Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#61

Post by ilaksh » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

Quarrelsome wrote: post #44

Can we talk about the usage of the term "AGI" here? Considering its connotations in popular culture it sounds terrifically inappropriate in terms of what we can feasibly build today. Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?

Open AI has always had AGI as their real mission as far as I know. And always been serious about it.

It is a research mission. No one "feasibly" knows exactly how to build AGI yet. But still we have many groups publicly pursuing it today.

If Microsoft is giving them a billion dollars in this context, I assume that Open AI engineers and scientists will build out services for Azure ML that will then be sold to developers or consumers.

This type of thing is actually pretty normal for just about every company that is seriously pursuing AGI, since they eventually need some kind of income and narrow AI is the way for those types of teams to do that.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#62

Post by gdb » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

mattferderer wrote: post #52

neiman wrote: post #27

$1B dollar is a lot of money. Microsoft is not a charity foundation, so the suspicious is obvious. > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large…

My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers. Also a great time to point out that while "Microsoft is not a ch…

> My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B.

It's a cash investment. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though.

> My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers.

I'm flattered that you think our research is that valuable! (As I say in the blog post: we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.)

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#63

Post by Eduardo3rd » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

Exciting announcement for the OpenAI team.

The wording in the press release reminds me of a question I haven't been able to answer for a while now. Can anyone point me to the moment in time when general purpose artificial intelligence was re-branded to artificial general intelligence? Is GAI that much worse of an acronym than AGI? What's the deal here?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#64

Post by tosh » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

New York Times has a bit more context

> Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai-micros...

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#65

Post by ppod » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #40

Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…

Your analogy would be accurate if people had spent the last century claiming that artificial transport was impossible, and then continually redefining what counted as transport until the concept was incoherent.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#66

Post by modzu » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #41

modzu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.

OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires some money so at one level it is a money problem.

but this is alchemy isn't it? there isn't even a theoretical framework from which we can even begin to suggest how to keep any "general intelligence" benign. good old fashioned research notwithstanding, a billion dollars is not about to change this. it reads to more to me like this is an investment in azure (ie microsoft picking up some machine learning expertise to leverage in its future cloud services). that's not a judgement, and i'm sure lots of cool work will still come from this, given the strength of the team and massive backing they have. it just smells funny.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#67

Post by ilaksh » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

option_greek wrote: post #39

Genuine question: In what sense is OpenAI open ?

Its just like the bag of sugar I have in my cabinet that claims to be low calorie. It says "ONLY 16 CALORIES (per 4 grams in tiny letters)".

I mean, sugar is pretty much the definition of a high calorie food. Its like, pure calories. And can affect insulin regulation, etc. That's why they need to put some marketing on it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#68

Post by bhouston » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

Hmmm.... it reads to me that someone has co-opted an open standard. How much of this is really an investment and how much is an in-kind contribution of Azure resources?

Also this sounds dangerous: "exclusive cloud provider".

When an OpenAI group starts to make exclusively partnerships with one vendor, I wonder how "Open" it is.

I can not imagine Khronos Group, which runs similarly named OpenGL, etc having a "exclusive" graphics card supported for their open standards. Cloud computing is to OpenAI as graphics cards are to OpenGL/Vulkan.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#69

Post by hootan » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

I'm not a genius. But, it was 2015 when Microsoft announced that, MS I never heard about it's release.

In that time I said, MS will move towards open source, because he realized that it's a winning and correct strategy for software distribution.

It didn't take long that MS aquired GitHub with 8M$.

His team foundation was a failure, he tried to get a good one.

But He also took control over all the source codes, and their histories. It wasn't dangerous in my opinion, before I realized that due to one-sided US sanctions, repos of some nationalities (like Iranians) got dissactivated !!!

It's not the defenition of open source, as far as I know...

MS is a corporation, hence, it has to obey the government.

But open source belongs to no one. These kind of investment might intended to bound the potential open source communities!!!

It is obvious that accepting these sort of money, without open access agreement is a horrible mistake that one can do. (We should learn from the story of GitHub)

In my opinion, when it's not clear what kind of right these investments brings for enterprises, ppl should stop contributing to them.

Maybe it's good idea to ask what Linus and Richard see in these movements!

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#70

Post by mattferderer » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

gdb wrote: post #62

mattferderer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers. Also a great time to point out that while "Microsoft is not a ch…

> My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. It's a cash investment. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though. > My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools…

Thank you for taking the time to clarify & correct my statements!