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Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

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Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#361

Post by bspammer »

imgabe wrote: post #340
9dev wrote: post #288

I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever…

You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think. I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.

The climate crisis has proven pretty thoroughly that companies will choose short term profit over humanity’s long term success every time. Public companies are literally forced to do so.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#362

Post by imgabe »

_mh56 wrote: post #141

[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.] Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp. msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money t…

This is a tweet directly from Satya Nadella. Do you think he's publicly lying in a way that would be disastrous to the company he runs?

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#363

Post by jug »

esskay wrote: post #206

This isnt the win people seem to think it is, at least not for end users. Micosoft dont buy companies and people to keep releasing free standalone products. They buy them to integrate into Windows. Cortana 2.0 incoming.

I think the whole problem that sparked all this was that Sam & Co. wasn't enough about being open and research, but more into closed products. I'm surprised over this particular solution because they enter Microsoft with a ton of knowledge of OpenAI internals which seems to open the floodgates for an array of lawsuits if they so much touch their codebases, unless it is under mutual and friendly terms. But now THAT it happened, I'm not surprised Sam is willing to build for Microsoft Copilot.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#364

Post by Arainach »

skc wrote: post #283
BSDobelix wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, why is he the best CEO?

Presumably because MSFT is the most highly diversified tech company on the planet and he's overseeing multiple billion dollar businesses there without breaking a sweat. Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a coherent AI strategy at the moment.

To be fair, MSFT was the most diversified tech company prior to his arrival - Google had Search, Facebook had Facebook, Apple had hardware. Microsoft by then had perhaps a dozen products with a billion dollars or more of revenue (Windows, Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, XBox, Azure, Surface, among others). Satya did well to focus on the cloud and grow opportunities there, but he hasn't significantly increased the diversity of the product lineup.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#365

Post by dtech »

imgabe wrote: post #340
9dev wrote: post #288

I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever…

You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think. I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.

Cmon, there's a myriad of examples where corporate/shareholder interest goes against humanities interest as a whole, see fossil fuels and PFAS for ones in the current zeitgeist.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#366

Post by cornholio »

ricardobeat wrote: post #136
shubhamjain wrote: post #99

Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qua…

And this kind of thinking seems to be the exact reason he was pushed away. “The future” as envisioned by a megacorp might not be that great.

I'm not sure I follow this chain of arguments, which I hear often. So, a technology becomes possible, that has the potential to massively disrupt social order - while being insanely profitable to those who employ it. The knowledge is already out there in scientific journals, or if it's not, it can be grokked via corporate espionage or paying huge salaries to the employees of OpenAI or whoever else has it.

What exactly can a foundation in charge of OpenAI do to prevent this unethical use of the technology? If OpenAI refuses to use it to some unethical goal, what prevents other, for profit enterprises, from doing the same? How can private actors stop this without government regulation?

Sounds like Truman's apocryphal "the Russian's will never have the bomb". Well, they did, just 4 years later.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#368

Post by pavlov »

imgabe wrote: post #340
9dev wrote: post #288

I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever…

You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think. I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.

Exxon shareholders are also part of humanity. The company has known about the dangers of climate change for 50 years and did nothing because it could have impacted short/medium-term profits.

In reality ownership is so dispersed that the shareholders in companies like Microsoft or Exxon have no say in long-term issues like this.

Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

#370

Post by altacc »

imgabe wrote: post #340
9dev wrote: post #288

I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever…

You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think. I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.

The mega rich have been building bunkers and preparing for the downfall of humanity for a long time now. Look around and you'll notice that greed wins out over everything else. We're surrounded by companies doing nothing or only small token gestures to protect humanity or the world we live in and instead focusing on getting rich, because getting rich is exactly why people become shareholders. Don't rely on those guys to save the world, it'll be the boring committees that are more likely to do that.
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