Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

semafor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 541 posts

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#301

Post by ReptileMan »

TekMol wrote: post #252
rowanG077 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty bad take. The mobile market is much larger precisely because they AREN'T computers. They are mobile companions. But you don't do the same things on a computer and on a mobile phone. Who edits their movies on a phone? Who codes on a phone? Who writes their PhD thesis on a phone? You will be hard pressed to find professionals who do these things. Because a phone is not a computer.

The main usage of computers even before mobile phones was to browse the web, read and write emails and play games. Web and mail is mostly done on phones now. Not sure about games. The use cases you mention are much smaller. Steve Jobs had the right analogy: Tablets are cars, desktop computers are trucks. Few people use trucks. Most use cars.

And yet SUV/Pickup is the most popular category of vehicles in the USA

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#303

Post by cmeacham98 »

davidguetta wrote: post #278
sekai wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't forget its ever increasing wack a mole game of non-openness in regards to censorship, wrongthink and pornography. That's because they want to make money, good luck attracting investors when your tool lists benefits of Nazi ideology or generates minor porn novels.

I think it's still crazy that in 2022 the fact that some stupid people can be offended by that have that much importance.

Is it possible, maybe, that it's not "some stupid people" with "much importance" - but actually the average person doesn't want technology to vocally support neo-nazis?

To be honest I don't really care either way (at least in this case), but I see people making this argument always act like it's a few elites ruining the world and it's impossible that the average person doesn't 100% agree with them.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#304

Post by danShumway »

This is just one of the many reasons why I don't think I'm as concerned about AI models as people around me are, either for art, text, or coding.

These technologies today are highly subsidized because the people making them want to create a lot of buzz. Yes, as they mature they're going to get better; but I also suspect they're going to become more limited, harder to use, more narrowly targeted, and more expensive to access.

In general, we rarely use new technology to its full potential, because doing so usually closes off commercial opportunities to exploit that technology. The norm is that new technologies are used to a fraction of their capabilities on the market, and are often locked down and purposefully hindered in order to protect market segments that are built around exploiting those technologies. See the ebook market and voice assistants, just off the top of my head.

Given that so much of this AI training/hosting is happening serverside where access controls are easy to add and where AI as a service is the most obvious monetization model, I would not be surprised at all to see AI go in the same direction.

I'm not sure what will happen with ChatGPT -- this is not a prediction of what I think will definitely happen. But I don't think it's impossible that ChatGPT transitions to focusing specifically on being a platform for other businesses, even if that limits its flexibility and the range of content it can produce, and even if that means it gets priced primarily for large businesses rather than for indies/startups.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#305

Post by yunohn »

andrewcamel wrote: post #193
mshake2 wrote: post #170

>The AI firm is currently raising funds at a $29 billion valuation. >The tech-industry giant is ready to pay upwards of $10 billion for the acquisition [49%] So Microsoft is undervaluing them, and also soaking up 75% of profit until their investment is paid back? Seems like a bad deal.

Helps when you can limit OpenAI’s inference capacity during negotiations

Not sure if this is a joke, or how you think actual commercial partnerships work.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#306

Post by noirscape »

fsloth wrote: post #202
zwily wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kids I see are done with Roblox and actually gone back to Minecraft.

This. Minecraft seems to have much more stickiness. Minecraft really seems to be the Lego of current gen kids - they keep returning to it. Freeform creative building is the key here, I think.

Probably because Minecrafts model is still mostly as "free" as it was 12 years ago; you pay the one-time upfront fee and after that Mojang/Microsoft gets out of your way and just lets you play and permits you to both let your creativity run loose and see what your friends can come up with.

Roblox by contrary runs on what amounts to a "financialize every individual interaction" model. That just becomes tiring for children after a while.

Kids are encouraged to spend as much money as possible on lots of bite-sized microgames, all existing on the "Roblox" platform, whilst being encouraged to use Roblox' own (proprietary black box, not reusable outside of Roblox btw) microgame creator to create more games, which they will alledgedly get paid for by the other kids buying those games and it can "be paid out in real money". That sounds got on paper, but in practice it's basically company scrip[0], since Roblox already takes a cut out of every internal currency purchase of a microgame, but once you try to convert it to real cash, you need to have an absurd amount of profit from your microgames first and they take *another cut* when you try to pay out. It's a model basically designed to keep every dollar converted to robux as robux.

At some point either mommy catches on that their kid is spending an awful lot of money on Robux/the kid gets frustrated that they're not getting their actual payouts because they want to say, buy a real world thing that you can't get with Robux and gets hit with the "earn 1k$ worth in Robux or we don't pay out" wall.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#307

Post by thatguy0900 »

pxue wrote: post #163
jacooper wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the difference, google is shy to open any of their AI projects.

Probably for a good reason? I was browsing thru their AI responsibilities page and was pleasantly surprised how comprehensive and well thought out it is. Not sure if OpenAI and with the release of chatgpt has fully implemented their own call for responsible ai

ChatGPT seems to just take the approach of manually selecting topics that the bot doesn't like to talk about. I doubt that approach will be a good one long term, especially when you can just find creative ways to ask the bot to pretend there isn't any rules and it will ignore the bans anyway

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#308

Post by highwaylights »

s_dev wrote: post #181
curiousmindz wrote: post #124

I expect this deal to be a must for Microsoft. OpenAI is probably very happy to raise the stakes as much as possible. So we will see how many billions Microsoft ends up paying for this. Still, is there a world in which we look back 10 years from now and think that we were overvaluing the impact of AI? (For example, this did happen with tablets, when people thought that the iPad would replace "computers"...)

Nah -- this sounds like Google buying YouTube or Android for billions while they were in their infancy but had proven tech. People did say at the time Google overpaid but they were some of the wisest investments Google ever made. I hope Microsoft don't buy them and OpenAI just becomes another FANG.

It's like YouTube and Android I would think, but similarly, they didn't have a road forward independently.

YouTube was burning a fortune on hosting costs and being sued out of existence when Google bought them. Android didn't have a monetisation path at the time, because the Play Store did not yet exist.

I suspect the same is true of OpenAI currently. They've got some great technology, but are spending a lot of money servicing free queries right now, and don't really have a route to selling their product to the world and building revenue yet.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#309

Post by nightski »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #303
davidguetta wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's still crazy that in 2022 the fact that some stupid people can be offended by that have that much importance.

Is it possible, maybe, that it's not "some stupid people" with "much importance" - but actually the average person doesn't want technology to vocally support neo-nazis? To be honest I don't really care either way (at least in this case), but I see people making this argument always act like it's a few elites ruining the world and it's impossible that the average person doesn't 100% agree with them.

Why does it always jump straight to white supremacy and Neo-Nazism? There's a lot of area in there that is being ignored and/or casually dismissed. It's not an honest discussion.
Post reply on HN