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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#331

Post by shigawire »

saturn8601 wrote: post #185
escapecharacter wrote: post #62

Earlier 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.

The externalities of breaking stuff haphazardly can very well outweigh any efficiency gains.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#332

Post by grepLeigh »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #294
grepLeigh wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know…

Red Hat killed CentOS and violated their support commitments so I wouldn’t trust them anymore.

That was after the IBM acquisition.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#333

Post by supriyo-biswas »

fallingknife wrote: post #198
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my former employer, there was a team who were very much into resume-driven development and wrote projects in Go even when Java would have been the better alternative considering the overall department and maintenance team expertise, all the while they were informally grumbling about how Go doesn’t have the features they need…

What good does that do on a resume? I thought learning a new language on the job was pretty standard.

Where I'm from, the recruiters often use dumb questions like "How many years of experience do you have with X?" where any answer below their threshold is an immediate ground for rejection.

Learning new technologies on the go is pretty much the standard, but it's something that employers don't understand.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#334

Post by sciens3_ »

only-one1701 wrote: post #252
CSMastermind wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but what's a better system?

Ideally it's the responsibility of management, starting at the top, to think critically about what kind of software most benefits the company and reward those that do it. Unfortunately, it's much harder to sell "amazing documentation and test coverage" to a CEO than "Gen AI wrapper that doesn't really do much", so here we are.

> Ideally it's the responsibility of management, starting at the top, to think critically about what kind of software most benefits the company and reward those that do it.

I work as if that ideal is true, and can’t stand playing the game. But others are still playing the game and eventually they win whatever B.S. position it is that they aspire to, and I get removed from the board.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#336

Post by jimbokun »

taco_emoji wrote: post #103
jimbokun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some fundamental constraint keeping it from happening? What cognitive capability do humans have that machines won't be able to replicate in that time frame? Each remaining barrier has been steadily falling.

What barriers have fallen? Computers still can't even drive cars

Is that true? What’s the current rate of accidents per miles driven for self driving cars vs human drivers?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#337

Post by bustling-noose »

Sam Altman should have sold OpenAI to Musk for 90$ billion or whatever he was willing to pay (assuming he was serious like he bought twitter). While I find LLMs interesting and feel many places could use those, I also think this is like hitting everything with a hammer and see where the nail was. People used OpenAI as a hammer until it was popular and now everyone would like to go their way. For 90$ billion he could find the next hammer or not care. But when the value of this hammer drops (not if it's a when) he will be lucky if he can get double digits for it. Maybe someone will buy them just for the customer base but these models can become obsolete quickly and that leaves OpenAI with absolutely nothing else as a company. Even the talent would leave (a lot of it has). Musk and Altman share the same ego, but if I was Altman, I would cash out when the market is riding on a high.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#338

Post by jimbokun »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #95
jimbokun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some fundamental constraint keeping it from happening? What cognitive capability do humans have that machines won't be able to replicate in that time frame? Each remaining barrier has been steadily falling.

We don't even have AI which can do useful things yet. The LLMs these companies make are fun toys, but not useful tools (yes, I know that hype-prone people are using them as such regardless). It beggars belief that we will go from "it's a fun toy but can't do real work" to "this can do things without even needing human supervision" without a major leap in capabilities.

This is certainly hyperbole. You can say current LLMs don’t match human capabilities. But people are using them for a lot of practical tasks already.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#339

Post by jimbokun »

zeusk wrote: post #254
taco_emoji wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What barriers have fallen? Computers still can't even drive cars

Something that requires a lot less than a PhD

PhD work might turn out to be a lot easier to automate than effectively interacting with the physical world.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#340

Post by erikerikson »

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…

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