How could this possibly happen over a weekend when it takes Microsoft weeks and weeks to go from recruitment to hiring someone?
Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#732I 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…
> It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well. If they didn’t fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way. At least this way, OpenAI can continue to operate independently instead of being Micr…
> If they didn’t fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way.
The story would be much more interesting if actually AI had fired him.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sam's history is full of the worst parts of venture capital and startup mindset. He's only an idealist so far as he's good at selling the ideal outcome and drowning out any criticism.
You can bring abundance to the world as a for profit entity. The exchange of services and goods in a market is positive-sum.
Free exchange obviously and provably is, but that's not _quite_ what's going on. I see a rapid trend towards regulatory capture, monopolization and setting up to siphon out money. All from the same few actors. And if history around tech hype serves us well, then we should be wary of a large, inflated bubble that is going to burst eventually, even if useful things are created meanwhile.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#734[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.] Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp. msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money t…
>I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially.
Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)
Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this story.
This is obviously a power struggle, for control over, potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the current moment.
Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has become normal to charter a company such that ownership and control are effectively separate... call it overiding the defaults of incorporation and company law.
FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit, for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop. Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP across the mesh of entities...
Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..
For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations. Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control or any kind of coups.
OpenAI.. totally different game.
The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum... These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct financial return on investments, and such.. these are not driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.
Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right now.
This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums.. imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual company r&d.
It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.
There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And that's the kind of game it is now.
So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here. My ears are certainly pricked.
Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#735All of the naysayers here seem convinced this is Altman and Microsoft looking to destroy OpenAI. Normally I am the cynic but this time I’m seeing a potential win-win here. Altman uses his talent to recruit and drive forward a brilliant product focused AI. OpenAI gets to refocus on deep research and safety. Put aside cynicism and consider Nadella is looking to create the best of all worlds for all parties. This might…
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that going forward there won’t be much investor interest in OpenAI. And if you separate out the products from OpenAI, that leaves the question of how an organization with extremely high compute and human capital costs can sustain itself. Can OpenAI find more billionaire benefactors to support it so that it can return to its old operating model?
I think openAI will become the research lab, while the new group in Microsoft lead by Sam will focus on creating products.
I personally expect the chat.openai.com site to just become a redirect to copilot.microsoft.com.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#736Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#737Have 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…
I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team? I would wager a substantial sum that Altman has not touch anything technical (let alone related to AI) in a very long time. He certainly showed he is a very good operator, networker and executer, but that doesbt give you the technical expertise to build state of the art AI. If he manages to get a significant amount o…
I don’t get it too. It’s akin to claiming that by hiring an Oracle executive you can build the best database tech. A little stretch but still. Chances are I’ll never understand how things like that work, because there must be few truths about humans my mind resists to believe.
My uneducated guess is that OpenAI really screwed up the PR part and the current Microsoft’s claims are more on the overall damage control / fire suppression side.
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ilya should just go to Anthropic AI at this point. They have better momentum at this point after all this, and share his ideals. But it would be funny because they broke off of OpenAI because of their Microsoft ventures already in 2019, haha. He'd be welcomed with a big "We told you so!"
Considering Anthropic and them joining up, with Ilya and Dario that would be a technical powerhouse. As Amodei already showed that such a key person can ramp up quality real fast out of nothing. The two back together would be fantastic. Between Altman and Brockman there's nothing to write home about tech-wise.
I've heard the opposite about Brockman. What makes you so confident about this tech abilities?
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#739Sam Altman is a prepper. He said in 2016: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to. [Wikipedia]
Re: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The climate crisis has proven pretty thoroughly that companies will choose short term profit over humanity’s long term success every time. Public companies are literally forced to do so.
Nobody knows “humanity’s long term interest” with any certainty. Consider that fossil fuels allowed humanity to make massive technological advancements in a relatively short time. Yes, it caused climate change, but perhaps those same technological advancements allow us to fix or adapt to that. Then, in 500 years, another disaster like an asteroid or a solar flare or the Earth’s magnetic poles reversing or whatever happens, and without the boost from fossil fuels we would have been too technologically behind to be able to survive it. What was in humanity’s long term interest then?
I’m not saying that’s definitely the case, but moving slowly when you live in a universe that might hurl a giant rock at you any minute doesn’t seem like a great idea.