The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership • Hacker News Board

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#321

Post by qnleigh » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

k9294 wrote: post #232

danans wrote: post #97

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI ... I think it's funny and telling that they've used the word "declare" where what they are really doing is "claim". These guys think they are prophets.

They have a definition actually) “When AI generates $100 billion in profits” it will be considered an AGI. This term was defined in their previous partnership, not sure if it's still holds after the restructuring. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

I wonder if they have more detailed provisions than this though. For example, if a later version of Sora can make good advertisements and catches on in the ad industry, would that count?

Or maybe since it is ultimately an agreement about money and IP, they are fine with defining it solely through profits?

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#322

Post by foobiekr » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #275

no_wizard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it. It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle

“Moving the goalposts” in AI usually means the opposite of devaluing the term. Peter Norvig (former research director at Google and author of the most popular textbook on AI) offers a mainstream perspective that AGI is already here: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... If you described all the current capabilities of AI to 100 experts 10 years ago, they’d likely agree that the capabilities…

"If you described"

Yes, and if they used it for awhile, they'd realize it is neither general nor intelligent. On paper sounds great though.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#323

Post by qnleigh » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

qgin wrote: post #55

cjbarber wrote: post #6

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. I wonder what criteria that panel will use to define/resolve this.

This makes me feel that the extremely short AGI timelines might be less likely. To sign this deal today, presumably you wouldn’t bother if AGI is just around the corner? Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Or if one party has a different timeline than the other...

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#324

Post by jimbokun » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:24 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #275

no_wizard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it. It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle

“Moving the goalposts” in AI usually means the opposite of devaluing the term. Peter Norvig (former research director at Google and author of the most popular textbook on AI) offers a mainstream perspective that AGI is already here: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... If you described all the current capabilities of AI to 100 experts 10 years ago, they’d likely agree that the capabilities…

That's a quite persuasive argument.

One thing they acknowledge but glance over, is the autonomy of current systems. When given more open ended, long term tasks, LLMs seem to get stuck at some point and get more and more confused and stop making progress.

This last problem may be solved soon, or maybe there's something more fundamental missing that will take decades to solve. Who knows?

But it does seem like the main barrier to declaring current models "general" intelligence.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#325

Post by jimbokun » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:24 PM UTC

gehwartzen wrote: post #156

no_wizard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it. It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle

This is exactly why they will have an “expert panel” to make that determination. They wouldn’t make something up

So the expert panel can make something up instead.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#326

Post by jimbokun » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #281

no_wizard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it. It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle

Consider: "Artificial two-star General intelligence". I mean, once they "reach AGI", they will need a scale to measure advances within it.

Well humans at that point probably won't be able to adequately evaluate intelligence at that level so the AIs will have to evaluate each other.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#327

Post by djha-skin » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

In short: Microsoft changed our business so that we can be for-profit, and asserted its rights over IP so that the whole OpenAI rebellion thing that happened earlier can't happen again.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#328

Post by torginus » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

wrsh07 wrote: post #207

philipwhiuk wrote: post #79

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails. Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?

Yes. Some ai skeptical people (eg Tyler Cowen, who does not think AI will have a significant economic impact) think gpt5 is AGI. It was news when dwarkesh interviewed Karpathy who said per his definition of AGI, he doesn't think it will occur until 2035. Thus, if karpathy is pessimistic, then many people working in AI today think we will have agi by 2032 (and likely sooner, eg end of 2028)

Depends on how you define AGI - if you define it as an AI that can learn to perform generalist tasks - then yes, transformers like GPT 5 (or 3) are AGI as the same model can be trained to do every task and it will perform reasonably well.

But I guess what most people would consider AGI would be something capable of on-line learning and self improvement.

I don't get the 2035 prediction though (or any other prediction like this) - it implies that we'll have some magical breakthrough in the next couple years be it in hardware and/or software - this might happen tomorrow, or not any time soon.

If AGI can be achieved using scaling current techniques and hardware, then the 2035 date makes sense - moores law dictates that we'll have about 64x the compute in hardware (let's add another 4x due to algorithmic improvements) - that means that 250x the compute will give us AGI - I think with ARC-AGI 2 this was the kind of compute budget they spent to get their models to perform on a human-ish level.

Also perf/W and perf/$ scaling has been slowing in the past decade, I think we got like 6x-8x perf/W compared to a decade ago, which is a far cry than what I wrote here.

Imo it might turn out that we discover 'AGI' in the sense that we find an algorithm that can turn FLOPS to IQ that scales indefinitely, but is very likely so expensive to run, that biological intelligences will have a huge competitive edge for a very long time, in fact it might be that biology is astronomically more efficient in turning Watts to IQ than transistors will ever be.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#329

Post by Arkhaine_kupo » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

chadcmulligan wrote: post #320

philipwhiuk wrote: post #79

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails. Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?

I think we've reached Star Trek level AI. In Star Trek (and the next generation) people would ask the computer questions and it would spout out the answers, which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination. In Star Trek though the computers never really ran anything (except for the one fateful episode - The Ultimate Computer in TOS), I always wondered why, it seems Rodden…

> which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination.

"Really similar" kinda betrays the fact that it is not similar at all in how it works just in how it appears.

It would be like saying a cloud that kinda looks like a dog is really similar to the labrador you grew up with.

Re: The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

#330

Post by parliament32 » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #79

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails. Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?

Why not? They're using Artificial Intelligence to describe token-prediction text generators which clearly have no "intelligence" anywhere near them, so why not re-invent machine learning or something and call it AGI?