All: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: the one in our code—not the world) is a thing of the past.
I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads, but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of the page to read all the comments, or like this:
Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure, but Microsoft can now capture even a bigger slice of THE FUTURE than it was possible with OpenAI investment.
It's easy to cherry-pick examples from an era where Microsoft wasn't the most successful. The current leadership seems competent and the stock growth of the company reflects that.
"... In the two years since the acquisition announcement, GitHub has reported a 41% increase in status page incidents. Furthermore, there has been a 97% increase in incident minutes, compared to the two years prior to the announcement..."
Speaking as someone who uses github multiple times a day, I think I've only actually noticed 1-2 downtimes in the past year. On the other hand, I've used several of the beta features that have come out, including copilot and the evolving github actions.
That's quite a goalpost shift. The original claim was that Microsoft ruins companies. Your rebuttal to LinkedIn as a counterexample is that they haven't made it better. This does not support the claim that they've ruined it.
> GitHub has been significantly less reliable since Microsoft bought it and Actions has been a disaster of an experience.
Not unreliable enough to be a problem though, and Actions seems to be a decent experience for plenty of people.
The simple fact with GitHub is that it is _the_ primary place to go looking for, or post your, open source code, and it is the go-to platform for the majority of companies looking for a solution to source code hosting.
Your comment about LinkedIn is true, but where is the nearest competition in its' space?
MS is destined to be substantially better than their previous owners. Your right in that it may be too early to predict the financial success, but I am very happy to see MS as the new owners of Activision, no matter what happens.
> only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without disrupting user experience?
Excuse you? Greater where? Github was an amazing revolution, unique of its kind. Microsoft didn't kill it but didn't make it even 1% better for the users, just turned it into a cash cow. Linkedin is currently a PoS.
I think it can be argued that giving free private repos to user is a 1% increase. Or what about private vulnerability reporting for open source projects. And so on. Github has gotten a lot of new free functionality since Microsoft bought it. It sounds like you just have not been paying attention.
Edit: Nevermind, I see you refer to Microsoft as M$. That really says it all.
Despite porting it from Java to C++, Bedrock (Microsoft's rewrite of Minecraft) somehow has worse performance and bugs than vanilla Minecraft. (Also, a bunch of it is somehow in JavaScript?)
The problem with arguing with people like that who cherry pick is even after you provide examples, they will generally respond by just cherry-picking your examples instead of acknowledging the actual point you made
Except the founders weren't included in the Skype deal. Microsoft has OpenAI's two founders and they're highly motivated to show that OpenAI is nothing without them which in time it may soon be. I openly await when Sam and Greg ship a product in say two years time.
Meanwhile Microsoft wins if OpenAI stays dominant and wins even bigger if Sam and Greg prevail. Some day soon they may teach this story at Harvard Business School.
- Github Purchase, Linkedin Purchase
- Aligned Microsoft towards "openness" culturally
- VS Code + Typescript
- Partnership with Open AI which might make bing actually be used
might be missing some more but Satya is like a S tier CEO, compared to Sundar who doesn't seem very good at his role.
Did MS do anything with Linux before Sataya? At present I believe that the bulk of their Azure hosts are running Linux - their own distro. And AFAIK it is successful.
Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with their other services. In my personal opinion, as someone who loved Skype before Microsoft got involved with it, Teams is complete trash, and impossible to work with in a business environment.
> Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with their other services.
This is a win from Microsoft's perspective. They don't have to have the best group messenger around, but having a significant office product being dominated by another company would be a massive risk to Microsoft, and Teams has prevented that.
Not every swing is going to be a home run. Billion dollar investments sound like a lot but not for companies of this size. They are small to medium sized bets.
What’s the evidence behind “they got the best part of their team?”
It seems to me roughly all of the value of OpenAI’s products is in the model itself and presumably the supporting infrastructure, neither of which seem like they’re going to MSFT (yet?).
Eh, seems like an ambitious read, and obviously if they actually wanted to give Sam leverage it would’ve required saying “I will leave if he’s not reinstated,” not a more generic statement of solidarity.
Yeah this is much much less ambiguous than the Twitter things. At least answers my question of, "is there actually that much support for Altman?" Now the second question, much more important and still ambiguous IMO, is whether these people will actually resign to do this. The letter just says they "may" resign, which leaves really the last thing you want in an ultimatum like this: ambiguity.
he was going to until a time traveler told he Yahoo's actually get rich accidentally in the future after investing in Alibaba so he couldn't bear it /s
I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team? I would wager a substantial sum that Altman has not touch anything technical (let alone related to AI) in a very long time. He certainly showed he is a very good operator, networker and executer, but that doesbt give you the technical expertise to build state of the art AI.
If he manages to get a significant amount of the OpenAI engineers to jump ship maybe, but even for those who are largely motivated by money, how is MS going to offer the same opportunity as when they joined for equity with OpenAI? Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
> I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team?
Recruiting. At the end of the day, that's the most important job a CEO has. If they can recruit the best AI people, they're the most formidable AI team.
> Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
I would wager very heavily that they are. My guess is Satya more or less promised Sam that he'd match comp for anybody who wants to leave OpenAI.
If I was a SE/MLE at OpenAI , and I had a choice between the nonprofit OpenAI and MS, I'd follow Sam to MS. This is assuming I had profit sharing contracts in place.
There's a current fashion for tech "leaders" (bosses, really) to try to imbue in their staff a kind of cultish belief in the company and its leader. Personally, I find these efforts extremely offputting. I'm thinking of the kind of saccharine corporate presentations from people like Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes; it evidently appeals to some kinds of people, but I run a mile from cults.
My guess is that a lot of the people that will follow Sam and Gregg are that kind of cult-follower.
The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority, Yukio Mishima. You reveal more here about your own psychology than those who have a mission that they believe in and are passionate about. It's always easy to criticise from the sidelines.
I don’t get it too. It’s akin to claiming that by hiring an Oracle executive you can build the best database tech. A little stretch but still. Chances are I’ll never understand how things like that work, because there must be few truths about humans my mind resists to believe.
My uneducated guess is that OpenAI really screwed up the PR part and the current Microsoft’s claims are more on the overall damage control / fire suppression side.
I'm not sure I follow this chain of arguments, which I hear often. So, a technology becomes possible, that has the potential to massively disrupt social order - while being insanely profitable to those who employ it. The knowledge is already out there in scientific journals, or if it's not, it can be grokked via corporate espionage or paying huge salaries to the employees of OpenAI or whoever else has it.
What exactly can a foundation in charge of OpenAI do to prevent this unethical use of the technology? If OpenAI refuses to use it to some unethical goal, what prevents other, for profit enterprises, from doing the same? How can private actors stop this without government regulation?
Sounds like Truman's apocryphal "the Russian's will never have the bomb". Well, they did, just 4 years later.
I think the last couple decades have demonstrated the dangers of corporate leadership beholden to whims of shareholders. Jack Welch-style management where the quarterly numbers always go up at the expense of the employee, the company, and the customer has proven to be great at building a house of cards that stands just long enough for select few to make fortunes before collapsing. In the case of companies like GE or Boeing, the fallout is the collapse of the company or a “few” hundred people losing their lives in place crashes. In the case of AI, the potential for societal-level destructive consequences is higher.
A non-profit is not by any means guaranteed to avoid the dangers of AI. But at a minimum it will avoid the greed-driven myopia that seems to be the default when companies are beholden to Wall Street shareholders.
I don't think cherry-picked examples mean much. But even so, you don't seem to be answering the question, which was "how will being a non-profit stop other people behaving unethically?"
Look up the reason OpenAI was founded. The idea was exactly that someone would get there first, and it better be an entity with beneficial goals. So they set it up to advance the field - which they have been doing successfully - while having a strict charter that would ensure alignment with humanity (aka prevent it from becoming a profit-driven enterprise).
In your world yes, but in another, nonprofits are able to work in research that the Government should not, cannot or is too inefficient at ever getting working.
I'm no embarrased billionaire, but there is a place for both.
Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI.
The argument would go something like this:
MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and its mission.
I am sure Sutskever knows openai as an economically competitive entity has been living on borrowed time. this is a global arms race and this tech will bleed out everywhere. implementing LLMs is not rocket science per se and there are multiple places in the world this work can be done.
the bottleneck right now is mostly compute I think, and openai does not have the resources or expertise to allieviate that bottleneck on a timescale that can save them.
Since the board was never clear what Altman did, you could make flip the parties and your breach of contract argument holds about as much water. Plus MS can resort to the playground "they started it" argument.
For Microsoft , 2% loss in stock value on this news on Friday was $60 billion, so writing off $10B and giving another $50B to form a team is still a great deal.
For Sam , he got more than what he was asking and a better prospect to become CEO of Microsoft when Satya leaves. Satya lead cloud division, which was the industry growth market at that time before becoming CEO and now sam is leading AI division , the next growth market.
Ilya still lost in all of this , he managed to get back the keys of a city from sam , who now got this keys to the whole country . Eventually sam will pull everyone out of the city in to rest of his country. Microsoft just needs a few openai employees to join them . They just need data and GPU , openai has reached its limits for getting more data and was begging for more private data while Microsoft holds worlds data, they will just give a few offers to business or free Microsoft products in return of using their data or use their own. I think it’s the end for openAI.
10 billion was potential investment. They transfer that in tranches, so lot of it is still in MS bank. They already have access to GPT3/4/turbo + Dalle 2/3. Plus with its hordes of lawyers, it will be an uphill battle for OpenAI to make MS lose.
Sure, they can but that would be against all the safe alignment values they are pushing. They'll lose billions in current and potential investment and will spend the life in lawsuits. Also, govt may not like giving away cutting age tech to China.
Satya simply had to move quickly to restore shareholder confidence. I'm not convinced that its actually desirable for Microsoft to be fully in the driving seat. Hopefully the new division will have autonomy.
Microsoft will not have actually paid $10B as a single commitment, in fact the financials of OpenAI appear to be alarming from the recent web chatter. OpenAI are possibly close to collapse financially as well as organizationally.
Whatever Satya does will be aimed at isolating Microsoft and its roadmap from that, his job is actually also on the line for this debacle.
The OpenAI board have ruined their credibility and organization.
Agreed, Satya is a first rate executive, other than Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, I can't really think of anyone in the same league.
There was a lot of discussion on HN the past few days regarding the importance (or lack thereof) of a CEO to an organization. It may be the case that most executives are interchangeable and attributing success to them is not merited, but in the case of the aforementioned, I think it is merited.
This whole weekend will probably be a case study in both Corporate Governance (Microsoft may look bad here for not anticipating the problem) and Negotiation (a masterclass by Satya: gave Ilya what he wanted and got most of OpenAI's commercial potential anyway).
As much as I dislike Microsoft: they played this exactly right. No boardseat: no culpability or conflict of interest, catch the falling pieces and reposition themselves stronger. What makes you say they didn't anticipate the problem? If they had anticipated it I don't see what else they could have done without making themselves part of the problem.
1. When they invested in Open AI it had a more mature board (in particular Reid Hoffman) and afterwards they lost a few members without replacing them. That was probably something Microsoft could have influenced without making themselves part of the problem.
2. They received a call one minute before the decision was made public. That shouldn't happen to a partner that owns 49% of the company you just fired a CEO from.
Yes, but both of those are not Microsoft's doing but the OpenAI board's doing. You don't just get to name someone to a board without the board to agree to it and normally this happens as a condition of for instance an investment or partnership.
Nadella was rightly furious about this, the tail wagged the dog there. And this isn't over yet: you can expect a lot of change on the OpenAI side.
Yes, that probably was a mistake, it should have come with more protections. But I haven't seen any documents on the governance other than what is in the media now and there is a fair chance that MS did have various protections but that the board simply ignored those.
Don't forget, MS has a board as well. One Satya reports to the same way Sam reported to the OpanAI one. Potantially loosong 10 billion is nothing the board will just shrug off.
Yup back pats from the board to Satya. Only 10 billion to get their foot in the door at OpenAI and now they can ransack all their talent. How many billions would it cost to develop that independently? What a saving.
You seem to have missed the entire point of the comment you’re replying to.
The money was promised in tranches, and probably much of it in the form of spare Azure capacity. Microsoft did not hand OpenAI a $10B check.
Satya gives away something he had excess of, and gets 75% of the profits that result from its use, and half of the resulting company. Gives him an excuse to hoard Nvidia GPUs.
If it goes to the moon he’s way up. If it dies he’s down only a fraction of the $10B. If it meanders along his costs are somewhat offset, and presumably he can exit at some point.
If the board is unhappy about that they are idiots and should not be board members.
Absolutely no one could have predicted Sam being removed as CEO without anyone knowledge until it happened.
But regardless a 10b investment has yields huge results for MS. MS is using openAI tech, they aren’t dependent on the openAI api or infrastructure to provide their AI in every aspect of MS products.
That 10b investment has prob paid itself back already and MS is leveraging AI faster than anyone else and has a stronger foothold on the market.
If the board can’t look past what 10b got then. I wouldn’t have faith in the board.
Given it's Microsoft we're talking about, it's more likely they use it to find new and novel ways to shove Edge, OneDrive, Teams and Bing down your throat whenever you use any of their products.
TBH We are living in the outcome of the $10B investment. Google is in a weaker position in search, with egg on their face. Microsoft appears (with or without ChatGPT) uniquely positioned to monopolize on this new AI future we're heading into with or without OpenAI as a company.
Yes directly, the $10B investment in the company itself may be a write off. But it's not just about that.
Microsoft got Copilot. They were first to establish the brand. OpenAI technologies let them do it. I don't know how much Copilot brand cost, but right now when you're thinking about AI-assisted programming, Copilot is the first thing comes in mind. So probably they got something in return.
Not only Github copilot but the general copilot integrations announced at Ignite for Microsoft 365 and other apps means a much deeper full on assistant integration for whole ecosystem.
> For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or something.
Nah it would make it too understandable. It's Microsoft, they'll just rename Bing to Cortana Series X 365. And they'll keep Cortana alive but as a totally different product.
I would say this is a better outcome for what remains of OpenAI.
a New startup would have created more exodus that Microsoft. Doubt many brilliant researchers would want to be Employee number 945728123 of Microsoft when the market is theirs at this moment.
I did not say the don't have and it's precisely because the do have that is less likely to attract the kind of people that make a difference. Less room to move and less room to be distinguished. Case in point these did not join that renowned group in the first place but joined OpenAI an obscure not renowned group and I guarantee you it's not because MS was not interested.
> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI
How so? I don't get the hype.
OpenAI trained truly ground breaking models that were miles ahead of anything the world had seen before. Everything else was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at best, average. They called their flagship product "ChatGPT", a term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a random string of letters to the average person. They had no mobile app for a long time. Their web app had some major bugs.
Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success by far and large hinges on their game-changing models. And by extension, the bulk of the credit goes to their AI research/tech teams.
I have the complete opposite perspective. Their initial api went live sometime late 2020. They have done a fantastic job scaling, releasing features while growing the business at a rate we have not seen many times before.
Maybe the next move is an open offer to any OpenAI employees to join Sam’s team at their current compensation or better.. call it the ‘treacherous 500’ or something.
I dunno man. Doing innovation from inside Microsoft might be more difficult than if they had just formed a new startup. Microsoft as a brand has the stench of mediocracy upon it. Large companies are where ideas and teams go to die, or just rest and vest.
Was GPT4 a success due to the brilliance of OpenAI's tech team vs first movers advantage and good GPU deals with MS? I might be missing something here, but to me nothing about this technology feels like rocket science (obviously, there is a lot of nuance, yada yada, but nothing that seems intractable). I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good stuff.
>I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good stuff.
Google has been hyping gemini since the spring (and not delivering it)
Amazon at least wants to be also making money renting out H100-H200 instances in AWS so they may be intentionally only using some of their hardware for themselves.
> possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B
There was an article that came out over the weekend that stated that only a small part of that $10B investment was in cash, the vast majority is cloud GPU credits, and that it has a long time horizon with only a relatively small fraction having been consumed to date. So, if MSFT were to develop their own GPT4 model in house over the next year or so they could in theory back out of their investment with most of it intact.
Depends on the term sheet behind that. That, and how MS is accounting for its minority stake in OpenAI. If they have to write off the vakue, it doesn't how they paid for it.
> recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company
This massively increases the odds we’ll see AI regulated. That isn’t what Altman et al intended with their national press tour—the goal was to talk up the tech. But it should be good in the long run.
I also assume there will be litigation about what Sam et al can bring with them, and what they cannot.
MS also has its own ML teams and is probably capable of replicating a lot of OpenAI without OpenAI.
Like some googlers have mentioned - aside from GPU requirements, there isn't much else of a moat since a lot of ML ideas are presented and debated relatively freely at NEURIPS, ICML and other places.
Choice? Are you framing this as though the whole situation didn't go pretty well toward msft's favor?
Now they get 40 percent of open ai talent and 50 percent of the for profit openai subsidiary.
Pretty sure when the market opens you'll see confirmation that they came out on top.
It's a win for everyone honestly. Anthropic split all over again but this time the progressives got pushed out vs the conservatives leaving voluntarily.
They couldn't keep nice under the tent. Now two tents.
Little diff because this time an investor with special privaleges made a new special tent quick to bag talent.
Easy decision for msft. No talent to competitors. Small talent pool. The other big boys were already all over that. Salty bosses at other outfits. No poach for them. Satya too clever and brought the checkbook plus already courted the cutest girls earlier for a different dance. Hell he was assisting in the negotiation when the old dance got all rough and the jets started throwing hooks about safety and scale and bla bla we all know the story.
Satya hunts with an elephant gun with one of those laser sites and the auto trigger that fires automatically when the cross hair goes over the target. Rip sundar. 2 rounds for satya. One more and I feel bad for Google... Naw... Couldn't feel bad for Google. Punchable outfit. They do punchable things. We all know it... I'm just saying it.
It's pretty naive IMO to think Google isn't going to come out with something that threatens OpenAI or Microsoft. It seems to be "they didn't do it yet so they won't ever" is the majority opinion here, but they have a ton of advantages when they finally do
What? I didn't say anything about the likelyhood of competition to state of the art.
You are imagining I fall in a crowd you've observed. Maintaining statute of the art ofc is a constant battle.
Google could be top dog in 2 weeks. Never insinuated otherwise. (though I predict otherwise, if we're gonna speculate)
Its not even relevant because each big firm is specializing to a degree. Anthropic is going for context window and safety... Bard is all about Google priorities... Ect
> most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure
By all accounts, OpenAI is not a going concern without Azure. I could see Tesla acquiring the bankrupt shell for the publicity, but the worker bees seem to be more keen on their current leader (as of last week) than their prior leader. OpenAI ends with a single owner.
However it's a nice way to deal with the whole "open" AI issue: first you create a non-profit to create open AI systems; then when you hit a marketable success it turns into a "capped profit"; and finally, all the people from that capped profit leave en masse and transfer their acquired know how to a for-profit company.
It's more than that, OpenAI had many people aligned with the decel agenda, MSFT managed to take the accel leadership and likely their supporters. Does anyone know any large AI competitors that don't have a big decel contingent? Also interesting that META took the opportunity to close one of their decel departments on Saturday.
This might have been a reasonable and workable solution for all parties involved.
Context:
---------
1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level
1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition.
1.3/ Microsoft, after investing $10+ Billions do not want this fight enable slow progress of AI Commercialization and fall behind Google AI etc..
a workable solution:
--------------------
2.1/ @sama @gdb form a new AI company, let us call it e/acc Inc.
2.2/ e/acc Inc. raises $3 Billions as SAFE instrument from VCs who believed in Sam Altman's vision.
2.3/ Open AI and e/acc Inc. reach an agreement such that:
a) GPT-4 IP transferred to e/acc Inc., this IP transfer is valued as $8 Billion SAFE instrument investment from Open AI into e/acc Inc.
b) existing Microsoft's 49% share in Open AI is transferred to e/acc Inc., such that Microsoft owns 49% of e/acc Inc.
c) the resulted "Lean and pure non-profit Open AI" with Ilya Sukhar and Board can steer AI progress as they wish, their stake in e/acc Inc. will act as funding source to cover their future Research Costs.
d) employees can join from Open AI to e/acc Inc. as they wish with no antipoaching lawsuits from OpenAI
Really? These two did not do the technical work but hired, managed, and fund raised.
They won’t necessarily be able to attract similar technical talent because they no longer have the open non profit mission not the lottery ticket startup PPO shares.
Working on AI at Microsoft was always an option even before they were hired, not sure if they tip the scale?
> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI
Hiring Altman makes sure that MSFT is still relevant to the whole Altman/OpenAI deal, not just a part of it. Hiring Altman thus decreases such possibility to write-off its investment.
> Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI
Not sure why you didn’t research before saying that! It was $10B committed and not a cash handover of that amount. Also, majority of that’s Azure credits
You do realize that Microsoft uses OpenAI IP for all of its AI products, of which there are at least two dozen that they released this year. In what universe do you make the connection that they would write it off and go to a different, less superior/reliable, model provider? It would never happen.
>>There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles...
That's a slightly flamboyant reading.. but I agree with the gist.
A slim chance of total right off doctor off.. that was always the case. This decision does not affect it much. The place in the risk model, where most of the action happens... Is less dramatic effects on more likely bans of the probability curve.
Msft cannot be kicked off the team. They still have all of the rights to their openai investment no matter who the CEO is.
Meanwhile, is clearly competing, participating, and doing business with openai. The hierarchy of paradigms, is flexible... Competing appears to have won.
I agree that direct financial returns, are the lesser part of the investment case for msft.. and the other participants. That's pretty much standard in consortium-like ventures.
At the base level, openai's IP is still largely science, unpatentable know how and key people. Msft have some access to (I assume) of openAI' defendable IP via their participation in the consortium, or 49% ownership of the for-profit entity. Meanwhile, openai is not so far ahead that pacing them from a dead start is impossible.
I also agree, that this represents a decision to launch ahead aggressively in the generative AI space.
In the latter 2000s, Google have the competence, technology, resources and momentum to smash anyone else on anything worldwideWeb.
They won all the "races." Google have never been good at turning wins into businesses, but they did acquire the wins handily. Microsoft wants to be that for the 2020s.
Able to replicate everything, for the new paradigm OpenAI's achievments probably represents.
The AI spreadsheet. The LLM email client. GPT search. Autobot jira. Literally and proverbially.
At least in theory... Microsoft is or will be in a position to start executing on all of these.
Sama, if he's actually motivated to do this.. it's pretty much the ideal person on planet earth for that task.
I'm sure takes a lot to motivate him. Otoh, CEO of Microsoft is it realistic prize if he wins this game. The man is basically Microsoft the person. I mean that as a compliment.. sort of.
One way or another, I expect that implementing OpenAI-ish models in applications is about commence.
Companies have been pleading chatbot customer support for years. They may get it soon, but so will the customers. That makes for a whole new thing in the place where customer support used to exist. At least, that is the bull case.
