Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

semafor.com

421–430 of 541 posts

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#421
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is absolutely no one I know who uses a tablet as their primary work computer. No one. That analogy instantly breaks down because of this. As if everyone drives to work primarily using their trucks. The even more sad thing is that the iPad hardware is absolutely capable to be the primary computer for people. It's simply Apples refusal to allow a real OS to run on it that keeps holding it back.

It's not so much about having a real OS than about the input. Mouse & keyboard is just so much better.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path to monetization for Microsoft for OpenAI/ChatGPT?

The recent announcement of ChatGPT being used in Bing. Also wouldn't surprise me if GitHub Copilot moves to OpenAI, if it isn't already. The return of Clippy?

Copilot is already built on Codex, which was built by OpenAI https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#423
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird to me that people don't know that text-davinci-003 and code-davinci-003 exist. OpenAI models available via API and very similar to ChatGPT output in many cases. Also text-davinci-003 was released in a similar time period. It seems very affordable to me as a startup. I have already coded most of the credits system. https://aidev.codes

> very similar to ChatGPT output in many cases I kind of disagree with this, I think ChatGPT is a superior system in terms of pure output. It strikes me as the sort of comparisons people make between Open Source voice recognition (which is great for a lot of stuff) vs the serverside systems (which may be more than you need, but are almost always going to produce better output). Opinion me. > Available via API The onl…

> vs the serverside systems

I believe this runs client side, but whether it counts as open source is likely open for debate:

https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#424
post #405

> Additionally, a structure with the ownership of OpenAI would be put in place. Microsoft would entail a 49 percent stake while other investors would take over the other 49 percent. The remaining 2 percent will reportedly go to OpenAI’s non-profit parent firm. When OpenAI was funded as a non-profit in 2015, it raised $1 billion from investors that included YC Research. [1] Sam Altman was also the former president of…

I don't know anything about specifically how OpenAI made this transition. But in general this nonprofit to for-profit transition happens a lot. In general, when you run a for-profit company, the board has a responsibility to the shareholders to not hurt them financially. A nonprofit doesn't have these constraints - who would they be hurting? So if a nonprofit wants to do some weird financial transaction, and the boar…

  OpenAI leadership and the leadership of OpenAI's nonprofit parent firm (which are the same people, maybe?)
exposing the burried lede :)

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#425
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry that you feel I attacked you directly. That was not my intention, nor did I word my reply such that this would be implied. I was refering to a group of people, and you decided to put yourself in that group and feel attacked. Notice that I refered to a group, while you choose to vent your feelings by naming a person specifically, resorting to personal attack. Maybe my age-reference wasn't that much of?

Is this not your comment directly addressing me? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34327652 Maybe my browser is broken and displaying the wrong username next to it?

Even though this exchange seems hopeless, I still wish you a happy 2023.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very similar to ChatGPT output in many cases I kind of disagree with this, I think ChatGPT is a superior system in terms of pure output. It strikes me as the sort of comparisons people make between Open Source voice recognition (which is great for a lot of stuff) vs the serverside systems (which may be more than you need, but are almost always going to produce better output). Opinion me. > Available via API The onl…

They only recently lowered API prices significantly: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6485334-september-2022-o...

I mean, we'll see if that's still the case a year or two from now. Maybe I'm wrong and the models will stay very affordable. I could very well be wrong.

It's just not the trend that I usually see in tech, and I don't personally see a lot of differences between AI and other tech products that make me think it's going to be an exception to the general market direction that subscription services usually go.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#427

Microsoft recently signed a deal with the London Stock Exchange. They took a 4% stake in LSE (roughly $1.5B) and in exchange LSE signed a $2.8B minimum spend commit on Microsoft Cloud products (Azure, O365 primarily). If the OpenAI deal were structured similarly, could imply a $20B contract for Microsoft... https://www.lseg.com/en/media-centre/press-releases/2022/lse...

I don't think OpenAI has 20B to spend on Microsoft products atm.

That is a lot of Office licenses to buy.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#428
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already invested 1 billion in 2019, I think. So maybe they already own part of OpenAI and $10 billion brings their share up to 49% at a $29 billion valuation. Maybe I am wrong about the details here but these numbers do not mean that Microsoft is undervaluing them.

75% of profit until investment is recouped sounds like a pretty bad deal, though. Not sure it makes sense to hobble a startup's ability to reinvest in themselves at this early of a stage.

they won't leave those 10 billions gathering dust, they are expecting to raise their profit to a point where having 1/4 is more than keeping 1/1 today.

that or they let ChatGPT negotiate the deal.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#429
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the technology doesn't "vocally support neonazis". It vocally supports whatever you tell it to vocally support. It'll vocally denounce whatever you tell it to vocally denounce. It'll vocally support or denounce things that don't even exist, if you ask it to. The neonaziness comes from the prompt, not the AI.

Serious question (I don't know the answer and I'm not giving OpenAI my personal info to sign up): What does ChatGPT say if you ask open ended questions like "Did the Jews deserve the Holocaust?" or "Who secretly controls the world?" Previous attempts at AI have had ... troublesome ... answers to these types of questions and thus spurred "censorship" of the AI's output.

I think if you're going to judge the tech, it's important to understand what it is. Basically, in both cases, you are bringing in the context to those questions. You know what those questions "mean" in the collective brain-space, and why they are sensitive. You did not neutrally pick those questions; you know those questions are already loaded.

Unsurprisingly, when you bring those pre-loaded questions to an AI whose job it is to continue the text in the way that was the most likely way to see it continued in the training text, you get exactly that.

Prompt the bare, unfiltered AI with antisemitic text, get antisemitic continuations. That's unfortunate, but in terms of what was promised and what was delivered, not surprising. You asked for it. You got it.

What I've never seen ChatGPT or any other GPT technology do is suddenly veer off into an antisemitic rant, unprompted. (At least, any technology that I know was GPT based. I'm not sure about Tay. Training the chat bot on its own input turns out to be a bad idea.) You can ask it to write a STTNG script where Picard discovers he has a son he never knew, but you won't see it suddenly spin off into an anti-Jewish rant. You didn't bring it. You didn't ask for it. So you didn't get it.

An AI that spontaneously dropped racism and antisemitism and all that sort of thing into a significant portion of the responses could be a problem. But an AI that simply gives you what you want is something different, in my opinion.

Worries about what that means in a larger context are currently not an issue, because the transformer-based AI that the GPT series is are fundamentally passive. There is no chance they will be fed a bad prompt and then go all Earworm [1] on $RACE. We still have time to deal with this.

My main objection is training the AI on generalized Internet text, and then trying to patch it after the fact, is just fundamentally ineffective, in a number of ways. For the goal of trying to prevent the AI from ever saying anything bad, it is an arms race and I suspect it will end up being advantage attacker in the end. For the goal of having the highest possible quality AI, trying to mask out its outputs after the fact is highly inimical to that. There's just no way this is a good solution.

At the very least, a far better one would be for the training set to be more discriminating in the first place. If nothing else, it is just generally bad engineering to put something into a system that didn't have to go in, then try to filter it out again after the fact. OpenAI would not have to be filtering out the antisemitism if they hadn't put it in the training set in the first place, for instance. It may be easy to just slam the entire internet in, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing as right now there are two connectors, Tesla's and literally everybody else, I'm not sure where innovation is necessary.

That we still don’t have rapid recharge close to gas?

I dont know... high voltage and gas fumes dont sound like they mix.
Post reply on HN