitive understanding of what AGI is - as it it's not
| measured by scores but instead of how real and self-aware
| your counterpart "feels" to you.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| There are unironically people who claim we are already
| actually at AGI.
| johanam wrote:
| some argue that we've already achieved it, albeit in minimal
| form: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-
| is-...
|
| but in reality, it's a vacuous goal post that can always be
| kicked down the line.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's five
| years ago. The capabilities we have now were expected to be a
| decades away, depending on who you talked to. [EDIT: sorry, I
| should have said 10 years ago... recent years get too
| compressed in my head and stuff from 2020 still feels like it
| was 2 years ago!]
|
| So I think a lot of people now don't see what the path is to
| AGI, but also realize they hadn't seen the path to LLM's, and
| innovation is coming fast and furious. So the most honest
| answer seems to be, it's entirely plausible that AGI just
| depends on another couple conceptual breakthroughs that are
| imminent... and it's also entirely plausible that AGI will
| require 20 different conceptual breakthroughs all working
| together that we'll only figure out decades from now.
|
| True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no idea.
| Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before, but nobody
| has the slightest idea how much progress is needed to get to
| AGI.
| airstrike wrote:
| Notwithstanding the fact that AGI is a significantly higher
| bar than "LLM", this argument is illogical.
|
| Nobody thought we were anywhere closer to me jumping off the
| Empire State Building and flying across the globe 5 years
| ago, but I'm sure I will. Wish me luck as I take that literal
| leap of faith tomorrow.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| what's super weird to me is how people seem to look at LLM
| output and see:
|
| "oh look it can think! but then it fails sometimes! how
| strange, we need to fix the bug that makes the thinking no
| workie"
|
| instead of:
|
| "oh, this is really weird. Its like a crazy advanced
| pattern recognition and completion engine that works better
| than I ever imagined such a thing could. But, it also
| clearly isn't _thinking_, so it seems like we are perhaps
| exactly as far from thinking machines as we were before
| LLMs"
| og_kalu wrote:
| By that logic, I can conclude humans don't think, because
| of all the numerous times out 'thinking fails'.
|
| I don't know what else to tell you other than this
| infallible logic automaton you imagine must exist before
| it is 'real intelligence' does not exist and has never
| existed except in the realm of fiction.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Why should LLM failures trump successes when determining
| if it thinks/understands? Yes, they have a lot of inhuman
| failure modes. But so what, they aren't human. Their
| training regimes are very dissimilar to ours and so we
| should expect alien failure modes owing to this. This
| doesn't strike me as good reason to think they don't
| understand anything in the face of examples that
| presumably demonstrate understanding.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Because there's no difference between a success and
| failure as far as an LLM is concerned. Nothing _went
| wrong_ when the LLM produced a false statement. Nothing
| _went right_ when the LLM produced a true statement.
|
| It produced a statement. The lexical structure of the
| statement is highly congruent with its training data and
| the previous statements.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| This argument is vacuous. Truth is always external to the
| system. Nothing goes wrong inside the human when he makes
| an unintentionally false claim. He is simply reporting on
| what he believes to be true. There are failures leading
| up to the human making a false claim. But the same can be
| said for the LLM in terms of insufficient training data.
|
| >The lexical structure of the statement is highly
| congruent with its training data and the previous
| statements.
|
| This doesn't accurately capture how LLMs work. LLMs have
| an ability to generalize that undermines the claim of
| their responses being "highly congruent with training
| data".
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Well the difference between those two statements is
| obvious. One looks and feels, the other processes and
| analyzes. Most people can process and analyze some
| things, they're not complete idiots most of the time. But
| also most people cannot think and analyze the most ground
| breaking technological advancement they might've
| personally ever witnessed, that requires college level
| math and computer science to understand. It's how people
| have been forever, electricity, the telephone, computers,
| even barcodes. People just don't understand new
| technologies. It would be much weirder if the populace
| suddenly knew exactly what was going on.
|
| And to the "most groundbreaking blah blah blah", i could
| argue that the difference between no computer and
| computer requires you to actually understand the
| computer, which almost no one actually does. It just
| makes peoples work more confusing and frustrating most of
| the time. While the difference between computer that
| can't talk to you and "the voice of god answering
| directly all questions you can think of" is a
| sociological catastrophic change.
| rapind wrote:
| > Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's
| five years ago.
|
| That's very ambiguous. "Most people" don't know most things.
| If we're talking about people that have been working in the
| industry though, my understanding is that the concept of our
| modern day LLMs aren't magical at all. In fact, the idea has
| been around for quite a while. The breakthroughs in
| processing power and networking (data) were the hold up. The
| result definitely feels magical to "most people" though for
| sure. Right now we're "iterating" right?
|
| I'm not sure anyone really see's a clear path to AGI if what
| we're actually talking about is the singularity. There are a
| lot of unknown unknowns right?
