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

261–270 of 460 posts

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#261

Post by crazygringo »

toasterlovin wrote: post #256
echelon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no moat in models (OpenAI). There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave). There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda). Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)

> I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost. In consumer markets the moat is habits. The switching cost for Google Search is zero. The switching cost for Coke is zero. The switching cost for Crest toothpaste is zero. Yet nobody switches.

(Never mind I was wrong -- deleting my comment to not spread misinformation. The definition of moat is wider than I was familiar with, thanks for the correction!)

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#262

Post by pclmulqdq »

whstl wrote: post #168
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.

Life is too short to program on languages one doesn't love. Those people, if they really exist, are right.

To be honest, I agree with you, and I think this is the right approach to life if you have a strong preference for languages. I think this only gets a bad name when people aren't upfront about their preferences and skills, with a lot of people having bad experiences with a go zealot at some point.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#263

Post by reverius42 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #244
marricks wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Playing golf while bantering with your old boys network is going to be hard to automate :)

The banter is actually quite easy to automate. You can hire a human to play golf for a small fraction of what the CEOs get paid, and then it's best of both worlds.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#264

Post by nativeit »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #216
pdimitar wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

I understand the criticism that languages should be pragmatic choices they serve the strengths of the project at hand, but I guess I always found most projects boasting they’re written in a specific language or framework are doing so precisely because of the overarching interest in the language itself, which seems like a perfectly valid justification for such projects to me.

I’ve seen the more cynical hype-driven stuff, but it’s inevitably superficial on first glance, where I have seen some real curiosity and exploration in many “Project X - Built In Rust/Go/Cobol/D/Whatever” and I think they’re exploring the dynamics of the language and tooling as much as anything else.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#265

Post by herval »

skepticATX wrote: post #29
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…

Listening to Satya in recent interviews I think makes it clear that he doesn’t really buy into OpenAI’s religious-like view of AGI. I think the divorce makes a lot of sense in light of this.

It feels like not even OpenAI buys into it much these days either

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#266

Post by herval »

paxys wrote: post #36
DebtDeflation wrote: post #31

A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll…

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.

Well but see, their “phd ai” doesn’t complain or have to stop to go to the bathroom

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#267

Post by int_19h »

bsimpson wrote: post #118
scarface_74 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would those people be “fired” when the entire promotion process and promo docs emphasize “scope” and “impact”? No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. They do it because a shit ton of money appears in their bank account every pay period and stock appears in their brokerage account every vesting period. I personally don’t have the shit tolerance to work in…

> No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. I'm sure there are plenty of people who work at big companies for precisely this reason (or at least, with that as _a_ reason among many). Yes, much of the prestige has worn off as the old guard retired and current leadership emphasizes chasing AI buzzwords and cutting costs. But still, big companies are one of the few…

Can confirm that this is definitely the case. Working at BigTech company to "make the world a better place" can actually feel like it makes some sort of sense because - especially if you're on a team that ships a highly visible product - you have a lot of customers, so even small improvements have an outsized effect.

And it takes a while for a young dev to register that the goals that the larger organization pursues are going to win out in the end anyway.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#268

Post by Etheryte »

testplzignore wrote: post #188

> OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4, the backbone of Microsoft’s Copilot assistant, aren’t cheap to run. Keeping them live on Azure’s cloud infrastructure racks up significant costs, and Microsoft is eager to lower the bill with its own leaner alternatives. Am I reading this right? Does Microsoft not eat its own dog food? Their own infra is too expensive?

Just because you own a datacenter, doesn't mean it's free. For one, you still need to pay the power and bandwidth bills, both of which would be massive, and for two, every moment of compute you use internally is compute you're not selling for money.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#269

Post by stavros »

reverius42 wrote: post #260
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit Congratulations, you’ve invented the HR department in corporate America.

> make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The better the pay, the more you will attract the people who are there for the pay first and making good products ... second or third or never. How do you combat that?

You interview them first.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#270

Post by orbifold »

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…

Mustafa Suleyman is building a team at Microsoft just for that purpose.
Post reply on HN