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OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

businessinsider.com

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

#241

Post by GVIrish »

JohnFen wrote: post #65
andy99 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft pay isn't the best in the industry so if compensation is the only thing that matters to someone, Microsoft shouldn't even be in their top five.

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

#242

Post by devjab »

anuraaga wrote: post #232
mrtksn wrote: 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…

I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG. Go…

Most of OpenAIs tech stack is AI toolage, but basically everything you interact with is written in Python. Nobody uses C# for anything serious, because why would you?

It’s not a bad language, it’s just not a very good language either. Need efficiency? Rust/C++. Need an all round language? Node or Python, which are less efficient, but still powerful enough to power Instagram and well OpenAI as far as Python goes and LEGO as far as Typescript goes. Realistically you’re looking to choose between C#, Java and Go. Both Java and Go are miles ahead of C# in terms of concurrency, I mean, C# is still stuck with “await” after all, and while I guess you can have a lengthy debate on C# vs Java, 9 gazillion large companies use Java while 0 use C#.

It’s not that C# is bad, like I said. It’s never really been better than it is now, it’s more a question of why would you ever use it? Even the C# developers at Microsoft admit to prototyping using Python because it’s just so much faster to build things with it, and while they do move things to C#, you have to wonder if they would if they weren’t working for Microsoft.

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

#243

Post by CyberDildonics »

Nthringas wrote: post #95
airstrike wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to argue IBM is bigger

I'm factoring in their legacy and history i.e. since they're older they're bigger

You can make up whatever you want, that doesn't mean it's reality. I guess Zildjian, the cymbal making company is bigger than amazon, apple, microsoft, netflix, facebook and IBM, since it was founded in 1623.

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

#244

Post by andrewjf »

zombiwoof wrote: post #223
scarface_74 wrote: post #167

Earlier 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?

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

Yep. Someone is going to get the money, I’d like it to be the employees.

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

#245

Post by lumost »

scarface_74 wrote: post #239
Grimblewald wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There costs are lower…for now. Do you think Microsoft is going to subsidize them forever?

GPUs will be cheaper later. GPUs have still been tracking Moore's law, enterprise GPUs went from a niche product to being the hottest enterprise hardware overnight. Margins on H200's are massive from what I understand. I would bet that we'll see massive competition in the hardware space from AMD, NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, and GOOG + startups.

We're likely to see an 8-16x reduction in hardware costs over the next decade. That's about enough to shrink the current GPT-4 inference endpoints to a laptop/desktop sized hardware footprint.

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

#246

Post by osigurdson »

staunton wrote: post #125
mrtksn wrote: 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…

> MS is still evil All big corporations are "evil", as in, their decisionmaking is scaled and institutionalized enough to effectively implement the goal of "maximizing shareholder value" above what's good for you or society.

What organizations are interested are interested in “what is good for you or society”? Even if they start out that way, eventually corruption sets in. I’d rather have companies have a clear profit motive instead of a series of fake motives and increased regulatory capture.

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

#247

Post by x86x87 »

MicolashKyoka wrote: post #189

Anything from business insider should be taken with a mountain of salt. The msft deal would've created a separate org for openai, sorta like how linkedin & github are operated. So much of the context disappears when you view things through the lens of someone not familiar with the domain.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. That move was purely to force them to reinstate the ousted CEO. Microsoft would have done anything to protect their investment, but that does not mean that everyone at OpenAI would have benefited from this move - far from it.

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

#248

Post by nicce »

PepperdineG wrote: post #159
tivert wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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 board ousted. The CEO was a member of the board and the ones that fired the CEO also fired the Chairman of the Board, so the board went from 6 to 4. So far there's been eve…

Is it still a coup?

Why do we have voting in board and democracy in the first place if one cannot use it for its intended use case without the fear of retaliation?

They clearly could have been more transparent, but it still does not make it as coup.

If you think so - that is why populism is considered as threat for democracy.

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

#249

Post by PeterStuer »

scarface_74 wrote: post #206
lumost wrote: 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?

Can you provide a source for this?

Since it is MS providing the compute for equity, they would not have an incentive to discount.

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

#250

Post by bogomipz »

huytersd wrote: post #225
bogomipz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe try to follow the thread where the OP states:

>"No one has explained how or why the entire board decided to do a coup ..."

To which I responded that there was in fact a very recent and relevant update to this. Your opinion on whether she belonged on the board is completely irrelevant to this fact and also childish.

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