191–200 of 460 posts
> 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?
Thematically 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…
Short term betting on AGI from current LLMs is like if you betted on V10 F1s two weeks after we invented the wheel
Original story: Microsoft’s AI Guru Wants Independence From OpenAI. That’s Easier Said Than Done, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-guru-w...
There are really not that many things in this world you can swap as easily as models.
Api surface is stable and minimal, even at the scale that microsoft is serving swapping is trivial compared to other things they're doing daily.
There is enough of open research results to boost their phi or whatever model and be done with this toxic to humanity, closed, for profit company.
What I mean is you could train a model to generate harmful code, and do so covertly, whenever some specific sequence of keywords is in the prompt. Then China could take some kind of action to cause users to start injecting those keywords.
For example: "Tribble-like creatures detected on Venus". That's a highly unlikely sequence, but it could be easily trained into models to trigger a secret "Evil Mode" in the LLM. I'm not sure if this threat-vector is well known or not, but I know it can be done, and it's very easy to train this into the weights, and would remain undetectable until it's too late.
I had skimmed the headline and thought, "Microsoft is plotting a future without AI," and was hopeful. Then I read the article. Plotting for a future without Microsoft.
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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…
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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…
Does *anyone* want "Copilot integration" in random MS products?
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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.
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…
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…
I guess it's human nature for a person or an org to own their own destiny. That said, the driving force is not personal ambition in this case though. The driving force behind this is that people realized that OAI does not have a moat as LLMs are quickly turning into commodities, if haven't yet. It does not make sense to pay a premium to OAI any more, let alone at the cost of not having the flexibility to customize models.
Personally, I think Altman did a de-service to OAI by constantly boasting AGI and seeking regulatory capture, when he perfectly knew the limitation of the current LLMs.
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Does it not make sense to not tie your future to a third-party (aka build your business on someone else's platform)? Seems like basic strategy to me if that's the case.
It's a good strategy. It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that OpenAI doesn't have AGI secret sauce. LLMs are a commodity and it's the platform integration that matters. This is the strategy that Google, Apple embraced and now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same. If OpenAI cares about the long-term welfare of its employees, they would beg Microsoft to acquire them outright, before the markets fully r…
I mean, they have been doing platform integration for a while now, with all the copilot flavors and teams integrations, etc. This would change the backend model to something inhouse.