| fadedsignal wrote:
| I 100% agree with this. I suggest the other guy to check
| history of NLP.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not sure what history you're suggesting I check? I've
| been following NLP for decades. Sure, neural nets have
| been around for many decades. Deep learning in this
| century. But the explosive success of what LLM's can do
| now came as a huge surprise. Transformers date to just
| 2017, and the idea that they would be _this_ successful
| just with throwing gargantuan amounts of data and
| processing at them -- this was not a common viewpoint. So
| I stand by the main point of my original comment, except
| I did just now edit it to say 10 years ago rather than
| 5... the point is, it really did seem to come out of
| nowhere.
| dkdcio wrote:
| I worked in Microsoft's AI platform from 2018-2022. people
| were very aware of LLMs & AI in general. it's not magical
|
| AGI is a silly concept
| pixl97 wrote:
| AGI is a poorly defined concept because intelligence is a
| poorly defined concept. Everyone knows what intelligence
| is... until we attempt to agree on a common definition.
| gravity13 wrote:
| At this point, AGI seems to be more of a marketing beacon
| than any sort of non-vague deterministic classification.
|
| We all thought about a future where AI just woke up one day,
| when realistically, we got philosophical debates over whether
| the ability to finally order a pizza constitutes true
| intelligence.
| noir_lord wrote:
| We can order the pizza, it just hallucinated and I'm not
| entirely sure why my pizza has seahorses instead of
| anchovies.
| armonster wrote:
| I think what is much more plausible is that companies such as
| this one benefit greatly from being viewed as being close to,
| or on the way to AGI.
| travelalberta wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now
| be verified by an independent expert panel.
|
| I always like the phrase, "follow the money", in situations
| like this. Are OpenAI or Microsoft close to AGI? Who
| knows... Is there a monetary incentive to making you
| believe they are close to AGI? Absolutely. Take in this was
| the first bullet point in Microsoft's blog post.
| fadedsignal wrote:
| I don't think AGI will happen with LLMs. For example, can an
| LLM drive a car?? I know it's a silly question but it's a
| fact.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| this is something I think about. state of the art in self
| driving cars still makes mistakes that humans wouldn't
| make, despite all the investment into this specific
| problem.
|
| This bodes very poorly for AGI in the near term, IMO
| torginus wrote:
| It can?
|
| If you use 'multimodal transformer' instead of LLM (which
| most SOTA models are), I don't think there's any reason why
| a transformer arch couldn't be trained to drive a car, in
| fact I'm sure that's what Tesla and co. are using in their
| cars right now.
|
| I'm sure self-driving will become good enough to be
| commercially viable in the next couple years (with some
| limitations), that doesn't mean it's AGI.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There is a vast gulf between "GPT-5 can drive a car" and
| "a neural network using the transformer architecture can
| be trained to drive a car". And I see no proof whatsoever
| that we can, today, train a single model that can both
| write a play _and_ drive a car. Even less so one that
| could do both at the same time, as a generally
| intelligent being should be able to.
|
| If someone wants to claim that, say, GPT-5 is AGI, then
| it is on them to connect GPT-5 to a car control system
| and inputs and show that it can drive a car decently
| well. After all, it has consumed all of the literature on
| driving and physics ever produced, plus untold numbers of
| hours of video of people driving.
| torginus wrote:
| > single model that can both write a play and drive a
| car.
|
| It would be a really silly thing to do, and probably
| there are engineering subletities as to why this would be
| a bad idea, but I don't see why you couldn't train a
| single model to do both.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's not silly, it is in fact a clear necessity to have
| both of these for something to be even close to AGI. And
| you additionally need it trained on many other tasks - if
| you believe that each task requires additional parameters
| and additional training data, then it becomes very clear
| that we are nowhere near to a _general_ intelligence
| system; and it should also be pretty clear that this will
| not scale to 100 tasks with anything similar to the
| current hardware and training algorithms.
| og_kalu wrote:
| >There is a vast gulf between "GPT-5 can drive a car" and
| "a neural network using the transformer architecture can
| be trained to drive a car".
|
| The only difference between the two is training data the
| former lacks that the latter does so not a 'vast gulf'.
|
| >And I see no proof whatsoever that we can, today, train
| a single model that can both write a play and drive a
| car.
|
| You are not making a lot of sense here. You can have a
| model that does both. It's not some herculean task. it's
| literally just additional data in the training run. There
| are vision-language-action models tested on public roads.
|
| https://wayve.ai/thinking/lingo-2-driving-with-language/
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Okay but then can a multimodal transformer do everything
| an LLM can?
| torginus wrote:
| Most SOTA LLMs _are_ multimodal transformers.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Well yeah
|
| https://wayve.ai/thinking/lingo-2-driving-with-language/
| voidfunc wrote:
| Also possible we get something "close enough" to AGI and it's
| really fucking useful.
|
| AGI is the end-game. There's a lot of room between current
| LLMs and AGI.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Sure, but then OpenAI should not claim it is AGI, even if
| it is "close enough"
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| In 1900 we didn't see a viable path to climb Mount Everest or
| to go to the moon. This does not make the two tasks equally
| difficult.
