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Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

thoughtfulbits.me

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Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#51

The underlying assumption here is that Sam would be willing to sell OpenAI. I don't think that's the case. There's no amount of money that Microsoft could throw at Sam to convince him to sell. Not only is he already wealthy, but he's also a true believer in AI. And unlike Snapchat, it's going to be very hard for incumbents to clone.

> And unlike Snapchat, it's going to be very hard for incumbents to clone We forgetting how Dall-E 2 was made irrelevant just a few weeks after release by Stable Diffusion? I agree with everything else you're saying though, I don't think he'd have any interest in selling it.

DALL-E 2 was a LOT better than Stable Diffusion. Sure it was open source but it was clearly a generation behind. Great if you didn't mind your inputs looking like last year's AI output.

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#52
post #44

This might sound naive, but wasn't the founding principle behind OpenAI that it should prevent powers around AI being concentrated in the hands of nations or big companies? I really hope OpenAI won't get acquired.

Sam Altman addresses that when he was asked that question in 'How I Built This' Podcast. Essentially: OpenAI did not realize the massive scale they needed for them to be successful. When they realized this, they could not raise any funding as 'non-profit'. They asked govt, who did not want to fund it, and other sources, at the end they did not have any other recourse. Sam Altaman says: 90% of funding was needed for c…

A paltry 100x cap on profit. Sure to dissuade any savvy investor and ensure that the public benefits first and foremost.

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#53

I think Microsoft is one of the few companies in the world that could replicate OpenAI's work. It's much easier to build something when you know it can be done and roughly how.

OpenAI is mostly likely using Azure for training as well, and Microsoft has the model weights directly (and officially! they are even allowed to use them), so that gives a lot of possibilities for Microsoft to replicate the tech, without purchasing OpenAI.

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#55
I was about to write a similar post, all companies using open ai will need more than a prompt as their competitive advantage. Or be caught in a race to the bottom. Microsoft needs open ai or risk this commoditize their business like msft did to ibm or component manufacturers did to dell.

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#56

I was listening to a podcast[1] and they say the cost of inference (responding to a question) in ChatGPT is about 1-2 cent. Is that true? And how would that map to the overall cost microsoft can pay for integrating that into Bing, considering number of search queries in Bing. 1- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/hard-fork-tiktok...

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599669552081960960

Elon Musk: What's the average cost per chat?

Sam Altman: average is probably single-digits cents per chat; trying to figure out more precisely and also how we can optimize it

--

Though I am not sure what per chat really means here. Per message?

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#57

In order to remain competitive, OpenAI will need to make ChatGPT free. It's basically going to be a repeat of the browser war since all the major tech companies have their own version of AI that they can offer with their other products. The main issue is that they, OpenAI, don't have any other sources of revenue so they can't continue to give away the product without going broke. Yet, the big companies can do it fore…

Becomes a non-profit _again_, although Wikipedia lists the parent company as a non-profit, still.

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#58

>AI similarly has powerful network effects. OpenAI's current business model is genius. By allowing free usage of chatGPT, they are getting millions of "free" employees, all actively and eagerly providing more data and more training to the system. I never buy this. This story is repeated so often in so many places. You hear it about Tesla all the time "Their dataset is so big because they have all those cars out there…

I doubt the data OpenAI receives from the usage of ChatGPT is even remotely close to the amount of data Google or Facebook handles that could be used to build a better language model. They have advantage over other AI startups, but I don't think they have much of an advantage over companies like Google and Facebook which both have massive amounts of data, money, and computing power. Which at the current state is the…

> OpenAI can never run ChatGPT at the scale needed for massive usage. They would drown in debt.

They have access to Microsoft's billions and the compute powers of Azure. The other day there was a HN post [1] about Microsoft has build a top 5 super computer. That computer is probably the computer OpenAI used to train their model on.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34307951

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Google processes about 8.5 billion search queries daily. Conversational voice assistants process about 120 million queries daily.

> Agreed. Google processes about 8.5 billion search queries daily. Misstyped queries of mostly the same stuff. Google's real data advantage here is gmail. Billions of real conversations between real people.

Your email account must look verify different to mine, which consists almost entirely of marketing spam and GitHub notifications… I don’t recall the last time I sent an email.

Re: Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

#60
No one has yet to mention that OpenAI is built on fair use of copyrighted information. If it's language and data is pulled from the web and their output is derivative, if they charge for the product, there will be significant intellectual property concerns. Microsoft would be wise to avoid opening their large balance sheet to that liability until it is litigated elsewhere.
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