111–120 of 1001 posts
so what happens if @eshear calls this probably-not-a-bluff, but lets everyone walk? The people that remain get new options and 500 other people still definitely want to work at OAI?
At this point, I think it’s absolutely clear no one has any idea what happened. Every speculation, no matter how sophisticated, has been wrong. It’s time to take a breath, step back, and wait until someone from OpenAI says something substantial.
If they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT. Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits. So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts. [1]…
We’re seeing our generation’s “traitorous eight” story play out [1]. If this creates a sea of AI start-ups, competing and exploring different approaches, it could be invigorating on many levels. [1] https://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/fairchild.h...
How would that work, economically? Wasn't a key enabler of early transitor work that required capital investment was modest? SotA AI research seems to be well past that point.
They were simple in principle but expensive at scale. Sounds like LLMs.
The key line: “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”
Microsoft can absorb all the employees and switch them into the new AI subsidiary which basically is an acqui-hire without buying out everyone else's shares and making a new DeepMind / OpenAI research division inside of the company.
So all along it was a long winded side-step into having a new AI division without all the regulatory headaches of a formal acquisition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ilya is much less active on Twitter than the others. The rumors that blamed him emerged and spread like wildfire and he did nothing to stop it because he probably only checks Twitter once a week.
One would think that he would be on Twitter this week.
Or maybe _this_ week he would need to spend his time doing something productive.
First class board they have.
> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
Well, we don't know.
What we do know, is that the "coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman" is a rumor and speculation about a thing we don't know anything about.
Well that accelerated very quickly and this is perhaps the most dysfunctional startup I have ever seen. All due to one word: Greed.
Perhaps it was just that original intention for openai to be a nonprofit, but at some point somewhere it wasn't pure $ and that's what makes it interesting. Also more tragic because now it looks like it's heading straight to a for profit company one way or another.
This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team). > In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we…
Exactly. I'm curious about how much of this was planned vs emergent. I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists.
Equally, it's not entirely unpredictable. MS is the easiest to read: their moves to date have been really clear in wanting to be the primary commercial beneficiary of OAI's work.
OAI itself is less transpararent from the outside. There's a tension between the "humanity first" mantra that drove its inception, and the increasingly "commercial exploitation first" line that Altman was evidently driving.
As things stand, the outcome is pretty clear: if the choice was between humanity and commercial gain, the latter appears to have won.