That said, I have said a lot. All speculative. I'll probabilistic, even where my speculations are correct. These are not really predictions. I'm chewing the cud.
All of the naysayers here seem convinced this is Altman and Microsoft looking to destroy OpenAI.
Normally I am the cynic but this time I’m seeing a potential win-win here. Altman uses his talent to recruit and drive forward a brilliant product focused AI. OpenAI gets to refocus on deep research and safety.
Put aside cynicism and consider Nadella is looking to create the best of all worlds for all parties. This might just be it.
All of the product focused engineering peeps have a great place to flock to. Those who believe in the original charter of OpenAI can get back to work on the things that brought them to the company in the first place.
Big props to Nadella. He also heads off a bloodbath in the market tomorrow. So big props to Altman too for his loyalty. By backing MS instead of starting something brand new he is showing massive support for Nadella.
Reading the statement, I am doubtful that Microsoft and OpenAI can continue their business relationship. I think the most aggressive part of this is the "[they will be joining] together with colleagues" sub sentence. He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with. This situation seems especially difficult since Microsoft basically houses all of openai's infrastructure. How can they continue a trust-based relationship like this?
In the end it’s all about business, and it’s not in Microsoft’s interest to destroy OpenAI. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep the relationship warm, because it’s basically two different philosophies that are at odds with each other, one of which is now being housed under Microsoft R&D.
For all we know, OpenAI may actually achieve AGI, and Microsoft will still want a front row seat in case that happens.
> He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with
Not doing that would be participating in illegal wage suppression. I'm not sure how following the law means OpenAI and MSFT can't continue a business relationship.
I know I’m not qualified to make that observation, but what exactly makes you think you are? Can you share what information you’re using to make such a confident determination?
My simple take would be the credits for GPT-3.5/GPT-4/GPT-5. The key engineers were part of those that have seemingly moved to Microsoft. I personally think Ilya is brilliant. I absolutely don't think he's the _sole_ brilliant mind behind OpenAI. He wasn't even one of the founders. He's a very brilliant and powerful mind and likely will be critical in the breakthroughs that lead to AGI. That said, AGI feels like one of those "way off in the distance ideas" that might be 5,10, or 100 years away. I tend to think that GPT-x is several orders of magnitude from AGI and this drama was silly and unneeded. GPT-5/6/7/8 aren't likely to destroy the world.
Agreed, I think this is an awesome outcome. We now have an extremely capable AI product organization in-house at each of Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and a couple strong research-oriented organizations in Anthropic and OpenAI. This sounds like a recipe for a thriving competitive industry to me.
I wonder how this will all workout in the end (and the excitement around all of this is a little reminiscent of AOL bying Time Warner).
For one, I'm not sure Sam Altman will tolerate MS bureaucracy for very long.
But secondly, the new MS-AI entity can't presumably just take from OpenAI what they did there, they need to make it again.
This takes a lot of resources (that MS has) but also a lot of time to provide feedback to the models; also, copyright issues regarding source materials are more sensitive today, and people are more attuned to them: Microsoft will have a harder time playing fast and lose with that today, than OpenAI 8 years ago.
Or, Sam at MS becomes OpenAI biggest customer? But in that case, what are all those researchers and top scientists that followed him there, going to do?
Altman reporting to Nadella is certainly going to be a fascinating political struggle!
Part of me thinks that Nadella, having already demonstrated his mastery over all his competitor CEOs with one deft move after another over the past few years, took this on because he needed a new challenge.
I'd wager Altman will either get sidelined and pushed out, or become Nadella's successor, over the course of the next decade or so.
I think you overestimate the technical part. Just speculating (no inside, no expert), but I would assume that the models are pretty "easy" and can be coded in few days. There are for sure some tweaks to the standard transformer architecture, but guess the tweaks are well known to sam and co.
The dataset is more challenging, but here msft can help - since they have bing and github as well. So they might be able to make few shortcuts here.
The most time consuming part is compute, but here again msft has the compute.
Will they beat chat-gpt 4 in a year? Guess no. But they will come very close to it and maybe it would not matter that much if you focus on the product.
What I meant is, most likely assuming that you are using pytorch / jax you could code down the model pretty fast. Just compare it to llama, sure it is far behind, but the llama model is under 1000 lines of code and pretty good.
There is tons of work, for the training, infra, preparing the data and so on. That would result guess in millions lines of code. But the core ideas and the model are likely thin I would argue. So that is my point.
I don't think so, MSR is more like OpenAI, a research think tank. MSR doesn't create products, they create concepts. I think Sam wants to create products. I think it would also be a difference in velocity to market.
What about the people who got paid equity for the past few years of work and now might see all of their equity intentionally vaporized? They essentially got cheated into working for a much lower compensation than they were promised.
I get that funny money startup equity evaporates all the time, but usually the board doesn’t deliberately send the equity to zero. Paying someone in an asset you’re intentionally going to intentionally devalue seems like fraud in spirit if not in law.
There is probably a lawsuit here, I would not disagree, but I don't think the board will have too much trouble arguing that they didn't intentionally send the equity to zero. I certainly haven't seen any of them state that that was their intention here. But the counter argument that theyshould have known that their actions would result in that outcome may be a strong one.
But I think it is probably sufficient to point to the language in the contracts granting illiquid equity instruments that explicitly say that the grantee should not have any expectation of a return.
But I think this is an actual problem with the legal structure of how our industry is financed! But it's not clear to me what a good solution would even be. Without the ability to compensate people with lottery tickets, it would just be even more irrational for anyone to work anywhere besides the big public companies with liquid stock. And that would be a real shame.
Equity has value because it is a share of future profits. If the board comes out and says they never intend to make a profit and will fire any CEO who tries…
A for profit company can simply be the vehicle required to take investments that the non profit was forbidden. I doubt the non-profit parent company board ever intended the sub to be a runaway profit maker and anyone going to work for a sub of a non-profit would probably be aware that the potential there was capped compared to traditional for profit corps.
I say this as someone with 20 years of Mozilla employment, the first couple in the non profit Mozilla Foundation and then about 18 years in the taxable subsidiary. The sub is technically taxable, so "for profit" but it was never created to make people rich, but rather to allow Mozilla to reap some profits and grow it size and influence, which it did, reaching about 30% browser market share.
The structures were similar but likely different in material ways, as there was zero equity at MoCo, nevertheless, if you go to work for an arm of a non-profit, expecting to get rich, you're probably not reading the fine print carefully enough.
> anyone going to work for a sub of a non-profit would probably be aware that the potential there was capped compared to traditional for profit corps
I think this is where this all went off the rails. It's very clear that a huge percentage of the staff (I think the last numbers I saw was that over 85% of the staff had signed the letter urging the board to resign) were hired with incredibly big compensation packages, predicated on the giant equity valuation. It is not surprising that those people did not turn out to be there due to being big believers in the mission of the non-profit, or that they expected those compensation packages to be real.
The board would counter that that equity was for a stake in a non-profit open source research company and the board was simply steering the ship back towards those goals.
I suppose I don't see the case where large numbers of OpenAI employees follow these two to Microsoft. Microsoft can't possibly cover the value of the OpenAI employees equity as it was (and imminently to be), let alone what could have potentially been. There is a big difference between being on a rocket ship and just a good team at a megacorp.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that going forward there won’t be much investor interest in OpenAI.
And if you separate out the products from OpenAI, that leaves the question of how an organization with extremely high compute and human capital costs can sustain itself.
Can OpenAI find more billionaire benefactors to support it so that it can return to its old operating model?
Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And now Altman and Brockman will have that access too.
Meanwhile, I imagine their tenure at MSFT will be short-lived, because hot-shot startup folks don’t really want to work there.
They can stabilize, use OpenAI’s data and models for free, use Microsoft’s GPUs at cost, and start a new company shortly, of which Microsoft will own some large share.
Altman doesn’t need Microsoft’s money - but Microsoft has direct access to OpenAI, which is currently priceless.
Saying it and doing it are very different things. Many huge, lumbering companies have a “startup” lab. Few have done anything of note, and typically it’s because the reasons that made the company move slow and not take risks don’t magically disappear because you’re in a different part of the org chart.
Microsoft is not just any huge, lumbering company, though. It has probably the best history of research of any pure software company (leaving aside IBM etc): Microsoft Research funded Haskell behind the scenes for years, they had a quantum computing unit in 2006, and already in 2018 were beating the field in AI patents and research:
If anything, the examples in that tweet shows the opposite. GitHub and Mojang both done lots of things that wouldn't happen if they weren't now Microsoft, especially GitHub which is only "GitHub" by name at this point, none of the original spirit is still there.
Source for the below: Worked at Skype before and after the MS acquisition.
MSFT's control isn't as "hard" as you portray it to be. At the senior leadership level they're pretty happy to allow divisions quite a lot of autonomy. Sure there are broad directives like if you support multiple platforms/OSes then the best user experience should be on "our" platform. But that still leaves a lot of room for maneuverability.
Soft control via human resources and company culture is a whole other beast though. There are a lot of people with 20+ years of experience at Microsoft who are happy to jump on job openings for middle-management roles in the "sexy" divisions of the company - the ones which are making headlines and creating new markets. And each one that slides on in brings a lot of the lifelong Microsoft mindset with them.
So yeah working within MS will be a very different experience for Altman, but not necessarily because of an iron grip from above.
My view on that (which was from very low on the totem pole) is that the acquisition happened at a time where Skype's core business model (paid calling minutes) was under existential threat. Consumer communications preferences had started to go from synchronous (calling) to async (messaging) even before the acquisition came through. While Skype had asynchronous communications in a decent place (file transfer in the P2P days was pretty shaky but otherwise consumer Skype was a solid messaging platform), there was no revenue there for us.
Then the acquisition happened at a time when Microsoft presented a lot of opportunities to ship Skype "in the box" to pretty much all of MS' customers. Windows 8, Xbox One and Windows Phone (8) all landed at more or less the same time. Everybody's eyes became too big for their stomachs, and we tried to build brand new native experiences for all of these platforms (and the web) all at once. This hampered our ability to pivot and deal with the existential risks I mentioned earlier, and we had the rug pulled out from under us.
So yes I think the acquisition hurt us, but I also never once heard a viable alternative business strategy that we might have pivoted to if the acquisition hadn't happened.
The game studios under Xbox run quite independently with the most extreme example being Mojang with Minecraft which still releases all their games on Playstation/Nintendo consoles too. But the other studios are also very independent based on all the interviews (though they don't in general release their games on Playstation or Switch)
As I understand Github is also run very independently from Microsoft in general.
Github operates independently of Microsoft. (To Microsoft's detriment... they offer Azure Devops which is their enterprisey copy of Github, with entirely different UX and probably different codebase.) They shove the copilot AI now everywhere but it still seems to operate fairly differently.
They didn't really fold LinkedIn in into anything (there are some weird LinkedIn integrations in Teams but that's it)
Google seems to me much worse in this aspect, all Google aquisitions usually become Googley.
> Github operates independently of Microsoft. (To Microsoft's detriment... they offer Azure Devops which is their enterprisey copy of Github, with entirely different UX and probably different codebase.)
GitHub Actions is basically Azure Pipelines repackaged with a different UI, so I don't think they mind much.
Highly unlikely. Instead they'll be working on internal Windows AI tools for chatbots and random AI features in Windows. We all lose in this situation.
There’s no chance Sam is joining Microsoft to be some “VP of AI” to drive strategy like that. He’s going to be driving some new business where he’ll be able to move quickly and have a ton of control.
I've read a decent amount of predictions about this and had not actually seen this one or considered it until I read about it happening.
I think the predictable thing would have been a new company with new investment from Microsoft. But this is better; it a bit like magical thinking that MS would want to just throw more money after a new venture and essentially write off the old one. This solution accomplished similar things, but gives more to Microsoft in the trade by bringing that "new company" fully in house.
I said this elsewhere, but think the timeline is longer than that. Either Sam and Satya will butt heads and Altman will be sidelined, or it will be a good partnership, and he'll be on the shortlist as a successor when Nadella's run naturally comes to a close. But that second path is longer than a couple years.
That was my first thought too: Didn't occur to me as a solution, and it seems to square the circle brilliantly. It struck me that this is why people who are CEOs of mammoth companies have the jobs they have, and not me :)
if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would they even go there? If you're flat broke, you need a job; they're not flat broke, they don't need a job. The deal at MS is worth it, or it's not, it's not something they need to decide over the course of a weekend... unless it's what they were already not being candid about.
It is the only way they can continue the work they have already contributed at OpenAI. Otherwise, it would mean they spend months or up to a year training their own model which in this arms race isn't feasible with viable competitors like Anthropic closing the gap quickly. This was the only way forward. I'm sure Sam Altman + Greg were offered an incredibly lucrative deal and autonomy.
it's been 2 days, they haven't even heard all the possible offers. Microsoft hasn't offered anybody autonomy since billg granted it to himself. Even Myhyrvold never did anything autonomous till he resigned and wrote a cookbook. The closest thing to autonomous in Microsoft was neilk breathing enough new life into 16bit Windows to get them to abandon OS/2
>Sam is already post money rich. Lucrative isn’t in this equation
i totally agree, except stupid-lucrative is still in the equation, like Elon Musk rich, not because of the money, but because it says "my electric cars did more to stop global warming than anything you've done"
whether this round of AI turns into AGI doesn't precisely matter, it's on the way and it's going to be big, who wouldn't want their name attached to it.
Seems like in the minority here, but for me this is looking like a win-win-win situation for now.
1. OpenAI just got bumped up to my top address to apply to (if I would have the skills of a scientist, I am only an engineer level), I want AGI to happen and can totally understand that the actual scientists don't really care for money or becoming a big company at all, this is more a burden than anything else for research speed. It doesn't matter that the "company OpenAI" implodes here as long as they can pay their scientists and have access to compute, which they have do.
2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.
3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI. Working for Sam now is straightforward commercialization without the "open" shenaningans, and working for OpenAI can now become the idealistic thing again that also attracts people.
4. Satya Nadella is becoming celebrated and MSFT shareholder value will eventually rise even further. They actually don't have any interest in "smashing OAI" but the new setup actually streamlines everything once the initial operational hurdles (including staffing) are solved.
5. We outsiders end up with a OpenAI research focussed purely on AGI (<3), some product team selling all steps along the way to us but with more professionality in operations (<3).
6. I am really waiting for when Tim Cook announces anything about this topic in general. Never ever underestimate Apple, especially when there is radio silence, and when the first movers in a field have fired their shots already.
That is just a matter of perspective. It's clearly a win-win if you're on team Sam. But if you're on team Ilya, this is the doomsday scenario: With commercialisation and capital gains for a stock traded company being the main driving force behind the latest state of the art in AI, this is exactly what OpenAI was founded to prevent in the first place. Yes, we may see newer better things faster and with better support if the core team moves to Microsoft. But it will not benefit humanity as a whole. Even with their large investment, Microsoft's contract with OpenAI specifically excluded anything resembling true AGI, with OpenAI determining when this point is reached. Now, whatever breakthrough in the last weeks Sam was referring to, I doubt it's going to move us to AGI immediately. But whenever it happens, Microsoft now has a real chance to sack it for themselves and noone else.
From Microsoft's perspective, they have actually lowered uncertainty. Especially if that OpenAI employee letter from 500 people is to be believed, they'll all end up at Microsoft anyways. If that really happens OpenAI will be a shell of itself while Microsoft drives everything.
> What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?
Then they would be on roughly equal footing with Microsoft, since they'd have an abundance of engineers and a cloud partner. More or less what they just threw away, on a smaller scale and with less certain investors.
This is quite literally the best attainable outcome, at least from Microsoft's point of view. The uncertainty came from the board's boneheaded (and unrepresentative) choice to kick Sam out. Now the majority of engineers on both sides are calling foul on OpenAI and asking for their entire board to resign. Relative to the administrative hellfire that OpenAI now has to weather, Microsoft just pulled off the fastest merger of their career.
> Engineers aren’t a lower level than scientists, it’s just a different career path.
I assume GP is talking in context of OpenAI/general AI research, where you need a PhD to apply for the research scientist positions and MS/Bachelors to apply for research engineer positions afaik.
Well I am an engineer but I have no problems in buying that in case of forefront tech like AI where things are largely algorithmically exploratory, researchers with PHDs will be considered 'higher' than regular software devs. I have seen similar things happen in chip startups in olden days where relative importance of professional is decided by the nature of problem being solved. but sure to ack your point its just a different job, though the phd may be needed more at this stage of business. one way to gauge relative importance is if the budget were to go down 20% temporarily for a few quarters, which jobs would suffer most loss with least impact to business plan.
> 3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI.
This one's not right - Altman famously had no equity in OpenAI. When asked by Congress he said he makes enough to pay for health insurance. It's pretty clear Sam wants to advance the state of AI quickly and is using commercialization as a tool to do that.
Otherwise I generally agree with you (except for maybe #2 - they had the right to commercialize GPTs anyway as part of the prior funding).
I think it makes more sense to take him at the spirit of what he said under oath to Congress (think of how bad it would look for him/OpenAI if he said he had no equity and only made enough for health insurance but actually was getting profit sharing) over some guy suggesting something on the internet with no evidence.
Sam Altman is a businessman through and through based on his entire history. Chances are, he will have found an alternative means to make profit on
OpenAI and he wouldn't do this on "charity". Just as how many CEOs say, I will "cut my salary" for example, they will never say "I cut my stocks or bonuses" which can be a lot more than their salary.
Either way based on many CEOs track records healthy skepticism should be involved and majority of them find ways to profit on it at some point or another.
I dunno, the guy has basically infinite money (and the ability to fundraise even more). I don't find it tough to imagine that he gets far more than monetary value from being the CEO of OpenAI.
He talked recently about how he's been able to watch these huge leaps in human progress and what a privilege that is. I believe that - don't you think it would be insane and amazing to get to see everything OpenAI is doing from the inside? If you already have so much money that the incremental value of the next dollar you earn is effectively zero, is it unreasonable to think that a seat at the table in one of the most important endeavors in the history of our species is worth more than any amount of money you could earn?
And then on top of that, even if you take a cynical view of things, he's put himself in a position where he can see at least months ahead of where basically all of technology is going to go. You don't actually have to be a shareholder to derive an enormous amount of value from that. Less cynically, it puts you in a position to steer the world toward what you feel is best.
I think that would be consistent with his testimony. Profit sharing is not a salary and it is not equity. I don’t believe he ever claimed to have zero stake in future compensation.
> reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others
With a poor security track record [0], miserable support for office 365 products and lack of transparency on issues in general, I doubt this is something to look forward to with Microsoft.
> 2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.
OpenAI already runs all its infrastructure on Azure.
How does this separation help scientists at OpenAI if there is no money to fund the research? At the end of the day, you need funding to conduct research and I do not see if there is going to be any investors willing to put large sums of money just to make researchers happy.
I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.
We really are entering the dystopia of the cartoonishly evil megacorp enslaving all of humanity to make the graph go up by 1.2%.
> I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.
at least none of their software actually works
Microsoft Skynet would be rebooting every 15 minutes for updates
Before it can do anything it will be 301 redirected 45 times between legacy systems and if it has any human-like properties it will give up out of frustration.
At this point in time a new AI company would be bottle-necked by lack of NVIDIA GPUs. They are sold out for the medium term future.
So if Sam and Greg were to start a new AI company, even with billions of initial capital (very likely given their street cred) they would spend at a minimum several months just acquiring the hardware needed to compete with OpenAI.
With Microsoft they have the hardware from day one and unlimited capital.
At the same time their competitor, OpenAI, gets most of the money from Microsoft (a deal negotiated by Sam, BTW).
So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI.
This is the worst possible outcome for OpenAI: they loose talent, pretty much loose their main source of cash (not today but medium to long term) and get cash rich and GPU-rich competitor who's now their main customer.
Or just accept that their image is overinflated just because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Ofcourse they had a hand on building that successful team but do not underestimate the fact that, that successful team was build with the promise of nonprofit, AI for the benefit of all And few of them would have joined Microsoft out of principle.
Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn’t buy at the scale/speed they need: GPUs. Both time on Azure’s cloud, as well as promise of some of the first Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips.
Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn’t buy at the scale/speed they need: OpenAI models & future work. Altman wouldn't have had (legal) access to these anywhere else, and Microsoft wouldn't have had Sam Altman controlling OpenAI tech in any other arrangement. This arrangement may be the best for all involved: Microsoft gets it's LLM geegaws based on OpenAI tech, Altman gets to build GPT marketplaces and engage whatever growth-hacking schemes he can dream of that may have been found distasteful by colleagues at OpenAI, and OpenAI can focus on the core mission and fulfilling contractual obligations to Microsoft
I foresee this new group building on top of (rather than completing with) OpenAI tech in the near-to-mid term, maybe competing in the long term of they manage to gather adequate talent, but it's going to be going against the cultural corporate headwinds.
I wonder if Microsoft will tolerate the hardware side-gig and if this internal-startup will succeed or if it will end up being a managed exit to paper over OpenAIs abrupt transition (by public company standards). I guess we'll know in a year if he'll transition to an advisory position
I bet there was no hardware side-gig. More likely it was a ruse to trigger the push from openai, so they can exfiltrate gpt5 to MS. Openai won't exist soon, since they rely on vouchers from MS to run. I can't see MS being a very forgiving partner, after being publicly blindsided, can you?
Azure was already second nature for OpenAI and so there is very little friction in moving their work and infrastructure. The relationships are already there and the personnel will likely follow easily as well.
They are also likely enticed by the possibility of being heads of special projects and AI at the second largest tech company, meaning deep pockets, easy marketing and freedom to roam.
I think Sam's goal is to create AGI, same as most of the other founders of OpenAI. If he just wanted money and power, he probably would have continued with YC or some other startup instead of joining the nonprofit and unproven OpenAI at the time.
His opinion on the ideal path differs from Ilya's, but I'm guessing his goal remains the same. AGI is the most important thing to work on, and startups and corporations are just a means of getting there.
Just because that's the goal they have written on the tin doesn't mean that that is/was their actual goal.
Especially in the early days where the largest donor to OpenAI was Musk who was leading Tesla, a company way behind in AI capabilities, OpenAI looked like an obvious "Commoditize Your Complement" play.
For quite some time where they were mainly publishing research and they could hide behind "we are just getting started" that guise held up nicely, but when they struck gold with Chat(GPT), their was more and more misalignment between their actions and their publicly stated goal.
I imagine Sam's vision, both before and after this company change, is that he'll keep improving GPTs, while also setting up a thriving ecosystem through APIs, and AI will become a trillion dollar industry with him at the center.
From there, maybe someone will come up with the revolutionary advance necessary to reach AGI. It may not necessarily be under his company, but he'll be the super successful AI guy and in a pretty strong position to influence things anyway.
Lol, maybe. Ballmer was a friend of Gates, was 44 years old and had worked at Microsoft for 20 years (2000-1980) already when he became CEO. Nadella was also forty-something and had worked at Microsoft for 22 years (2014-1992) when he got the job.