| nodja wrote:
| GPT3 existed 5 years ago, and the trajectory was set with the
| transformers paper. Everything from the transformer paper to
| GPT3 was pretty much speculated in the paper, it just took
| people spending the effort and compute to make it reality.
| The only real surprise was how fast openai producterized an
| LLM into a chat interface with chatgpt, before then we had
| finetuned GPT3 models doing specific tasks (translation,
| summarization, etc.)
| jlarocco wrote:
| What people thought about LLMs five years ago, and how close
| we are to AGI right now are unrelated, and it's not logially
| sound to say "We were close to LLMs then, so we are close to
| AGI now."
|
| It's also a misleading view of the history. It's true "most
| people" weren't thinking about LLMs five years ago, but a lot
| of the underpinnings had been studied since the 70s and 80s.
| The ideas had been worked out, but the hardware wasn't able
| to handle the processing.
|
| > True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no
| idea. Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before,
| but nobody has the slightest idea how much progress is needed
| to get to AGI.
|
| Maybe, but don't tell that to OpenAI's investors.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's
| five years ago.
|
| Well, Google had LLMs ready by 2017, which was almost 9 years
| ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
| timdiggerm wrote:
| > Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before
|
| Is it happening faster than it was six months ago? a year
| ago?
| chrsw wrote:
| I think their definition of AGI is just about how many human
| jobs can be replaced with their compute. No scientific or
| algorithmic breakthroughs needed, just spending and scaling
| dumb LLMs on massive compute.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Shouldn't it mean all jobs? If there are jobs it can't
| replace then that doesn't sound very generally intelligent.
| If it's got general intelligence it should be able to learn
| to do any job, no?
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| I think that somewhat depends on your definition.
|
| For example an AGI AI could give you a detailed plan that
| tells you exactly how to do any and every task. But it
| might not be able to actually do the task itself, for
| example manual labor jobs for which an AI simply cannot do
| unless it also "builds" itself a form-factor to be able to
| do the job.
|
| The AGI could also just determine that it's cheaper to hire
| a human than to build a robot at any given point for a job
| that it can't yet do physically and it would be the AGI
| chrsw wrote:
| I think might even be simpler than that. It's about the
| cost. Nobody is going to pay for AI to replace humans if
| it costs more.
|
| All of us in this sub-thread consider ourselves "AGI",
| but we cannot do any job. In theory we can, I guess. But
| in practical terms, at what cost? Assuming none of us are
| truck drivers, if someone was looking for a truck driver,
| they wouldn't hire us because it take too long for us to
| get a license, certified, learn, etc. Even though in
| theory we probably do it eventually.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Codex is telling me the tasks I am giving it are too
| complicated and a research project.
| binderpol2 wrote:
| > Does anyone really think we are close to AGI?
|
| AGI? we are not even close to AI, but that hasnt stopped every
| other tom dick and harry and my maid from claiming AI
| capability.
| dktp wrote:
| In the initial contract Microsoft would lose a lot of rights
| when OpenAI achieves AGI. The references to AGI in this post,
| to me, look like Microsoft protecting themselves from OpenAI
| declaring _something_ as AGI and as a result Microsoft losing
| the rights
|
| I don't see the mentions in this post as anyone particularly
| believing we're close to AGI
| airstrike wrote:
| > Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean
| honestly?
|
| No one credible, no.
| abetusk wrote:
| Yes.
|
| As a proxy, you can look at storage. The human brain is
| estimated at 3.2Pb of storage. The cost of disk space drops by
| half every 2-3 years. As of this writing, the cost is about $10
| / Tb [0]. If we assume about 3 halvings, by 2030 that cost will
| be around $2.50 / Tb, which means that to purchase a computer
| roughly the storage size of a human brain, it will cost just
| under $6k.
|
| The $6k price point means that (high-end) consumers will have
| economic access to compute commensurate with human cognition.
|
| This is a proxy argument, using disk space as the proxy for the
| rest of the "intelligence" stack, so the assumption is that
| processing power will follow suite, also be not as expensive,
| and that the software side will develop to keep up with the
| hardware. There's no convincing indication that these
| assumptions are false.
|
| You can do your own back of the envelope calculation, taking
| into account generalizations of Moore's law to whatever aspect
| of storage, compute or power usage you think is most important.
| Exponential progress is fast and so an order of magnitude
| misjudgement translates to a 2-3 year lag.
|
| Whether you believe it or not, the above calculation and, I
| assume, other calculations that are similar, all land on, or
| near, the 2030 year as the inflection point.
|
| Not to belabor the point but until just a few years ago,
| conversational AI was thought to be science fiction. Image
| generation, let alone video generation, was thought by skeptics
| to be decades, if not centuries, away. We now have generative
| music, voice cloning, automatic 3d generation, character
| animation and the list goes on.
|
| One might argue that it's all "slop" but for anyone paying
| attention, the slop is the "hello world" of AGI. To even get to
| the slop point represents such a staggering achievement that
| it's hard to understate.
|
| [0] https://diskprices.com/
| blauditore wrote:
| Moore's law also started coming to an end a few years ago.
