Good. I'm plotting a future without Microsoft
Look out; I was downvoted for enjoying a present without it.
Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
371–380 of 460 posts
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you proposing... not paying your employees because paying them will attract people who do it for the money?
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#373I think they both want a future without each other. OpenAI will eventually want to vertically integrate up towards applications (Microsoft's space) and Microsoft wants to do the opposite in order to have more control over what is prioritized, control costs, etc.
I think OpenAI is toxic. Weird corporate governmance shadiness. The Elon drama, valuations based on claims that seem like the AI version of the Uber for X hype of a decade ago (but exponentially crazier). The list goes on. Microsoft is the IBM of this century. They are conservative, and I think they’re holding back — their copilot for government launch was delayed months for lack of GPUs. They have the money to make…
Toxic indeed. It's douchebaggery, from its name to its CEO. They ripped off benefactors to their "non-profit," and kept the fraudulent "open" in the company name.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
This approach is notable for benefitting from swelling headcount increases
i.e. if you hire 1000 new people, even if only a small fraction will vouch for you, on average you -and everyone else- will benefit by seeing the # of people who listed you in the "top 5 who helped you being productive" increase
The old Google performance review was arguably similar (the managers could still punish their reports, but peer feedback was valued a lot more), but I think that Google swelled in size because of other effects (probably because managers might've been indirectly rewarded by having more reports, despite managers rarely being among the people who others would list as "making you more productive")
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
A head start is a moat iff you can't move easily from the leader to a competitor that catches up qualitatively; nvidia’s headstart against AMD is a moat to the extent that you can't just take the software written against NVidia GPUs and run it on AMD if AMD catches up. (That is, being currently ahead isn't a moat, but it can impose switching costs which are.) Taking code that runs against one hosted LLM and running i…
ROCM is close to being perfected and I think in few years and some investment you can use it directly to run 99% software written in CUDA with similar performance.
Since 2007 Nvidia has built with CUDA and compatible hardware
- a large and growing ecosystem
- a massive installed base of backwards compatible hardware
- the ability to massively scale delivery of new systems
- and lots lots more
They now have scale that enables them to continue to invest at a level that no competition can do.
None of these are easily reproduced.
As per SemiAnalysis AMD in late 2024 can’t get essential software working reliably out of the box.
It’s easy to say AMD ‘is close to perfecting ROCM’ the reality of competing with Nvidia is much harder.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#376Maybe 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…
And why not? should he just allow the owners of capital to extract as much value as possible without actually doing anything, but woe be the worker if he actually tries to free himself.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#377A 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 $200 per month, they'll…
Until Sam Altman proves he lets an AI manage his finances without interference from humans, I wouldn't pay for any of these.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#378Sam Altman should have sold OpenAI to Musk for 90$ 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…
There are reasons for not wanting to sell their brainchild to Musk (of all people) that don't involve money.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#379Earlier 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.
Using chatgpt to format text is a task that it can do really well and is useful. Yeah, you can write a script to do it, but chatgpt is faster and you don't need to know programming.