Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

techstartups.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 460 posts

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#161

Post by Spooky23 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #57
Spooky23 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OpenAI is toxic. Weird corporate governmance shadiness. The Elon drama, valuations based on claims that seem like the AI version of the Uber for X hype of a decade ago (but exponentially crazier). The list goes on. Microsoft is the IBM of this century. They are conservative, and I think they’re holding back — their copilot for government launch was delayed months for lack of GPUs. They have the money to make…

IBM of this century in a good way?

In this context, it’s not good or bad, it just is.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#162

Post by robertlagrant »

zombiwoof wrote: post #40
laughingcurve wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just not correct. As someone who has done the budgets for PhD hiring and funding, you are just wildly underestimating the overhead costs, benefits, cost of raising money, etc.

Respectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them.

> Respectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them.

Does that include all overheads such as HR, payroll, etc?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#163

Post by PKop »

barumrho wrote: post #74
echelon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no moat in models (OpenAI). There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave). There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda). Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)

Given xAI built its 100k gpu datacenter in a very short time, is the infra really a moat?

xAI does not have infra to sell the service and integrations of it to enterprises and such. It's an open question if "models" alone and simple consumer products that use them are profitable. So, probably hyperscale cloud platform infra is a moat yes. Microsoft has Semantic Kernel, Microsoft.Extensions.AI, various RAG and search services, and an entire ecosystem and platform around using LLM's to build with that xAI does not have. Just having a chat app as interface to one's model is part of the discussion here about models as commodities. xAI does have X/Twitter data which is a constantly updating source of information so in that aspect they themselves do have something unique.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#164

Post by voxl »

Fernicia wrote: post #110
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, a model with PhD level intelligence could presumably produce research in minutes that would take an actual PhD days or months.

Presumably. What a powerful word choice.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#165

Post by pdimitar »

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.

And I see people who assume choosing a language was done for "flashy stuff" the less capable.

See, we can all generalize. Not productive.

Only thing I ever saw from Golang devs was pragmatism. I myself go either for Elixir or Rust and to me Golang sits in a weird middle but I've also written 20+ small tools for myself in Golang and have seen how much quicker and more productive I was when I was not obsessed with complete correctness (throwaway script-like programs, small-to-mid[ish]-sized projects, internal tools etc.)

You would do well to stop stereotyping people based on their choice of language.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#166

Post by pdimitar »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #145
synergy20 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

golang is decent and is the only new lang climbed up to 7th in popularity, it does shine at what it's good at

The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake. Not because it's a good choice. For a large web backend, go is great. For many other things it's terrible.

> The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake

Hard to take you seriously when you do such weird generalized takes.

While it's a sad fact that fanboys and zealots absolutely do exist, most devs can't afford to be such and have to be pragmatic. They pick languages based on merit and analysis.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#167

Post by zozbot234 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #145
synergy20 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

golang is decent and is the only new lang climbed up to 7th in popularity, it does shine at what it's good at

The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake. Not because it's a good choice. For a large web backend, go is great. For many other things it's terrible.

Rust is pretty antithetical to resume-driven development because a lot of the stuff that's written in Rust is too well-written and free of the usual kinds of software defects. It immediately becomes "done" and enters low-effort maintenance mode, there's just very little reason to get involved with it anymore since "it just works". Believe it or not, this whole dynamic is behind a lot of the complaints about Rust in the workplace. It's literally making things too easy.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#168

Post by whstl »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #145
synergy20 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

golang is decent and is the only new lang climbed up to 7th in popularity, it does shine at what it's good at

The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake. Not because it's a good choice. For a large web backend, go is great. For many other things it's terrible.

Life is too short to program on languages one doesn't love.

Those people, if they really exist, are right.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#169

Post by MWil »

Lerc wrote: post #135
bsimpson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

good god, lemon

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#170

Post by PKop »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #105
klelatti wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD could have ROCm perfected if they really want to. It's not an act of will or CEO dictat. It's about hiring and incentivising the right people, putting the right structures in place etc all in the face of competing demands. Nvidia have a huge head start and by the time AMD have 'caught up' Nvidia with it's greater resources will have moved further ahead.

If head start is a moat, why wouldn't you count OpenAI's headstart as moat?

Not all industries or product segments are equal is the obvious answer. The point here whether one agrees or not is models are easier to catch up to than GPUs
Post reply on HN