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

Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

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

#571

Post by rjtavares »

jacquesm wrote: post #515
rjtavares wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole weekend will probably be a case study in both Corporate Governance (Microsoft may look bad here for not anticipating the problem) and Negotiation (a masterclass by Satya: gave Ilya what he wanted and got most of OpenAI's commercial potential anyway).

As much as I dislike Microsoft: they played this exactly right. No boardseat: no culpability or conflict of interest, catch the falling pieces and reposition themselves stronger. What makes you say they didn't anticipate the problem? If they had anticipated it I don't see what else they could have done without making themselves part of the problem.

I based that opinion on two news that came out:

1. When they invested in Open AI it had a more mature board (in particular Reid Hoffman) and afterwards they lost a few members without replacing them. That was probably something Microsoft could have influenced without making themselves part of the problem.

2. They received a call one minute before the decision was made public. That shouldn't happen to a partner that owns 49% of the company you just fired a CEO from.

Sources:

1 - https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

2 - https://www.axios.com/2023/11/17/microsoft-openai-sam-altman...

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

#572

Post by hobofan »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #272
ah765 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Sam's goal is to create AGI, same as most of the other founders of OpenAI. If he just wanted money and power, he probably would have continued with YC or some other startup instead of joining the nonprofit and unproven OpenAI at the time. His opinion on the ideal path differs from Ilya's, but I'm guessing his goal remains the same. AGI is the most important thing to work on, and startups and corporations are…

>I think Sam's goal is to create AGI Supposedly his goal was the same as OpenAi --> AGI that benefits society instead of shareholders. Seems like a hard mission to accomplish within Microsoft.

Just because that's the goal they have written on the tin doesn't mean that that is/was their actual goal.

Especially in the early days where the largest donor to OpenAI was Musk who was leading Tesla, a company way behind in AI capabilities, OpenAI looked like an obvious "Commoditize Your Complement" play.

For quite some time where they were mainly publishing research and they could hide behind "we are just getting started" that guise held up nicely, but when they struck gold with Chat(GPT), their was more and more misalignment between their actions and their publicly stated goal.

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

#574

Post by bradley13 »

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have very similar backgrounds. They are both highly intelligent, both dropped out of college and lack any advanced education. They are classic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: well-networked, great at fund raising, maybe even good managers. Potential contribution to advanced AI research: zero.

What, exactly, does Microsoft want to do with them? Best guess: Use their connections and reputation to poach talent from OpenAI.

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

#575

Post by quickthrower2 »

kjksf wrote: post #117
waihtis wrote: post #8

Anyone else find it strange that startup founders of the magnitude of Sam & Greg would join a gigantic corporation as employees? It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.

Their alternative is to start a new AI company. At this point in time a new AI company would be bottle-necked by lack of NVIDIA GPUs. They are sold out for the medium term future. So if Sam and Greg were to start a new AI company, even with billions of initial capital (very likely given their street cred) they would spend at a minimum several months just acquiring the hardware needed to compete with OpenAI. With Micr…

They could get a infra deal with AWS, Google, NVidia or AMD even :-).

Or they write the AI that runs on your M3

That said the Microsoft offer came quickly than Amazon can deliver a 3090 to your house so…

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

#578

Post by ssnistfajen »

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.

Corporate shareholder interest has been proven to be short sighted again and again throughout history. Believing such entities can properly prepare for a singularity event is more delusional than asking a fruit fly to fly an aircraft.

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

#579

Post by upwardbound »

lwhi wrote: post #563
upwardbound wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a misconception that Microsoft has less morals. Their Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Eric Horvitz, was one of the key people behind America's 2022 nuclear weapons policy update which states that we will always maintain a human in the loop for nuclear weapons employment. (i.e., systems like WOPR are now forbidden under US policy.) Here is the full excerpt of the part of the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review whic…

Are we talking about the same Microsoft here??!? Sheeeeh ... I grew up with Microsoft in the 80s and 90s .. Microsoft has zero morals. What you're referring to here is instinct for self preservation.

You're certainly right they were pretty evil back then. I think they became ethical at about the same time Bill Gates did. Even though this involved him stepping back to start the Gates Foundation, he was still a board member at Microsoft for a number of years, and I think helped guide its transition.

As perhaps a better example, Microsoft (including Azure) has been carbon-neutral since 2012:

https://unfccc.int/climate-action/un-global-climate-action-a....

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2012/05/08/making-carbon-ne...

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

#580

Post by tw1984 »

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…

> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

Hiring Altman makes sure that MSFT is still relevant to the whole Altman/OpenAI deal, not just a part of it. Hiring Altman thus decreases such possibility to write-off its investment.

Post reply on HN