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Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

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Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Sam thinks OpenAI will be so important he has a shot at CEO of Microsoft in a couple years?

But Satya is making a few 100 mil a year, tops. Sam could easily make himself a billionaire with one raise. And who wants to control all of Microsoft, that's a whole lot of headaches

What's the functional difference between a billion and a hundred million?

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#242

In 1990 Microsoft hired all of the important talent from Borland who up until that point had been outpacing them in terms of product development. We got Access, Visual Studio, and .Net / C# as a direct result. Borland faded into obscurity. Hard not to feel like there will be a parallel here.

Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#243

Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI without actually needing to cross the 49% regulatory hurdle? Depending on who follows them to MSFT, that might actually be the outcome here. And OpenAI is suddenly Xerox Parc.

>Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI No, Ilya alone is like 75% of the brains and I'm fairly certain he's not going anywhere.

I don't know, way before all of this drama started, the rumors were that he was barely contributing any original or significant ideas to research and the grounbreaking ideas had come from lower level researchers.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#244
post #220

Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qua…

> Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?

That surely is no problem from the pov of said mega-corp.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#245
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they only had AI model velocity and not product velocity. The user-side implementation of chatGPT is actually quite below what would be expected based on their AI superiority. So the parts that Sam & Greg should be responsible for are actually not great.

Sam and Greg were responsible for everything including building the company, deciding on strategy, raising funding, hiring most of the team, coordinating the research, building the partnership with Microsoft and acquiring the huge array of enterprise customers. To act like they were just responsible for the "UI parts" is ridiculous.

I'm the first to defend CEOs and it's not a popular position to be in usually, believe me. But in this case, they did an experiment and it blew up based on their model's superiority alone.

Product-wise, however, it's looking like good enough AI is being commoditized at the pace of weeks and days. They will be forced to compete on user experience and distribution vs the likes of Meta. So far OpenAI only managed to deliver additions that sound good on the surface but prove not to be sticky when the dust settles.

They have also been very dishonest. I remember Sam Altman said he was surprised no one built something like chat GPT before them. Well... people tried but 3rd parties were always playing catch-up because the APIs were waitlisted, censored, and nerfed.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#246

I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still the…

It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the mission and working with or learning from the existing team will still want to work there.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#248

Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qua…

Microsoft is now the for-profit arm of OpenAI.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#250
post #247

What is Sam's actual value re: AI and not just as a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need? Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.

The exodus of personnel behind him.
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