Microsoft is just so bad at marketing their products, and their branding is confusing. Unfortunately, until they fix that, any consumer facing product is going to falter. Look at the new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 rebrands just of late. The business side of things will still make money but watching them flounder on consumer facing products is just so frustrating. The Surface and Xbox brand are the only 2 that seem to have somewhat escaped the gravity of the rest of the organization in terms of that, but nothing all that polished or groundbreaking has really come out of Microsoft from a consumer facing standpoint in over a decade now. Microsoft could build the best AI around but it doesn't matter without users.
Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
61–70 of 460 posts
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.
These people should be fired. I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit. But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel.
Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure.
Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it.
The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no moat in models (OpenAI). There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave). There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda). Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)
Is anyone other than Nvdia making money from this particular gold rush?
Data center construction and power companies.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#64A 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…
Even worse: AFAIK there's no reason to believe that the $20k/mo or $10k/mo pricing will actually make them money. Those numbers are just thought balloons being floated.
Of course $10k/mo sounds like a lot of inference, but it's not yet clear how much inference will be required to approximate a software developer--especially in the context of maintaining and building upon an existing codebase over time and not just building and refining green field projects.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
What even is AGI? Like, what does it look like? Genuine question.
Obviously the other responder is being a little tongue-in-cheek but AGI to me would be virtually indistinguishable from a human in both ability to learn, grow and adapt to new information.
Honestly it doesn't even need to learn and grow much if at all if its able to properly reason about the world and its context and deal with the inexhaustible supply of imperfections and detail with reality.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#66Maybe 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…
There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.
At my former employer, there was a team who were very much into resume-driven development and wrote projects in Go even when Java would have been the better alternative considering the overall department and maintenance team expertise, all the while they were informally grumbling about how Go doesn’t have the features they need…
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#67OpenAI will in the end be aquired for less than its current valuation. Initially, I've been paying for Claude (coding), Cursor (coding), OpenAI (general, coding), and then started paying for Claude Code API credits. Now I canceled OpenAI and Claude general subscriptions, because for general tasks, Grok and DeepSeek more than suffice. General purpose AI will unlikely be subscription-based, unlike the specialized (prof…
I have to look at Claude Code. I pay for Cursor right now.
Claude Code is another level, because it's agentic. It iterates. Although it keeps you further from the codebase than Cursor and thus you may lose the grasp of what it generates- that's why I still use Cursor, before the manual review.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.
These people should be fired. I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit. But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel.
Why would those people be “fired” when the entire promotion process and promo docs emphasize “scope” and “impact”?
No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. They do it because a shit ton of money appears in their bank account every pay period and stock appears in their brokerage account every vesting period.
I personally don’t have the shit tolerance to work in BigTech (again) at 50. But I suggest to all of my younger relatives who graduate in CS to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” and tell them how to play the politics to get ahead.
As the Dilbert author said, “Passion is Bullshit”. I have never been able to trade passion for goods and services.
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#69A 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…
It's bizarre. These are the pricing setups that you'd see for a military-industrial contract. They're just doing it out in the open
Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no moat in models (OpenAI). There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave). There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda). Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)
Is anyone other than Nvdia making money from this particular gold rush?
Consulting companies