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Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

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Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#501

Post by gptgpp »

World177 wrote: post #377

> 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…

Sure, it's a little bit on the nose that a company titled "OpenAI" became, rapidly became absorbed by large private interests and, for the most part, open only in name (to be fair they do publish quite a few papers).

But also, in Microsoft's defense, AI is potentially dangerous! We NEED large corporations to control it behind closed doors. Think of the terrible things the unwashed masses would do with such a disruptive technology!

I, for one, would like to see legislation similar to that on cryptography, that bans exports and places heavy restrictions on who can access and develop such technologies.

I'm thinking maybe we could call it the "Save the Children from AI Super-Predators" act? Or maybe the "American AI Freedom" bill, since a similar naming scheme is working great for OpenAI? I'm totally open to input for names. Call your senator, today!

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#502

Post by idontpost »

mshake2 wrote: post #408
swagmoney1606 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that really bothers me is how much of a contradiction "OpenAI" is. There's virtually nothing open about it.

You can ask ChatGPT if you can run it locally, and it will happily say it is open source, then give 2 github.com links that 404 and then say it doesn't know where the code is if you press it for answers.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#504

Post by xen2xen1 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #401
xen2xen1 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding it to Bing could be an actual differentiator, which has been announced. MS also has a lot of speech tech, so making a search engine an actual spoken chat could possibly be huge. That's just for Bing.

> Adding it to Bing could be an actual differentiator, which has been announced. For who? I'm not going to switch off of Google to Bing, are you? How would they get the word out to Google users to give Bing's new feature a try? Headlines like this? How many users will actually switch their daily search engine from Google to Bing due to this? 100k?

Ryan Reynolds. Just put Ryan Reynolds on Twitter, TV, and a few Facebook ads, and everyone will know. And yes, there are lots of people that could switch if it actually gave you an answer. At least it's significantly new, and a possible successor to text search. No, I would not change, but I read HN, I am not the mass market they are looking for. Oddly enough, the use I find most compelling would be Cortana, or Siri, or Google Assistant. If you could suddenly make them not dumb, then that would be very, very different. I'll bet the most likely place this ends up is Office. They already have an app like Stable Diffusion, I'll bet the voice reading on Outlook for emails will turn into a chat, or some such. Then you can add an actual conversation from there "would you like to schedule a meeting" and so on. "Would you like to add a contact? Ok, would you like to have me check for a business or personal address for them?". Cortana still exists for Office and Windows, IIRC.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#505

Post by danShumway »

rurp wrote: post #477
danShumway wrote: post #304

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…

I think you're right that these models will soon be aggressively locked down and monetized, but I'm still pretty nervous about them. The dynamic of powerful but inaccessible tools is going to lead to a lot more inequality. If AI does start to create a large amount of business value, that value will be almost entirely captured by the wealthiest companies and individuals, and will further cement existing moats. There's…

insert Cory Doctorow post that I'm too lazy to look up about how the Ludites weren't against technology, they were against the way it was being used against them

Honestly, most of my concern around AI has very little to do with the technology or its effectiveness, partly because I don't think that technological effectiveness is always necessarily the biggest indicator of what technologies will win in a market. I have zero doubt that a company like Adobe or Microsoft would love to become the gatekeeper of what content gets made and how people make it regardless of whether their gatekeeping actually makes it easier for people to create.

Every big company would love to be the middleperson in-between writers/artists/coders and their creative/professional output.

But even there, there's a big difference between AI being a tool used against normal professionals, and AI taking over the world and putting every programmer out of business. I definitely don't mean to dismiss concerns about access, but I think I'm a lot more bearish about the ability of the modern tech industry to pull off commercializing a genuinely useful, important category of tech without immediately hampering it to the point where ordinary people start to notice and where it stops being a great replacement for the thing it was supposed to replace.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#506

Post by localhost »

localhost wrote: post #238
la64710 wrote: post #153

Question to AI/ML folks : Is there no comparable open source model? Is the future going to be controlled by big corporations who own the models themselves? If models are so computationally intensive to produce does it mean than the more computational power a company has the better its models will be?

RE: Open Source models, there is the AnthropicAI model making the rounds on Twitter[1] and Stability.ai (makers of Stable Diffusion) are working on one [2]. If we use recent history as an example, OpenAI announced DALL-E in Jan 5, 2021 [3], announced v2 and a waitlist for public use in July 20, 2022, and Stable Diffusion shipped an open source model on August 22, 2022 [4] using ~$600K of compute (at retail prices on…

This tweet has a lot of additional details with timelines for releasing weights of LLMs: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1579551634832883712?s=20

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#507

Post by kmeisthax »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #497
kmeisthax wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has a very, very complicated ownership structure. They explicitly call this a "capped profit corporation". What this means in practice is that they have a non-profit arm that owns a for-profit arm, and the for-profit arm has some vague and laughably high "profit cap" to meet. Personally, it sounds like a really sketchy way to work around privacy and copyright concerns. I.e. "we're just doing non-profit researc…

> and the for-profit arm has some vague and laughably high "profit cap" to meet. What's a profit cap? I've never even heard of that.

See https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#508

Post by soiler »

danShumway wrote: post #304

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…

That's a very good point about things like voice assistant, but I don't think your conclusion is right. We do have voice assistant technology and it's widespread and a lot of people use it daily. It's a wild scifi technology and I wish I could use it, but due to the interest of corporate profit it is not something that can be used without allowing a tech giant to harvest your identity and labor.

When I finally bought a new Pixel and set up GrapheneOS, I've never felt more like I was living in the future. For the first time in my life, I had a truly personal digital assistant. I mean, there's still tracking all over the web and who knows what's really hidden in the Google hardware or whatever. But this is the closest I can reasonably come to actually owning my portable digital life. And it's laughably out of reach for 99%+ of the population of the US, let alone the world (due to cost, specific hardware, knowledge of availability, and the difficulty of installation).

So I don't get to benefit from Google's world-class mapping and navigation. I don't get to use voice-to-text or even keyboard swiping reliably. But most people do, in exchange for their privacy and the value of their labor. And I think that's what we'll see with AI as well; they'll find a way to monetize it by way of deceiving the public into getting used to having access for free, and the power imbalance will g=continue to grow in our society.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#509

Post by Der_Einzige »

seydor wrote: post #472
Der_Einzige wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya but how long will it be before I have 400GB of VRAM on a single GPU? Until then, I can't run these models at home even if the weights were published.

there is already work to reduce the size of these LLMs and it can only get better from now on

Quantization and pruning have dramatic impacts on model quality, no matter how often they say that it doesn't in papers.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#510

Post by boplicity »

mannerheim wrote: post #403
matmatmatmat wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 MM of compute doesn't seem all that out-of-reach for most "mid-size" companies, especially if the result is economical.

I don't think the result is economical purely because if it were, Google would be monetising their own models by now (of course, maybe they could monetise it if they were willing to go with a paid instead of ad model for search).

I think there are a lot of assumptions that Google hasn't already integrated this type of technology into their search engine. I suspect they have, but they've done so conservatively, to avoid changing how their "Golden Goose" lays eggs.
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