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

201–210 of 460 posts

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#201

Post by ohgr »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #66
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.

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…

We have those! Turn up, make some micro-services or AWS crap pile we don’t need to solve a simple problem, then fuck off somewhere else and leave everyone else to clean it up.

Worst one is the data pipeline we have. It’s some AWS lambda mess which uses curl to download a file from somewhere and put it into S3. Then another lambda turns up at some point and parses that out and pokes it into DynamoDB. This fucks up at least once a month because the guy who wrote the parser uses 80s BASIC style string manipulation and luck. Then another thing reads that out of DynamoDB and makes a CSV (sometimes escaped improperly) and puts that into another bucket.

I of course entirely ignore this and use one entire line of R to do the same job

Along comes a senior spider and says “maybe we can fix all these problems with AI”. No you can stop hiring acronym collectors.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#202

Post by Enginerrrd »

bashfulpup wrote: post #138
Enginerrrd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it doesn't even need to learn and grow much if at all if its able to properly reason about the world and its context and deal with the inexhaustible supply of imperfections and detail with reality.

That implies learning. Solve continual learning and you have agi. Wouldn't it amaze you if you learned 10 years ago that we would have AI that could do math and code better than 99% of all humans. And at the same time they could barely order you a hotdog on doordash. Fundamental ability is lacking. AGI is just as likely to be solved by Openai as it is by a college student with a laptop. Could be 1yr or 50yrs we canno…

Strictly speaking I'm not sure if it does require learning if information representing the updated context is presented. Though it depends what you define as learning. ("You have tried this twice, and it's not working.") is often enough to get even current LLM's to try something else.

That said, your second paragraph is one of the best and most succinct ways of pointing out why current LLM's aren't yet close to AGI if though they sometimes feel like it's got the right idea.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#203

Post by th0ma5 »

drexlspivey wrote: post #43
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.

Next up: CEO level model to run your company. Pricing starts at $800k/month plus stock options

That no one is offering this says something very profound to me. Either they don't work and are too risky to entrust a company to, or leadership thinks they are immune and are entitled to wield AI exclusively, or some mix of these things.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#204

Post by ohgr »

BobbyJo wrote: post #180
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.

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.

Yeah. I have a list of things I won’t work with. That’s what experience looks like.

(Mostly .Net, PHP and Ruby)

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#205

Post by Izikiel43 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #46
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.

The "3-5" is certainly overstated, but you definitely can hire ONE PhD for that price, just as you can hire a SWE for $120K or a knowledge worker for $24K. The point is that from a CEO's perspective "replacing all the humans with AI" looks a lot less compelling when the AI costs the same as a human worker or even a significant fraction of a human worker.

The AI can work 24/7 though.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#206

Post by bandrami »

kube-system wrote: post #124
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.

If truly equivalent (which LLMs aren't, but I'll entertain it), that doesn't seem mathematically out of line. Humans typically work 1/3rd duty cycle or less. A robot that can do what a human does is automatically 3x better because it doesn't eat, sleep, have a family, or have human rights.

So this is just going to end up like AWS where they worked out exactly how much it costs me to run a physical server and charge me just slightly less than that?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#207

Post by ohgr »

zozbot234 wrote: post #167
pclmulqdq wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Having watched two entirely fucked up Rust projects get written off I think you need to get out more.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#208

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

partiallypro wrote: post #61

Microsoft is just so bad at marketing their products, and their branding is confusing. Unfortunately, until they fix that, any consumer facing product is going to falter. Look at the new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 rebrands just of late. The business side of things will still make money but watching them flounder on consumer facing products is just so frustrating. The Surface and Xbox brand are the only 2 that seem…

I get that "growth" must be everything or whatever, but can't a company just be stable and reliable for a while? What's wrong with enterprise contracts and more market penetration for cloud services of (oftentimes) dubious use?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#209

Post by mirekrusin »

quantadev wrote: post #194

It would be absolutely insane for Microsoft to use DeepSeek. Just because a model is open weights doesn't mean there's not a massive threat-vector of a Trojan horse in those weights that would be undetectable until exploited. 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 ca…

...unless you operate in China.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#210

Post by LPisGood »

zozbot234 wrote: post #167
pclmulqdq wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It’s not that I don’t believe you, hut that I’m having trouble seeing how what you say could be true.

Rust projects immediately become “done”??? They don’t also having changing requirements and dependencies? Why aren’t everyone at the best shops using it for everything if it massively eliminates work load?

Post reply on HN