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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#131

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #31

A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll…

There is too little to go on, but they could already have trial customers and testimonials lined up. Actually demoing the product will probably work better than just having a human-less signup process, considering the price.

They could also just be trying to cash in on FOMO and their success and reputation so far, but that would paint a bleak picture

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#132

Post by Severian »

scarface_74 wrote: post #68
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people should be fired. I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit. But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel.

Why would those people be “fired” when the entire promotion process and promo docs emphasize “scope” and “impact”? No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. They do it because a shit ton of money appears in their bank account every pay period and stock appears in their brokerage account every vesting period. I personally don’t have the shit tolerance to work in…

Funny what his passions turned into, so yeah, ironically agree.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#133

Post by ewhanley »

pradn wrote: post #107
only-one1701 wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the document…

It's the responsibility of leadership to set the correct goals and metrics. If leadership doesn't value maintenance, those they lead won't either. You can't blame people for playing to the tune of those above them.

This is exactly right. If resume driven development results in more money, people are (rightly) going to do it. The incentive structure isn't set by the ICs.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#135

Post by Lerc »

bsimpson wrote: post #34
only-one1701 wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the document…

There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.

I had not encountered the phrase kidding-on-the-square before. Searching seems to reveal a spectrum of opinions as to what it means. It seems distinct to the 'It's funny because it's true' of darker humour.

It seems to be more on a spectrum of 'Haha, only joking' where the joke teller makes a statement that is ambiguously humorous to measure the values of the recipients, or if they are not sure of the values of the recipients.

I think the distinction might be on whether the joke teller is revealing (perhaps unintentionally) a personal opinion or whether they are making an observation on the world in general, which might even imply that they hold a counter-opinion.

Where do you see 'kidding on the square' falling?

(apologies for thread derailment)

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#136

Post by scubbo »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #104
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my former employer, there was a team who were very much into resume-driven development and wrote projects in Go even when Java would have been the better alternative considering the overall department and maintenance team expertise, all the while they were informally grumbling about how Go doesn’t have the features they need…

I see that a lot from the Go crowd. That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Sure there's differences, but a language does not make the engineer. Someone who is attracted to flashy stuff makes for an indulgent planner.

> That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability.

Hmm. Can't say I agree here - at least not with the literal text of what you've written (although maybe we agree in spirit). I agree that _simplistic_ strong opinions about languages are a sign of poor thoughtfulness (" is good and is bad") - but I'd very much expect a Staff+ engineer to have enough experience to have strong opinions about the _relative_ strengths of various languages, where they're appropriate to use and where a different language would be better. Bonus points if they can tell me the worst aspects about their favourite one.

Maybe we're using "opinion" differently, and you'd call what I described there "facts" rather than opinions. In which case - yeah, fair!

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#137

Post by doitLP »

paxys wrote: post #36
DebtDeflation wrote: post #31

A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll…

It's pretty funny that OpenAI wants to sell access to a "PhD level" model at a price with which you can hire like 3-5 real human PhDs full-time.

Don’t forget that this model would have a phd in everything and work around the clock

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#138

Post by bashfulpup »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #65
valiant55 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the other responder is being a little tongue-in-cheek but AGI to me would be virtually indistinguishable from a human in both ability to learn, grow and adapt to new information.

Honestly it doesn't even need to learn and grow much if at all if its able to properly reason about the world and its context and deal with the inexhaustible supply of imperfections and detail with reality.

That implies learning. Solve continual learning and you have agi.

Wouldn't it amaze you if you learned 10 years ago that we would have AI that could do math and code better than 99% of all humans. And at the same time they could barely order you a hotdog on doordash.

Fundamental ability is lacking. AGI is just as likely to be solved by Openai as it is by a college student with a laptop. Could be 1yr or 50yrs we cannot predict when.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#139

Post by hinkley »

moduspol wrote: post #64
DebtDeflation wrote: post #31

A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll…

Even worse: AFAIK there's no reason to believe that the $20k/mo or $10k/mo pricing will actually make them money. Those numbers are just thought balloons being floated. Of course $10k/mo sounds like a lot of inference, but it's not yet clear how much inference will be required to approximate a software developer--especially in the context of maintaining and building upon an existing codebase over time and not just bu…

Man. If I think about all of the employee productivity tools and resources I could have purchased fifteen years ago when nobody spent anything on tooling, with an inflation adjusted $10K a month and it makes me sad.

We were hiring more devs to deal with a want of $10k worth of hardware per year, not per month.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#140

Post by d--b »

OpenAI is over ambitious.

Their chasing of AGI is killing them.

They probably thought that burning cash was the way to get to AGI, and that on the way there they would make significant improvements over GPT 4 that they would be able to release as GPT 5.

And that is just not happening. While pretty much everyone else is trying to increase efficiency, and specialize their models to niche areas, they keep on chasing AGI.

Meanwhile more and more models are being delivered within apps, where they create more value than in an isolated chat window. And OpenAi doesn’t control those apps. So they’re slowly being pushed out.

Unless they pull off yet another breakthrough, I don’t think they have much of a great future

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