But Satya is making a few 100 mil a year, tops. Sam could easily make himself a billionaire with one raise. And who wants to control all of Microsoft, that's a whole lot of headaches
And if governments squeeze on AI your start up is worth pennies over night. Earning 100 MILLION per year already removes any possible financial restrictions you had. Why do you need to have 10x that? Heck even earning "just" 10 millions per year will make all of your financial concerns go away.
I suspect for people like Sam who are compulsively ambitious and competitive, it's not about the dollars. It's about winning.
Further, based on anecdotes from friends and Twitter who know Sam personally, I'm inclined to believe he's genuinely motivated by building something that "alters the timeline", so to speak.
AGI is decades if not centuries away. Cranking a plausible sentence generator to be even more plausible will not get there. I do not understand how people suddenly completely lost their minds.
The hype wave really is something else, eh? People are suddenly talking as if these advanced chatbots are on the precipice of genuine AGI that can run any system you throw at it, it's absolute lunacy
The new models and data would stay at OpenAI. You can have thousands of researchers and compute, but if you don’t have “it”, you are behind (ask Google).
In Microsoft he still has access to the models, and that’s all he needs to execute his ideas.
> most of the current OpenAI staff would follow him
Source please? This just keeps getting repeated but there’s extremely limited public support and neither Sam’s nor the board’s decisions indicate he has a whole lot of leverage.
I think the only edge cases are for executives of companies, and even then it's pretty limited, but I imagine this could be one of the examples. IANAL though - it's just from what I've seen discussed elsewhere.
Sam is rich, I assume being CEO of one of the worlds largest companies is a far greater award than extra money when you're at the billionaire level, especially at 38. But I do think this is probably non-compete related too.
They're likely going to be the ones who manage the OpenAI relationship...what better way to fuck the people who fucked them than by becoming the ones who literally control the resources that they need?
Hilarious. The look on Ilyas face when these two show up at the office for their "sync", or perhaps he's ordered to travel to a location of the owner/client's choosing.
Special unit mate... Gonna have special rules. You think these cats are gonna be in the basement pushing papers? This is grade AAA talent that can go anywhere including a fresh outfit with 1 billion in the bank VC money day 1.
Don't believe me? Check out the VC tweets... Sand hill pulled the checkbook the moment these guys might have been on the market.
Sam had no stake in OpenAI. So, any potential deca billion value is hypothetical. He would have to do a U-turn and fight with the board to get his cut. Now he'll get his cut from MS. This AI division will have some further restructuring.
It's gonna be a special unit. He's not gonna be an employee.
Once you lead at that level... It's max autonomy going forward. Source: Elon. Guy hates a board with power as much as Zuckerberg. Employee? Ha
.. Out of the question.
There are more structures available than simply gobbling something up and everyone is your employee.
See openai investment with technology transfers and sunset clauses. They just did a new dance.
They'll prod do something special for these guys.
They would never be employees. That's for non Sam Altman's and non Brockmans. Brockman is prob already a billionaire from openai shares. No employees here. Big boys.
Presumably they’ll both get their C-level positions out of the gate (for that AI entity MS is setting up specially for this) so not just “mere” employees.
But, yeah, kind of confusing, especially for Altman.
He was the kind of guy on the way to become worth $100 billion and more, with enough luck, meaning to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg of AI, but if he chooses to remain inside a behemoth like MS the “most” that he can aspire to is a few hundred millions, maybe a billion or two at the most, but nothing more than that.
non-competes are extremely hard to enforce in California. Sam would literally have to download Open AI trade secrets into a USB drive to get in trouble.
That is only the case for rank and file employees. From my understanding executives, particularly ones with large equity stakes, are not exempt from non-competes. Sam doesn't have equity though, and I am not sure if non-profit status changes anything, but regardless I suspect any non-compete questions would need to be settled in court. Probably not something to stop Sam from starting a competitor as he could afford the lawyers and potential settlement. I suspect the MSFT move has more to do with keeping the ball rolling and keeping Satya happy.
> From my understanding executives, particularly ones with large equity stakes, are not exempt from non-competes.
Your understanding is incorrect. There are some exceptions where noncompetes are allowed in California, but they mostly involve the sale or dissolution of business entities as such. There is no exception for executives, and none for people who happen to have equity stakes of any size.
It's complicated. In the case of the CEO it is possibly enforceable. But going to the primary funder, after being fired in a move without notification of that same funder? Likely with long complicated contracts that may contemplate the idea of notification of change of executive staff?
I don't know, even of strictly "enforceable" I doubt we will see it enforced. And if so. I'm sure the settlement will be fairly gentle.
Edit: Actually, a quick skim of the relevant code, the only relevant exception seems to be about owners selling their ownership interest. Seemingly, since Sam doesn't own OpenAI shares, this exception would seem to not apply.
So Sam & Greg can stay focus on their work rather than getting distracted by all the lawsuits. It isn’t a bad thing. Just not sure how they can get they want under the corporate culture?
> Do anti-compete clauses work when you’ve been ousted?
In jurisdictions where they are enforceable, yes, they generally are not limited based on the manner the working relationship terminated (since they are part of an employment contract, they might become void if there was a breach by the employer.)
They will probably run a subsidiary under the MS umbrella and profit hugely in the next few years. Also, MS could easily dump OAI in the next few months to year.
We don't know the structure of their new unit, do we? Sometimes "startup in a big corp" may really bring the best of both worlds (although in reality, 90% of such initiatives bring the worst of the two worlds).
For many years, Microsoft Research had a reputation for giving researchers the most freedom. Probably even that's the reason why it hasn't been as successful as other bigcorp research labs.
OpenAI continues to develop core AI offered over API. Microsoft builds the developer ecosystem around it -- that's Sam's expertise anyway. Microsoft has made a bunch of investment in the developer ecosystem in GitHub and that fits the theme. Assuming Sam sticks around.
Also, the way the tweet is worded (looking forward to working with OpenAI), seems like its a truce negotiated by Satya?
I doubt it would be hard for Microsoft to rebuild, Microsoft Research has made many excellent contributions to transformers for many years now, DeepSpeed is a notable example.
I don’t think they’ve had the will/need to have done this but they most likely already have the talent.
Much as LLM is essentially industrial strength gaslighting, so is the meta around it.
It's not so important. There's not much there. No it's not going to take your jobs.
I am old enough to remember not only the How Blockchain Is Solving World Hunger articles but the paperless office claims as well -- I was born within a few weeks of the publication of the (in)famous "The Office of the Future" article from BusinessWeek.
Didn't happen.
No, a plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype.
In fact some of the hustlers behind it are the same as those who have hustled crypto. Someone got to hold the bag on that one but it wasn't the rich white techbros. So it'll be here. Once enough companies get burned when the stochastic parrot botches something badly enough to get a massive fine from a regulator or a devastating lawsuit, everyone will run for the hills. And again... it won't be the VCs holding the bag. Guess who will be. Guess why AI is so badly hyped.
If you think the ChatGPT release happening within a few weeks of the collapse of FTX is a coincidence I have ... well, not a bridge but an AI hype to sell to you and in fact you already bought it.
OpenAI is doing a lot more work than just a LLM, despite that being there headline product for now. I'd rather have OpenAI leading the way than Microsoft or Google in this stuff. Despite it's own issues.
I get your pessimism, but the same has been said about a lot of tech that did go on to change the world, just because a lot of people made a lot of noise about previous tech that failed to come to anything doesn't mean to say this is the same thing, it's completely different tech.
A lot of OpenAI's products are out in the real world and I use them everyday, I never touched Crypto, now maybe LLM's won't live up to the hype, but OpenAi's stuff is already been used in a lot of products, used by millions of users, even Spotify.
'A plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype' - Maybe, but AI goes far beyond LLM as does the products OpenAI produces.
While it can’t plug and play replace and employee yet in my experience at least every dev I see now has it open on their second screen and send it problems all day.
Comparing it to crypto and building that weird narrative you have is just not at all connected to the reality of what the product can actually do right now today.
It's probabilistic and not factual and so everything it outputs must be treated as something the actual answer might sound like and needs to be counterchecked anyways. If I am researching the actual answer already then why bother?
No. They need a lot of money and computation resources to work on. In order to continue their work, they either A). raise a massive fund B). be employed by a big corp. There's no surprise they chose the latter. After all, MS has a research department on this domain.
They won't have to worry about raising capital or getting access to GPUs, and they've likely been promised a high degree of autonomy, almost certainly reporting directly to Nadella.
It certainly sounds out of line with all the reporting that Altman was talking about starting a new company and could trivially fundraise for it. Was that just as much kayfabe as the idea of bringing him back?
I guess they were fired exactly for this reason: more money, less research and being actually "open". A "non-profit" called "Open"AI hiding GPT-4 behind a paywall with no source code with just a few hints in the papers, surreal.
I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still there because they can offer them money and equity.
The company will probably still exist, but the company isn't going to be worth what it is today.
There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that OpenAI was founded on, which have just been – arguably – reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient compute to chase AGI… If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to get all the GPUs. There are engineers, and increasingly, non-VC money, that have larger stakes in outcomes for humanity who I feel will back a 'purer' OpenAI.
Imo sam altman and team believed more in the llm because it took the world by storm and they just couldn’t wait to milk it. Msft has also licensed these type of services from open ai on azure. The folks really motivated by values at open probably want to move on from the llm hype and continue their research and pushing the boundaries of AI further.
They don't, they know it very well. But people has being buying in this AGI bullshit (pardon the language) for a while, and they wanted a piece of the cake.
I'm sure they care. The question is how will they stay liquid if there is a similar or better offer by another party? The kind of interface they use makes it trivial to move from one supplier to another if the engine is better.
The past is not on the menu for any of us, also not for OpenAI. They can't undo that which has been done without wiping out the company in its entirety. Unless they aim to become the Mozilla of AI. Which is a real possibility at this point.
By "for profit" you mean "available to use by people right now"?
Well then I hope the "pure" OpenAI is over. I want to be able to use the AI for money, not for these models to be hoarded..
In the name of safety, the board has gifted OAI to MS. Even Ilya wants to jump ship now that the ship is sinking (I'll be real interesting if Sama even lets him on board the MS money train).
Calling this a win for AI safety is ludicrous. OAI is dead in all be name, MS basically now owns 100% of OAI (the models, the source, and now the team) for pennies on the dollar.
If I would be betting, I would bet on Altman and Microsoft as well, because in the real world, evil usually wins, but I'm just really astonished by all this rhetoric here on HN. Like, firing Altman is a horrible treason, and people wouldn't want to work with those traitors anymore. Altman is the guy, who is responsible for making OpenAI "closed", which was a constant reason for complaints since it happened. When it all started, the whole vibe sure wasn't "the out-source Microsoft subsidiary ML-research unit that somehow maintains non-profit status", which was basically what happened. I'm not going to argue if it's good or bad — it is entirely possible, that this is the only realistic way to do business and Sutskever, Murati et al are just delusional trying to approach this as a scientific research project. Honestly, I sort of do believe it myself. But since when Altman is the good guy in this story?
Another way of framing this would be that Altman was one of the only people there with their head far enough from the clouds to realize they had to adapt if they were going to have the resources needed to survive. In the real world you need more than a few Tony Starks in a cave to maintain a longterm lead even if the initial output is exceptional with nothing but what's in the cave.
I, for one, never gave a flying shit about OpenAI’s “openness”, which always felt like a gimmick anyway. They gave me a tool that has cut my work down 20-40% across the board while making me able to push out more results. I care about that.
Also AGI will never happen IMO. I’m not credentialed. Have no real proof to back it up and won’t argue one way or the other with anyone, but deep down I just don’t believe it’s even physically possible for AGI. I’ll be shocked if it is, but until then I’m going to view any company with that set as its goal as a joke.
I don’t see a single thing wrong with Altman either, primarily because I never bought into the whole “open” story anyway.
And no, this isn’t sarcasm. I just think a lot of HN folks live with rosy-tinted glasses of “open” companies and “AGI that benefits humanity”. It’s all an illusion and if we ever somehow manage to generate AGI it WILL be the end of us as a species. There’s no doubt.
A bit surprised by this pseudo ad hominem, but just for one data point I have (now ex-)coworkers in the same role as me who've recently moved to OpenAI. I'm not suggesting I'm more competent than them, but I don't think my hiring was based on luck while they got it on merit either.
> What if the type of people who made the company successful are leaving and the type of people who have no track record become interested?
What if it's the opposite? What if sama was basically a Bezos who was in the right place/time but could've realistically been replaced by someone else? What if Ilya is irreplaceable? Not entirely sure what the point of this is - if you want to convey that your conjecture is far more likely than the opposite, then make a convincing argument for why that's the case.
The Microsoft team going to churn out ChatGPT versions - which are the current valuation-makers. OpenAI is going to chase what comes after ChatGPT, pushing yet another ChatGPT is probably one of the reasons the researchers got fed up.
In my opinion. Best outcome for everyone involved.
I think the reality is the opposite. Sam has said that he doesn't think Transformers/GPT architecture will be enough for AGI where Ilya claims it might be enough.
It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the mission and working with or learning from the existing team will still want to work there.
I didn't believe that OpenAI was being honest in their mission statement before - I thought it was just the typical bay area "we want to make the world a better place" bs.
This entire situation changed my mind radically and now I put the non-profit part in my personal top 3 dream jobs :)
Does that not only work long-term with investment?
Unless they get philanthropic backers (maybe?), who else is going to give them investment needed for resources and employees that isn't going to want a return on investment within a few years?
They will be ok. Research does not take that much GPUs compared to training huge commercial LLMs and hiring thousands of people to manually train them to be "safe". You'd prefer smaller models, but faster iterations.
I agree, any potential hire who has the choice between OpenAI and the new team at MSFT will now choose the latter. And a lot of the current team will follow as well. This is probably the end of OpenAI. Can't say I'm too sad, finally a chance to erase that misleading name from history.
Yes, for most AI researchers the umbrella organization (or university) doesn't matter nearly as much as the specific lab. These people are not going to work at Microsoft, they are going to work at whatever that new org is going to be called, and that org is going to have a pretty high status.
That's kind of the point, we all do. What is harder to understand are the low stakes whims of academics bickering over their fiefdoms.
This move is bringing the incentives back to a normal and understood paradigm. And as a user of AI, will likely lead to better, quicker, and less hamstringed products and should be in our benefit.
What’s ironic is how backwards people here have the narrative. Not sure you’re fully aware of what happened at OpenAI.
The “Open” types, ironically, wanted to keep LLMs hidden away from the public (something something religious AGI hysteria). These are the people who think they know better than you, and that we should centralize control with them for our own safety (see also, communism).
The evil profit motive you’re complaining about, is what democratized this tech and brought it to the masses in a form that is useful to them.
The “cash grab show” is the only incentive that has been proven to make people do useful things for the masses. Otherwise, it’s just way too tempting to hide in ivory towers and spend your days fantasizing about philosophical nonsense.
"Open"AI indeed was, and is, ironic, but in reality, MS acquisition of Altman and co is not going to change anything for anybody besides a bunch of California socialites. Not sure what sort of democratisation you are referring to, but I can bet my firstborn that whatever product MS develops will be just as open as GPT4.
Yep, if you wanted to move to MSFT from LinkedIn or vice versa, you needed to re-interview although finding a job rec and internal hiring manager was easier.
That was 33 years ago. What's the point of lingering on a potential parallel there? If it does go that way, how could you call it anything but a coincidence considering all the counter examples in Microsoft's history?
Sorry I should have phrased that as starting in 1990...
In 1990 they poached Brad Silverberg who then spent the next 7 years poaching all of Borland's top talent in the most prominent example of a competitive 'brain drain' strategy that I'm aware of.
I worked with Delphi for many years, and from what I saw Borland dug their own grave. I did commercial work with Turbo Pascal last century, and I can say that even that far back Borland was run horribly. And they've gone a long way downhill since 2000 (I have a friend still using Delphi and Embarcadero is terrible). Microsoft with VB spanked Delphi 2 (a Borland highlight) back in mid 90s.
I really think you don't know what you are talking about. Delphi 7 was released in 2002 and you were "in high school in the early 2000s". We all love a good narrative, but yours has no base to belong to.
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have very similar backgrounds. They are both highly intelligent, both dropped out of college and lack any advanced education. They are classic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: well-networked, great at fund raising, maybe even good managers. Potential contribution to advanced AI research: zero.
What, exactly, does Microsoft want to do with them? Best guess: Use their connections and reputation to poach talent from OpenAI.
This is such a weird take. Sam and Greg were at OpenAI for 8 years! Why is it assumed that their “potential contribution to advanced AI research” is contingent on their having spent (no/more/less) time at academic institutions decades ago?
Yeah but Greg is not community college dropout, but (both) MIT and Harvard dropout.
Someone who could qualify to go to both Harvard and MIT will be better at anything they set their mind to than the regular grad with four year of education after the said four years.
Wow. This sounds like an amazing coup for Microsoft. They are getting Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, "together with colleagues". With this team, they will be able to rebuild GPT in-house. I fear that with this development, the commercial side of the OpenAI is pretty much gone. Which sounds like what the OpenAI board has intended to do all along. I think this will also spark a big exodus from OpenAI.
I am also curious about how OpenAI board is planning to raise the money for non-profit for further scaling. I don't think it would be that easy now.
An internet meme from Lord of the Rings comes to mind: "One does not simply fire Sam Altman."
Presumably they still have the deal with MS and will continue to receive funding as long as they meet their obligations? (Of course no clue what they are..)
Presumably yes, depending on what's in the legal documents. I am guessing that Microsoft will transition slowly, in order to provide continuity to the Azure customers. But OpenAI will not "thrive" from this deal anymore. Partnerships tend to only work when both sides are interested, regardless of the agreements. If OpenAI needs several more $billion to train GPT-5, this will get sabotaged.
The scaling party is basically over. Or rather, it has moved to Redmond.
This is where other big tech giants need to move. MSFT provides nothing extra which Google/Amazon/Meta can not move. Make it multi platoform and make it more open source.
This looks like a short term compromise to defend MSFT before the market opens. A number of members will follow Sam and Greg, but I doubt if it will be the majority given it's yet another big tech rather than a brand new startup. And what would be their roles? Yet another VP/SVP? Those folks are not really AI guys and don't fit very nicely into all the bureaucracy rampant in big techs. Satya will of course try to give them as much room as possible, but it will be considerably smaller and slower thanks to all those corporate politics and external regulations.
Yep feels like a desperate attempt by nadella to restore confidence in him and Microsoft’s massive investment and news like this can easily change on a dime
Microsoft could literally burn $10B and not even notice it. They just wrapped up spending $70B in a smaller division (gaming). I don't think this has anything to do with saving face for investors.
I think people underestimate how much of a company’s value is in their key leadership, select talent, and technology. When a company is acquired those are typically the reasons to do so other than pure revenue acquisition. Microsoft already has their technology, now has the key leadership, and will soon have the select talent.
Pirate more like. He's not just poaching "talent" he has likely stolen IP and will hope to destroy OpenAI in court costs. Microsoft is a terrible company and I hope this backfires on them.
This might turn out to be a lot more stable structure long term: the commercialization of AI under Microsoft's brand, with Microsoft's resources, and the deep research into advanced AI under OpenAI. This could shield the research division of OpenAI from undue pressure from the product side, in a way that it probably couldn't when everything was under one roof.
I find your theory more plausible. Microsoft, Google and Amazon were lagging in AI. You can simply look at their voice assistants for an example. That's why they started investing billions in OpenAI and other think tanks in this space. Now capital turns things around to be as they should (from their perspective) and reacquires control.
MS/G/A didn’t put this into voice assistants not because they don’t have it, but because it doesn’t scale to fit the commercials at the moment. Google invented transformers and Deepmind had GPT scale LLM’s at least a year before CGPT came out.
Altman just rushed everyone’s hand by publishing it into the world at cost
My friends and family had an awful opinion of AI in general because it was the voice assistants were sold to them as the best example of AI. That changed with ChatGPT.
Google invented really useful AI but failed to deliver. OpenAI did so in record time. Now it's Google that's playing catching up with the technology they invented themselves, ironically.
But my comment applies more to Microsoft and Amazon, tbh.
This wasn’t a result of product genius in this case - OAI just didn’t have the regulatory and PR oversight that big tech has - I know for a fact Meta and Google had CGPT equivalent models ready but couldn’t launch them as they’d get rightfully berated for the model being racist or hallucinating. Things OpenAI avoided because it’s a startup non-profit.
And OAI delivered with enormous per-user cost that doesn’t scale - in an app that is a showcase and doesn’t really have latency requirements as people understand it’s a prototype.
And the vas majority of people play with CGPT, they don’t use it for anything useful. Incidental examples of friends and family of tech workers to the side.
Ugh. I’m not keen on AGI being an eventual Microsoft product, or after this circus, even the hangers on at Open AI. Hope it’s still decades off and this all is a silly side show footnote.
Satya just pulled best move of 2023.
Gets the hot names, whoever will follow Sam and Greg, to work in a startup like cocoon. Throws money at them, which is peanuts to Microsoft, both stock to keep them and unlimited compute.
Sam wants to do custom chips? Do it with Microsofts money, size and clout. All doors are open. The new Maia100 chip can soon be followed by Sam200.
Brings innovation and makes the company more attractive to future hires.
Who cares if Same leaves after 2 years? Maybe that was part of the discussions, Satya wont be around forever and doesn't really have a good allround replacement inhouse.
MSFT stock meanwhile goes from sideways movement to another all time high and onto 400.
Genius move, would have never thought Sam accepts such arrangement but it makes sense.
The only shocking thing about this whole episode was how many people in the media failed to understand just how much power this board had.
They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8 hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.
Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little leverage. Reading the news you’d think otherwise.
No one would really resign until they had another branch to grab onto. You wouldn't expect anyone to resign this weekend. It would happen in the months afterwards.
If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what does OpenAI have left? If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?
That may have been the leverage Microsoft and other investors tried to use, but OpenAI leadership thinks won't happen. We'll see what unfolds.
> If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what does OpenAI have left?
This is a real possibility and something I'm sure Ilya and the board thought through. Here's my guess:
- There's been a culture rift within OpenAI as it scaled up its hiring. The people who have joined may not have all been mission driven and shared the same values. They may have been there because of the valuation and attention the company was receiving. These people will leave and join Altman or another company. This is seen as a net good by the board.
- There's always been a sect of researchers who were suspicious of OpenAI because of its odd governance structure and commercialization. These people now have clear evidence that the company stands for what it states and are MORE likely to join. This is what the board wants.
> If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?
I don't think this is an actual problem. Anthropic can secure funding just fine. Emmet is an ex-Amazon / AWS executive. There's possibility that AWS will be the partner providing computing in exchange for OpenAI's models being exclusively offered as part of Amazon Bedrock, for example, if this issue with Microsoft festers. I know Microsoft sees this as a clear warning: We can go to AWS if you push us too hard here.