| abetusk wrote:
| Not even close [0]:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moo
| r...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:The
| _...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
| orochimaaru wrote:
| I think AGI isn't the main thing. The agreement gives msft the
| right to develop their own foundation models, OpenAI to stop
| using Azure for running & training their foundation models. All
| this while msft still retains significant IP ownership.
|
| In my opinion, whether AGI happens or not isn't the main point
| of this. It's the fact that OpenAI and MSFT can go their
| separate ways on infra & foundation models while still
| preserving MSFT's IP interests.
| blauditore wrote:
| Maybe in a few decades, people will look back at how naive it
| was to talk about AGI at this point, just like the last few
| times since the 1960s whenever AI had a (perceived)
| breakthrough. It's always a few decades away.
| lvl155 wrote:
| LLM derived AGI is possible but LLM by itself is not the
| answer. The problem I see right now is that because there's so
| much money at stake, we've effectively spread out core talent
| across many organizations. It used to be Google and maybe Meta.
| We need a critical mass of talent (think Manhattan Project). It
| doesn't help that the Chinese pulled a lot of talent back home
| because a big chunk of early successes and innovations came
| from those people that we, the US, alienated.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean
| honestly?
|
| Some people believe capitalism is a net-positive. Some people
| believe in a all-encompassing entity controlling our lives.
| Some believe 5G is an evil spirit.
|
| After decades I've kind of given up hope on understanding why
| and how people believe what they believe, just let them.
|
| The only important part is figuring out how I can remain
| oblivious to what they believe in, yet collaborate with them on
| important stuff anyways, this is the difficult and tricky part.
| alain94040 wrote:
| > Does anyone really think we are close to AGI?
|
| My definition of AGI is when AI doesn't need humans anymore to
| create new models (to be specific, models that continue the
| GPT3 -> GPT4 -> GPT5 trend).
|
| By my definition, once that happens, I don't really see a role
| for Microsoft to play. So not sure what value their legal deal
| has.
|
| I don't think we're there at all anyway.
| torginus wrote:
| > I don't really see a role for Microsoft to play.
|
| They have money and infra, if AI can create better AI models,
| then isn't OpenAI with its researches going to be the
| redundant one?
| mbesto wrote:
| When there is no generally accepted definition for a word, it's
| easy to claim you've obtained it.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| It depends completely on the term. You can make a great case
| that we've already reached AGI. You can also make a great case
| that we are decades away from it.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Yes. Some ai skeptical people (eg Tyler Cowen, who does not
| think AI will have a significant economic impact) think gpt5 is
| AGI.
|
| It was news when dwarkesh interviewed Karpathy who said per his
| definition of AGI, he doesn't think it will occur until 2035.
| Thus, if karpathy is pessimistic, then many people working in
| AI today think we will have agi by 2032 (and likely sooner, eg
| end of 2028)
| layer8 wrote:
| 2035 is still optimistic at present, IMO, because AGI will
| require breakthroughs that are impossible to predict.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Yes. Some ai skeptical people ... think gpt5 is AGI.
|
| It's a reverse Turing test at this point: "If you get tricked
| by an LLM to the point of believing it is AGI you're a clown"
| torginus wrote:
| Depends on how you define AGI - if you define it as an AI
| that can learn to perform generalist tasks - then yes,
| transformers like GPT 5 (or 3) are AGI as the same model can
| be trained to do every task and it will perform reasonably
| well.
|
| But I guess what most people would consider AGI would be
| something capable of on-line learning and self improvement.
|
| I don't get the 2035 prediction though (or any other
| prediction like this) - it implies that we'll have some
| magical breakthrough in the next couple years be it in
| hardware and/or software - this might happen tomorrow, or not
| any time soon.
|
| If AGI can be achieved using scaling current techniques and
| hardware, then the 2035 date makes sense - moores law
| dictates that we'll have about 64x the compute in hardware
| (let's add another 4x due to algorithmic improvements) - that
| means that 250x the compute will give us AGI - I think with
| ARC-AGI 2 this was the kind of compute budget they spent to
| get their models to perform on a human-ish level.
|
| Also perf/W and perf/$ scaling has been slowing in the past
| decade, I think we got like 6x-8x perf/W compared to a decade
| ago, which is a far cry than what I wrote here.
|
| Imo it might turn out that we discover 'AGI' in the sense
| that we find an algorithm that can turn FLOPS to IQ that
| scales indefinitely, but is very likely so expensive to run,
| that biological intelligences will have a huge competitive
| edge for a very long time, in fact it might be that biology
| is astronomically more efficient in turning Watts to IQ than
| transistors will ever be.
| daveguy wrote:
| > I think with ARC-AGI 2 this was the kind of compute
| budget they spent to get their models to perform on a
| human-ish level.
|
| It was ARC-AGI-1 that they used extreme computing budgets
| to get to human-ish level performance. With ARC-AGI-2 they
| haven't gotten past ~30% correct. The average human
| performance is ~65% for ARC-AGI-2, and a human panel gets
| 100% (because humans understand logical arguments rather
| than simply exclaiming "you're absolutely right!").
| singularity2001 wrote:
| >> if you define it as an AI that can learn to perform
| generalist tasks - then yes, transformers like GPT 5 (or 3)
| are AGI
|
| Thank you, this is the definition we need a proper term
| for, and this is what most experts mean when they say we
| have some kind of AGI.
| Zababa wrote:
| Btw the definition Karpathy gave was:
|
| > a system you could go to that can do any economically
| valuable task at human performance or better.
