Currently, it feels like many of the frontier models have reached approximately the same level of 'intelligence' and capability. No one is leaps ahead of the rest. Microsoft probably figured this is a good time to reconsider their AI strategy.
Clearly you don't use models so much.
Even in the openAI ecosystem there are models that, while similar in theory, produce very different results, so much that some murderous are unusable. So even small differences translate to enormous differences.
> 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. I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior. When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes t…
Okay but what's a better system?
Ask every single person in the org “list the top 5 people who made you more productive this year”.
Reward people based on (# who listed them * average salary of those who listed them).
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…
I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft doesn't kill projects. Zune, Games for Windows Live, Skype, Encarta, CodePlex, Windows Phone, Internet Explorer. https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
Those mostly aren't counter-examples though. In most cases they supported them long after most people had stopped using them. Google is notorious for killing popular products.
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…
As a software engineer with a PhD: I am not getting paid enough.
China Government can create the poisoned Trojan Horse LLMs, and then simply feed it to the USA, because people in the USA have a false sense of security about Open Weights LLMs they self-host. People think if you self-host stuff you're totally safe, but the weights can be pre-poisoned. AFAIK the threat vector I'm identifying has never been exploited, and I've never even heard anyone else describe or mention it.
When they mention open weight models (llama, deepseek) they mean running them on their infra, not through 3rd party apis, right?
> Okay but what's a better system? Why does promotion need a new feature? Reward for maintenance over time. Build on existing features / components. Reward for helping and up-skilling others.
Especially at some of these bigger tech companies that have been around multiple decades. Im not a huge fan of Microsoft and their products. But man, you know there are probably a few hundred engines who are the bedrock of the company, if they disappeared tomorrow, Microsoft would probably be screwed. They probably work on the products and on areas you never hear about that never get flashy headlines. They are the people keeping the guts of Windows and all their multi-decade projects still pumping. Answering and fixing bug reports on these products.
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…
What a load of BS. Even if initial time saving was true because of "no bugs feature" and it is not. Any software product that serves real business needs usually constantly evolves. Most of the time is spent on planning new features and integrating those into existing architecture.
Yup. It's easy to write a to-do app. What is hard is 10 years later of features and needing to add more. While also dealing with the architecture short sightedness and pitfalls. Anyone who has worked on legacy software knows, at some point, all architectural decisions eventually become architectural pitfalls, primarily because requirements and customers change. It becomes a point where, its not really the code that's the issue, its design and customers' changing requirements.
If head start is a moat, why wouldn't you count OpenAI's headstart as moat?
Because we already see firms competing effectively with OpenAI. There is as yet no indication that AMD can match Nvidia's execution for the very good reason that doing so is extremely difficult. The head start is just the icing on the cake.
I see pre AGI AI to be superset of search and its hard to argue that google isn't ahead technically for decades and what they are doing is extremely difficult.
> 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. I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior. When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes t…
Okay but what's a better system?
Dont offer excessive money. Money is like shit whose smell attracts flies. The more money starts entering the system, the more flies come in. The more flies, the more rigorous the vetting process. That's where the infamous google hiring system started kicking in.