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OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

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251–260 of 264 posts

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#251
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously MS does some great things but I wonder what do you think about their culture? MS is trying to make me use Edge Browser by randomly refusing to let me use Bing chat in any other browser. This makes me think that MS is still evil and will force me to do things the moment they can. I gave up Bing Chat because of this and was using Perplexity.ai instead, until Bing got integrated into ChatGPT. Another thing is…

I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG. Go…

> painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous.

Hard to understand this point of view with:

- vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension

- Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is worth around 7.7 billion and from the best I can find, it doesn’t have a quarter of the gaming market. How much power could they yield

That figure is quite ridiculous. Even if one completely ignores Steam and all of their games/products, even CS:GO alone is worth billions by itself, with millions of concurrent players (and growing) more than a decade after its launch! All that said, I would expect Valve's total immediate-term 'worth' to be much less than it could be, which is the entire point of this topic. The reason companies treat their customers…

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/gabe-newell/....

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole first part disgusted me. "most powered person he's met"? Good lord does that come off as tone deaf, almost groveling. And the most important company in human history? The hell is that guy smoking, because I've got good shit and that's some serious hyperbole. Is the hype machine in the room with us right now?

I would guess 90% of tech today is hype, that's what you're reading, the hype machine in practice.

It certainly seems that way my dude. I can't remember the last time I saw a new piece of tech or software and thought "fuck yeah this is revolutionary".

Maybe Git...? I thought that was pretty cool back in 2006.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#254
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's one way of viewing it, yes, but considering how influential they are in spaces other businesses are struggling in (free software), having a $34B market cap isn't shabby performance. IBM getting an easy-in to free software via a respected (by business, anyway) partner is a big opportunity, but they'd have to play their cards right and I can't think of the last big thing IBM was behind. They might be abl…

Yes Red Hat is significant in its niche of enterprise server operating systems, but it's not in the same league as Microsoft as a company overall. Red Hat would typically be deployed on AWS or Azure where they rake in all the money. While Microsoft makes $73B profit, IBM makes $2B profit.

So IBM/RH can't be big because the biggest makes more money...? We've had two exchanges and I'm still trying to understand why this matters.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#255
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Red Hat is significant in its niche of enterprise server operating systems, but it's not in the same league as Microsoft as a company overall. Red Hat would typically be deployed on AWS or Azure where they rake in all the money. While Microsoft makes $73B profit, IBM makes $2B profit.

So IBM/RH can't be big because the biggest makes more money...? We've had two exchanges and I'm still trying to understand why this matters.

This is very basic stuff. You are overthinking it.

Microsoft is in the group of "big five" tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft). IBM is not in that group.

The reason for that is IBM is significantly smaller in terms of revenue and market cap and so on. IBM exists in a tier below the "big tech" level. This is how company sizes are measured.

Very simple. Not complicated.

Server operating systems are a small fraction of Microsoft's business.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG. Go…

> painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Hard to understand this point of view with: - vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension - Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc

Not sure I quite follow the point, Microsoft maintains PyLance and Pyright, tools that have had a large positive impact on Python development, including AI. Not sure about live share, but if there are feature gaps with paid IDEs I would say they're not so large - the functionality available for free in VSCode or its ecosystem (enabled by Microsoft with the help of many OSS developers) has helped democratize software engineering in a great way.

Yes they have some problems in hiding their attempts for lockin on the Windows side but ignoring all the good and just labeling them terrible for that is troubling.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#257
post #78

As if OpenAI employees would have any problem landing a new gig... Going from an agile startup environment to an F50 is a huge leap culturally. It's like going from Summer science camp to the army.

It’s the opposite though. MSFT is the classic rest and vest company. OpenAI likely has bad WLb. Like going from the army to summer camp

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, what? Are you claiming that if a company experiences a 10x (!) increase in valuation, that the dilution fully destroys that upside and the average developer experiences no increase in their comp? That is not even vaguely close to true in my experience.

I'm sure Sam's cut will go up x10. But there are many ways to screw options of the regular employees. I'm not talking about key people, about first 50 employees, etc. Regular people.

I have been the "regular people" at many companies that have increased in valuation. Dilution has never erased the gains of even much-more-modest increases in valuation. This sounds like paranoid fantasy to me.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to argue IBM is bigger

I'm factoring in their legacy and history i.e. since they're older they're bigger

older and bigger are not synonyms. IBM is not bigger than Microsoft today. the past is irrelevant for this conversation.

Re: OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Hard to understand this point of view with: - vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension - Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc

Not sure I quite follow the point, Microsoft maintains PyLance and Pyright, tools that have had a large positive impact on Python development, including AI. Not sure about live share, but if there are feature gaps with paid IDEs I would say they're not so large - the functionality available for free in VSCode or its ecosystem (enabled by Microsoft with the help of many OSS developers) has helped democratize software…

> Not sure I quite follow the point, Microsoft maintains PyLance and Pyright, tools that have had a large positive impact on Python development,

I think GP's point is that PyLance and Pyright, while free, are still proprietary and not open-source.

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