Surprising how Sam Altman's firing as CEO of OpenAI and moving to Microsoft wasn't mentioned in this article.
Do you have a source?
They mean the past events.
Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
181–190 of 460 posts
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#182Earlier 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.
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.
You are trying to combine two repelling magnets together.
Case in point: Tesla/SpaceX meets your first criteria: "I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second."
Google meets your second criteria: "And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit."
Other than small time boutique software firms like Fog Creek Software or Panic Inc(and thats a BIG maybe) you are not going to get this part of your message: "But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel."
There are tradeoffs in life and each employee has to choose what is important to them(and each company CEO has to set standards on what is truly valued at the company).
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#183Maybe 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…
I wonder if incentives for most companies favor doing things in-house?
Yes, you can say you built it from scratch, showing leadership and impact, which is what big tech promotions are gauged by.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#184Earlier 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…
It's a phrase I learned from my mom/grandpa growing up. "On the square" means "but I also mean it."
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#185Earlier 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.
Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure. Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it. The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
This motivated part of Musk's moves at Twitter(and now DOGE). You can't reliably evaluate which people are checked out and when you are against the clock, you have to take a hatchet and accept that you will break things that are in motion.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#186Thematically investing billions into startup AI frontier models makes sense if you believe in first-to-AGI likely worth a trillion dollars + Investing in second/third place likely valuable at similar scales too But outside of that MSFTs move indicates that frontier models most valuable current use case - enterprise-level API users - are likely to be significantly commoditized And likely majority of proceeds will be c…
What even is AGI? Like, what does it look like? Genuine question.
Apparently according to ClosedAI it's when you charge for API key the same as salary for employee.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Understandable, but still wrongfully blaming a player rather than the game itself.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#188> OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4, the backbone of Microsoft’s Copilot assistant, aren’t cheap to run. Keeping them live on Azure’s cloud infrastructure racks up significant costs, and Microsoft is eager to lower the bill with its own leaner alternatives.
Am I reading this right? Does Microsoft not eat its own dog food? Their own infra is too expensive?
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#189That OpenAI would absolutely dominate the AI space was received wisdom after the launch of GPT-4. Since then we've had a major corporate governance shakeup, lawsuits around the non-profit status which is trying to convert into for-profit, and competitors out-innovating OpenAI. So OpenAI is no longer a shoo-in, and Microsoft have realized that they may actually be hamstrung through their partnership because it prevents them from innovating in-house if OpenAI loses their lead. So the obvious strategic move is to do this. To make sure that MS has everything they need to innovate in-house while maintaining their partnership with OpenAI, and try to leverage that partnership to give in-house every possible advantage.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI already started divorce proceedings with their datacenter partnership with Softbank/etc, and it'd hardly be prudent for the world's largest software company NOT to have it's own SOTA AI models. Nadella might have initially been caught a bit flat footed with the rapid rise of AI, but seems to be managing the situation masterfully.
In what world is what they are doing masterful? Their product marketing is a huge mess, they keep changing the names of everything every few months. Nobody knows which Copilot does what anymore. It really feels like they're scrambling to be first to market. It all feels so incredibly rushed. Whatever is there doesn't work half the time. They're hugely dependent on one partner that could jump ship at any moment (grant…
> In what world is what they are doing masterful?
They got access to the best AI to offer to their customers on what seems to be very favorable terms, and bought themselves time to catch up as it now seems they have.
GitHub Copilot is a success even if Microsoft/Windows Copilot isn't, but more to the point Microsoft are able to offer SOTA AI, productized as they see fit (not every product is going to be a winner) rather than having been left behind, and corporate customers are using AI via Azure APIs.