This was expected. Who would possibly think Sam would join MS to be a "senior research" or "VP of engineering"? They get to form a company and run a startup within Microsoft with full Microsoft backing.
OpenAI is so over.
Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#332Satya wins by letting Ilya win. Wow.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#333[deleted]
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#334I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee are...quite different.
Exactly. I'm not so sure that most of OpenAI's employees would be very excited to join Microsoft.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#335I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company". Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it. Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.
> If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in.
Sam is a serial startup (co)founder who has spent additional time at YC -- in the startup world, that kind of talk is so common as to be a stereotype. It's a good way to get people who do care about that kind of stuff to accept equity in a firm that is statistically likely to fail (or, in OpenAI's case, explicitly warns investors that they should not expect profit and treat investments as donations) as compensation when they could earn greater secure compensation from more established firms. It's a great sales pitch, even when there is no truth behind it.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#336I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company". Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it. Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sam's history is full of the worst parts of venture capital and startup mindset. He's only an idealist so far as he's good at selling the ideal outcome and drowning out any criticism.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPT-5 is almost certainly already done. But considering they sat on 4 for 8 months with Altman as head, who knows if it'll see the light of day.
5 months ago they said they hadn't started training: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/07/openai-gpt5-sam-altman/ and had no intention to do so within the next 6 months: https://the-decoder.com/gpt-5-is-nowhere-close-says-openai-c... They just started development in the last week or so: https://decrypt.co/206044/gpt-5-openai-development-roadmap-g...
The little secret is that the training run (meaning, creating the raw autocompleting multimodal token weights) for 5 ran in parallel with 4.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#338So Altman now has a backer for his NVIDIA killer, and one who can use it not just for LLMs but Azure too, and one day possibly consumer GPUs? Forget Xbox, subsidised graphics cards as a loss-leader for Game Pass subscriptions would be an interesting play. What will the antitrust people think?
You're not beating Nvidia if you aim for GPUs.
The more plausible approach is developing more specialized chips, which are only good at Tensor Ops. Heck, that's what Nvidia's top of the line chips are. The A100 and H100 don't support OpenGL or any other Graphics Api.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#339What is Sam's actual value re: AI and not just as a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need? Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.
Leadership
People believe his vision of AI
That is it
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#340I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever…
You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think.
I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.