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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#221

Post by kindeyoowee »

deadbabe wrote: post #218
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.

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.

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#222

Post by booleandilemma »

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.

Don't you need to be awake to feed it prompts?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#223

Post by conjectures »

ohgr wrote: post #201
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, the good ole Rube Goldberg machine.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#224

Post by grepLeigh »

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.

As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM.

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#225

Post by quantadev »

mirekrusin wrote: post #209
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.

If DeepSeek is indeed a poisoned model, then they (China) will be aware not to ever trust any code it generates, or else they'll know what it's triggers are, and just not trigger it.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#226

Post by goyel »

thewebguyd wrote: post #87
rdtsc wrote: post #20

They probably saw the latest models like gpt 4.5 not being as revolutionary as expected and deepseek and others catching up.

I think Microsoft isn't buying the AGI hype from OpenAI, and wants to move to be more model agnostic, and instead do what Microsoft (thinks) it does best, and that's tooling, and enterprise products. MS wants to push Copilot, and will be better off not being tied to OpenAI but having Copilot be model agnostic, like GH Copilot can use other models already. They are going to try and position Azure as "the" place to run…

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#227

Post by feyman_r »

paxys wrote: post #32

Microsoft's corporate structure and company culture is actively hostile to innovation of any kind. This was true in Ballmer's era and is equally true today, no matter how many PR wins Nadella is able to pull off. The company justifies its market cap by selling office software and cloud services contracts to large corporations and governments via an army of salespeople and lobbyists, and that is what it will continue…

How does one define an AI powerhouse? If its building models, a smart business wouldn't bank on that alone. There is no moat.

If the definition of an AI Powerhouse is more about the capability to host models and process workloads, Amazon (the other company missing in that list) and Microsoft are definitely them.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#228

Post by marricks »

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

Which is funny because the CEO level one is the easiest to automate

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#229

Post by conjectures »

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…

Not from what I've seen. The compiler is slow af which plays badly with how fussy the thing is.

It's easy to have no defects in functionality you never got around to writing because you ran out of time.

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