401–410 of 1001 posts
I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company". Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it. Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.
I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still the…
It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the mission and working with or learning from the existing team will still want to work there.
This entire situation changed my mind radically and now I put the non-profit part in my personal top 3 dream jobs :)
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.
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> OpenAI's board should book themselves for an IQ test, it is just beyond my understanding why they hate their own successful business so much. OpenAI's board doesn't run a business, they run a nonprofit with a mission oriented around safety and public benefit, not private profit. It has a for-profit subsidiary, explicitly subordinated to the nonprofit's mission, as a funding mechanism, but being successful at bringi…
Yep, they will know become a real non profit.
In 1990 Microsoft hired all of the important talent from Borland who up until that point had been outpacing them in terms of product development. We got Access, Visual Studio, and .Net / C# as a direct result. Borland faded into obscurity. Hard not to feel like there will be a parallel here.
Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...
In 1990 they poached Brad Silverberg who then spent the next 7 years poaching all of Borland's top talent in the most prominent example of a competitive 'brain drain' strategy that I'm aware of.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Borland-Says-Microso...
I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still the…
There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that OpenAI was founded on, which have just been – arguably – reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient compute to chase AGI… If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to…
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.
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…
The argument would go something like this:
MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and its mission.
Plot twist: it was Satya who planted the idea in the OpenAI's board's mind to fire Sam in the first place... Inception-style.
"whoops wrong person"