Earlier quoted context omitted.
why ?
because IBM is both bigger and slower?
I don't think IBM is a "major tech companie" in the modern lingo
OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
21–30 of 264 posts
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#22> This person called the company "the biggest and slowest" of all the major tech companies Could not be further from the truth.
Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.
You realize that was literally 20 years ago?
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.
They didn't miss the cloud revolution, and certainly not the AI revolution either. Microsoft is doing absolutely great under Satya Nadella.
> and certainly not the AI revolution either.
The AI revolution is still underway, we don't know who missed what yet. In term of research output. Most of the ground breaking work did "not" come from msft. They just bough they way in. Valid strategy, but definitely not novel.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.
They didn't miss the cloud revolution, and certainly not the AI revolution either. Microsoft is doing absolutely great under Satya Nadella.
That’s more down to dumb luck partnering with OpenAI.
You have a point with the cloud computing. I’d hesitate to call it a revolution though. I’d never willingly use a microsoft cloud product if I wasn’t forced to by my employer.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#25they didn’t want to leave because of OpenAI’s great compensation packages ($300k+) I do think it is a little unfair to characterize MSFT as “slow and boring” when they’ve been the ones to make the fastest pivot to supporting generative AI as a product line
These are all people who could make good money anywhere. Few are presumably there solely because it's the best paying job. Part of it is certainly identity, OpenAI or $hot_startup sounds way cooler than Microsoft to a lot of people. And part would be wanting to work at a startup and not a legacy SaaS company and all the baggage that entails. Whatever carve-out they were going to get, there's now way you'd be as unconstrained working at MS as you would at OpenAI. It's precisely because the money isn't that important that a lot would have probably bailed if they all were absorbed into Microsoft.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.
They didn't miss the cloud revolution, and certainly not the AI revolution either. Microsoft is doing absolutely great under Satya Nadella.
They were not first in either areas. They leveraged existing products like office to catch up.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#27During that whole mess it seemed to slip out that MS has access to all the IP up to AGI. And that has a definition that might be "replacing people at work", so not passing the Turing test fully but close enough.
There are some problems that need to get cleared up for that to happen. The system needs to loose the cutoff date, be a bit more deterministic and still function. The whole quagmire around copyright needs to get resolved. (Because it looks like the output of LLM's is immediately in the public domain)
If I worked at OpenAI, I would be looking for that contract and reading it myself. Because giving away all the IP for the half assed runway where you have to get to AGI... doesn't sound like it ends in a massive pay day. MS may have cleaned up its public image in the recent years, or been displaced by things people hate and fear more. But there is this: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/microsoft-ai/ and the underlying tos looks a like like old school M$ and shady dealings.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#28> This person called the company "the biggest and slowest" of all the major tech companies Could not be further from the truth.
Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.
> Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.
Remember the whole antitrust thing? Microsoft was under a consent decree that expired between 2007-2009 (different provisions expired at different times).
That decree, combined with the material threat of additional action during that time window, limited their ability to compete (because that's, well, the entire point of a consent decree motivated by an antitrust settlement).
There's a reason that you see a notable difference in Microsoft's market position and strategy from 2012-present compared to the previous decade (2001-2012). The timing of the Ballmer-to-Nadella transition is not coincidental; it's indicative of the larger shift the company made as they repositioned themselves to aggressively expand again.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#29> This person called the company "the biggest and slowest" of all the major tech companies Could not be further from the truth.
My impression is that it's pretty true of Microsoft in general, but not of the AI research teams I'm familiar with. As with any tech company of its size, there's lots of variation from team to team.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#30Is it actually news that 70% (or whatever) of the employees at a hot startup wouldn't go to work for Microsoft even if they kept their compensation packages (which would probably have a lot of asterisks attached) because of executive suite drama?