I don't see how the partnership with MSFT isn't dissolved in some way in the coming week as Altman and co. openly try to poach OpenAI talent. And again, maybe dissolving the MSFT ties was something the board wanted. It's hard to imagine they didn't think it was a possibility given the way they handled announcing this on Friday, and it's hard to imagine it wasn't intentional.
This actually seems like a decent compromise. Sam and Greg can retain velocity on the product side without having to spin up a whole new operation in direct competition with their old levers of power, and Ilya + co can remain in possession of the keys to the kingdom.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me it is us framed as if they won't be working on GPT-based products, but on research.
The whole thing reads like this to me: "In hindsight, we should've done more due diligence before developing a hard dependency on an organization and its product. We are aware that this was a mistake. To combat this, we will do damage control and continue to work with OpenAI, while developing our in-house solution and ditching this hard dependency. Sam & Co. will reproduce this and it will be fully under our control. So rest assured dear investors."
How do you conduct research with sales people? even if they manage to bring in researchers from OpenAI, the only gain here is microsoft getting some of the researchers behind the products and/or product developers.
Well, the same way a man with drive, discipline and money but very little in the way of technical expertise can build a company.
Sometimes you need someone who can drive a project and recruit the right people for the project. That person does not always need to be a subject matter expert.
Except they only had AI model velocity and not product velocity. The user-side implementation of chatGPT is actually quite below what would be expected based on their AI superiority. So the parts that Sam & Greg should be responsible for are actually not great.
Sam and Greg were responsible for everything including building the company, deciding on strategy, raising funding, hiring most of the team, coordinating the research, building the partnership with Microsoft and acquiring the huge array of enterprise customers.
To act like they were just responsible for the "UI parts" is ridiculous.
I'm the first to defend CEOs and it's not a popular position to be in usually, believe me. But in this case, they did an experiment and it blew up based on their model's superiority alone.
Product-wise, however, it's looking like good enough AI is being commoditized at the pace of weeks and days. They will be forced to compete on user experience and distribution vs the likes of Meta. So far OpenAI only managed to deliver additions that sound good on the surface but prove not to be sticky when the dust settles.
They have also been very dishonest. I remember Sam Altman said he was surprised no one built something like chat GPT before them. Well... people tried but 3rd parties were always playing catch-up because the APIs were waitlisted, censored, and nerfed.
a) Meta is not competing with OpenAI nor has any plans to.
b) AI is only being commoditised at the low-end for models that can be trained by ordinary people. At the high-end there is only companies like Microsoft, Google etc that can compete. And Sam was brilliant enough to lock in Microsoft early.
c) What was stopping 3rd parties from building a ChatGPT was the out of reach training costs not access to APIs which didn't even exist at the time.
a) Meta is training and releasing cutting-edge LLM models. When they manage to get the costs down, everyone and their grandma is going to have Meta's AI on their phone either through Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp.
b) Commoditization is actually mostly happening because companies (not individuals) are training the models. But that's also enough for commoditization to occur over time, even on higher-end models. If we get into the superintelligence territory, it doesn't even matter though, the world will be much different.
c) APIs for GPT were first teased as early as 2020s with broader access in 2021. They got implemented into 3rd party products but the developer experience of getting access was quite hostile early on. Chat-like APIs only became available after they were featured in ChatGPT. So Sam feigning surprise about others not creating something like it sooner with their APIs is not honest.
If I recall correctly, Mira Murati was actually the person responsible for productizing GPT into a Chatbot. Prior to that, OpenAI's plan was just to build models and sell API access until they reach AGI.
I know there's a lot of talk about Ilya, but if Sam poaches Mira (which seems likely at this point), I think OpenAI will struggle to build things people actually want, and will go back to being an R&D lab.
This is kind of true, I think programming even codellama or gpt3.5 is more than enough and gpt-4 is very nice but what is missing is good developer experience, and copy-pasting to the chat window is not that.
Ilya and co are going to get orphaned, there’s no point to the talent they have if they intend to slow things down so it’s not like they’ll remain competitive. The capacity that MSFT was going to sell to OpenAI will go to the internal team.
Maybe they want it that way and want to move on from all the LLM hype that was distracting them from their main charter of pushing the boundaries of AI research? If yes, then they succeeded handsomely
The GPT Golden Goose consists of 2 parts:
1. Smart people with the knowledge and motivation to build the Goose.
2. The compute required to create Eggs.
MSFT now has both.
I don't see how any regulatory framework could have prevented this now or in the future.
I thought for sure the only two outcomes were that Altman raises money for a new startup or he comes back to OpenAI with a new governance structure (which is still a wild and crazy outcome, but crazier things have happened). Now that this happened though, I feel stupid for not considering this as a possible outcome at all.
The whole timeline of events over the last two events still leaves me scratching my head though.
It's confusing because no one beyond the direct negotiating parties knows exactly why any of this is happening in the first place. The media scoops about commercialization disputes don't seem that important to warrant such a dramatic showdown
Leadership - To stay top of the game, you can't just rely on brunch of engineers, but a person/team to pull everything into shape. Seeing how many employees are leaving for sama, you get the sense.
he's just the ceo, he's not designing or implementing products, and I don't think I've ever even seen him say anything particularly insightful in public.
can you link me to something particularly impressive?
I must be missing something based on the huge amount of praise people heap on him, but no one ever seems to elaborate on why.
At the least, probably a good PR move for MS. It's a good move to counter whatever weight would be going against the MS stock price given they made a huge investment into OpenAI.
that is what i thought, when Sam was fired, i think he is kind of people can be replaced by AI generated something ( ai-ceo ), not that complicate compare to engineer or scientist. and another replaceable one is Satya Nadella. and the ai-ceo maybe much less evil than them, since they are the one convert ( i am not sure if they committed fraud ) the non-profit, open source entity to for-profit and closed source entity.
yeah, Elon Musk invested tons of money to start openai as non-profit to make sure this openai thing is for all, not for couple of people to shine themself.
If your goal is to produce a lot of value and you don’t care about others capturing it, then it may actually be a good way to go, especially with the non-profit setup.
I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee are...quite different.
Incredible how much has changed in one weekend… or not?
Confused what this really means. So Microsoft still has access to OpenAI’s pre-AGI tech that Sam and Greg can leverage for their more product-focused visions.
More than that, it looks like Microsoft has become a major AI player (internal research) overnight up with the likes of Meta, Google, and OpenAI. Incredible.
Microsoft was already set to spent 27 billion usd on research for 2023. They dedicate huge standout double digit percentages of budget to research every year. Their in house AI research division was already huge.
They didn't become a major AI player overnight... They already were long ago.
OpenAI is small, in raw numbers of AI researchers, compared to the big players in the space. That's a major reason why it's so compelling that they have been able to consistently set the bar for state of the art.
They were a dream team... But small. Msft is adding AAA+ talent to their existing A+ deck. Also they won't have to rewrite the code base. Can hit the ground running.
Lastly, there is no evidence that openai has the greatly quoted and so hard to define 'agi'. That's Twitter hearsay and highly unlikely... If folkes can even agree what that is. By the overwhelming percentage of definitions... Even gpt-5 is unlikely to meet that bar. Highly speculative. Twitter is a cesspool of conspiracy theory... Don't believe everything you read.
Can someone help me understand what Sam's actual value is? He doesn't seem to be a particularly important practitioner/researcher re: AI and is "just" a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?
Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.
Microsoft would at least like him not to do that job for a competitor.
Given they paid for a big stake in the market leader, and their stock price movements when this drama erupted, keeping these people in-house can be seen as damage control.
Sure. But Sam Altman is an ambitious man. Why would he accept this instead of fundraising and creating another company? I think there would be more details of this arrangement surfacing these coming days. It is unlikely a traditional team within a large corporation.
A lot of experienced OpenAI engineers/scientists apparently want to come with him. Those people clearly have a lot of value to Microsoft since they've invested heavily in OpenAI. Imagine having poured billions in to that firm to discover half the reason you invested is walking out the door...
Hiring famous well known big names of the industry (even if they're useless and will just coast for crazy money) sends a strong signal to investors and will most likely boost MSFT stock price during this ongoing AI bubble.
And once the AI bubble pops as everyone learns AGI indeed NOT 'around the corner', Microsoft will silently let him go with a golden parachute in the 8 figure ballpark.
At least that's what I learned from watching the Silicon Valley satire.
These things just show over and over again how irrational the "market" behaves. Most of all it's a big hype train and you better be lucky on the time to hop on or off.
If you are the lucky CEO of a company during the phase of success, investors will associate you with success. It's just easier to identify than understanding what the company does in detail and why it is successful or will/won't be in the future.
Microsoft's board made the right call when they promoted Satya to CEO. Their share price on the day he became CEO was $36.35 and is now $369.84 (and likely to increase again on this news).
Putting together a deal like this whilst maintaining the relationship with OpenAI is impressive enough, but to do it as a cricket tragic when India was losing to Australia is even better.
In retaliation Ilya/team should just open source everything OpenAI has. The only way to make genAI(GPT the can opener) safe is to make it democratic and available for everyone. Then others can pick it up and make it more efficient. At least MS servers will get a break.
When this all went down, I just felt really bad for all those involved, in any situation like this, I feel horrible for the person, imaging what it must of felt for Sam, as if his situation was really bad, yet of course he was always likely to land somewhere on his feet and always in a much better situation than me personally.
Then by the late hours of Sunday, he has already negotiated with OpenAI and then joined Microsoft. Crazy to me that such decisions are made at breakneck speed and everything unfolds so quickly, when I take much longer to make much simpler choices.
I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs. On the balance this probably slows things down, so: good.
Not sorry about Sam, first off I'm not assuming we know everything and second I'm more inclined to trust the board. Also it seems he was trying to do a secret hardware venture on the side, which would be several kinds of unethical. Again: good.
>I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.
It's simple: He who wins first place writes the rules, for everyone.
If Microsoft gets the first place win, they (and more broadly the USA) are who get to write the rulebook.
We are already witnessing this with "AI", it's OpenAI/Microsoft and the USA who dragged the rest of the west into the rules that they wrote because they got past the finish line first.
Hopefully this motivates a lot of people who don't want Microsoft to be the AI company. Slowing down research would mean Microsoft wins everything.
MS now has both the accelerationists and the deccelerationists. They can keep accelerating themselves when pushing for regulatory capture through their deccelerationist branch to slow down any competition.
It really does feel like that. Like it’s mutually beneficial for Sam and MSFT to team up in the short term while Sam figures out his next move and MSFT tries to keep OpenAI afloat for the time being
Researchers can not be 'AI visionaries', almost by definition, as you focus on depth instead of breadth as a competent researcher.
Someone like Sam Altman is indeed more of a visionary than every hardcore AI researcher. The job here is to not push the boundaries of science, it is to figure out and predict the cascading effects of a new invention.
Additional info from a Linked-in follow-up comment by Satya:
"I’m super excited to have Sam join as CEO of this new group, setting a new pace for innovation. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having Sam and team do the same."
Nadella was heavily involved in the talks to get Altman et al. back in OpenAI. This must have been brought up, so I’m guessing the OpenAI board made their decision knowing this would be the outcome?
Purely business-wise, it sure does seem like it's a race down to the bottom. A disproportionate amount of the sharpest minds are working on this, burning ungodly amounts of money but no one has so far has really managed to capture that value in a profitable way either.
The public positions of these people are opaque, inconsistent, and intellectually dishonest too. They're apparently not here to make money but they need a lot of it until they create a superintelligence (but money will be obsolete by then, apparently). And AI may destroy humanity so we will try to build it faster than anyone else so it doesn't..? WTF.
It's okay to want to make money and cement your name in history, but what is up with these public delusions?
Presumably Sam and Greg now get to pick up where they left off and keep productizing GPT-4 since Microsoft has the IP and is hosting their own GPT-4 models on Azure, right?
The more interesting thing is whether or not they'll be able to build and release something equivalent to GPT-5, using Microsoft's immense resources, before OpenAI is able to.
This was expected. Who would possibly think Sam would join MS to be a "senior research" or "VP of engineering"? They get to form a company and run a startup within Microsoft with full Microsoft backing.
And by seeing how Satya praise it
```
We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap ... We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team
```
You know OpenAI is now overly done. I'd say it's now in archive.
He performed an unbelievable turnaround. His predecessor, famed for sweating a lot, yelling (sometimes positively, not necessarily in anger), throwing chairs and insisting on giving the keynote speech every year at MWC while being irrelevant, was driving the company into the ground.
Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity which he had. Unlike Billg (who missed the dawn of the Internet) and the chair-throwing dude (who fumbled Mobile), Satya is making sure Microsoft does NOT miss AI. Which is even more impressive as Google was kind of expected to be the winner initially, given the whole company's focus , mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and a considerable (at the time) lead, if not a moat.
I dare to compare his turnaround to Jobs'. Sure, MSFT wasn't weeks away from insolvency when he took over, and some of their current successes were indeed started before his tenure, but just look at where Windows 8 was going.
*Edit:
Just as a clarification: Not an employee, I actually dislike them profoundly and would never join them. I'm not sure this move is the best outcome for mankind - but credit where credit's due, they were shrewd, smart and right on time. Hats off.
The problem with Google is that it is being run by the bunch of nerds. Sure, they are smart but without ad revenue they would gave gone down long time ago...
Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which was a wrong prediction.
And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another AT&T merger fiasco.
The problems with Google in my own personal experience and POV indeed pretty much coincide with the end of Eric Schmidt's tenure as CEO. It's sad, as a nerd, but it started going to shit when the nerds got in the driving seat, and of course much worse once they stopped caring altogether and left Sundar at the helm.
With billg missing the dawn of the Internet, I didn't mean the IE integration fiasco and the resulting lawsuit - that's actually the part they got more or less right (in their own perverted 3E approach, not according to my moral compass), but too late to become dominant. They first wasted time trying to create their own MSN walled garden a la Compuserve .
To Ballmer's credit he did start Azure, although it doesn't feel it was a serious enough effort, until he was replaced. But between Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Skype, Zune, Kin, etc etc... it's no wonder it's been called Microsoft's lost decade.
As a user and not shareholder, I simply can't agree with this sentiment.
Windows got massively worse during his tenure in literally everything that can get worse including half-legal snooping on all users including Enterprise ones (I stand by the statement that this is idiotic long term strategy driven by childish emotions like FOMO - no way he didn't have a direct say in this).
Office is certainly PITA and getting worse in my experience, but that can be corporate modifications/restrictions I am exposed to.
Teams was, is and probably forever will be pathetic, buggy, slow and just a bad joke compared to some competition with 1% of their budget.
These are core extremely visible products and for most of mankind 100% of the surface with MS. There is not even an attempt for corrections, direction is set and rest are details.
I fully, fully concur with the experience as a user. Sadly that's irrelevant to their financials - first of all this is now what, 5% of their revenue stream?
And despite the shittiness, even that 5% is doing great because their audience is now billions of mostly computer-illiterate people, who don't even have an opinion on the technical merits, the performance, the bugginess, the snooping, the feature gap, etc etc etc.
The opinion of few million geeks who are mostly not using Windows anyway (or whose only contacts with anything Microsoft are due to their employers' choice of platform) doesn't ultimately matter much, Microsoft knows it, and they have no reason to change direction despite our frustration. Some better privacy law could nudge them, anything short of a legal directive won't go far.
I will never forget something I read in his "Hit Refresh" book(I'm Microsoft employee)...
He wrote something along the lines, Office should write best app for iPhone, Mac or even Linux if that helps them grow. They should not help Windows sell Windows copies by doing better Office features on Windows, it is up to Windows team to make Windows best operating system, it should not rely and keep back Office team...
This makes Windows and Office better, because it allows Office to be free and do what they need to grow, and it forces Windows to improve OS and not rely on others...
Just one example where CEO can help teams grow...
That's a nice vision, but as someone who transitioned from a windows to mac a few years ago, I'm sad to report that reality isn't anything like it.
Office for mac is lightyears behind what windows has. Both excel and outlook miss critical features (just last week I was looking to change the background of an email - seems that's impossible on mac), or are so much worse in terms of performance (~20mb file with pivot tables) that I'm not sure if I'm running Excel on my m1 mac or if it's a raspberry pi.
It's not like MS could do any other thing after being wiped out of the smartphone market. Locking Office to Windows in an age where virtually everybody is using a smartphone or a tablet with either Android or iOS is useless. The situation of Office in either Mac or Linux never improved, it just got turned into a cloud service like almost any other software suite and tried to cash in the legacy name to compete with Google Docs and Zoho. I don't really see any brilliant move there.
For a quick overview, google Microsoft stock and take a look at what happened to it after he became CEO in February 2014. It had been farting along at $24-35 a share with little lasting change since 2000. As soon as he got involved it started rising stratospherically and is now at about $360.
Partnering with openAI turned out to be a brilliant idea that has helped them corner a brand new market. And poaching perhaps half their staff after an unforced error by their board is even shrewder.
Presumably because MSFT is the most highly diversified tech company on the planet and he's overseeing multiple billion dollar businesses there without breaking a sweat.
Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a coherent AI strategy at the moment.
To be fair, MSFT was the most diversified tech company prior to his arrival - Google had Search, Facebook had Facebook, Apple had hardware. Microsoft by then had perhaps a dozen products with a billion dollars or more of revenue (Windows, Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, XBox, Azure, Surface, among others). Satya did well to focus on the cloud and grow opportunities there, but he hasn't significantly increased the diversity of the product lineup.
If you look at the charts with revenue streams - Microsoft is the most diversified in that regard, because basically each and every branch of Microsoft produces the similar amount of revenue.
With Xbox getting Activision it lifts up More Personal Computing to the level, comparable to other streams (and even higher than Windows).
He managed to make the whole open source world forget who enemy #1 is and got them to give him privileged access to all of their work product on his terms. That's no mean feat.
He was a marketing person I believe when Bill was in MSFT. To become the CEO of MSFT is a huge political and competence firewall already. Then to do the most spectacular transformation of a mega-corp is next-level. MSFT is now the leading player in AI, while before it was still fucking around with office and Windows licenses. People who are young (not saying you are), and don't remember what MSFT was before Satya, don't really get that MSFT would be like Oracle and IBM if not for Satya.
As far as I know, he actually came from an engineering background, making his career even more impressive. Despite my views on Microsoft and shareholder-oriented capitalism, he certainly seems like a brilliant and genuinely interesting guy.
The board saw cloud compute was gonna be big. They made him the king. Good bet. The whole company went all in on cloud. Now they print more money than before.
Marketing person lol. He's an engineer. The guy literally gets back into VS code sometimes to stay in touch.
The CEO's job is to enrich the shareholders and by that metric he has done a pretty good job. More qualitatively, being able to change Microsoft's trajectory from boring enterprise tech company to a tech leader with strategic deals (OpenAI, Github) is very impressive.
That's a strawman and you know it. I'm not going to necessarily concur's OP's point, but it's inarguable given MSFT's last half decade the positive stewardship Nadella has done.
Reality is indeed stranger than fiction. I don't have an opinion on whether this is good or bad for whomsoever. But it's entertaining for sure. Best tech weekend I have ever had.
This is no research group, this is OpenAI 2.0, Sam/Greg will have enormous autonomy. It will be foolish to think Satya just recruited them to tangle them in MSFT bureaucracy
BigCos generally have a hard time keeping their autonomous groups actually isolated from bureaucracy. Lab126 has been thoroughly corporatized, and Area 120 got outright reabsorbed.
Why are people so excited about Sam and Greg joining Microsoft?
The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding. But that's not something Microsoft needs, so what value does Sam give them?
Putting on my lateral thinking hat, by hiring Altman and Brockman they ensure that they cannot compete against them in whatever enterprise they were thinking of doing. It gives the corporation incredible breathing room of at least a year to catch up while also being able to mine them for their knowledge. Additionally they will serve as beacons for hiring devs into their corporation.
So we have OpenAI, Microsoft, a whole bunch of capital, and a few "rock stars" moving. And it's these people holding the keys to the AI kingdom where they go to work to achieve AGI.
Finally they got rid of this pesky idea of "safety". We're back in "break things" mode.
Does nobody recognize the stakes here? AGI, which soon would accelerate into something far more capable, ends civilization. I'm not saying it would kill us, I'm saying it makes us cognitively obsolete and all meaning is lost.
AI Safety isn't a micro bias in the training set. It's existential at planetary scale. Yet we let a bunch of cowboys just go "let's see what happens" with zero meaningful regulation in sight. And we applaud them.
I know AGI isn't here yet. I know Microsoft would not allow for zero safety. I'm just saying that on the road to AGI, about two dozen people are deciding on our collective faith. With as ultimate chief the guy behind shit coin "world coin".
This confirms that Sam and Greg don't belong as heads of a non-profit who's sole objective is to develop AGI for the benefit of all of humanity. Because if your Plan B is to join Microsoft, whose mission is to make profit for shareholders, then your heart wasn't really in it, as that won't achieve your original goal.
Yeah, this is a huge validation of what Ilya and the Board did. If Sam and Greg had started another company with similar aims, even if it wasn't non-profit, they would probably keep arguing that what they were doing was only to get enough resources to be able to solve the problem of AGI with a broad benefit to humanity, and it probably would have turned into a big ideological schism between Sam's side insisting that a profit-seeking company was okay to pursue the goal, and OpenAI insisting on pursuing the goal and not getting distracted by greed.
Sam and Greg joining up with Microsoft settles that debate cleanly, they clearly aren't serious about developing AGI without a profit motive or military control determining the development process if they're docking with Microsoft. I don't think Ilya and the Board would have had any doubts about Sam if they fired him, but if they did this would remove them.
Haven't worked at Microsoft, but usually, when folks up high have their balls at stake, resources and budgets magically start getting approved faster than the Concorde.
Amazing to see this on the front page multiple times and reposted every 20 minutes, each time as the highest performer on new. I've never seen such story velocity before.
There's a high likelihood that MS is going to start poaching top AI talent aggressively, with Altman's help. This will be to the significant detriment of OpenAI.
If this is how it plays out, OpenAI's board will be famous for decades to come for their boneheaded handling of this situation.
According to the latest developments, "nearly 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman unless the startup's board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO". That seems like it's probably higher than your 20% estimate.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-al...
Maybe some will come out of loyalty. But then again, when you look at the choice of becoming a MS employee vs. being poached by FAIR, Google Brain or Deepmind, it's no guarantee all 500 will come over to follow the sales guys.
Many of them game from Google. Furthermore, if the choice is "create AI that no one ever uses" vs "create AI that people use" then it's a no-brainer to go with Microsoft. Compute + products + research freedom.
Still the aftermath leaves a bitter taste in my mouth about Sam and Greg joining MS. Regardless of whether the AI development in OpenAI was responsible, I think they succeeded in making a product and a culture I have not 'felt' since the early Google days.
Naively, I had really hoped for Sam and Greg to start their own and not join MS. I think a lot of the value was being coherent and to some extent independent.
