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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#71

Post by Enginerrrd »

partiallypro wrote: post #61

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…

Yeah, the office suite is such a cash cow. It is polished, feature rich, and ubiquitous compared to alternatives and somehow has remained so for decades. And yet, I'm increasingly getting seriously concerned they are going to break it so badly I'll need to find an alternative.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#72

Post by JumpCrisscross »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #48
bsimpson wrote: post #34

Earlier 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.

> 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

Congratulations, you’ve invented the HR department in corporate America.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#73

Post by sailfast »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #46
laughingcurve wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just not correct. As someone who has done the budgets for PhD hiring and funding, you are just wildly underestimating the overhead costs, benefits, cost of raising money, etc.

The "3-5" is certainly overstated, but you definitely can hire ONE PhD for that price, just as you can hire a SWE for $120K or a knowledge worker for $24K. The point is that from a CEO's perspective "replacing all the humans with AI" looks a lot less compelling when the AI costs the same as a human worker or even a significant fraction of a human worker.

Being able to control their every move, scale them to whatever capacity is required, avoid payroll taxes, health plans and surprise co-pay costs, equity sharing, etc might make this worthwhile for many companies.

That said, the trade-off is that you're basically hiring consultants since they really work for OpenAI :)

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#74

Post by barumrho »

echelon wrote: post #25
strangescript wrote: post #7

I think they have realized that even if OpenAI is first, it won't last long so really its just compute at scale, which is something they already do themselves.

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.)

Given xAI built its 100k gpu datacenter in a very short time, is the infra really a moat?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#75

Post by c0redump »

only-one1701 wrote: post #19
aresant wrote: post #4

Thematically investing billions into startup AI frontier models makes sense if you believe in first-to-AGI likely worth a trillion dollars + Investing in second/third place likely valuable at similar scales too But outside of that MSFTs move indicates that frontier models most valuable current use case - enterprise-level API users - are likely to be significantly commoditized And likely majority of proceeds will be c…

What even is AGI? Like, what does it look like? Genuine question.

A machine that has a subjective consciousness, experiences qualia, etc.

See Thomas Nagels classic piece for more elaboration

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#76

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #36
DebtDeflation wrote: post #31

A 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 pretty funny that OpenAI wants to sell access to a "PhD level" model at a price with which you can hire like 3-5 real human PhDs full-time.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#77

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Softbank’s Masa’s magic is convincing everyone, every time, that he hasn’t consistently top ticked every market he’s invested in for the last decade. Maybe Satya’s finally broken himself of the spell [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/business/dealbook/softban...

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#78

Post by slt2021 »

paxys wrote: post #32

Microsoft's corporate structure and company culture is actively hostile to innovation of any kind. This was true in Ballmer's era and is equally true today, no matter how many PR wins Nadella is able to pull off. The company justifies its market cap by selling office software and cloud services contracts to large corporations and governments via an army of salespeople and lobbyists, and that is what it will continue…

you are right, Microsoft is a hodge podge of legacy on-premise software, legacy software lifted and shifted to the cloud, and some innovation pockets.

Microsoft bread and butter is Enterprise bloatware and large Enterprise deals where everything in the world is bundled together for use-it-or-lose-it contracts.

Its not really much different from IBM like a two decades ago

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#79

Post by throw_m239339 »

moelf wrote: post #39
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty funny that OpenAI wants to sell access to a "PhD level" model at a price with which you can hire like 3-5 real human PhDs full-time.

$20k can't get you that many PhD. Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month, effectively costs double that because of school overhead and other stuff.

> $20k can't get you that many PhD. Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month, effectively costs double that because of school overhead and other stuff.

But you are not getting a PhD worker for 20K with "AI", that's just marketing.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#80

Post by DebtDeflation »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #59
DebtDeflation wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "3-5" is certainly overstated, but you definitely can hire ONE PhD for that price, just as you can hire a SWE for $120K or a knowledge worker for $24K. The point is that from a CEO's perspective "replacing all the humans with AI" looks a lot less compelling when the AI costs the same as a human worker or even a significant fraction of a human worker.

Although remember that the cost to the company is more like double the actual salary.

Again, irrelevant. We're talking about orders of magnitude here. Current pricing is in line with most SaaS pricing - tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars per seat per month. Now they're suddenly talking about thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per seat per month.
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