81–90 of 264 posts
Microsoft will be the leader in AI with or without OpenAI. Mark my words, you can take that to the bank. Come back to this post in 5 years, you'll see I predicted the future.
Apple more likely. Or some other co we don't know about yet. OpenAI is going to crumble. Microsoft will be challenged for trust. We'll see what happens.
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It's "business insider". Don't underestimate how poorly management understands "technical resources". I can certainly see lots of leadership just assuming that pay is the only relevant variable and ignore culture entirely during an acquihire, assuming people are fine doing whatever as long as they're paid.
To be fair, there are a lot of devs for whom compensation is the only thing that really matters -- they are overrepresented here on HN, even. It would be pretty easy to assume that's the majority point of view. It also may be that's exactly the sort of person that Microsoft prefers, too, but I don't know.
During 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…
LLMs are impressive, can increase productivity for certain workers in certain industries etc, yes but avoid reaching like that please.
I am still so confused by this whole saga. No one has explained how or why the entire board decided to do a coup, and then simply changed their minds a few days later. I have to assume that the individuals involved are under a mix of social and legal pressure to not talk about the circumstances.
This recent TIME article lays out the saga pretty straightforwardly and makes it a bit less confusing. https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/ At least, that was how I felt after reading it. Basically, within the span of a year, OpenAI transformed from a research lab inside a non-profit that was pursuing a seemingly-Quixiotic dream of artificial general intelligence (AGI)... into one of the fastest-…
Things would have played out very differently if the board was more experienced and thoughtful. Their hearts might have been in the right place, but their actions were reckless and ultimately backfired.
pg talks about how Sam Altman is the most powered person he's ever met. Seems we have a super powerful psychopath running perhaps the most important company in human history. I do think he legitimately believes he's doing the right thing though all throughout, which maybe makes it more scary. Sorta like how Mark Zuckerberg seemed to truly believe in Facebook's mission and wound up having all sorts of negative externa…
> I do think he legitimately believes he's doing the right thing though all throughout, which maybe makes it more scary I really think the opposite. I think he's after the biggest payday/most power he can get, and anything else is a secondary consideration.
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I don't think IBM is something that comes to mind when people are talking "Major tech companies" anymore.
They ought to, considering they acquired Red Hat a while back.
Microsoft has a market cap of $2.8 Trillion.
IBM is only at $146 Billion. But IBM still has a higher head count.
During 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…
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> I do think he legitimately believes he's doing the right thing though all throughout, which maybe makes it more scary I really think the opposite. I think he's after the biggest payday/most power he can get, and anything else is a secondary consideration.
I think you can fairly ascribe a lot of negative attributes to Sam, but an unnatural thirst for money isn't it. Nothing about anything he does makes me think he's motivated by increasing his personal net worth.
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I thought the offer from MSFT, albeit unofficial, was that anyone who made the switch kept their current salary.
i would guess a lot of OpenAI employees are sitting on some pretty valuable stock/options if the company doesn't implode
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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.
There's just a feeeew things. Yeah, we're gonna tell you when to restart, we'll update it for you. We'll tell you what you can and can't run on your own machine. We'll "protect you" by trying to keep you inside the Microsoft Store, so you can adjust to buying all of your software instead of getting anything for free. Freedom is bad!
What can Microsoft do for a programmer who self-hosts and doesn't trust proprietary software? They co-opted GitHub but that really just reduced trust in GitHub more than anything. And GitHub itself is proprietary software built on top of Git. VS Code is a laggy mess. Azure has nothing to hook me. LLMs are toys or another privacy invasion vector to "analyze". I don't trust them to store my e-mail.
Everything MS touches dies a slow death. Look at Skype.