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Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

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Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#181

Post by bmitc »

voidfunc wrote: post #178
bmitc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Microsoft need him? Microsoft has some of the foremost researchers and research divisions in the world and have successfully demonstrated their ability to evolve as a business. Altman's background doesn't seem remotely enough to have such a high-level position at a company like Microsoft.

Assuage investor anxiety - it's a drop in the bucket to pay Altman virtually anything he wants to keep the market from thinking too much.

Investor anxiety concerning what, exactly?

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#183

Post by cedws »

xxpor wrote: post #57
ryanSrich wrote: post #55

Microsoft invested $10b and owns 49% of OpenAi. Yet they don’t have a board seat? Thats genuinely insane, and seems like a huge issue.

They invested in the for-profit, not the non-profit. The non-profit controls the for-profit.

Sounds like a mess. It's practically annexed by Microsoft now anyway, might as well stop being shy about being for-profit.

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#184

Post by beebmam »

kcb wrote: post #54
swalsh wrote: post #27

Greg Brockman has also left: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

Feels like the kind of situation where the two are just going to end up forming a new company that eventually surpasses OpenAI.

Eventually being maybe 5+ years to build out the cloud tech to do so. The reason GPT-4 succeeded is massive RDMA+GPU compute clusters for training the model.

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#185

Post by robswc »

capableweb wrote: post #120
baron816 wrote: post #62

I wonder if this is one of those pivotal moments in history where OpenAI collapses or fades and Google or someone else dominates the future of AI, and we’re all left wondering “what if”.

Unless Google (or someone else) outright acquires GPT4 and future GPT research, it's unlikely that someone will suddenly overtake OpenAI. From what we've seen, no one is close to GPT4, sometimes not even GPT3.

Well, it doesn't have to be as good as GPT4. I've gotten a ton of use/power out of a local llama model. Even GPT3 was "good enough" for a lot of tasks. I mostly use ChatGPT because its the most convenient.

OpenAI has pretty much the "best" model and first mover advantage. They can lose the latter, and might struggle to keep the former.

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#186

Post by YeBanKo »

wmf wrote: post #149
IAmNotACellist wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI shouldn't even be making a profit, as it's a 501(c)3 charity. The whole umbrella for-profit corp they formed when they became popular should be illegal, and is clearly immoral.

If OpenAI hadn't restructured they wouldn't have gotten any money from Microsoft and they would have either run out of money or the team would have left and started ClosedAI. There's no scenario where they developed GPT-3/4 while staying nonprofit.

Or they would get more money from other donors to build open source models.

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#187

Post by kristjansson »

So MSFT put $10bn into OpenAI, presumably at least in part on the strength of sama’s leadership. But if the stories are to be believed, a huge chunk of that investment was in Azure credits, and investment into new Azure GPU DCs/clusters for OAI to spend those credits on.

If MSFT doesn’t like this move, why wouldn’t they just … not honor those credits? Or grant more to a successor entity? Does OAI have its own warehouse of GPUs separate from Azure?

Seems like a very dangerous game for Ilya to play.

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#188

Post by dehrmann »

paulcole wrote: post #164
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #7

Link to MS statement https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/17/a-statement-from... In my opinion, I'd say the shortness and lack of details backs up the story that they had no idea. You'd see way more words if a marketing department had it's hands on something like this. This was 100% a get something out asap job.

What would make you think a marketing department would potentially be involved here? Besides the obvious Marketing = Bad connection prevalent here on HN?

I think they just mixed up marketing and corporate comms.

Re: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman

#190

Post by astrange »

Cacti wrote: post #147
taftster wrote: post #41

Microsoft has a "Cloud + AI" division [1]. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sam Altman at or near the top of that organization come Monday. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_engineering_groups#C...

lol there’s thousands of Sams out there, he’s not that special, and he’s certainly not indispensable. I don’t know why so many here are struggling to accept that this guy fucked up, lied to his boss, got caught, and got fired for it, and that’s all there is to it. boards will tolerate many things, but willfully lying to them about anything material is not one of them. a ceo who won’t tell the board the truth is a ceo…

The chairman of the board quit with him, though. Doesn't seem like he had a problem.
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