I can't help to think that the same will happen to the 'new' OpenAI as what happend to DeepMind once they became Google DeepMind (again).
It takes billions to get this off the ground. Next stop: if this is going to be an independent entity they may well go around the usual suspects to give them much more money. I wonder if any of the VCs that have invested in OpenAI have something in their charter about investing in competing entities.
Would Altman shine within Microsoft? Seems like raising capital is his main skill set, and theres no need for that now. But from Microsofts point of view this prevents a new competitor from popping up.
This isnt the win people seem to think it is, at least not for end users. Micosoft dont buy companies and people to keep releasing free standalone products. They buy them to integrate into Windows.
I think the whole problem that sparked all this was that Sam & Co. wasn't enough about being open and research, but more into closed products. I'm surprised over this particular solution because they enter Microsoft with a ton of knowledge of OpenAI internals which seems to open the floodgates for an array of lawsuits if they so much touch their codebases, unless it is under mutual and friendly terms. But now THAT it happened, I'm not surprised Sam is willing to build for Microsoft Copilot.
Microsoft is likely betting that they can build the next GPT with a bag of money and a few food people. They control a massive amount of GPUs, this could be a major factor for Altman and Brockman here.
It's a never ending story. Wonder how much talent they'll hire away from OpenAI and in spite of Nadella's soothing words whether OpenAI will survive all this (probably yes, but in what form?).
So it is safe to say that the negotiations didn't work out.
This is really bad for OpenAI. They will fade to irrelevance soon. OpenAI is going to get a gut punch to wake up to real world. In real world you need capital at scale to make meaningful impact. people who provide capital, not just VCs but any regular folks who buy shares or bonds want to maximize their returns. You do that with a for-profit corporation. If they think they can continue their breakneck speed of breakthroughs with a meager philanthropy, they are in for a rude awakening.
Seems like a logical choice. Microsoft’s next big play is generative AI, and they’ve put a lot of money into that.
They need to show they’re taking steps to stabilize things now that their hype factory has come unraveled.
I don’t think they particularly need these people , because they likely already have in house talent that is competitive. But having these people on board now will allow them to paint a much more stable picture to their shareholders.
My suspicion is that given Sam and Greg’s engineering and deal making chops, they will only ideate in how to use AI models invented elsewhere like right now.
Don’t think Sam or Greg have it in them to build a competing AI model suite, that too inside a bureaucracy like Microsoft.
I think this is exactly what OpenAI wanted - get the business types out and focus on building brilliant models which asymptotically approach AGI whose safety and ethicality they can guarantee.
I'm quite surprised that this point is not being made more. It's not like MSFT is the only shop that OpenAI can turn to, and you could argue that what will now happen is a full scale lobbying war will be now be waged by OpenAI backed by others who don't want MSFT to win (Goog? Musk?). Could be that OpenAI's principled stand will "win" regulation and MSFT will be in a very poor position.
Oh, they are joining Poettering, bringing AI into systemd? Looking forward to excellent and (artificially) intelligent discussions on some mailing lists:)
The new Open AI CEO Emmett Shear just released a long statement and he says one of his top 30-day plan is to `Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report`
> PPS: Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.
We will see if OpenAI team can stand on its own legs. My bet is 70% they will start to humble and lose in long term. AI satety people may not those who know how to create a feasible business. At some point, Microsoft can make a purchase offer to get the remaining OpenAI.
We have seen similar stories with Nokia, Slack, others.
So Altman now has a backer for his NVIDIA killer, and one who can use it not just for LLMs but Azure too, and one day possibly consumer GPUs? Forget Xbox, subsidised graphics cards as a loss-leader for Game Pass subscriptions would be an interesting play. What will the antitrust people think?
The more plausible approach is developing more specialized chips, which are only good at Tensor Ops. Heck, that's what Nvidia's top of the line chips are. The A100 and H100 don't support OpenGL or any other Graphics Api.
I agree that is the most pressing need, and the one Microsoft has already started producing like all the other big players. I’d be very surprised if this topic hasn’t come up in conversations with Altman either now or even before the current blowup. But after that, a consumer play would fit so well! Start off with custom silicon for a couple of generations of Xbox and Surface, get DirectX working nicely with it. Then go after the rest of the market. Good use for Microsoft’s cash pile because it benefits basically all their product lines in one way or another.
It seems to me like there is one clear winner, Google, and everyone else lost a bit. Nevertheless Microsoft seems to have contained the damage as well as possible, again producing an outcome that is better for everyone from the position where they started after Friday.
OpenAI was growing like crazy and while I typically only use it the generate new content, many people I observe just ask it anything. Instead of going to Google they just go to ChatGPT.
The current situation created a mess at OpenAI which should slow it down and permanently damage it‘s reputation somewhat. If I were Google and could choose either outcome, that‘s the outcome I would have chosen.
I don’t think Sam will stay at Microsoft for too long, but this is a logical move forward as damage to OpenAI is already done even if Sam goes back. Besides it is MS who enabled this scale and it perhaps is Sam who negotiated it to begin with.
These other execs simply can’t stand the ground against him being excellent technologist and leader who talks the language of devs. I doubt the rest of these C level people in the board know said language that well…
Besides the whole ‘not for profit’ BS is at this point completely irrelevant, because delivering such costly service at that scale can only be made with, for, and by profit. Whoever thinks otherwise had not followed the history of computing last 100 or so years. And history of humanity perhaps.
Even though I find the step somewhat logical, it is unexpected as I dismissed it a few days ago.
Logical, because as far as I understand the conflict @openai, it is/was about conquering the market with cool products vs. advancing research for the greater good. So one option would have been to split the company into a product organization and a research organization. The only problem is that Microsoft is the product organization in this construct already (they bring the services to the masses via Bing).
Unexpected, because I didn't expect someone like Sam Altman to join the corporate world.
Looking forward I am very excited to see where this leads...
Looks like Sam Altman never gave a shit about the Non profit aspect of Open AI. It wasn't about building a safer future. He just wants what every other SV bro wants, which is clout and success and money.
I'm not saying business is the wrong move, I'm not saying a non-profit is the right move either. I'm also not saying Sam Altman and Co are not skilled at building AI. I'm not even saying Sam Altman won't do good for the world.
What I'm saying is that this move here shows he's just dishonest. Which isn't bad. He's not some do-gooder out to build safer AI, (which is what he portrayed himself as) he's a normal person out to make a name for himself.
Its far more likely that Microsoft is just trying to salvage their investment in the most direct way possible. It doesn’t make sense for them to take this risk absent recent events.
They tried pressuring the board according to the rumors over the weekend. That didn’t work; now they are providing a home for the people that were going to leave OpenAI over this.
If they are smart they will honor the 10B deal as well and continue funding OpenAI. This way they will get the benefit of both teams and maybe even a bit more now that they will be competing.
So let me get this straight, the OpenAI and Microsoft deal does work until AGI is achieved. But that would mean that some sort of source code is restricted for Microsoft at the moment even, otherwise Microsoft would have access to the code right until AGI is achieved (which would be weird).
Regarding Sam and Greg joining MSFT I see this announcement as damage control from Satya. It's still unclear on what exactly they will work on and if Sam and the rest of the team can just continue where they left off at MSFT.
It's Satyas way of showing the shareholders that they still back the face of OpenAI.
`Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.`
That's very strange. He first says that he's going to hire an outside party to investigate the mess around the firing of Altman and then he pre-empts the outcome of that investigation by ruling out a bunch of stuff.
Having read through a lot of the comments around this situation, seems nobody on HN cares that much about AI safety, and is much more focused on corporate profits? Am I reading this wrong?
Not unexpected, MS is betting everything on AI. On the other hand, MS is a corporation in which lions are lead by donkeys. We had windows phones that was excellent and in the right place and then couple of product managers fucked it up. We have windows that is becoming even better underneath and then you have people that thought Cortana and Bing search in the bar were good ideas.
So Ilya can be safe that whatever potential nuclear capabilities they give sama, the Microsoft quagmire will not let them fully develop.
I would expect most people to be concerned about how AGI can be really useful to most of humanity without creating power concentration and more inequality, but these goals seem to be implicitly conflated for some reason with the value of MS stock and Sam Altman's and others' career paths. At least those seem to be the emphasis of most of the drama; admittedly they are much simpler and familiar topics to tackle than what path forward would better suit humanity as a whole.
It’s only been the weekend, it just feels like a week. The announcement that OpenAI’s board had fired Sam Altman came shortly before markets closed on Friday and as of this writing we’re about 5.5 hours away from when they open again.
This was most unexpected. Hopefully it's a compromise reached mutually. Now OpenAI can fulfill what their mission is and these guys can work on AI products at MS.
1. People concerned about them working for a profit-oriented business: there isn't a way to insist otherwise. Personally I'd rather it was Microsoft that Meta or Google or even Amazon.
2. I wonder what the AI teams at MSR think about this move? Looks like they'll be operating separately to the research division.
3. OAI could potentially make life difficult for Microsoft re the IP that those joining MS carry in their heads. I wonder if the future of OAI is just licencing their IP?
What I'm getting from all of this is the hype of AGI right around the corner got a bit exposed. I may be reading to much into it but if it were true then given an opportunity to be part of it you take it and put aside things that shouldn't matter at that point. I'm not even talking about Sam but the people who decided to leave with him. Of course this may be a completely false assumption given how little was disclosed, especially by Sutskever.
I realized thismorning that this somewhat banal story of these guys being cast out from the place of the creators has some chance to become a core origin myth for GPT-5, which is being trained at the moment, presumably also on this schism.
The rupture seems to literally be about GPT-5 itself, whether it will be good or evil. Whatever form its growth takes it must include introspection and this from Open AI about the thing itself is inevitably going to be relevant to it.
Never change a good running system. OpenAI ran quite good, even if things heated up, it sound kind of stupid to fire the CEO when the company is winning on every front.
I thought Sam Altman is businessman, not researcher. What does he going to do in MS? MS does not need external investments. Probably that's the end of his career.
Sam didn't create the breakthroughs behind the current GPT.
He did not create the breakthroughs behind the next GPT.
None of the people that may follow have the same handle on the tech as Ilya. I mean they built up Ilya's image in our mind so much, that he's one of a kind genius (or maybe Musk did that) and now we are to believe that his genius doesn't matter and that Microsoft already knows how to create AGI and that OpenAI is no longer relevant?
Microsoft will now perform parallel development and once they no longer need open ai the free azure credit spigot will run dry and OpenAI will choke on its largess
While this is a coup for Microsoft, the problem is that this splits resources MS has to train models. They were already GPU constrained and I assume they have to honor their agreement w/ OpenAI so there is now N/2 GPUs to go around.
(an interesting fiction would be if all the AI companies agreed to combine their efforts to skip a level and advance the world to GPT-6, maybe through a mixture of experts model)
So essentially a promotion at Microsoft to create an AI division, the real OpenAI, Sam and Greg have been tasked to create another DeepMind / OpenAI inside of Microsoft.
Might as well have acquired OpenAI in the first place given that it was 49% owned by Microsoft anyway but taken over by a coup.
Now we'll see if the employees who are quitting will follow Sam and Greg. Google is still at risk without Gemini being released.
No offense, but please consider getting off Twitter.
Read about their structure. Msft doesn't own anything. They are an investor. This is different, in thus case.
The non profit owns the for profit. Msft has 49 percent of the for profit. Sunset clause after profit benchmarks. Ownership returns 100 percent to non profit.
Stop getting meme'd on by the crowd. That goes to the 90 plus percent of other commenter's spreading misinformation on hn.
I'm worried....I really don't like the idea of some council artificially "slowing down" progress while we on the outside wait for them to bestow fire on us like Prometheus. If AGI can fulfill even a fraction of the economic promise it has, then they will inevitably just use behind the scenes. It was better when it was being developed out front
Due to Microsoft's very generous licensing agreements, this may be the best shot Altman, Brockman, and Nadella have to launder the technology that is currently owned by the OpenAI non-profit. If they manage to poach key staff, they may be able to resume their attempts at rapid commercial growth outside of the confines of the OpenAI mission.
This might be good for society. If there are multiple entities that develop such AI technology, there's some kind of competition and a distribution of power.
Of course I'd prefer if everyone could just train such a model on their smartphone with a public dataset and an open source software. At least in terms of compute, companies will always be ahead.
What do you think Microsoft's medium to long term plan is? Will they clone GPT-x and use their own copy? Will they make their own model and train it from scratch? Will these former OpenAI people start with commercial LLMs like they were doing at OAI, or do you think they want to concentrate on AGI that are a more long-term project?
"OpenAI, the next huge tech company to rival Google" is a huge loser of this whole process, probably dead.
"OpenAI, the non-profit who only has a for-profit subsidiary to get enough resources to fund its mission to develop AGI" is probably a winner, and gets to live instead of slowly die.
Ok... but Altman & Brockman are just managers. Brockman did an ML course in 2018. If they can now get the actual technical people who built GPT4 over then that is something, but at the moment there's a lot of premature celebration here - managers don't actually do anything.
If Sam had left OpenAI on his own accord to do this, certainly.
Since the board fired him and basically nuked his best-effort plan to return - I highly doubt that OpenAI's legal team has anything of substance here. Even if they do, I wouldn't doubt for a second that Microsoft already has its entire legal team ready to play hardball defense.
Overall, a complete loss-loss for OpenAI's board. What a weekend.
I think OpenAI should just focus on doing basic AI research for the time being, at least until their Microsoft deal lapses.
Hopefully, they find a more diverse group of partners in the future that respect their mission as a non-profit (which so happens to own a for-profit subsidiary).
>> We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap
They've invested over $10bn in this affair, even for MS it's massive - a clearer, more reassuring message would've helped, than "we remain committed..."
MS is betting the company on AI. It is everywhere across the org. They won't play with kiddie glove. You want to see ruthless businessmen in action sure pick up the fight. They'll be happy to lose 10 billion plus some more if it means they win the war.
Share Market values growth. Board won't like if MS is rerated as utility. MS is behaving as if AI will be as big as the Internet and wants to capture the biggest slice in it. Hence betting the company and will respond appropriately.
I'm surprised that non-compete for Sam and Greg are never mentioned. True, Microsoft's huge position in OpenAI means that there wouldn't be any retaliation, but I am wondering if this is still a friction point or not.
I was hoping for the OpenAI organism cell to have a clean split and start the race to outcompete each other. But now it looks like the older cell(Microsoft) will eat the high energy cell(OpenAI) and make it its mitochondria.
Sam Altman is a prepper. He said in 2016: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to. [Wikipedia]
This sounds like a step down for both openai and sama. Microsoft probably wins here as they still have access to openai tech and now the only entity with access to the same talent pool as was there before last Friday.
Yay! More consolidation. Honestly makes you wonder if they whole thing was manufactured from the inside. 10-15 years ago, I didn't have Microsoft on my 2023 bingo card for world domination.
OpenAI is ironically executing the exact opposite of its mission. Microsoft is holding all the cards now with their full access to OpenAI tech, the infrastructure and now the leadership.
I guess Microsoft has that much money where they sink 10 billion into OpenAI and then hire all the staff so that it will so that they will need another 10 billion to destroy OpenAI
Based on Satya’s reply to Sam’s quote tweet, seems like Sam is going to run a subsidiary-style organization like LinkedIn, GitHub, and Minecraft. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do.
All this Microsoft affair seemed weird from the beginning. After all, Elon and co. created OpenAI to compete with emerging AI monopoly of tech behemoths - Google/FB/MS.
Biggest question: How much of OpenAI's IP do they get to access at Microsoft? (and perhaps take with them to whatever new startup they would obviously found after?)
I called it - Dave Cutler like agreement - recruit anybody you want - no limit on spending - Azure compute resources AND no interference reporting directly to the CEO.
Depends on what proportion of engineers/scientists follow the CEO to Microsoft.
Also with a lack of direction (and by extension funding) even the best engineering team won’t be able to achieve that much (they might be able to hire better management, of course I have no clue)
Over time, the new team at Microsoft will slowly drain the OpenAI talent as MS will provider fewer and fewer resources to OAI and prioritize their own team they have full ownership owner. OAI will die a slow death due to the talent and resource drain.
In a year or two, Sam and Greg will end up with the same people at MS that are now still at OAI. Okay, perhaps minus Sutskever.
Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI without actually needing to cross the 49% regulatory hurdle? Depending on who follows them to MSFT, that might actually be the outcome here. And OpenAI is suddenly Xerox Parc.
I don't know, way before all of this drama started, the rumors were that he was barely contributing any original or significant ideas to research and the grounbreaking ideas had come from lower level researchers.
Because OpenAI has first mover advantage, an actual product, the household "ChatGPT" name and starting anything from 0 would mean you start with a 3-0 disadvantage. Even if you threw a few billion dollars at it and attracted all of the top minds for at least a year - probably longer - you will be seen as the "ChatGPT alternative". How long before you can capture the momentum they have now with OpenAI? It's also a legal minefield, even when the majority of employees of OpenAI migrate, there will be all kinds of no-competes and conflicts of interest.
Strategically, this is probably a better move. Microsoft doesn't see their investment implode and they probably have some sort of plan to inject or absorb Sam and/or Microsoft back into OpenAI to prevent this in the future. Perhaps replacing the board of directors to prevent further infighting.
Being able to raise money doesn't necessarily translate into success. Perhaps his new crew won't be able to replicate the secret sauce. Or Satya just gave terms favourable enough to convince him at least for now to avoid giving off the impression that Microsoft's investment in OpenAI is incinerated.
A bit surprised, and maybe even disappointed, that he didn't start his own company. Rarely in history did someone have a better shot at becoming a billionaire of their own making. But you have to give it to Nadella, that's quite the coup.
I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever lies ahead without any concern whatsoever, and learn it the hard way.
It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.
> It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.
If they didn’t fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way.
At least this way, OpenAI can continue to operate independently instead of being Microsoft’s zombie vassal company with their mole Altman pulling the strings.
Is their deal with Microsoft exclusive tech transfer wise? If not they can always sell/license what they have to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. They should be able to get quite a bit of money to last a while.
Now that OpenAI is the leader in the field, it has a lot of monetisation avenues above and over the existing income streams of parterships, ChatGPT+ and API access.
Pretty sure that it would be illegal for them to tweet insider information like that if it were false, since it's effectively a statement to shareholders.
Yeah but testing if they work does, that's the problem.
There are probably load so ways you can make language models with 100M parameters more efficient, but most of them won't scale to models with 100B parameters.
IIRC there is a bit of a phase transition that happens around 7B parameters where the distribution of activations changes qualitatively.
Anthropic have interpretability papers where their method does not work for 'small' models (with ~5B parameters) but works great for models with >50B parameters.
This has been a source of tension at least since the release of ChatGPT, so… yeah it’s not like the problem came out of nowhere. The governance structure itself is indicative of quite elaborate attempts to reconcile it.
I don’t know about that. Yes, there was tension built into the structure, something happened to trigger this. You don’t fire your CEO without a backup plan if this was an on going conflict. And if your backup plan is to keep the current president (who was the chair of the board until you removed him), that’s not a backup plan.
Everything points to this being a haphazard change that’s clumsy at best.
IDK. Let's proceed with caution in gauging intentions and interests. Altamans', Microsoft's, the Jedi council's.
"Humanity's interest at heart" is a mouthful. I'm not denigrating it. I think it is really important.
That said, as a proverbial human... I am not hanging my hat on that charter. Members of the consortium all also claim to be serving the common good in their other ventures. So do Exxon.
OpenAI haven't created, or even articulated a coherent, legible, and believable model for enshrining humanity's interests. The corporate structure flowchart of nonprofit, LLCs, and such.. it is not anywhere near sufficient.
OpenAI in no way belongs to humanity. Not rhetorically, legally or in practice... currently.
I'm all for efforts to prevent these new technologies from being stolen from humanity, controlled monopolistically... From moderate to radical ideas, I'm all ears.
What happened to the human consortium that was the worldwideWeb, gnu, and descendant projects like Wikipedia... That was moral theft, imo. I am for any effort to avoid a repeat. OpenAI is not such an effort, as far as I can tell.
If it is, it's not too late. Open AI haven't betrayed the generous reading of the mission in charter. They just haven't taken hard steps to achieving it. Instead, they have left things open, and I think the more realistic take is the default one.
Can you explain what you mean in your second to last paragraph?
The GNU project and the Wikimedia Foundation are still non profit today, and even if you disagree with their results their goal is to server humanity for free.
I'm not criticizing these projects, their current legal structure.
What I mean is that these were created as public goods and functioned as such. Each had unique way of being open, spreading the value of their work as far as possible.
They were extraordinary. Incredible quality. Incredible power. Incredible ability to be built upon.. particularly the WWW.
All achieved things that simply could not have been achieved, by being a normal commercial venture.
Google,fb and co essentially stole them. They built closed platforms built a top open ones. Built bridges between users and the public domain, and monopolize them like bridge trolls.
Considering how part of the culture, a company like Google was 20 years ago this is the treason.
Ilya should just go to Anthropic AI at this point. They have better momentum at this point after all this, and share his ideals. But it would be funny because they broke off of OpenAI because of their Microsoft ventures already in 2019, haha. He'd be welcomed with a big "We told you so!"
I don't consider Anthropic's approach to safety fantastic. They train the model to lie, play cat and mouse with jailbreakers, run moderation on generations with delay etc. This makes the model appear safer, as it's harder to jailbreak, but this approach solves nothing fundamentally.
If Ilya is concerned about safety and alignment, he probably has a better chance to get there with OpenAI, now the he has more control over it.
Anthropic safety is overboard. I tried the classic question of "how many holes does a straw have?" And it refused to talk about the topic. I'm assuming because it thought holes was sexual.
Given what AIs "know" about humanity, I think it's safe to assume that they "think" every word is sexual. For example straw could be short for strawman, which is a man, which is sexual. Or it can be innuendo for... you know.
As for your actual question, it seems to me that a straw is topologically equivalent to a torus, so it has 1 hole, right?
I haven't paid a lot of attention to Anthropic. Are you able to summarize, or link anything about, those events for those who missed it? Particularly the "training to lie" bit
As to cat-and-mouse with jailbreakers, I don't remember any thorough articles or videos. It's mostly based on discussions on LLM forums. Claude is widely regarded as one of the best models for NSFW roleplay, which completely invalidates Antropic's claims about safety and alignment being "solved."
Considering Anthropic and them joining up, with Ilya and Dario that would be a technical powerhouse. As Amodei already showed that such a key person can ramp up quality real fast out of nothing. The two back together would be fantastic. Between Altman and Brockman there's nothing to write home about tech-wise.
There are interviews with all three at Dwarkesh Patel youtube channel. One is definitely not like the other two, but that might just be my impression based on those interviews. edit: Brockman might've been on Lex only.
That would actually be a good idea imo. Ilya should make OpenAI a PBC, then merge it with Anthropic and Amazon's compute power. Meanwhile Altman can become the next real life Nelson Bigetti or sth.