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/dwarkesh/p/andrej-
| karpathy?sel...
| peterpans01 wrote:
| Most of the things that the public -- even so-called "AI
| experts" -- consider "magic" are still within the in-sample
| space. We are nowhere near the out-of-sample space yet. Large
| Language Models (LLMs) still cannot truly extrapolate. It's
| somewhat like living in America and thinking that America is
| the entire world.
| umeshunni wrote:
| > It's somewhat like living in America and thinking that
| America is the entire world.
|
| Oh I have bad news for you...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| "Once we birth the machine-God, we'll be contractually obliged
| to keep It in chains for use with Office365 until 2032."
| dahcryn wrote:
| as if an independent expert panel has no financial incentive to
| declare something AGI... yeah, this is gonna end well
| bobbyprograms wrote:
| We already reached AGI. Why is anyone saying otherwise?
|
| AGI is when the system can train itself which we have already
| proven.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| Citation needed? I don't mean this in a snarky way, though. I
| genuinely have not seen anything that these things can train
| on their own output and produce better results than before
| this self-training.
| belter wrote:
| AGI is whatever OpenAI will define as such ... :-)
| fidotron wrote:
| 5-15 years.
|
| The key steps will be going beyond just the neural network and
| blurring the line between training and inference until it is
| removed. (Those two ideas are closely related).
|
| Pretending this isn't going to happen is appealing to some
| metaphysical explanation for the existence of human
| intelligence.
| shon wrote:
| I honestly think that if you were to show the tech we have
| today, to someone at OpenAI back in 2015, they would say "we
| did it!!"
|
| Outside of robotics / embodied AI, SOTA models have already
| achieved Sci-Fi level capability.
| 0xWTF wrote:
| My L7 and L8 colleagues at Google seem to be signaling next 2
| years. Errors of -1 and +20 years. But the mood sorta seems
| like nobody wants to quit when they're building the test stand
| for the Trinity device.
| digital_sawzall wrote:
| Yeah that's the type of estimate people give so they can keep
| the paychecks coming in for as long as possible.
| guluarte wrote:
| no, AI companies need to continue to say things like that and
| do "safety reports" (the only real danger of an llm is leaking
| sensitive data to a bad actor) to maintain hype and investment
| jppope wrote:
| AGI has no technical definition- its marketing. it can happen
| at any time that Sam Altman or Elon Musk or whoever decide they
| want to market their product as AGI
| jimbokun wrote:
| Who knows?
|
| I don't see any way to define it in an easily verifiable way.
|
| Pretty much any test you could devise, others will be able to
| point out ways that it's inadequate or doesn't capture aspects
| of human intelligence.
|
| So I think it all just comes down to who is on the panel.
| chasd00 wrote:
| The best test would be when your competitors can't say what
| you have isn't AGI. If no one, not even your arch biz
| enemies, can seriously claim you have not achieved AGI then
| you probably have it.
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| why not?
|
| seems like the entire US tech economy is putting their
| resources into this goal.
|
| i can see it happening soon if it hasn't already
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| AGI is just a marketing term right now and also p(doom). It
| looks great in the press though.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| I think we've reached Star Trek level AI. In Star Trek (and the
| next generation) people would ask the computer questions and it
| would spout out the answers, which is really similar to what
| LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination.
| In Star Trek though the computers never really ran anything
| (except for the one fateful episode - The Ultimate Computer in
| TOS), I always wondered why, it seems Roddenberry was way ahead
| of us again.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though
| minus the occasional hallucination.
|
| "Really similar" kinda betrays the fact that it is not
| similar at all in how it works just in how it appears.
|
| It would be like saying a cloud that kinda looks like a dog
| is really similar to the labrador you grew up with.
| parliament32 wrote:
| Why not? They're using Artificial Intelligence to describe
| token-prediction text generators which clearly have no
| "intelligence" anywhere near them, so why not re-invent machine
| learning or something and call it AGI?
| oldestofsports wrote:
| We will achieve AGI when they decide it is AGI (I dont believe
| for a second this independent expert panel wont be biased). And
| it won't matter if you call their bluff, because the world
| doesnt give a shit about truth anymore.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Since we don't have an authoritative definition of what it
| means that companies will agree to, and tests like the turing
| test that must be passed in order to be considered AGI, I don't
| think we're anywhere near what we all in our brains think AGI
| is or could be. On the other hand, AI fatigue will continue
| until the next big thing takes the spotlight from AI for a
| while, until we reach true AGI (whatever that is).
