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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

#161

Post by reducesuffering »

ghaff wrote: post #30

Is it actually news that 70% (or whatever) of the employees at a hot startup wouldn't go to work for Microsoft even if they kept their compensation packages (which would probably have a lot of asterisks attached) because of executive suite drama?

Either OpenAI leadership was playing lip service to it's non-profit mission in hopes for riches and fame or they are profoundly naive. Google learned this a long time ago, that they tried not to care about stock price or monetary incentives but always the most pressing thing Googlers cared about was that their stock price went up, when they had $200k - $10m compensation on the line. OpenAI hired people with huge pay packages and surprise surprise when the primary thing on those peoples' minds is making their stock go up, the primary reason OpenAI was founded to prevent.

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

#162

Post by Clubber »

bogomipz wrote: post #145
reso wrote: 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

That certainly doesn't leave a good taste in my mouth.

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

#163

Post by Clubber »

gwern wrote: post #154
Laaas wrote: post #11

> This person called the company "the biggest and slowest" of all the major tech companies Could not be further from the truth.

It doesn't need to be true, just needs to be what a nontrivial number of OAers think. And given how many people I still see putting down 'M$', I can absolutely believe a dislike of Microsoft is widespread.

It was in vogue to make fun of M$ in the late 90s and aughts; the Gates/Ballmer era. Even for people using M$ products for a living. I think the moniker just stuck. I don't dislike M$ more than I dislike Google or any other similar tech leviathan.

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

#164

Post by Clubber »

nijave wrote: post #120
Laaas wrote: 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.

>They didn't miss the cloud revolution Imo they barely kept pace largely by leveraging existing software and repurposing it for cloud. They still seem to be playing catch-up with multiple solutions to the same problem--some deprecated, some preview. Take for instance Postgres. Azure had Single Server built on Windows containers. They acqui-hired Citus to build out distributed and they released Flexible Postgres as a…

They're the #2 player in cloud, more than double the size of #3 Google, according to this.

https://www.knowledgehut.com/blog/cloud-computing/top-cloud-...

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

#165

Post by tymekpavel »

mrtksn wrote: post #147
kbenson wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in. I'm not sure of any large one that doesn't. The incentives are aligned such that it's hard for them not to. It's easy to find examples of similar (sometimes almost identical) behavior from most large companies.

Okay, what other company does it? You may say Apple & App Store but that's not the same.

Apple/iMessage/Safari

Google/Android/Chrome/YouTube

Meta/Messenger/Facebook/WhatsApp

...just to name a few.

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

#166

Post by zlg_codes »

chrisoverzero wrote: post #156
zlg_codes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a funny assertion. Why was Microsoft chasing WSL and PowerShell if they weren't trying to appeal to markets that were smaller than the existing market but might still be worth revenue? It's not as stark and simple as 99/1 split. They've tried hard to prove they're friendly to free software and yet there's still plenty of people that don't trust them. Many people use proprietary software because they're forced…

> Why trust software you can't inspect? Because for nearly everyone, that’s all software.

But you're defending ignorance and apathy. The core problem here is people don't really trust these systems, they're conditioned to believe that it's the only way it's done and that other ways are unfair in one manner or another.

It's not a conscious, calculated decision being made. It's social engineering in action. Most people don't read the Terms and Conditions. Most people don't understand how to inspect their computers for malware or misbehaving processes. They aren't qualified to determine the trustworthiness of their software. So we're supposed to pretend people chose to have details of how to fix their shit hidden from them? No, it was actions from industry to socially manipulate and normalize practices. Average people are being taken advantage of by industry, and the people who say something about it get blown off because "it just doesn't matter".

Yeah, sure, until it does. And they'll be too fucked to do anything about it, because human nature can never overcome this delusional positivity that life is fine and nobody is bad and businesses never mislead people. People with this outlook are poor at evaluating risk.

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

#167

Post by scarface_74 »

mrtksn wrote: post #106
xazzy wrote: post #40

Am an employee, signed the letter. I can't read the article so maybe the content is more nuanced, but the framing irks me. This all happened really fast and the offer was informal. I can only speak for myself but I do have a lot of respect for modern MS, and would have seriously considered the move if that's what kept the team together and comp was reasonable. I would be surprised if most people felt differently.

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?

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

#168

Post by staunton »

JoshTko wrote: post #130
dmazzoni wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that all makes sense. Things would have played out very differently if the board was more experienced and thoughtful. Their hearts might have been in the right place, but their actions were reckless and ultimately backfired.

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?

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

#169

Post by scarface_74 »

mrtksn wrote: post #132
staunton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in. I'm not talking about "hey, we have this product that you might like", I'm talking about "if you want to use this product, you must also use this product". There's also no technical reason for it, sometimes they will let me use it. Not O.K.

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

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

#170

Post by Clubber »

zlg_codes wrote: post #94
wintogreen74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One old guy in a bubble thinks says another young guy in same bubble (who he just happened to mentor) is "the most powered person he's ever met."

That whole first part disgusted me. "most powered person he's met"? Good lord does that come off as tone deaf, almost groveling. And the most important company in human history? The hell is that guy smoking, because I've got good shit and that's some serious hyperbole. Is the hype machine in the room with us right now?

I would guess 90% of tech today is hype, that's what you're reading, the hype machine in practice.
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