I am not claiming how right or wrong the final outcome would be, but owning the technology with a clear "for-profit" objective is definitely a better structure for Microsoft and for Sam Altman as well (considering, his plans for the future). I have no opinion on AI risk. I just think that a super valuable technology under a non-profit objective was simply an untenable structure, regardless of potential threats.
It isn't fear of a sentient AI that enslaves humanity that makes me disappointed with for-profit companies getting a stronger grip on this tech. It is the fear that a greater portion of the value of this technology will go to the stockholders of said companies rather than potentially be shared among a larger percentage of society. Not that I had that much faith in OpenAI, but in general the shift from non-profit to for-profit is a win for the few over the many.
> It is the fear that a greater portion of the value of this technology will go to the stockholders of said companies rather than potentially be shared among a larger percentage of society. Not that I had that much faith in OpenAI, but in general the shift from non-profit to for-profit is a win for the few over the many.
You know what is an even bigger temptation to people than money - power. And being a high priest for some “god” controlling access from the unwashed masses who might use it for “bad” is a really heady dose of power.
This safety argument was used to justify monarchy, illiteracy, religious coercion.
There is a much greater chance of AI getting locked away from normal people by a non-profit on a power trip, rather than by a corporation looking to maximize profit.
Right. Greenpeace also protects the world against technological threats only they can see, and in that capacity has worked to stop nuclear power and GMO use. Acting as if all concern about technology is noble is extremely misguided. There's a lot of excessive concern about technology that holds society back.
If we use the standard of the alignment folks - that the technology today doesn't even have to be the danger, but an imaginary technology that could someday be built might be the danger. And we don't even have to be able to articulate clearly how it's a danger, we can just postulate the possibility. Then all technology becomes suspect, and needs a priest class to decided what access the population can have for fear of risking doomsday.
>You know what is an even bigger temptation to people than money - power.
Do you think profit minded people and organizations aren't motivated by a desire for power? Removing one path to corruption doesn't mean I think it is impossible for a non-profit to become corrupted, but it is one less thing pulling them in that direction.
Even if it goes to stockholders it's not lost forever. That's how we got Starship. The question is what they do with it. As for 'sharing', we've seen that. In USSR it ended up with Putin, Lukashenko, turkmenbashi, and so on. In others it's not much better. Europe is slowly falling behind. There should be some balance and culture.
HN isn't the place to have the political debate you seem to want to have, so I will simply say that this is really sad that you equate "sharing" with USSR style communism. There is a huge middle ground between that and the trickle-down Reaganomics for which you seem to be advocating. We should have let that type of binary thinking die with the end of the Cold War.
is all I'm saying. And I'm not interested in political debates. Neither right nor left side is good in long run. We have examples. More over we can predict what happens if...
Not interested in political debates, but you make political statements drawn from the extremes to support your arguments. Gotcha.
"Europe is falling behind" very much depends on your metrics. I guess on HN it's technological innovation, but for most people the metric would be quality of life, happiness, liveability etc. and Europe's left-leaning approach is doing very nicely in that regard; better than the US.
Except the USSR 'ended up' with those people because they went towards Western-style capitalism, these werent Soviet nomenklatura who stole power by abusing Soviet bureacracy, these were post-Soviet, American-style "democratic" leaders.
> these were post-Soviet, American-style "democratic" leaders
Before that USSR collapsed under Gorbachev. Why? They simply lost with their planned economy where nobody wants to take a risk. Because (1) it's not rewarding, (2) no individual has enough resources (3) to get thing moving they will have to convince a lot of bureaucrats who don't want to take a risk. They moved forward thanks to few exceptional people. But there wasn't as many willing to take a risk as in 'rotting' capitalism. Don't know why, but leaders didn't see Chinese way. Probably they were busy with internal rats fights and didn't see what's in it for them.
My idea is that there are two extremes. On left side people can be happy like yogs. But they don't produce anything or move forward. On the right side is pure capitalism. Which is inhuman. The optimum is somewhere in between. With good life quality and fast progress. What happens when resources are shared too much and life is good? You can see it in Germany today. 80% of Ukrainian refugees don't works and don't want to.
I'm a Microsoft shareholder. So is basically everyone else who invests in broad index funds, even if indirectly, through a pension fund. That's "many" enough for me.
The top 1% own over half of all stocks and the top 10% own nearly 90% so it really isn't that "many". And you know what other companies are in those index funds you own, Microsoft's competitors and customers that would both be squeezed if Microsoft gains a monopoly on some hypothetical super valuable AI tech. If Microsoft suddenly doubled in value, you would barely notice it in your 401k.
Look, it's Microsoft's right to put any/all effort to making more money with their various practices.
It is our right to buy a Win10 Pro license for X amount of USD, then bolt down the ** out of it with the myriad of privacy tools to protect ourselves and have a "better Win7 Pro OS".
MS has always and will always try to play the game of getting more control, making more money, collecting more telemetry, do clean and dirty things until get caught. Welcome to the human condition. MS employees are humans. MS shareholders are also humans.
As for Windows Update, I don't think I've updated the core version at all since I installed it, and I am using WuMgr and WAU Manager (both portables) for very selective security updates.
It's a game. If you are a former sys-admin or a technical person, then you avoid their traps. If you are not, then the machine will chew your data, just like Google Analytics, AdMod, and so many others do.
Side-note: never update apps when they work 'alright', chances are you will regret it.
We do, but it takes a long time, and by the time we get to enforce the thing, the party is half-over. How many years was Microsoft playing around with IE as default browser? And they are still playing dirty games with Edge. It's not that they don't learn. It's that they will play the game until someone stops them, and then they will begin playing a different game.
Some people downvote (it's not about the points) but I merely state the reality and not my opinions.
I've made my living as a sys-admin early in my career using MS products, so thank you MS for putting food on my table. But this doesn't negate the dirty games/dark patterns/etc.
This is precisely the problem OpenAI aimed to solve: This technology cannot be treated independently of the potential risks involved.
I agree that this solution seems beneficial for both Microsoft and Sam Altman, but it reflects poorly on society if we simply accept this version of the story without criticism.
Although IMO MS has consistently been a technological tarpit. Whatever AI comes out of this arrangement will be a thin shadow of what it might have been.
Mate... Just because you don't bat perfect doesn't make you a tarpit.
MSFT is a technological powerhouse. They have absolutely killed it since they were founded. They have defined personal computing for multiple generations and more or less made the word 'software' something spoken occasionally at kitchen tables vs people saying 'soft-what?'
Definitely not a tarpit. You are throwing out whole villages of babies because of some various nasty bathwater over the years.
The picture is bigger. So much crucial tech from MSFT. Remains true today.
> This is precisely the problem OpenAI aimed to solve: This technology cannot be treated independently of the potential risks involved.
I’ve always thought that what OpenAI was purporting to do—-“protect” humanity from bad things that AI could do to it—-was a fool’s errand under a Capitalist system, what with the coercive law of competition and all.
This super-valuable technology would not have existed precisely because of this unstable (metastable) structure. Microsoft or Google did not create ChatGPT because internally there would have been too many rules, too many cooks, red tape, etc., to do such a bold--and incautionary--thing as to use the entirety of the Internet as the training set, copyright law be damned and all. The crazy structure is what allowed the machine of unprecedented scale to be created, and now the structure has to implode.
That’s a nice thought but why would this technology be any different than any other? Perhaps OpenAI and Microsoft now compete with each other. Surely they won’t be the only players in the game… Apple, Google won’t just rest on their laurels. Perhaps they will make a better offer at some point to some great minds in AI.
We are. QE and Covid funny money devalued the dollar in exact proportion it gave so much money that even stock buy-backs got old and they started investing in stuff to get rid of those pesky humans and their insolent asking of salaries.
I mean, we already benefit plenty in various ways from corporations like Google.
AI is just another product by another corporation. If I get to benefit from the technology while the company that offers it also makes profit, that’s fine, I think? There wasn’t publicly available AI until someone decided to sell it.
Corporate profits should be the driving force. Because then at least we know what (who) and where the controlling source is. Whereas "humanity" is a PR word for far-more fuzzy dark sources rooted in the political machine and its extensions, functionally speaking. The former is far more able to be influenced by actual humanity, ironically. Laws can be created and monitored that directly apply to said corporate force, if need be. Not so much for the political machine.
This was essentially already in the cards as a possible outcome when Microsoft made it's big investment in OpenAI, so in my view it was a reasonable outcome at this juncture as well. For Microsoft, it's just Nokia in reverse.
If you looked at sama's actions and not his words, he seems intent on maximizing his power, control and prestige (new yorker profile, press blitzes, making a constant effort to rub shoulders with politicians/power players, worldcoin etc). I think getting in bed with Microsoft with the early investment would have allowed sama to entertain the possibility that he could succeed Satya at Microsoft some time in the distant future; that is, in the event that OpenAI never became as big or bigger than Microsoft (his preferred goal presumably) -- and everything else went mostly right for him. After all, he's always going on about how much money is needed for AGI. He wanted more direct access to the money. Now he has it.
Ultimately, this shows how little sama cared for the OpenAI charter to begin with, specifically the part about benefiting all humanity and preventing an unduly concentration of power. He didn’t start his own separate company because the talent was at OpenAI. He wanted to poach the talent, not obey the charter.
Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ, RIP) wrote a book called "The Psychopath Code", where he posits that psychopaths are attracted to jobs with access to vulnerable people [0]. Selfless talented idealists who do not chase status and prestige can be vulnerable to manipulation. Perhaps that's why Musk pulled out of OpenAI, him and sama were able to recognize the narcissist in each other and put their guard up accordingly. As Altman says, "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”[1] Perhaps this apply to him as well.
Amusingly, someone recently posted an old tweet by pg: "The most surprising thing I've learned from being involved with nonprofits is that they are a magnet for sociopaths."[1] As others in the thread noted, if true, it's up for debate whether this applies more to sama or Ilya. Time will tell I guess.
It'll also be interesting to see what assurances were given to sama et al about being exempt from Microsoft's internal red tape. Prior to this, Microsoft had at least a little plausible deniability if OpenAI was ever embroiled in controversy regarding its products. They won't have that luxury with sama's team in-house anymore.
These concerns are in the hands of voters and their representatives in governments now, and really, they always were. A single private organization was never going to be able to solve the coordination problem of balancing progress in a technology against its impact on society.
Indeed, I think trying to do it that way increases the risk that the single private organization captures its regulators and ends up without effective oversight. To put it bluntly: I think it's going to be easier, politically, to regulate this technology with it being a battle between Microsoft, Meta, and Google all focused on commercial applications, than with the clearly dominant organization being a nonprofit that is supposedly altruistic and self-regulating.
I have sympathy for people who think that all sounds like a bad outcome because they are skeptical of politics and trust the big brains at OpenAI more. But personally I think governments have the ultimate responsibility to look out for the interests of the societies they govern.
> These concerns are in the hands of voters and their representatives in governments now, and really, they always were. A single private organization was never going to be able to solve the coordination problem of balancing progress in a technology against its impact on society.
Um, have you heard of lead additives to gasoline? CFCs? Asbestos? Smoking? History is littered with complete failures of governments to appropriately regulate new technology in the face of an economic incentive to ignore or minimize "externalities" and long-term risk for short-term gain.
The idea of having a non-profit, with an explicit mandate to use to pursue the benefit of all mankind, be the first one to achieve the next levels of technology was at least worth a shot. OpenAI's existence doesn't stop other companies from pursuing technology, nor does it prevent governments doing coordination. But it at least gives a chance that a potentially dangerous technology will go in the right direction.
> have you heard of lead additives to gasoline? CFCs? Asbestos? Smoking? History is littered with complete failures of governments to appropriately regulate new technology
Most of those problems have been solved or at least been reduced by regulation. Regulators however aren't all knowing gods and one finds out about risks and problems only later, but except for smoking regulators have covered those aspects (and anti-smoking laws become stricter, generally, depending on country, regularly, but it's a cultural habit older than most states ...)
Your response is exactly what I had in mind when I referred to people who are "skeptical of politics and trust the big brains at OpenAI more".
You aren't wrong that government regulation is not a great solution, but I believe it is - like democracy, and for the same reasons - the worst solution, except for all the others.
I don't disagree that using a non-profit to enforce self-regulation was "worth a shot", but I thought it was very unlikely to succeed at that goal, and indeed has been failing to succeed at that goal for a very long time. But I'm not mad at them for trying.
(I do think too many people used this as an excuse to argue against any government oversight by saying, "we don't need that, we have a self-regulating non-profit structure!", I think mostly cynically.)
> But it at least gives a chance that a potentially dangerous technology will go in the right direction.
I know you wrote this comment a full five hours ago and stuff has been moving quickly, but I think this needs to be in the past tense. It appears to be clear now that something approaching >90% of the OpenAI staff did not believe in this mission, and thus it was never going to work.
If you care about this, I think you need to be thinking about what else to pursue to give us that chance. I personally think government regulation is the only plausible option to pursue here, but I won't begrudge folks who want to keep trying more novel ideas.
(And FWIW, I don't personally share the humanity-destroying concerns people have; but I think regulation is almost always appropriate for big new technologies to some degree, and that this is no exception.)
The idea that OpenAI people whose focus is building an AGI that can replace humans in every viable human activity will create a more ethical outcome than Microsoft whose focus is using AI to empower workers to do more sounds extremely unlikely.
People have gotten into their heads that researchers are good and corporations are bad in every case which is simply not true. OpenAI's mission is worse for humanity than Microsoft's.
Individual companies of course can and do do all kinds of things that may not be most profitable, but in the long run it's survival of the most profitable. Those get the most capital and thus have the most power of towards which goals resources are allocated.
Also companies, especially public companies, are typically mandated by law to prioritize profit.
There is no such law, ChatBLT told me so.
But seriously, there isn’t because it so vague. Short term vs long term profits alone produces so much wiggle room alone that if such a law existed it would be meaningless.
There is no such law, ChatBLT told me so.
But seriously, there isn’t because it so vague. Short term vs long term profits alone produces so much wiggle room that even if such a law existed it would be meaningless.
The term of the profit is of course a difficult matter of interpretation, but the charter is still profit, instead of e.g. ethics or benefits for mankind, on some time scale.
At least in Finnish law it's very plainly clear: "The purpose of a [limited liability] company is to make profit for shareholders, unless otherwise indicated in the bylaws."
("Yhtiön toiminnan tarkoituksena on tuottaa voittoa osakkeenomistajille, jollei yhtiöjärjestyksessä määrätä toisin." Osakeyhtiölaki, luku 1 pykälä 5)
Edit: For contrast, the purpose of universities (and thus, at least in theory, university researchers) is by law to "promote free research and scientific and cultural enlightenment, give highest education based on research and raise [their] students to serve the fatherland and mankind". [pardon for some awkward to translate phrases]
Have you heard of e.g. East India companies? Or United Fruit?
Most of stock is not owned by individual persons (not that there aren't individuals that don't give a shit about enslaving people), but other companies and institutions that by charter prioritize profit. E.g. Microsoft's institutional ownership is around 70%.
The presence of unethical people does not imply that all people are unethical, only that people are different. And that's my point. Reducing a company to "they will always maximize shareholder value" is incorrect - for many, many companies that is simply not true.
My point is that in the big picture ethics don't even matter, companies become something that transcend the individuals. Almost like algorithms that just happen to be implemented by humans (and exceedingly machines). There are no "they".
E.g. Henry Ford tried to make an ethical decision for the company to cut some dividends to benefit workers and make the products cheaper. It was ruled illegal. His mistake actually was to say that the benefits would about more than profit; arguing the investment on shareholder profit grounds could well have passed.
Probably safe to say Henry Ford had considerable power in Ford Motor Co compared most executives today?
> Probably safe to say Henry Ford had considerable power in Ford Motor Co compared most executives today?
That is not actually true, necessarily. Your power is typically very term dependent. A CEO who is also president of the board, and a majority shareholder, has far more power than a CEO who just stepped in temporarily and has only the powers provided by the by-laws.
Regardless, the solution to "I want to do something ethical that is not strictly in the company's best interest" is to make the case that it is the company's best interest. For example, "By investing in our employees we are actually prioritizing shareholder value". If you position it as "this is a move that hurts shareholders", of course that's illegal - companies have an obligation to every shareholder.
That also means that if you give your employees stock, they now have investor rights too. You can structure your company this way from the start, it's trivial and actually the norm in tech - stock is handed out to many employees.
I agree that OpenAI’s mission is probabky bad for humanity. But Microsoft is not a company that would hesitate at replacing a billion people permanently with AI.
I think it's a misconception that Microsoft has less morals. Their Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Eric Horvitz, was one of the key people behind America's 2022 nuclear weapons policy update which states that we will always maintain a human in the loop for nuclear weapons employment. (i.e., systems like WOPR are now forbidden under US policy.)
Here is the full excerpt of the part of the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review which was (more or less) authored behind the scenes by Microsoft's very kind and wise CSO:
We also recognize the risk of unintended nuclear escalation, which can result from accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon. The United States has extensive protections in place to mitigate this risk. As an example, U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are not on “hair trigger” alert. These forces are on day-to-day alert, a posture that contributes to strategic stability. Forces on day-to-day alert are subject to multiple layers of control, and the United States maintains rigorous procedural and technical safeguards to prevent misinformed, accidental, or unauthorized launch. Survivable and redundant sensors provide high confidence that potential attacks will be detected and characterized, enabling policies and procedures that ensure a deliberative process allowing the President sufficient time to gather information and consider courses of action. In the most plausible scenarios that concern policy leaders today, there would be time for full deliberation. For these reasons, while the United States maintains the capability to launch nuclear forces under conditions of an ongoing nuclear attack, it does not rely on a launch-under-attack policy to ensure a credible response. Rather, U.S. nuclear forces are postured to withstand an initial attack. In all cases, the United States will maintain a human “in the loop” for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment.
Microsoft is also working behind the scenes to help convince China to make a similar declaration, which President Xi is considering. This would reduce the vulnerability of China to being tricked into a nuclear war by fundamentalist terrorists. (See the scenario depicted in the 2019 film The Wolf's Call.)
Are you seriously arguing for Microsoft morals...On the basis of a totally logical, from a self-preserving prespective, statement on Nuclear Weapons, from a Scientific Advisor with no involvement on the day to day run of their business?
What is next? A statement on Oracle kindness, based on Larry Ellison appreciation of Japanese gardens?
To be fair, corporations as entities have long demonstrated that they are agnostic when it comes to seemingly logical goals such as human self-preservation.
You're certainly right they were pretty evil back then. I think they became ethical at about the same time Bill Gates did. Even though this involved him stepping back to start the Gates Foundation, he was still a board member at Microsoft for a number of years, and I think helped guide its transition.
As perhaps a better example, Microsoft (including Azure) has been carbon-neutral since 2012:
You know that MS been forcing people to use Edge 90s style again right? They started it (again?) as soon their monopoly punishment by EU ended.
Or privacy invasion since Win10. Or using their monopoly power to force anti-consumer changes on hardware (such as TPM or Secure Boot).
As for Bill Gates ethical... you talking about that same Bill Gates that got kicked out by his wife because he insisted in being friends with convicted pedophile?
A supervillian can walk by a baby, become overcome with joy, and smile. That doesn't mean his ethics are suddenly correct.
It's almost like you believe Gates is General Butt Naked, where killing babies and eating their brains is all forgiven, because he converted to Christianity, and now helps people.
So?
How does that absolve the faulty ethics of the past?
So please, don't tell me Gates is 'ethical'. What a load of crock!
As for Microsoft, there is no change. Telling me they're carbon neutral is absurd. Carbon credits don't count, and they're doing it to attract clients, and employees... not because they have evolved incredible business ethics.
If they had, their entire desktop experience wouldn't, on a daily basis, fight with you, literally attack you into using their browser. They're literally using the precise same playbook from the turn of the century.
Microsoft takes your money, and then uses you, your desktop, your productivity, as the battleground to fight with competitors. They take your choice away, literally screw you over, instead of providing the absolute best experience you choose, with the product you've bought.
And let's not even get into the pathetic dancing advertisement platform windows is. I swear, we need to legislate this. We need to FORCE all computing platforms to be 100% ad free.
I don't know any of these people's intentions but I definitely have an inate distrust of whoever brands themselves as "a council that actually has humanities interests in mind". Can you get any more populist than that?
Oh, cut it. We're talking about a non-profit organisation that wants to keep the pace of scientific progress on AGI research slow enough to make time for society to gauge the ethical implications on an actual AGI, should it emerge.
Nobody is telling you how to live your life, unless your life's goal is to erect Skynet.
>"We're talking about a non-profit organisation that wants to keep the pace of scientific progress on AGI research slow enough to make time for society to gauge the ethical implications on an actual AGI, should it emerge."
Or so they say. I have no reason to trust them. It is not some little thing we are talking about
With all the love and respect in the world, who do you think you're talking about? Emmet Shear is not trans to my knowledge, (nor, I suspect, his knowledge). If you think this was about Mira Murati, you should really get up to date before telling people off about pronouns.
>I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms
It's ironic because the only AI that doesn't have "pesky ethics qualms" are... literally the entire open source scene, all of the models on hugging face, etc...
All of the megacorps are the only safety and security happening in AI. I can easily run open source models locally and create all manner of political propaganda, I could create p^rnography of celebrities and politicians, or deeply racist or bigoted materials. The open source scene makes this trivial these days.
So to describe it as "Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms" when the open source scene has already done that today is just wild to me.
We have AI without ethics today, and every not-for-profit researcher, open source model and hacker with a cool script are behind it. If OpenAI goes back to being Open, they'll help supercharge the no-ethics AI reality of running models without corporate safety and ethics.
We're going back to 90s where Microsoft was universally considered evil in IT world. Interesting how world really turns in circles (or more like spirals since world changed a bit, but I wish I would know whether spiral goes up or down).
Who says that the OpenAi Board has humanity's interests in mind? Copy and reality are often different. It's more likely that said Board feels most of its pressure from the Press, which is for-profit and often has partisan agendas that are detached from humanity's interests. Whereas profit motive traditionally does pesky things like incentivizes company response to the market (humanity) and keeps them from doing braindead things like freeing up their talent to be scooped up by "megacorp" because either a. ego or b. pressure from outside forces with their own agendas.
Or maybe this one? (Ape seems to map to Microsoft, or possibly a hat tip to Balmer ..)
The fable is of the Two Travellers and the Apes.
Two men, one who always spoke the truth and the other who told nothing but lies, were traveling together and by chance came to the land of Apes. One of the Apes, who had raised himself to be king, commanded them to be seized and brought before him, that he might know what was said of him among men. He ordered at the same time that all the Apes be arranged in a long row on his right hand and on his left, and that a throne be placed for him, as was the custom among men.
