Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#171

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #165

darkhorse222 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

> how much quicker and more productive I was when I was not obsessed with complete correctness

That's pretty much another way of saying that stuff becomes a whole lot quicker and easier when you end up getting things wrong. Which may even be true, as far as it goes. It's just not very helpful.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#172

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #118

scarface_74 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. I'm sure there are plenty of people who work at big companies for precisely this reason (or at least, with that as _a_ reason among many). Yes, much of the prestige has worn off as the old guard retired and current leadership emphasizes chasing AI buzzwords and cutting costs. But still, big companies are one of the few…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#173

Post by madmask » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

moelf wrote: post #39

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.

$20k can't get you that many PhD. Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month, effectively costs double that because of school overhead and other stuff.

Come to Italy where 1.1k is enough

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#174

Post by madmask » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

shellfishgene wrote: post #121

mattmaroon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Don't know where you live that the all-in costs on someone with a PhD are $4k-$7k/mo. Maybe if their PhD is in anthropology. 2. How many such PhD people can it do the work of?

Postdocs in Europe make about 3-4k eur/month in academic research.

We wish, it’s more like half in many places

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#175

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

only-one1701 wrote: post #24

lwansbrough wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI agent with superhuman coherence that can run indefinitely without oversight.

People sincerely think we're < 5 years away from this?

People on HN in 2015 were saying that by now car ownership would be dying and we’d be renting out our self driving cars as we sat at work and did fuck all. Ben Thompson had podcasts glazing Uber for 3 hours a month.

The hype cycle for tech people is like a light bulb for a moth. We’re attracted to potential, which is both our superpower and kryptonite.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#176

Post by saturn8601 » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

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…

Ah man I don't want to hear things like that. I work in an Angular project and it is the most pleasant thing I have worked with (and i've been using it as my primary platform for almost a decade now). If I could, i'd happily keep using this framework for the rest of my career(27 years to go till retirement).

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#177

Post by samtp » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

valiant55 wrote: post #33

only-one1701 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is AGI? Like, what does it look like? Genuine question.

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.

Would it also get brainrot from consuming too much social media & made up stories? Because I imagine it's reasoning would have to be significantly better than the average human to avoid this.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#178

Post by pdimitar » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #171

pdimitar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

> how much quicker and more productive I was when I was not obsessed with complete correctness That's pretty much another way of saying that stuff becomes a whole lot quicker and easier when you end up getting things wrong. Which may even be true, as far as it goes. It's just not very helpful.

Obviously. But I did qualify my statement. There are projects where you're OK with not getting everything right from the get go.

FWIW I very much share your exact thoughts on Rust skewing metrics because it makes things too easy and because stuff almost immediately moves to maintenance mode. But that being said, we still have some tasks where we need something yesterday and we can't argue with the shot-callers about it. (And again, some personal projects where the value is low and you derive more of it if you try quickly.)

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#179

Post by usefulcat » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

whstl wrote: post #159

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 have lot of sympathy for resume-driven developers. They're just answering to the labor market. More power to them. When companies do what the market expect we praise them. When it's workers, we scorn them. This attitude is seriously fucked up. When companies start hiring based on experience, adaptability, curiosity, potential and curiosity then you get to complain. Until that, anyone doing it should be considered a…

Pretty sure most of the resentment comes from working with such people. Which I think is understandable.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#180

Post by BobbyJo » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

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.

Language matters quite a bit when deciding how to build an application though. I see having no strong opinions on language to be a sign the person hasn't developed a wide enough variety of projects to get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses.