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Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

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

#751

OMG, it is 12am in SF. I need to sleep. But what a play, MSFT the winner here. They now owns the actual OpenAI Edit: PM->am

Or they just acquired sales people

Greg Brockman has already announced some of the others on the leadership team -- https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1726530200484372688

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

#752

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

How so? I don't get the hype.

OpenAI trained truly ground breaking models that were miles ahead of anything the world had seen before. Everything else was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at best, average. They called their flagship product "ChatGPT", a term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a random string of letters to the average person. They had no mobile app for a long time. Their web app had some major bugs.

Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success by far and large hinges on their game-changing models. And by extension, the bulk of the credit goes to their AI research/tech teams.

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

#753
post #408

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…

Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI. The argument would go something like this: MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for wha…

Microsoft does not prevent OpenAI from achieving their mission. OpenAI does not bind Microsoft to behave one way or another.

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

#754
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…

We're going back to 90s where Microsoft was universally considered evil in IT world. Interesting how world really turns in circles (or more like spirals since world changed a bit, but I wish I would know whether spiral goes up or down).

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

#755
post #704

I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it. We really are entering the dystopia of the cartoonishly evil megacorp enslaving all of humanity to make the graph go up by 1.2%.

If they really build AGI (I doubt it), the AGI might be able to bring Microsoft under its control. This could be bad news for a lot of businesses.

That's a lot of code to be purged, even for a superintelligent AI.

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

#756
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…

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…

Thats called whitewashing an evil corp with one anecdote. HN deserves better.

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

#757

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…

Microsoft got Copilot. They were first to establish the brand. OpenAI technologies let them do it. I don't know how much Copilot brand cost, but right now when you're thinking about AI-assisted programming, Copilot is the first thing comes in mind. So probably they got something in return.

Yeah, Copilot has become a very nice branding.

For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or something.

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

#758
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…

> 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…

Moloch always wins.

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

#759
post #344

It's really telling of US tech culture, how AI hype quickly turned from "Open" and "we're doing it for humanity" into a mega-corp cash grab *show. I understand what money does to principles, but this is comical.

What’s ironic is how backwards people here have the narrative. Not sure you’re fully aware of what happened at OpenAI.

The “Open” types, ironically, wanted to keep LLMs hidden away from the public (something something religious AGI hysteria). These are the people who think they know better than you, and that we should centralize control with them for our own safety (see also, communism).

The evil profit motive you’re complaining about, is what democratized this tech and brought it to the masses in a form that is useful to them.

The “cash grab show” is the only incentive that has been proven to make people do useful things for the masses. Otherwise, it’s just way too tempting to hide in ivory towers and spend your days fantasizing about philosophical nonsense.

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

#760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, why is he the best CEO?

He performed an unbelievable turnaround. His predecessor, famed for sweating a lot, yelling (sometimes positively, not necessarily in anger), throwing chairs and insisting on giving the keynote speech every year at MWC while being irrelevant, was driving the company into the ground. Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity which he had. Unlik…

The problem with Google is that it is being run by the bunch of nerds. Sure, they are smart but without ad revenue they would gave gone down long time ago...

Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which was a wrong prediction.

And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another AT&T merger fiasco.

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