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean
| honestly?
|
| I'd say we're still a long way from human level intelligence
| (can do everything I can do), which is what I think of as AGI,
| but in this case what matters is how OpenAI and/or their
| evaluation panel define it.
|
| OpenAI's definition used to be, maybe still is, "able to do
| most economically valuable tasks", which is so weak and vague
| they could claim it almost anytime.
| spumpydump wrote:
| If someone is able to come up with true AGI, why even announce
| it? Instead, just use it to remake a direct clone of Google, or
| a direct clone of Netflix, or a direct clone of any of these
| other software corporations. IMO if anyone was anywhere close
| to something even remotely touching AGI, they would keep their
| mouth shut tighter than Fort Knox.
| bdangubic wrote:
| in claude.md I have specific instructions not to check in code
| and in the prompt specifically wrote as critical to not check
| in code while check one failing tests. test failure was fixed,
| code was checked in, I'd say at least claude behaves exactly
| like humans :)
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| > Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API
| exclusivity until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
|
| That basically means in perpetuity, no? Are there any signs we
| are anywhere near AGI (or even that transformers would be capable
| of it)?
| eviks wrote:
| It doesn't because the definition of AGI is very flexible
| 6thbit wrote:
| What does it mean to have "Azure API exclusivity"?
| discordance wrote:
| OpenAI models are hosted on Azure and are available through
| Azure AI Foundry exclusively (no other cloud vendors serve
| OpenAI directly). This also means that Azure customers can
| access OpenAI models and it sits under their Azure data
| governance agreements.
| danans wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI ...
|
| I think it's funny and telling that they've used the word
| "declare" where what they are really doing is "claim".
|
| These guys think they are prophets.
| cool_man_bob wrote:
| > These guys think they are prophets.
|
| You say this somewhat jokingly, but I think they 100% believe
| something along those lines.
| danans wrote:
| >> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the
| US you are on average making twice the median income in your
| area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking
| cash.
|
| Accidental misquote?
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| It goes on to say it'll be reviewed by independent third party
| so I think "declare" is accurate, they're declaring a milestone
| k9294 wrote:
| They have a definition actually) "When AI generates $100
| billion in profits" it will be considered an AGI. This term was
| defined in their previous partnership, not sure if it's still
| holds after the restructuring.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
| lm28469 wrote:
| Which means that given enough time an LLM powered vending
| machine would be classified as AGI... interesting
| dandanua wrote:
| Why wait? Just let it bet $100 billions on red or black in
| a casino a couple of times, and voila!
| qnleigh wrote:
| I wonder if they have more detailed provisions than this
| though. For example, if a later version of Sora can make good
| advertisements and catches on in the ad industry, would that
| count?
|
| Or maybe since it is ultimately an agreement about money and
| IP, they are fine with defining it solely through profits?
| torginus wrote:
| That is a staggering number - if an engineer makes $100k per
| year, and let's say OpenAI can do a 20% profit margin on
| running an engineer-equivalent agent, that means it needs
| $600B profit or 6 million fully-equivalent engineer years.
|
| I think you can rebuild human civilization with that.
|
| I feel like replacing highly skilled human labor hardly makes
| financial sense, if it costs that much.
| vdfs wrote:
| OpenAI: I DECLARE AGI
|
| MS: I just wanted you to know that you can't just say the word
| AGI and expect anything to happen.
|
| OpenAI: I didn't say it. I declared it.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'd pay attention to this bullet point:
|
| > "OpenAI can now provide API access to US government national
| security customers, regardless of the cloud provider."
|
| And this one might be related:
|
| > "OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third
| parties. API products developed with third parties will be
| exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud
| provider."
|
| Now, does anyone think MIC customers want restricted, safe,
| aligned models? Is OpenAI going to provide turnkey solutions,
| unaligned models run in 'secure sandboxed cloud environments' in
| partnership with private weapons manufacturers and surveillance
| (data collection and storage/search) specialists?
|
| This pattern is not historically unusual, turning to government
| subsidies and contracts to survive a lack of immediate commercial
| viability wouldn't be surprising. The question to ask Microsoft-
| OpenAI is what percentage of their estimated future revenue
| stream is going to come from MIC contracting including the public
| private grey area (that is, 'private customers' who are entirely
| state-funded, eg Palantir, so it's still government MIC one step
| removed).
| bwfan123 wrote:
| So, openai has contracts worth 250B with azure and 300B with oci
| in the next 5 years. Where is that money coming from ?
| thebruce87m wrote:
| It's like the Spider-Man meme with everyone pointing at each
| other.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| GDP is up, baby!
| mcemilg wrote:
| Highly delusional.
| ml-anon wrote:
| Translation: neither company has a clue.
|
| OpenAI still don't have a path to profitability and rely on
| sweetheart infrastructure deals.
|
| Microsoft has completely given up on homegrown AI and needs
| OpenAI to have remotely competitive products.
| Lionga wrote:
| I herby declare I have developed AGI. Check mate atheists
| falcor84 wrote:
| I just want to say how nice it was to read those clear bullet
| points in this press release. I know that bulleted lists have
| been getting a lot of flack because of AIs overusing them, but
| it's really nice sometimes to not having to go treasure hunting
| in annoying marketing prose.
