[deleted]
OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
201–210 of 264 posts
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting how you don't place any blame on Altman on understand addressing board concerns. A more experience CEO would have read the tea leaves.
A more experienced CEO would have come out ahead of the result Altman got, how?
By not getting abruptly fired in the first place. He ultimately survived with the backing of the investors, but he didn't come out of this looking amazing. He clearly had issues with a number of the board members and appears to have been caught totally off guard by the firing, which isn't a great look.
I think the old board came out of this looking even worse, but that doesn't mean Altman ended up better off than if he had managed things better from the start.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Red Hat deal was relatively small at $34B. Microsoft has a market cap of $2.8 Trillion. IBM is only at $146 Billion. But IBM still has a higher head count.
I mean, that's one way of viewing it, yes, but considering how influential they are in spaces other businesses are struggling in (free software), having a $34B market cap isn't shabby performance. IBM getting an easy-in to free software via a respected (by business, anyway) partner is a big opportunity, but they'd have to play their cards right and I can't think of the last big thing IBM was behind. They might be abl…
Yes Red Hat is significant in its niche of enterprise server operating systems, but it's not in the same league as Microsoft as a company overall. Red Hat would typically be deployed on AWS or Azure where they rake in all the money.
While Microsoft makes $73B profit, IBM makes $2B profit.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering Microsoft’s and the rest of BigTech revenue and market share in their areas, it doesn’t seem like enough people of importance share your opinions to matter.
[flagged]
I’m saying not enough people care about the opinions of a few idealistic geeks to make it a worthwhile market for any company to care.
In the context of who the market caters to, whether you and people like you ignore Microsoft is meaningless
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really think “non profits” are any less power hungry than for profits?
I'm not the original poster, but yes I do. Sure there are plenty of examples of power hungry non-profits and once in a while a for-profit company acts altruistically, but on average I think that there's a difference. If we randomly picked some executives from either type of company I would bet that the people in the non-profit group would more often have motivations beyond pure power and money accumulation.
Let’s take the executives of the non profits that make the most revenue, how many do you think are not concerned with power…now add religious institutions to that mix.
Then add college administrators to that mix.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open AI doesn’t have any meaningful “products” they have good technology and they charge $20 a month for a subscription to a technology demo that doesn’t come close to covering their costs. You think the employees at “Open” AI care about anything more than their large paychecks no matter what they say?
I’d be curious if $20/mo is or is not enough to cover their costs. It’s opaque what their inference setup is, or what the final economics of LLMs will be. With 30-100 Billion param models becoming available which are in spitting distance of gpt-4, and dedicated ASIC implementations… openAI might be charging too much.
Are you taking into account they are also paying far below market costs for compute or even what a large customer could negotiate?
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#207I 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.
> 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 don't know how anyone can call the board's action a "coup." Calling it that seems to be a propagandistic abuse of the term. The board was in charge, and it's not a coup if it fires a subordinate (the CEO). If anything, the coup was getting the boar…
Sure, it was not my point to suggest it wasn’t legal, just that it was a bold action which has gone completely unexplained.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should envy people that stand firm on their beliefs and are vindicated, not those that may experience backlash in the future because people that had a different view won in the end. Suffering hardship for doing what you think is right is not something to envy. Don't envy martyrs, wish for a world without the need for them.
How many people will stand by their “beliefs” at the cost of millions of dollars?
Plenty, but I suspect most of them already have millions of dollars so it's relatively much less of a sacrifice.
But for someone who's not a millionaire that looks at the situation and doesn't know how it will shake out, and maybe believes it's 60/40 or 75/25 against what they think is right, it's possible that principle can make up the difference in those assessments and make the difference in what they choose.
Just because someone isn't passing up a "sure thing" doesn't mean they aren't sacrificing something, especially when most sure things aren't actually sure at all. In reality it's all a matter of statistical likelihoods (and we either think of them that way, or like most people use a different model of thinking that amounts to the same thing while convincing us it's not), so I don't see this situation as being all that different.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really think “non profits” are any less power hungry than for profits?
I'm not the original poster, but yes I do. Sure there are plenty of examples of power hungry non-profits and once in a while a for-profit company acts altruistically, but on average I think that there's a difference. If we randomly picked some executives from either type of company I would bet that the people in the non-profit group would more often have motivations beyond pure power and money accumulation.
Having worked in non-profits and with a community of people who do, there’s not a difference.
Large non-profits optimize for revenue, small ones for impact.
The big fish eat the little ones or turn them into impact sharecroppers.
Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
why ?
IMHO, today, Google takes the cake for slowest. Meta is still probably the most agile, and Amazon is super hit or miss (so most variance) Idk where Microsoft would fit in that hierarchy, like Amazon it's kind of hit or miss but with less variance and extrema. From what I've seen and heard, both Gaming and Azure are pretty darn competent these days from an engineering and product perspective. Not perfect of course, bu…
Huh, I've heard several people refer to Microsoft as a "retirement home." Maybe that's just an ageism thing.