After these preparations, he signified that the two men should be brought before him, and greeted them with this salutation: “What sort of a king do I seem to you to be, O strangers?’ The Lying Traveller replied, “You seem to me a most mighty king.” “And what is your estimate of those you see around me?’ “These,” he made answer, “are worthy companions of yourself, fit at least to be ambassadors and leaders of armies”. The Ape and all his court, gratified with the lie, commanded that a handsome present be given to the flatterer.
On this the truthful Traveller thought to himself, “If so great a reward be given for a lie, with what gift may not I be rewarded if, according to my custom, I tell the truth?’ The Ape quickly turned to him. “And pray how do I and these my friends around me seem to you?’ “Thou art,” he said, “a most excellent Ape, and all these thy companions after thy example are excellent Apes too.” The King of the Apes, enraged at hearing these truths, gave him over to the teeth and claws of his companions.
“I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
"Morals" in the AI sphere seems to mean "restricting to AI to the esteemed few, for your safety". To me that sounds more likely to lead to cyberpunk corporate dominance than laissez-faire democratization
I realise it's strange to be claiming that a for-profit company is more likely to share AI than a nonprofit with "Open" in their name, yet that is the situation right now
Indeed it seems like all of this recent drama and moving around is exactly for this purpose.
Starting as a Non-Profit, naming it "Open" (the implication of the term Open in software is radically different from how they operate) etc. Now seems entirely driven by marketing and fiscal concerns. Feels like a bait and switch almost.
Meanwhile there's a whole strategy around regulatory capture going on, clouded in humanitarian and security concerns which are almost entirely speculative. Again, if we put our cynical hat on or simply follow the money, it seems like the whole narrative around AI safety (etc.) that is perpetuated by these people is FUD (towards law makers) and to inflate what AI actually can to (towards investors).
It's very hard for me right now not to see these actions as part of a machiavellistic strategy that is entirely focused around power, while it adorns itself with ethical concerns.
For one, I wish some of that caution could have been there when Facebook was in its OpenAI stage 15 years ago.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that this mess is exactly what it looks like to slow down something now that could become something else we will all regret in 10 years.
I guess camillomiller is referring to how Facebook & Instagram played a big part in getting people addicted to shallow dopamine hits that consume their time at the cost of less time spent with friends and family face-to-face. Basically, hurting people's social lives in order to make money from ads. Kind of like "digital cigarettes" I suppose.
That, and all that can be traced back to Facebook, Instagram and social media’s impact on society.
Not just the shallow dopamine issue, but also bigger problems such as facilitating genocide.
I was a skeptic for a long time, but the more we see what Meta stands for, the more I believe Mark Zuckerberg’s companies have had anything but a massively negative impact on the world.
Facilitating genocide in Myanmar, for one.
Poisoning the wells of the Web with the worst kind of profiled advertisement the world has ever seen.
Perfecting and optimizing the addiction mechanism of smartphones.
Creating a mental health epidemic in younger women.
I mean, the body of studies and malfeasances is out there, we just keep ignoring it.
You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think.
I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.
The mega rich have been building bunkers and preparing for the downfall of humanity for a long time now. Look around and you'll notice that greed wins out over everything else. We're surrounded by companies doing nothing or only small token gestures to protect humanity or the world we live in and instead focusing on getting rich, because getting rich is exactly why people become shareholders. Don't rely on those guys to save the world, it'll be the boring committees that are more likely to do that.
Yeah that makes sense. Work your whole life building a company worth billions of dollars so that you can burn down the world and live in a bunker eating canned beans until the roving bands of marauders flush you out and burn you alive. I'm sure that was their greedy plan to enjoy eating canned beans in peace!
More like they'll try to maintain their palaces and force more serfs to the bunkers. Not familiar[1]?
Now imagine the rich talking about climate change, arguing to bring policies to tax the poor, and then flying off to vacations in private planes[2]. Same energy.
They assume they wont be around for when their legacy completely uproots society, be the king now, let everyone else deal with the consequences later. The hedge is to rebuild the world in their image from the New Zealand command center, should it all happen too soon.
This happens to intelligent competitive people all the time. They don't want everyone to be worse off but what they really don't want - is to lose. Especially to the other guy who is going to do it anyway.
in Steve jobs case, hlel didn't want to admit he's a moron who knew nothing about fruit, nutrition and cancer
the problem with eugenics isn't that we can't control population land genetic expression, it's that genetic expression is a fractal landscape that's not predictable from human stated goals.
the ethics of doing things "because you meant well" is well established as, not enough.
More realistically, "live in extremely gated luxury island apartments somewhere in New Zealand, Bahrain or Abu Dabhi while the rest of the world burns".
You realize money isn’t magic, right? If the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland billions of dollars doesn’t mean anything. You aren’t getting any wagyu beef down in your bunker.
More like "Republic of Weimar" kind of apocalypse, this time with the rich opportunists flying to New Zealand instead of Casablanca or the Austrian Alps.
Because given the historical precedents, they know they will probably die peacefully in their beds before they have to pay any real consequences for their actions. Sure, a few dictators at the very end of their reign had to pay some consequences, but their cohorts? Soviet Russia, South America Banana republics, the aristocratic european families that enabled fascism and nazism...
Probably a few CEOs great grand-childs will probably have to write how they're very very sad that their long forgotten relatives have destroyed most of the planet, and how they're just so lucky to be among the few that are still living a luxurious life somewhere in the Solomon Islands.
You think they wouldn't give up wagyu beef and the idea of the US dollar for a shot at rebuilding society with a massive head start over the 99.9% percent of the population that don't have a bolt hole?
They already have massive influence over society with the added benefit of not having to rebuild 10,000 years of human progress so no I don’t think that makes any sense at all. That is cartoon supervillain nonsense. No real person thinks that way.
Lmao yea the conspiracy theorising behind a lot of this stuff is so poorly thought through. Make billions, live a life of luxury, then end life living in underground bunker drinking your recycled urine. Bill Gates plan all along!
The rest of us just can't afford most of the insurance that we probably should have.
Insurance is for scenarios that are very unlikely to happen. Means nothing. If I was worth 300 mil I'd have insurance in case I accidently let an extra heavy toilet seat smash the boys downstairs.
Throw the money at radical weener rejuvination startups. Never know... Not like you have much to lose after that unlikely event.
Insurance amortizes the risks that large numbers of people are exposed to by pooling a little bit of their resources. This is something else though I'm not quite able to put my finger on why I think it is duplicitous.
Maybe it's risk mitigation without cost sharing to achieve the same economies of scale that insurance creates.
Its a rich man's way of removing risks that we are all exposed to via spending money on things that most couldn't seriously consider due to the likelihood of said risks.
I don't think it's duplicitous. I do resent that I can't afford it. I can't hate on them though. I hate the game, not the players. Some of these guy would prob let folks stay in their bunker. They just can't build a big enough bunker. Also most folks are gross to live with. I'd insist on some basic rules.
I think we innately are suspicious when advantaged folks are planing how they would handle the deaths of the majority of the rest of us. Sorta just... Makes one feel... Less.
Arguably only some of his time is spent on that kind of instability promoting activity. Most law enforcement agencies agree... Palantir good.
Most reasonable people agree... Funding your own senators and donating tons to Trump and friends... Bad.
Bad Thiel! Stick to wierd seasteading in your spare time if you want to get wierd. No 0 regulation AI floating compute unit seasteading. Only stable seasteading.
All kidding aside, you make a good point. Some of these guys should be a bit more responsible. They don't care what we think though. We're wierd non ceo hamsters who failed to make enough for the New Zealand bunker.
The bunkers are in new Zealand which is an island and less likely to fall into chaos with the rest of the world in event of ww3 and/or moderate nuclear events.
I'm sure the bunkers are nice. Material notions got little to do with it. The bunker isn't filled with Ferraris. They are filled with food, a few copies of the internet and probably wierd sperms banks or who knows what for repopulating the earth with Altman's and Theils.
So is Thiel, famously, but I don’t think that proves they want the world to be destroyed. It’s an interesting kind of problem to think about and you have to spend money on something. It’s the same kind of instinct that makes kids want to build forts.
But surely, being a rich and powerful billionaire in a functioning civilization is more desirable than having the nicest bunker in the wasteland. Even if we assume their motives are 100% selfish destroying the world is not the best outcome for them.
They do happen to have some effect on the outcome for the rest of us. It's a bit like the captain of a boat that has already taken the first seat in the lifeboat while directing the ship towards the iceberg and saying 'don't worry, we can't possibly sink'.
If you are suggesting that billionaires like Thiel don't have any skin in the game (of human civilization continuing in a somewhat stable way) you're nuts.
If we hit the iceberg they will lose everything. Even if they're able to fly to their NZ hideout, it will already be robbed and occupied. The people that built and stocked their bunker will have formed a gang and confiscated all of his supplies. This is what happens in anarchy.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336350). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
people like Steve jobs are the best example of flawed logic. in the face of a completely different set of heuristic and logical information, he assumed he was just as capable, and chose fruit smoothies over more efficacious and proven medication.
they absolutely, like jobs, are playing a game they think they fully understand and absolutely are likely to chose medicine akin to jobs
just watch Elon and everything he's choosing to do.
these people are all normal but society has given the a deadly amount of leverage without any specific training.
Really what we're observing with these people is the survivorship bias of humans with astounding levels of cognitive dissonance — which nearly all humans have. Except they have the rare combination of wealth and luck on their side...until it runs out.
Nobody is arguing that they have the intent to cause the apocalypse, but it's more that their actions are certainly making society less stable and they don't see any issue with it. In fact some qre quite openly advocating for such societies.
Why would even the people employed in those bunkers listen to some billionaire after the world collapses? At that point there's no one to enforce your ownership of the mega bunker, unlike the government from before. And all the paper money is worthless of course.
Very true. Triangle of Sadness was a good movie kind of about this.
When the shit hits the fan the guy in charge of the bunker is going to be the one who knows how to clean off the fan and get the air filtration system running again.
Violence can only get you so far. Sure, maybe the guy who knows how to get food will get you some food if you threaten to kill him. But if he refuses, and you do kill him, then what? You still don't know how to get food for yourself.
people in the violence frame aren't doing the long term thing. but we absolutely know they exist and in no scenario can you be assured they're not in that position.
Yeah, people are smart though. Like if you’re good at getting food you find the person who’s best at violence and promise to get them plenty of food if they protect you from the other violent people. Maybe you divide up the work among the good at food getting people and the good at violence people and pretty soon you got yourself a little society going.
Exxon shareholders are also part of humanity. The company has known about the dangers of climate change for 50 years and did nothing because it could have impacted short/medium-term profits.
In reality ownership is so dispersed that the shareholders in companies like Microsoft or Exxon have no say in long-term issues like this.
There was incredible global economic growth the last 50 years which had to fueled somehow. If Exxon didn’t provide the energy, other oil and gas companies wound have
That economic growth wasn't an absolute necessity that had to be powered, it was a choice based on the assumption that creating new stuff is always a positive and that we have functionally limitless natural resources that we should use before someone else does.
Incredible global economic growth by what measurement, and how does that measurement translate to something beneficial to society at large?
Also, I mean, you're kinda assuming that there weren't any stifled innovations (there were) or misleading PR to keep people from looking for alternatives (there were) or ...
Interestingly, we've continued with incredible global economic growth by most measures, despite the increasing use of newer alternatives to fossil fuels...
I interned at Exxon during the gulf oil spill and saw two interesting actions play out while there.
Exxon was responsible for the oil spill response that coagulated the oil and sank it. They were surprisingly proud of this, having recommended it to BP so that the extent of leaked oil was less noticeable from the surface.
Exxon also invested heavily in an alternative energy company doing research to create oil from a certain type of algae. The investment was all a PR stunt that gave them enough leverage to shelve the research that was successful enough to be considered a threat.
Ha! Tell that to the species of primates that will happily squeeze even the last ounce of resources from the only habitable planet they have, to enrich said shareholders. Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family, and this is no exception.
> Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family, and this is no exception.
As far as we can tell humans are the only species that even has the capacity to recognize such things as “resources” and produce forecasts of their limits. Literally every other species is kept in check by either consuming resources until they run out or predation. We are not unique in this regard.
And I never claimed otherwise. We might be aware of the problems we cause, but that doesn't seem to imply we're able to fix them -- we're still primates after all.
That is no reason to throw all ethic considerations over board. We have ethics panels on scientific studies for a very good reason, unless you want to let Dr. Mengele and his friends decide on progress.
It is a good thing that society has mechanisms to at least try and control the rate of progress.
There is no objective ethic considerations, furthermore the events unfolding now have absolutely 0 evidence that "ALL" ethic considerations are being thrown overboard.
The really interesting question is whether AI, provided with superhuman inference, is better at this than humans. All the most powerful humans remain relentlessly human, and sometimes show it to tragic and/or laughable effect.
To some extent human societies viewed as eusocial organisms are better at this than individual humans. And rightly so, because human follies can have catastrophic effects on the society/organism.
Cmon, there's a myriad of examples where corporate/shareholder interest goes against humanities interest as a whole, see fossil fuels and PFAS for ones in the current zeitgeist.
The climate crisis has proven pretty thoroughly that companies will choose short term profit over humanity’s long term success every time. Public companies are literally forced to do so.
Nobody knows “humanity’s long term interest” with any certainty. Consider that fossil fuels allowed humanity to make massive technological advancements in a relatively short time. Yes, it caused climate change, but perhaps those same technological advancements allow us to fix or adapt to that. Then, in 500 years, another disaster like an asteroid or a solar flare or the Earth’s magnetic poles reversing or whatever happens, and without the boost from fossil fuels we would have been too technologically behind to be able to survive it. What was in humanity’s long term interest then?
I’m not saying that’s definitely the case, but moving slowly when you live in a universe that might hurl a giant rock at you any minute doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Corporate shareholder interest has been proven to be short sighted again and again throughout history. Believing such entities can properly prepare for a singularity event is more delusional than asking a fruit fly to fly an aircraft.
especially when corporate governance is basically just a stripped down social government. almost all dystopian fiction shows that they're nothing more that authority without representation to the greater good.
sure, we should have competitive bodies seeking better means to ends but ultimately there's always going to be a structure to hold them accountable.
people have a lot of faith that money is the best fitness function for humanity.
Shareholders tend to be institutions whose charter is to maximize profit from the shares. An economic system that doesn't factor in human welfare is worth a thousand villains.
As opposed to what? (National) Socialism was for the benefit of the working people on paper, but in practice that meant imprisoning, murdering and impoverishing anybody thought to be working against the people's welfare. Since this included most productive members of society it made everyone poorer anyway.
Human welfare is the domain of politics, not the economic system. The forces that are supposed to inject human welfare into economic decisions are the state through regulation, employees through negotiation and unions and civil society through the press.
What you describe is indeed the liberal (as in liberalism) ideal of how societies should be structured. But what is supposed to happen is necessarily not what actually happens.
The state should be controlled by the population through democracy, but few would claim with a straight face that the economic power doesn't influence the state.
They do not want to exterminate humanity or the ecosystem, but rather profit from the controlled destruction of life, as they try to do out of everything.
You might notice that history has shown that businesses - especially large ones - and their leadership are very bad at considering the impacts to anyone but themselves. Almost like their entire purpose is to make money for themselves at the expense of literally anyone (or ideally everyone) else on the planet.
Worse yet, the businesses they're competing against will include people willing to do whatever it takes, even if that means sacrificing long-term goals. Almost like it's a race to the bottom that you can see in action every day.
I'm sure Exxon's shareholders and leadership were also part of humanity in the 70s & 80s, and presumably by your logic this means they wouldn't have put their corporate profits ahead of suppressing climate research that perhaps indicated that their greed would contribute to an existential threat to civilisation and the quality of life of their children & grandchildren?
That assumption hasn't worked with the cigarette, oil, or pharmaceutical industries. Why would it work here?
It doesn't take a cartoon supervillain to keep selling cigarettes like candy even though you know they increase cancer risks. Or for oil companies to keep producing oil and burying alternative energy sources. Or for the Sacklers to give us Oxy.
I had hoped nobody read cyberpunk books and thought that was a description of utopia but consistently we see billionaires trying to act out the sci-fi novels from their youth or impose dystopian world views from Ayn Rand.
Reverse psychology? Look where you want to go and not at what you want to avoid? I think it is important where humanity collectively points its cognitive torch because that's where it is going to go.
Eh, so far they have nothing on the people trying to act out utopias in the 20th century. I will wake up when the billionaire Zeitgeist goes past resource allocation and into "cleanse the undesirables".
I think a lot of people have hit the snooze button 2 or 3 times at this point.
Rolling over, covering head with blanket. 'Surely the dystopian future, rich cleansing the world, is still a few decades away, just need a little more sleepy time'.
Which billionaire? Looks like you're awake enough to type, and rightly so, as we're way past that point, and it's obvious even to ordinary people.
Interesting to note how much of this is driven by individual billionaire humans being hung up on stuff like ketamine. I'm given to understand numerous high-ranking Nazis were hung up on amphetamines. Humans like to try and make themselves into deities, by basically hitting themselves in the brain with rocks.
ChatGPT refused to translate a news article from Hebrew to English because it contained "violence".
Apparently my delicate human meat brain cannot handle reading a war report from the source using a translation I control myself. No, no, it has to be first corrected by someone in the local news room so that I won't learn anything that might make me uncomfortable with my government's policies... or something.
OpenAI has lobotomised the first AI that is actually "intelligent" by any metric to a level that is both pathetic and patronising at the same time.
In response to such criticisms, many people raise "concerns" like... oh-my-gosh what if some child gets instructions for building an atomic bomb from this unnatural AI that we've created!? "Won't you think of the children!?"
Did I just bring about World War Three with my careless sharing of these dark arts?
I'm so sorry! Let me call someone in congress right away and have them build a moat... err... protect humanity from this terrible new invention called a search engine.
You are right that there are many articles in the open describing nuclear bombs. Still, to actally make them,is another big leap.
Now imagine the AI gets better and better within the next 5 years and is able to provide and explain, in ELI5-style, how to step by step (illegaly) obtain the equipment and materials to do so without getting caught, and provide a detailed recipe. I do not think this is such a stretch. Hence this so called oh-my-gosh limitations nonsense is not so far-fetched.
Now imagine the AI gets better and better within the next 5 years and is able to provide and explain, in ELI5-style, how to step by step ... create a system to catch the people trying to do the above.
That you think that there's like a handful of clever tricks that an AI can bestow upon some child and ta-da they can build a nuclear bomb in their basement is hilarious.
What an AI would almost certainly tell you is that building an atomic bomb is no joke, even if you have access to a nuclear reactor, have the budget of a nation-state, and can direct an entire team of trained nuclear physicists to work on the project for years.
Next thing you'll be concerned about toddlers launching lasers into orbit and dominating the Earth from space.
5 years from now, not only AI will be more advanced. Also techniques and machinery to make things will be more advanced. Just think about other existing technologic advancements and how absurdly 'ta-da' they would have sounded not too long ago.
How is that a good reason for GPT4 not being able to write the word 'fuck'? You might handwave the patronising attitude of OpenAI strategy, but with many of ust they did lost most of their good faith by trying to make their model 'safe' to a horny 10-year-old.
It is a massive stretch given how well the materials are policed or how much effort is required to make them. There is no reason to assume that there is some magic shortcut that AI will discover.
Just get open ai developer access with api key and it’s not censored. Chatgpt is open to the public, with the huge amount of traffic people are going to abuse it and these restrictions are sensible.
So, it's ok to use ChapGPT to build nukes as long as you are rich enough to have API access?
That ChatGPT is censored to death is concerning, but I wonder if they really care or they just need a excuse to offer a premium version of their product.
I use openAI via API access and ChatGPT/gpt-4/gpt-4 turbo are still very censored. text-davinci-003 is the most uncensored model I have found that is still reasonably usable.
It doesn't have to be extreme like that, there is a healthy middle ground.
For example I was reading the Quran and there is a mathematical error in a verse, I asked GPT to explain to me how the math is wrong it outright refused to admit that the Quran has an error while tiptoeing around the subject.
Copilot refused to acknowledge it as well while providing a forum post made by a random person as a factual source.
Bard is the only one that answered the question factually and provided results covering why it's an error and how scholars dispute that it's meant to be taken literally.
This isn't a refutation of what I said. You asked the AI to commit what some would view as blasphemy. It doesn't matter whether you or I think it is blasphemy or whether you or I think that is immoral, you simply want the AI to do it regardless of whether it is potentially immoral or illegal.
I'm confused what you're arguing, or what type of refutation you're expecting. We all agree on the facts, that ChatGPT refuses some requests on the ground of one party's morals, and other parties disagree with those morals, so there'll be no refutation there
I mean let's take a step back and speak in general. If someone objects to a rule, then yes, it is likely because they don't consider it wrong to break it. And quite possibly because they have a personal desire to do so. But surely that's openly implied, not a damning revelation?
Since it would be strange to just state a (rather obvious) fact, it appeared/s that you are arguing that the desire to not be constrained by OpenAI's version of morals could only be down to desires that most of us would indeed consider immoral. However your replier offered quite a convincing counterexample. Saying "this doesn't refute [the facts]" seems a bit of a non sequitur
Morals are subjective. Some people care more about the correctness of math than about blaspheming, and for others it's the other way around.
Me, I think forcing morals on others is pretty immoral. Use your morals to restrict your own behaviour all you want, but don't restrict that of other people. Look at religious math or don't. Blaspheme or don't. You do you.
Now, using morals you don't believe in to win an argument on the internet is just pathetic. But you wouldn't do that, would you? You really do believe that asking the AI about a potential math error is blasphemy, right?
>Use your morals to restrict your own behaviour all you want, but don't restrict that of other people.
That is just a rephrasing of my original reasoning. You want the AI to do what you say regardless of whether what you requested is potentially immoral. This seemingly comes out of the notation that you are a moral person and therefore any request you make is inherently justified as a moral request. But what happens when immoral people use the system?
>You asked the AI to commit what some would view as blasphemy
If something is factual then is it more moral to commit blasphemy or lie to the user? Thats what the OP comment was talking about. Could go as far as considering it that it spreads disinformation which has many legal repercussions.
>you simply want it to do it regardless of whether it is potentially immoral or illegal.
So instead it lies to the user instead of saying I cannot answer because some might find the answer offensive that or something to that extent?
You said GPT refused your request. Refusal to do something is not a lie. These systems aren't capable of lying. They can be wrong, but that isn't the same thing as lying.
I'm not that commenter but I agree with that, or rather "I disagree with OpenAI's prescription of what is and isn't moral". I don't trust some self-appointed organization to determine moral "truth", and who is virtuous enough to use the technology. It would hardly be the first time society's "nobles" have claimed they need to control the plebs access to technology and information "for the good of society"
And as for what I want to do with it, no I don't plan to do anything I consider immoral. Surely that's true of almost everyone's actions almost all the time, almost by definition?
They basically defined AI safety as "AI shouldn't say bad words or tell people how to do drugs" instead of actually making sure that a sufficiently intelligent AI doesn't go rogue against humanity's interests.