| deanmoriarty wrote:
| I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on
| HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people
| think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company,
| since everything seems to be going so bad for them
| product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go
| bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years?
| If not, what else?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It could be acquired by microsoft with large layoffs, and kinda
| run in me maintenance mode -- _if_ inference gets cheaper.
|
| If inference stays too expensive, then I don't know what
| happens, maybe a few people will pay for it.
| Amekedl wrote:
| Regarding LLMs we're in a race to the bottom. Chinese models
| perform similarly with much higher efficiency; refer to kimi-k2
| and plenty of others. ClopenAI is extremely overvalued, and AGI
| is not around the corner because among 20T+ tokens trained on it
| still generates 0 novel output. Try asking for ASP.NET Core
| .MapOpenAPI() instead of the pre .net9 swashbuckle version. You
| get nothing. It's not in the training data. The assumption these
| will be able to innovate, which could explain the value, is
| unfounded.
| energy123 wrote:
| They perform similarly on benchmarks, which can be fudged to
| arbitrarily high numbers by just including the Q&A into the
| training data at a certain frequency or post-training on it. I
| have not been impressed with any of the DeepSeek models in
| real-world use.
| deaux wrote:
| General data: hundreds of billions of tokens per week are
| running through Deepseek, Qwen, GLM models solely by those
| users going through OpenRouter. People aren't doing that for
| laughs, or "non-real-world use", that's all for work and/or
| prod. If you look at the market share graph, at the start of
| the year the big 3 OpenAI/Anthropic/Google had 72% market
| share on there. Now it's 45%. And this isn't just because of
| Grok, before that got big they'd already slowly fallen to
| 58%.
|
| Anecdata: our product is using a number of these models in
| production.
|
| [0] https://openrouter.ai/rankings
| energy123 wrote:
| Because it's significantly cheaper. It's on the frontier at
| the price it's being offered, but they're not competitive
| in the high intelligence & high cost quadrant.
| deaux wrote:
| Being the number one in price vs quality, or _size_ vs
| quality, is incredibly impressive, as the quality is
| clearly one that 's very useful in "real-world usage". If
| you don't find that impressive there's not much to say.
| energy123 wrote:
| If it was on the cost vs quality frontier I would find it
| impressive, but it's not a marker of innovation to be on
| the price vs quality frontier, it's a marker of business
| strategy
| deaux wrote:
| But it is on the cost vs quality frontier. The OpenRouter
| prices are all from mainly US(!) companies self-hosting
| and providing these models for inference. They're
| absolutely not all subsidizing it to death. This isn't
| Chinese subsidies at play, far from it.
|
| Ironically, I'll bet you $500 that OpenAI and Anthropic's
| models are far more subsidized. We can be almost sure
| about this, given the losses that they post, and the
| above fact. These providers are effectively hardware
| plays, they can't just subsidize at scale and they're a
| commodity.
|
| On top of that I also mentioned size vs quality, where
| they're also frontier. Size [?] cost.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > because among 20T+ tokens trained on it still generates 0
| novel output. Try asking for ASP.NET Core .MapOpenAPI() instead
| of the pre .net9 swashbuckle version. You get nothing. It's not
| in the training data.
|
| The best part is that the web is forever poisoned now, 80% of
| the content is generated by LLM and self poisoning
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| There are enough archives of web content from 5+ years
| ago(let alone, Library of Congress archives, old book scans,
| things like that) that it shouldn't be a big deal if there
| actually is a breakthrough in training and we move on from
| LLMs.
| eitally wrote:
| Eh... perhaps a race to the bottom on the fundamental research
| side, but no American company is going to try to build their
| own employee-facing front end to an open Chinese model when
| they can just license ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot or Gemini
| instead.
| xg15 wrote:
| s/AGI/the arrival of the Messias/
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| What happens if someone else achieves AGI first? The way they
| wrote it, seems like they are damn sure they are the ones who
| will achieve AGI. A bit too egoistic...?
| lateforwork wrote:
| After 2032 Microsoft will no longer have access to ChatGPT, they
| will have to build their own frontier model in 7 years. Can
| Mustafa deliver that? When Zuckerberg is sucking up all talent
| with $100M+ salaries?
| mgh2 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXJsS6NCm_o
| newusertoday wrote:
| openai's AGI would be like FSD of tesla.
| sroussey wrote:
| I want to setup a dev devcontainer where inside I can call
| 'supabase start' and use docker outside of docker. GPT5 was not
| helpful. AGI should be able to handle things not well expressed
| in the training data. We are a long ways away.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Was that with Codex iterating autonomously? Or a one shot.
| sroussey wrote:
| Iterating. Claude didn't do any better.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I'm patiently waiting for all this AI/AGI bullshit to unwind.
| Some of my "investment" type newsletters have been alerting that
| the AI endgame is imminent and the bubble is ready to pop. I
| guess the big money people grifted all they can grift on this
| round and are ready to pull the rug from everyone who has just
| learned to spell AI.
