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OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

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221–230 of 264 posts

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#221
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So because their costs are lower than that of competitors, customers should pay more? Ok.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one company of any size that isn’t doing the same thing?

Valve's a great example. They have overwhelming market share and could have long since tried to tighten the screws to make a buck, and haven't done anything of the sort. They've also launched numerous 1st party systems and hardware that they could have tried to shove on people (Steamdeck, Index, controllers, etc) but, again, have done nothing of the sort.

Valve is worth around 7.7 billion and from the best I can find, it doesn’t have a quarter of the gaming market. How much power could they yield

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#223
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously MS does some great things but I wonder what do you think about their culture? MS is trying to make me use Edge Browser by randomly refusing to let me use Bing chat in any other browser. This makes me think that MS is still evil and will force me to do things the moment they can. I gave up Bing Chat because of this and was using Perplexity.ai instead, until Bing got integrated into ChatGPT. Another thing is…

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?

* this *

notice how the one OpenAI employee posted he'd "consider it" if the comp was right. Ie, it's about the money.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#225
post #53

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.

There was a bit of insight today from a board member on her perspective. See: https://archive.is/Sy3Xm

Honestly who cares what Helen has to say. She didn’t belong on a board in the first place.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#226
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't miss the cloud revolution, and certainly not the AI revolution either. Microsoft is doing absolutely great under Satya Nadella.

Weird, Microsoft's been invisible to me since the early 2000s. I don't think they could sell me anything. Their whole corporate image is just slimy. Like that one friend that wants you to set up an account on something he's got going, or wants you to join him on an investment. You can totally trust him. You'll have a site, some cloud storage, office software, the works. And the investment? Yeah dude it'll rocket any…

I don’t know if you intended this to be hilarious but it is.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#227

Earlier 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…

Do you think Microsoft would have a competitive foundational model if not for OpenAI? Cause Google and Meta seem like they’re top of the pack there, with AWS at the very least releasing some.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve's a great example. They have overwhelming market share and could have long since tried to tighten the screws to make a buck, and haven't done anything of the sort. They've also launched numerous 1st party systems and hardware that they could have tried to shove on people (Steamdeck, Index, controllers, etc) but, again, have done nothing of the sort.

Valve is worth around 7.7 billion and from the best I can find, it doesn’t have a quarter of the gaming market. How much power could they yield

That figure is quite ridiculous. Even if one completely ignores Steam and all of their games/products, even CS:GO alone is worth billions by itself, with millions of concurrent players (and growing) more than a decade after its launch!

All that said, I would expect Valve's total immediate-term 'worth' to be much less than it could be, which is the entire point of this topic. The reason companies treat their customers poorly is because it's profitable, but it also has consequences. You see large short to mid term growth in exchange for long term failure. That's why I think it's more typical to see public companies treat their customers poorly than it is for private companies. Generally the "employees" (including board and CEO) of a public company are evaluated on their short to mid-term performance.

By contrast private companies, especially ones that remain private long beyond the point of being able to 'cash out' with a public offering, tend to be more focused on the long term viability. So it's expected that their 'value', whatever it may be, would be less than it would be if they acted in a hostile fashion to their users.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#229
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t believe religious institutions deserve to be non profit.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#230
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Nothing about anything he does makes me think he's motivated by increasing his personal net worth.

Not even the weird shitcoin with the eye scanner he's been pushing (WorldCoin)?

Based on the last 5 years of crypto hype and failures across the industry, the only motivating factor to get involved in it seems to be 'increase their personal net worth'.

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