Altman pulling an Elop
Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
71–80 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#72Listen. I was confused when the whole thing was going down. I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down. I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO. ...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative. I remain, confused.
Sam joining MS was actually one of the theories I read in the initial, or one of the first, threads about his ouster. 10 billion dollar seems like a pretty steep recruiting cost, but MS knows what they are doing, right? Right?
What Sam is going to bring to MS? Recruits? MS already has all the money and infra they need.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#73Listen. I was confused when the whole thing was going down. I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down. I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO. ...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative. I remain, confused.
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Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#74Listen. I was confused when the whole thing was going down. I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down. I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO. ...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative. I remain, confused.
And for the OpenAI employees, they can just switch the badge in a blink second, it almost feel like a no-brainer to many. I think Sam just took the easier route to rebuild OpenAI within MSFT. Now the trouble comes to the SV VCs they now will be furious.
And then they get to say one of the most depressing sentences in an engineer's lexicon: "It's almost like we're a startup within a big company!"
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#75Anyone 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.
I bet MS probably bankrolls a subsidiary or lightweight spinoff for AGI if they are under MS, they can keep the original research and code.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#76Listen. I was confused when the whole thing was going down. I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down. I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO. ...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative. I remain, confused.
By joining Microsoft, they retain access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI. They don't have to start from scratch and ramp up. They can start up right where they left off.
Your comment got me thinking, it's not just all the current access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI, it's also everything that will come out of OpenAI in the future.
Remember, Microsoft has an exclusive license to all models that come out of OpenAI until they reach the pre-agreed income threshold, which given the current trajectory of OpenAI, will not happen anytime soon.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#77Anyone 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.
> It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect. Except if Sam and Greg have some anti-compete clauses. If they join MS, they have a nice 10 billion USD leverage against any lawsuites.
So Sam & Greg can stay focus on their work rather than getting distracted by all the lawsuits. It isn’t a bad thing. Just not sure how they can get they want under the corporate culture?
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Sam thinks OpenAI will be so important he has a shot at CEO of Microsoft in a couple years?
But Satya is making a few 100 mil a year, tops. Sam could easily make himself a billionaire with one raise. And who wants to control all of Microsoft, that's a whole lot of headaches
Exactly, he could just launch a new company, most of the current OpenAI staff would follow him.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#79Anyone 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.
> It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect. Except if Sam and Greg have some anti-compete clauses. If they join MS, they have a nice 10 billion USD leverage against any lawsuites.
In California the anti-compete clauses are not enforceable, afaik
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#80This actually seems like a decent compromise. Sam and Greg can retain velocity on the product side without having to spin up a whole new operation in direct competition with their old levers of power, and Ilya + co can remain in possession of the keys to the kingdom.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me it is us framed as if they won't be working on GPT-based products, but on research. The whole thing reads like this to me: "In hindsight, we should've done more due diligence before developing a hard dependency on an organization and its product. We are aware that this was a mistake. To combat this, we will do damage control and continue to work with OpenAI, while develo…
How do you conduct research with sales people? even if they manage to bring in researchers from OpenAI, the only gain here is microsoft getting some of the researchers behind the products and/or product developers.