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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#211

Post by coffeefirst »

only-one1701 wrote: post #19
aresant wrote: post #4

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…

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

It's the messiah, but for billionaires who hate having to pay people to do stuff.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#212

Post by BeetleB »

hyperbrainer wrote: post #148
BeetleB wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month Do they really get paid that much these days?

That amount is standard at EPFL and ETH, but I don't know about the USA.

I knew someone who got his PhD at EPFL. He earned almost triple what I did in the US.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#213

Post by mirsadm »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #205
DebtDeflation wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doing what?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#214

Post by kube-system »

bandrami wrote: post #206
kube-system wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would they ask for less?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#215

Post by devsda »

bsimpson wrote: post #34
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…

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.

> 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.

I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior.

When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes the primary goal and not the product. If you know beforehand that you are not going to stay long to see it through, you tend to take more shortcuts and risks that becomes the responsibility of maintainers later.

We have a couple of job hoppers in our org where the number of jobs they held is almost equal to their years of experience and their role is similar to those with twice the experience! One can easily guess what their best skill is.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#216

Post by pclmulqdq »

pdimitar wrote: post #166
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.

> The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake Hard to take you seriously when you do such weird generalized takes. While it's a sad fact that fanboys and zealots absolutely do exist, most devs can't afford to be such and have to be pragmatic. They pick languages based on merit and analysis.

Most of the people who use Go and Rust do it for pragmatic reasons. That doesn't influence the culture of the zealots in each community.

You should search for headlines on HN that say "written in Go" or "written in Rust" and then compare that to the number of headlines that say "written in JavaScript" or "written in Kotlin."

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#217

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

I have to say that the median crate I interact with has the following readme:

" Version 0.2 - Unstable/buggy/slow unless you use exactly like the example - not going to get updated because I moved on to something else"

Rust is another programming language. It's easier to write code without a certain class of bugs, but that doesn't mean version 0.2 of a casual project is going to be bug-free.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#218

Post by deadbabe »

bsimpson wrote: post #34
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…

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.

This is wrong.

Google kills off projects because the legal liability and security risks of those projects becomes too large to justify for something that has niche uses or gives them no revenue. User data is practically toxic waste.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#219

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

bsimpson wrote: post #184
Lerc wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#220

Post by eitally »

trentnix wrote: post #158
wkat4242 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Product confusion, inconsistent marketing, unnecessary product renames, and rushing half-baked solutions has been the Microsoft way for dozens of products across multiple di…

Rule #1 for Microsoft product strategy: if you can't yourselves figure out the SKUs and how they bundle together, the odds are good that your customers will overpay. It's worked for almost 50 years and there's no evidence that it will stop working. Azure is killing it and will continue to eat the enterprise even as AWS starts/continues to struggle.
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