This is almost certainly itself an AI written article.
Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
281–290 of 460 posts
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understandable, but still wrongfully blaming a player rather than the game itself.
I don't think it's wrong to blame people who make life more difficult for others for their own aggrandizement The game doesn't exist without players. I could make more money if I worked at Meta or Amazon, but at what cost? I understand the realities of Game Theory, but then one could argue that being blamed and criticized for one's choices is also part of the game. "Mr Wolfcastle, how do you sleep at night?" "On a bi…
You are more likely to leave tech/full time employment after working at a FAANG. Either you made enough,it burnt you out, everywhere else seems down, etc. You go to another FAANG or try a startup or leave altogether.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#283Maybe 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.
Thats nothing during peak ZIRP people would move tech companies before the launch (or after a project was cancelled) and still ladder climb. "Failing upwards"
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
$20k can't get you that many PhD. Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month, effectively costs double that because of school overhead and other stuff.
> Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month Do they really get paid that much these days?
https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/working-teaching-and-resea...
Computer science is rate 5, so 73kCHF the first year, 78kCHF the second, then 83kCHF onwards.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#285Earlier 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.
I used to work for Coke — they've been making a lot of money for a very long time.
The size of a moat befits the size of a castle it protects. Coke absolutely has a moat, but it's not big enough to defend Coke as a trillion dollar company.
The question isn't whether OpenAI has a moat or not, it's if its current moat is big enough to protect a trillion-dollar company.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
If you are working at either Google or Meta, you’re involved in adTech. Not exactly making the world a better place.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see that a lot from the Go crowd. That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Sure there's differences, but a language does not make the engineer. Someone who is attracted to flashy stuff makes for an indulgent planner.
Language matters quite a bit when deciding how to build an application though. I see having no strong opinions on language to be a sign the person hasn't developed a wide enough variety of projects to get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses.
The more senior I get the less opinionated I am. Someone wants to do something in some different or some different way.. why not. In the end the language matters little the tech stack doesn't matter unless you are going down a specific path and even then it probably doesn't matter that much if you have a choice on what to use.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#288Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure. Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it. The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
This motivated part of Musk's moves at Twitter(and now DOGE). You can't reliably evaluate which people are checked out and when you are against the clock, you have to take a hatchet and accept that you will break things that are in motion.
You can somewhat reliably evaluate what works and what does not, what brings you forward and what is slack you can cut. It takes time (6-12 months at least) of very engaged work of a very engaged team - which you can bring with you.
You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#290Earlier 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…
It's like a perl script you wrote on acid. It's done because you cannot enter that mindspace anymore and the code you created is like the output of an encrypted password with no path back.