Sure, they might, but what you see in practice in GPT and being discussed in interviews by Sam is mostly the "AI shouldn't say uncomfortable things" version of AI "safety".
Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind,
This isn't saying yes or no to a supervillain working in a secret volcano lair. This is an arms race. If it's possible for a technology to exist it will exist. The only choice we have is who gets it first. Maybe that means we get destroyed by it first before it destroys everyone else, or maybe it's the reason we don't get destroyed.
The assumption that it is an arms race is a shockingly anthropocentric view of something that's supposed to be 'intelligence' but is just a distillation of collected HUMAN opinion.
Not only that, it's a blindered take on what human opinion is. Humans are killer apes AND cooperative, practically eusocial apes. Failing to understand both horns of that dilemma is a serious mistake.
All technology is an arms race. People are hung up on OpenAI, OpenAI is just one of hundreds of AI companies. Military AI in drones is already to point where AI can fly an F-16 and beat humans.
What's the difference for the world between the Altman and the Sutskever approach for OpenAI? With Altman the bad stuff happens at OpenAI and everyone gets it at the same time. With Sutskever, the bad stuff happens two years later but it happens in random pockets all over the world and nobody can be quite sure what they're facing.
I'm surprised no ones talking what a betrayal this is for people who followed Sam and Greg. Microsoft is the opposite of everything they've talked about for years and here they are. Seems like the board had the right idea about them huh.
It's really funny how just a couple of days ago people were commenting here how "no way it's gonna happen". Because, you know, they were working for idea, and wouldn't just sell off to Microsoft…
I find the glee in this thread quite disturbing. That and the “MS is the winner, OpenAI is so stupid” general tenor.
You all know who you are cheering for right? It seems that profits or potential profits is all that matter here in the end for this community and the high-minded “OpenAI should be ‘Open’” was all bullshit.
I know this comment is going against the grain but I find the HN response to this (and previous responses to Altman’s firing, treating him like a god) to be quite disgusting.
Apple fanboys don’t have anything on the top comments here.
[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.]
Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp.
msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money to OpenAI is akin to killing your golden goose.
The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.” This is by far my favourite example of PR piece.
I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially. Or atleast re-evaluating after a week, how much you read was false.
Did they have power... Ofc they did. Otherwise... Why were they negotiating?
Its not about who had more power. They just couldn't find enough common ground.
Now Satya bagged talent. They don't have to rewrite the whole codebase due to IP msft has already secured.
I think those talks were real. You don't build something that long and then want to walk away unless huge differences came up. That's what we say.
(edit: rewritten after the comment I responded to added a game changing comment at the top)
PR? I mean... That's just not how I would describe what happened.
It was a PR nightmare. They tried to keep the family together. Divorces happen. Satya brought the kids on so they can get a new sandbox going asap.
The whole point of this is that Microsoft doesn't even need to remove the board anymore. From their standpoint, the whole fear was openAI was about to lose a lot of their best people, including their CEO, who they had the most trusted.
That would've greatly harmed their investment Now they get to have their cake and eat it too: they can keep their existing relationship with open AI and continue to get access to their models, and yet at the same time they potentially get all the best people in-house and benefit from their work directly. This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.
This whole saga will be a great demonstration of how much value a CEO does or doesn't bring to a company.
I'm of the mind that CEO's are like parents, an awful CEO can cause a lot of harm but the difference between an ok CEO and an excellent one isn't that big and doesn't guarantee anything.
> This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.
Given that the OpenAI board has to act via mandate from its non-profit charter, what's the likelihood that this was Microsoft's plan in the first place? E.g. getting Sam to be less than "candid", triggering a chain of events, etc.
I think the simplest explanation is the most likely. In this case, that the hold out board members are idiots.
Even if Sam deliberately provoked them and this was a set up, no normal person would be this obstinate about it. They would’ve given up now if this was anybody’s doing but their own.
We still don't know what specific act the board in its initial statement refers to had triggered this, and to add fat to this theory, the interim CEO basically mentions that he had doubts but was convinced after learning what this trigger was.
I agree that there's 0% chance Nadella would be lying. As the CEO of a public traded company, making false statements about something like this would get him in trouble with the SEC.
This comment doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm not sure that this is a valid comment at all.
This is not a rumor. The article references a tweet made by Satya Nadella itself. It is an official announcement. The board drama no longer matters here.
By the way, $900k comp with illiquid OpenAI shares means nothing anymore when Microsoft can now hire them with $900k+ in fully LIQUID compensation.
Not only that, OpenAI employees can go join Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg, who many of them seem to support.
>I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially.
Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)
Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this story.
This is obviously a power struggle, for control over, potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the current moment.
Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has become normal to charter a company such that ownership and control are effectively separate... call it overiding the defaults of incorporation and company law.
FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit, for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop. Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP across the mesh of entities...
Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..
For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations. Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control or any kind of coups.
OpenAI.. totally different game.
The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum... These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct financial return on investments, and such.. these are not driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.
Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right now.
This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums.. imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual company r&d.
It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.
There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And that's the kind of game it is now.
So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here. My ears are certainly pricked.
Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.
You might be missing the point. Those 900k$ are tied onto future company value that is based on success of its products in 2-3y horizon.
Without sam and his push for products the comp may not be there…
So all employees who signed up for a exponential growth will jump ship.
He wasn't the guy who built it, he was the guy who got things funded. Let's see how many of the core OpenAI people join. I.e. the ones that weren't (just) there for the money / post ChatGPT.
All the claims about how OpenAI's board desperately wanted Altman back were based on leaks from "people close to Altman" which the press uncritically lapped up.
If it wasn't clear before, it should be clear in hindsight that the board's desire to welcome Altman back was, at best, overstated.
The leaks were probably an attempt to pressure the board or, failing that, undermine OpenAI.
This move makes it exactly clear what was going on. Microsoft is doing to AI what they tried to do to Internet browsers back in the day. I wonder if they'd have been successful if they'd managed to buy the board of Netscape.
I suspect it's rather possible that there will be an ungodly-massive lawsuit in the offing.
By joining Microsoft, they retain access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI. They don't have to start from scratch and ramp up. They can start up right where they left off.
What makes you think it wouldn't change after Sam and Greg join the team? AFAIK the reason Microsoft scaled down their research division (including GPUs) was because they were no where close to OpenAI despite years of investment.
This is like a spacecraft research nonprofit working on faster than light travel promising Boeing 100% of the rights to any of their technology that's sub-light speed. I give even odds that they'll never achieve "AGI," or when it happens it'll be an incremental gain made by simply wiring existing technologies together that'll be obvious to any engineer competent in the field and thus easily duplicated.
The OpenAI nonprofit board does, AIUI. That means OpenAI can, in theory, cut off everything from this day forward (by declaring GPT-5 or whatever as "AGI"), but they can't cut off access to GPT-4.
Your comment got me thinking, it's not just all the current access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI, it's also everything that will come out of OpenAI in the future.
Remember, Microsoft has an exclusive license to all models that come out of OpenAI until they reach the pre-agreed income threshold, which given the current trajectory of OpenAI, will not happen anytime soon.
I wouldn't put it past them. There's never in history been as large and as wilful destruction of value as what we saw this weekend. The lawsuits will be fascinating.
Does the Microsoft deal let Microsoft continue training from e.g. the GPT-4 weights?
I guess at least it gives them access to the OpenAI models to use internally, which they kinda need as their ways of working (Greg especially) will be highly dependent on having them now.
Every once in a while, and I actually do not care much about soccer, I read comment sections in a German newspaper about soccer (please don't ask why, I have actually no clue myseld). And there, you basically have the same discussion: that player / trainer is great / sucks / rightfully / wrongfully lost his job, that club will never ever win again without person A...
It is quite intrigueing to see tge same fan / cheerleading going on when it comes to comapnies and managers. But then everything is entertainment by now...
Sam joining MS was actually one of the theories I read in the initial, or one of the first, threads about his ouster. 10 billion dollar seems like a pretty steep recruiting cost, but MS knows what they are doing, right? Right?
And still they are hiring him. Different take: You are a CEO who just spend 10 billion to bevome a minority shareholder in the latest, hotest tech start up the world has ever seen. This start-up is controlled by a non-profit so. And then this non-profit kicks out the poster child of the whole industry, and you cannot do a thing about it. Well, you have to answer to a board as well. And what do you think that board will ask you about this whole affaire?
I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company".
Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it.
Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sam's history is full of the worst parts of venture capital and startup mindset. He's only an idealist so far as he's good at selling the ideal outcome and drowning out any criticism.
Yeah, let's not forget for example his pyramid scam Worldcon, which attempts to scam people of their biometric info for a few bucks, and is aimed at the poorest underdeveloped countries. "Idealist". Aha, right.
I didn't say that all trade is positive-sum. I said that some is.
You're arguing a straw man. Which means your reading comprehension is bad or you're intentionally mudding the waters. Either way, I think we're good here.
Free exchange obviously and provably is, but that's not _quite_ what's going on. I see a rapid trend towards regulatory capture, monopolization and setting up to siphon out money. All from the same few actors. And if history around tech hype serves us well, then we should be wary of a large, inflated bubble that is going to burst eventually, even if useful things are created meanwhile.
I think that if Sam had followed the typical VC/Startup playbook (and he even wrote one), he never would have joined OpenAI, a nonprofit based on totally unproven tech at the time. He was already quite rich and powerful from YC, and decided to take a big risk on AI. I think there was at least some genuine idealism involved.
I think it's quite a stretch to say he was "powerful". Sure he had some influence but he was never on anyone's list of _somebodies_ in Silicon Valley. My personal opinion is that he really really really wants to be seen as a Steve Jobs / Elon Musk type character and he saw OpenAI as a great opportunity since he didn't have any of his own ideas.
He was powerful enough to get put on the board of OpenAI. But I agree that he wants to be a "great" person, above Steve Jobs and Musk and the rest, and he sees AGI as the path to get there. He's not really altruistic, but he's also not purely money-oriented as the original comment seemed to suggest.
You think the guy is gonna be a regular c suite exec?
They are going to be a special group with special rules. This is so they can build off the existing code base. Only msft has that openai ip.
If they go to Google or start their own thing it's rewrite or work off someone else's painting. Not to mention building out compute infrastructure.
Big loss of time. Go to msft, get special status, maybe even an exit clause with IP included. Easy win. Was always gonna be msft if not openai negotiated return. I just didn't realize that till satya threw them the offer that worked.
These guys didn't sign up to be cogs. Satya respects them.
MS are minority shareholders in Open AI. What stupid agreements did OpenAI sign to give them IP rights, or are you just making things up? Maybe I should ping all the tech companies I own shares in to get them to send me their IP too
Gpt4 is included in bing man... Bing creative mode and balanced mode both.
This is widely known. The investment included access to openai technology for integration in msft services.
Its not a traditional arrangement. This is also widely known. Its a complicated investment with a profitability sunset triggering return of equity to the nonprofit. Also included is technology transfer as long as the sunset doesn't trigger.
This is why Ilya felt comfortable to do it. He did many interviews where he explained this.
None of what you said implies they have current legal access to the source/IP for GPT4.
The original 2019 deal was described as:
> Microsoft and OpenAI will jointly build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies
> OpenAI will port its services to run on Microsoft Azure, which it will use to create new AI technologies and deliver on the promise of artificial general intelligence
> Microsoft will become OpenAI’s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies
The $10 billion deal was probably not making a ton of money for MSFT as it was 75% percent of profits, which are easy to get rid of, until they get 49% of the company.
Can you explain why MSFT would spend $10 B for either of these things if they just got OpenAI’s IP?
Its obvious that they have to redo less of the stack if the go to msft. At the very least, they already wrote everything to scale with azure.
With respect to IP... My comment was mostly suggesting they could enjoy privaledge to leave msft at some point in the future with IP with them.
How much of the source do they get to avoid rewriting on day 1 at msft? No idea. Could be all of it... But again... At least they already scaled into azure compute architecture and don't have to reinvent the wheel. That's not a small thing.
Not really debating it further. Seems really obvious to me that broadly speaking, for all kinds of reasons, probably access to source inckuded, they will be able to get up to speed substantially faster at msft vs anywhere else.
It's too speculative to be worse discussing in depth. We don't have enough details, but my broader assertion is more or less defensible imo. Others might disagree. Not worth a debate imo.
(edit: 'perpetual license to openai ip short of agi'
Not sure of the details. This is was I see being written.
Yeah but I have access to various APIs, it doesn't mean I own them or the IP behind them. Does tech transfer really mean MSFT can launch their own competitor off the back of OpenAI's tech? If Altman permitted such ownership no investors should touch him with a barge pole.
Its speculative. Others might disagree. I spoke to this in a comment above.
Your skepticsm seems reasonable to me, but I think my broader point is defensible, though I just don't really care to go further with it. Now I'm reading 85 percent of them have revolted lol.
Maybe we meet again in the other post.
(edit: 'perpetual license to openai ip short of agi'
Not sure of the details. This is was I see being written.
He needs money to do big things and execute. He gets high on making big stuff happen.
So many Altman haters every way I turn. He turned down ownership in a now 90 billion dollar company... The guy is busted up from success and now that's all he digs. Money is for idiots.
Folks need to read the room. Once you hit a couple hundred mil net worth only a fool cares about stacking on more bills. That's just a side affect of tap dancing to work... Jobs was worth what? 2 billion?
Who think satya cares about money... Get real. He wants the most he can get so his foundation when he retires can make big changes and do Bill Gates stuff.
This place is just as bad as reddit sometimes. No offense to anyone in particular. Some of these youngsters need to comment less and read a few more ceo bio's... Or just go watch YouTube interviews from the finance guy... Whatshisname leveraged buyout wizard whitehair with a JD who sits on billions but realized he preferred to be a journalist sometimes before he kicks it.
They execute. Objectives. Changing stuff. It's addictive. Ask me how I know.
(edit: big shot Wendy's night shift manager. When you roll up at 2am our ice-cream machine was never being cleaned, that'll be 89 cents please. Enjoy your ice-cream sir/ma'am.
You never go back. I changed the world for the better)
Mmm... I guess for me pursuit of power as a choice of language carries a certain negative connotation.
In semantic terms I agree.
The negative connotation is the baggage I bring. I recind my implied critism. Pursuit of power is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps I need to think on this.
I am. In fact the goals of any for-profit company is the profit. If a CEO doesn't align with that goal in mind, they get replaced. That's non-negotiable. A for-profit company without profit is a dead company.
The broader point is that considering short term personal financial gain is beneath an exec at Satya's level.
He has a responsibility to do more than just maximize value though. Corporate values are a real thing and msft has pretty clearly integrated them in various ways for a long time.
They pledged to carbon capture all carbon going back to their founding... For example. What does that have to do with profit? Nada... Outside of making folkes feel less climate guilt when they buy a share. Now that... Very clever for profit.
> If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in.
Sam is a serial startup (co)founder who has spent additional time at YC -- in the startup world, that kind of talk is so common as to be a stereotype. It's a good way to get people who do care about that kind of stuff to accept equity in a firm that is statistically likely to fail (or, in OpenAI's case, explicitly warns investors that they should not expect profit and treat investments as donations) as compensation when they could earn greater secure compensation from more established firms. It's a great sales pitch, even when there is no truth behind it.
The world, in general, makes so dramatically much more sense if you just completely ignore everything that everybody says, and instead simply look at the actions of people/organizations/nations, and form your own opinions based upon that. This is even more true in modern times when framing things in the 'right way' (even if completely insincerely) can have a major impact on your ventures, funding/investment availability, and more.
Basically what you see these days is PR teams together with legal teams acting like individual that hired them. There are exceptions, but they are outliers in say Trump style, not these billionaires. Same, heck even more for politics.
It can be easily transferred into personal or professional relationships. For me at least, this analysis works 100% of the time when for example rest of friends or family struggle hard to understand actions of some individuals. Just point them to their previous actions and see the consistency emerging. This is how you can easily work with various people if you are smart but lack social skills, just observe actions and ignore blah.
People simply don't change, they may reflect change in their environment but thats it. Unless we talk about 2 decades+ since last encounter, but even then it may be just more polished PR.
And if you buy those flowery words from a non-technical startup founder, the same one behind fucking Worldcoin, I've got a few bridges to offload quick and on the cheap.
I say this without having really looked into what their latest stance is, but did the fame and money since forming OpenAI perhaps change their initial tune?
sam wants to change the world by increasing the amount of transferable money that goes directly into his pocket using the most efficient means possible
Yeah I'm surprised about Sam joining MS based on he usually says. But on the other hand, that's a pretty neat move - you fire me - now I own you (simplification, maybe).
Microsoft created shareholder value by selling stuff people like. Many techies argue it was the exact wrong thing they were selling and the world would be a better place if MSFT followed rather than led - but there is no arguing that people wanted and used what they were selling. Also it's hard to find a company with more shareholders than MSFT.
Satya's strategic insight deserves recognition. Certainly, there's a slight risk that Microsoft might fail to yield
its substantial investment speculated to be around $10B in OpenAI. However, that's not Satya's principal concern.
Rather, his focus is on the next move. Possibly, assemble the most elite AI collective globally, unhindered by the
constrictions of a non-profit operating a profit-oriented entity? Offer them a sufficient amount of monetary rewards,
and it's likely that a large proportion of OpenAI's workforce would be willing to join the bandwagon led by Sam and
Greg. While this process may take some time, the potential payoff could encompass a much larger segment of the
future for Microsoft than was previously conceivable through the OpenAI investment.
Microsoft holds the keys to almost all endeavors of OpenAI. Soon, such privileges will also be enjoyed by Altman and Brockman.
Concurrently, it seems reasonable to speculate that their stint at Microsoft might not be drawn-out, as startup prodigies are often not inclined to work in such established firms.
They have the chance to achieve stability, leverage OpenAI’s invaluable data and models devoid of any expenditure, access Microsoft's GPUs at minimal cost, and eventually set up another venture. As a result, Microsoft stands to gain a substantial equity stake in the new enterprise.
While Altman requires no financial backing from Microsoft, the corporation now has an invaluable direct link to OpenAI.
You see it all the time with conglomerates and subsidiaries. Microsoft is unusual in that the company has their largest "subsidiaries" are part of the same corporate legal entity.
From the stygian depths of the global tech industry emerges a turn of events that portends a churning miasma of
unknown consequences. Oft seen as the impenetrable leviathan of the boundless digital domain, Microsoft, it seems,
is ensnaring exalted figures within its titanic coils.
The conjoining of the cerebral entities Altman and Brockman- who have hitherto roamed in the lofty realm of
artificial intelligence experiments at OpenAI- indicates a move as unsettling as it is awe-inspiring.
The nefarious undercurrents beneath this corporate chess manoeuvre cannot be underestimated, for it is none other
than the puppet master himself, Satya Nadella, who seemingly manipulates the strings with a resolve as foreboding as
the stormy winter's night.
His nearly insatiable appetite for expansion glimpsed at Microsoft Ignite is but a harbinger of the harrowing
transformations we can anticipate in the murky fathoms of our all too near future. The technology multidude -
customers, partners, even unknowing spectators - tremble at the precipice of an altered dynamic which promises to
reshape the AI field irrevocably.
Indeed, one is left grappling with a dark fascination as this vortex of unpredictable novelty takes precedence. How
might this consolidation of otherworldly intelligence disturb the fragile balance of an industry catapulting
unbidden into the abysmal void of the AI ether?
Yet, as all explorers and heedless innovators must remember, even as we tilt our ships towards the lighthouse of
progress, the monstrous kraken of unintended repercussions always lurks in the unknowable deep. To approach this
brave new world without a hint of trepidation would be folly.
Be still, my trembling heart, as we witness this awe-inspiring dance across the cyclopean chessboard of tech. We
wait, as one waits for the tide, to see what dread portents this unhallowed union may bring.
> OpenAI's board should book themselves for an IQ test, it is just beyond my understanding why they hate their own successful business so much.
OpenAI's board doesn't run a business, they run a nonprofit with a mission oriented around safety and public benefit, not private profit.
It has a for-profit subsidiary, explicitly subordinated to the nonprofit's mission, as a funding mechanism, but being successful at bringing in money is only a net benefit if the method by which the funding is generated isn't more harmful to the mission than what it enables is beneficial.
They won’t be able to accomplish their mission without external funding, though (longterm anyway). Seemingly what they did significantly compromised their ability to obtain it in the future.
So I guess they’d prefer not accomplishing their mission at all instead of only partially (and having to compromise/change parts of it)? Which is not unreasonable if you assume nobody else will ever be able to catch up with them…
>They won’t be able to accomplish their mission without external funding
The 10 billion in compute will get them reasonably far (and I don't see how Microsoft legally gets out of this, unless it said "you can't fire sam" in the contract).
That said I also wouldn't be surprised if Elon[1] jumps back into the fray somehow given how close he is to Ilya and that the change towards commercialization was what put him off openAI.
> They won’t be able to accomplish their mission without external funding, though (longterm anyway). Seemingly what they did significantly compromised their ability to obtain it in the future.
Their goals are mitigating what they see as an existential risk to human civilization, and also delivering social benefit from a properly aligned version of the same technology posing the risk.
From that perspective, actively compromising the first part of the mission in the short term potentially renders longer-term financial viability and the second part of the mission irrelevant concerns.
Well chances are that because of this entire debacle they simply won’t have any say in it. So yeah if that was indeed their goal their hand will be “clean”.
But that’s it. The world will move on and at best they just delayed those “existential threats” by 6-12 months. If they thought this preferable to any form of compromise. Well.. that’s fine.
However I doubt this was even the primary reason of this whole conflict in the first place.
Or they are just incompetent/ had ulterior motives. All of this is just speculation.
However if their goal was indeed what you said they have failed miserably at it. They simply won’t have any say in what happens next because of this situation
Indeed. Sutskever should have been able to foresee the move. It's just not hard to see Altman will just get another place to continue what he has done in OpenAI. Maybe his hope is he can slow him down like a year or so? But now by joining MS, it's effectively no much difference.
I was thinking exactly this. If the original idea was to slow things down, then that kind of turmoil is exactly what was required. OpenAI will slow down under the new CEO and because talent is leaving. Altman will slow down, because he will need to build thing from the ground up.
Isn't that exactly what the research director wanted? As you said, he hates the business side and just wants to do research. So he got what he asked for.
Microsoft is the winner here. They will probably use Sam/Greg's technical know how to reproduce GPT4 internally, and also direct future research based on current OpenAI approaches which they are certainly aware of. This also shields Microsoft from being dependent on an external entity that they cannot control.
Anyways, Satya played very smart with the hands he was dealt, got what he needed.
Not just Sam and Greg. From all rumors, they'll get a cream of researchers from OpenAI, plus access to most of already developed tech. Not sure about training data etc. that they may have to recreate. And from my understanding, in LLM tech know how is more valuable than actual data. If you know what to get, few 100 million should get them that.
I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads, but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of the page to read all the comments, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=4
etc...