Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 623 posts

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#41

Post by arethuza »

modzu wrote: post #33
codelemur wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[EDIT]: friendly -> non-friendly oops. That's what seems so confusing about HN replies here. (Non-friendly) AGI is an extreme existential risk (depending on who you listen to). I'm perfectly fine with rewarding the org that's responsible for researching friendly AGI to do it _right_ (extremely contingent on that last bit).

the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.

OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires some money so at one level it is a money problem.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#42

Post by pmontra »

gdb wrote: post #4
streetcat1 wrote: post #2

So is this the open-ai exit?

(I work at OpenAI.) Quite the opposite — this is an investment!

$1B is not like investing $100 in a crowdfunded project, "nice toy and let's hope for the best." I expect that Microsoft is going to look very closely at what OpenAI does and possibly steer it into a direction they like. Unless you have a few other $1B investors. We'll see how it plays out.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#44

Post by Quarrelsome »

Can we talk about the usage of the term "AGI" here? Considering its connotations in popular culture it sounds terrifically inappropriate in terms of what we can feasibly build today.

Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#45

Post by kuzehanka »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #38
kuzehanka wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like a month of CosmosDB storing a DVD worth of records!

Cosmos is throughput not size. So it would be a month of having the capacity to I/O a DVD worth of records.

It's both. And storage cost is amplified by number of regions replicated to.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#46

Post by dd36 »

est31 wrote: post #14
gdb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OpenAI board remains in charge of OpenAI’s AGI-relevant decisions. Microsoft has the right to appoint one board seat, which they have not yet exercised.

I've written up my opinion on the deal that OpenAI gives to investors here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_o... TLDR either the public is being conned or Microsoft is. And assuming that Microsoft probably has used top lawyers to close the deal, I doubt it's them.

Lawyers practice law not investment. Lawyers are involved in every bad and good deal.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#47

Post by Miraste »

kuzehanka wrote: post #17
gdb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) Quite the opposite — this is an investment!

Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity. As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI…

OpenAI is a for-profit corporation now. It's in their interest to use as many buzzwords as possible to attract that sweet venture capital, regardless of whether said buzzwords have any base in reality.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#48

Post by codelemur »

modzu wrote: post #33
codelemur wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[EDIT]: friendly -> non-friendly oops. That's what seems so confusing about HN replies here. (Non-friendly) AGI is an extreme existential risk (depending on who you listen to). I'm perfectly fine with rewarding the org that's responsible for researching friendly AGI to do it _right_ (extremely contingent on that last bit).

the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.

(no sarcasm)

You know, I can't prove that researchers being funded is the best way of figuring out how to do things, but I have a gut intuition that tells me that.

I'll look into it so that I'm not just blindly suggesting that $$ ==> people ==> research ==> progress.

Thanks for the opportunity to reflect!

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#49

Post by est31 »

modzu wrote: post #33
codelemur wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[EDIT]: friendly -> non-friendly oops. That's what seems so confusing about HN replies here. (Non-friendly) AGI is an extreme existential risk (depending on who you listen to). I'm perfectly fine with rewarding the org that's responsible for researching friendly AGI to do it _right_ (extremely contingent on that last bit).

the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.

You need to be able to test your designs and for that you need resources like AI accelerators.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#50

Post by marketdroid933 »

neiman wrote: post #37
marketdroid933 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t describe the terms of the deal. Is it $1 billion in cash/stock? Or $1 billion in Azure credits and engineering hours?

it must be described somewhere, though not in the announcement. I don't think you're allowed to make $1B deals with a public company without specifying those things somewhere.

Well, sure it’s detailed somewhere. We in this thread don’t know, is what I was getting at.

The comment I replied to may not be far off the mark in what this really is: computer/human time “worth $1 billion” or something.

If it’s actual cash that says something different to me than a donation of resources with some value estimated by MS.

Post reply on HN