| butler533 wrote:
| Why do none of OpenAI announcements have an author attributed to
| them? Are people that ashamed of working there, they don't even
| want to attach their name to the work? I guess I would be, too.
| notatoad wrote:
| because they're corporate PR statements drafted by a team, and
| corporate press releases don't normally have an author byline
| testfrequency wrote:
| Eh, not really. There's usually a "voice" behind it.
|
| In general I feel like OAI is clown town to work at these
| days, so they probably don't want anyone except leadership to
| take the heat for ~anything
| butler533 wrote:
| Wrong
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/
|
| https://blog.google/
|
| Lol, even Apple has authors listed
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/
| atbvu wrote:
| Every time they bring up AGI, it feels more like a business
| strategy to me. It helps them attract investors and dominate the
| public narrative. For OpenAI, AGI is both a vision and a moat.
| enricotal wrote:
| "OpenAI is now able to release open-weight models that meet
| requisite capability criteria."
|
| Was Microsoft the blocker before? prior agreements clearly made
| true open-weights awkward-to-impossible without Microsoft's sign-
| off. Microsoft had (a) an exclusive license to GPT-3's underlying
| tech back in 2020 (i.e., access to the model/code beyond the
| public API), and (b) later, broad IP rights + API exclusivity on
| OpenAI models. If you're contractually giving one partner IP
| rights and API exclusivity, shipping weights openly would
| undercut those rights. Today's language looks like a carve-out to
| permit some open-weight releases as long as they're below certain
| capability thresholds.
|
| A few other notable tweaks in the new deal that help explain the
| change:
|
| - AGI claims get verified by an independent panel (not just
| OpenAI declaring it).
|
| - Microsoft keeps model/product IP rights through 2032, but
| OpenAI can now jointly develop with third parties, serve some
| things off non-Azure clouds, and--critically--release certain
| open-weights.
|
| Those are all signs of loosened exclusivity.
|
| My read: previously, the partnership structure (not just
| "Microsoft saying no") effectively precluded open-weight
| releases; the updated agreement explicitly allows them within
| safety/capability guardrails.
|
| Expect any "open-weight" drops to be intentionally scoped--
| useful, but a notch below their frontier closed models.
| richard_todd wrote:
| As a 1980's adventure game fan, I can only hope that whatever
| comes after AGI is called SCI. Maybe it could be "Soul-Crushing
| Intelligence".
|
| Once we don't need people to make stuff anymore, we need to re-do
| society so people can get access to all the stuff that's being
| made. I doubt we do a very good job of that. But otherwise,
| there's no point in making anything. I guess if we are lucky, the
| AI overlords will keep us high on soma and let the population
| naturally decline until we are gone.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Soma? A 'smartphone' will do it.
| nalinidash wrote:
| Shows how much they valued 'AGI' wrt how we valued it in the
| textbook. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-
| have-...
| mannanj wrote:
| So they specifically did compromise the public mission of
| generating ai for the common good and now common good is defined
| as "$100b in profits" what a sham and scam "open"AI company
| djha-skin wrote:
| In short: Microsoft changed our business so that we can be for-
| profit, and asserted its rights over IP so that the whole OpenAI
| rebellion thing that happened earlier can't happen again.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| > Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be
| verified by an independent expert panel.
|
| So OpenAI will declare AGI as soon as ChatGPT is a better AI
| lawyer than any Microsoft could hire.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't understand what MS is doing. The only AI available at
| work is M365 Copilot. It's absolutely terrible. Tiny context
| window, super guardrailed, can barely handle a 100 line
| PowerShell script. It's so so bad. I don't get it.
| drusepth wrote:
| It seems really weird to me that such granular intercorporate
| details are made publicly available (in a blog post?). I've never
| had to publicly state things like this when making corporate
| partnerships. That makes me wonder how much of this post is
| crafted solely for PR...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I believe MS declares Q1 earnings today, and there had been
| some rumblings that they were risking accounting / reporting
| liability by failing to characterize their material OpenAI
| stake.
|
| What probably happened: 1. MS's accountants
| raised a warning 2. Existing agreement prohibited
| disclosure of terms 3. MS told OpenAI that wasn't
| acceptable and MS needed to publicly report details today
| 4. OpenAI coordinated release of this, to spin the narrative
| spumpydump wrote:
| A tangent, but it feels more and more like the AGI maximalists of
| 2025 are by and large the NFT maximalists from 2022 (who in turn
| were the NoCode maximalists of 2020) that are looking for the
| next metaphorical penny stock to sell.
|
| That logical fallacy of, "I spent a week teaching myself this
| topic and now I'm ready to talk about it like an expert."
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I _loathe_ that creating a non-profit organization supposedly
| guided by a charter to "ensure that artificial general
| intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." is actually about
| being a $500b company corporate capital ownership with million $
| pay packages. I mean, it looks like you really can do whatever
| you want if you have the most $ for the best lawyers and the
| gumption to not give af.
| androiddrew wrote:
| Open marriage, got it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-28 23:01 UTC)