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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

#781

Post by ramblerman »

coahn wrote: 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.

> I understand what money does to principles,

That's kind of the point, we all do. What is harder to understand are the low stakes whims of academics bickering over their fiefdoms.

This move is bringing the incentives back to a normal and understood paradigm. And as a user of AI, will likely lead to better, quicker, and less hamstringed products and should be in our benefit.

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

#782

Post by mistermann »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #758
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mostly. But Elua is still here, and the game isn't over yet.

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

#783

Post by 23623456 »

krick wrote: post #544
impulser_ wrote: post #118

I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still the…

If I would be betting, I would bet on Altman and Microsoft as well, because in the real world, evil usually wins, but I'm just really astonished by all this rhetoric here on HN. Like, firing Altman is a horrible treason, and people wouldn't want to work with those traitors anymore. Altman is the guy, who is responsible for making OpenAI "closed", which was a constant reason for complaints since it happened. When it a…

Another way of framing this would be that Altman was one of the only people there with their head far enough from the clouds to realize they had to adapt if they were going to have the resources needed to survive. In the real world you need more than a few Tony Starks in a cave to maintain a longterm lead even if the initial output is exceptional with nothing but what's in the cave.

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

#785

Post by Applejinx »

causi wrote: post #631
9dev wrote: 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…

Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, This isn't saying yes or no to a supervillain working in a secret volcano lair. This is an arms race. If it's possible for a technology to exist it will exist. The only choice we have is who gets it first. Maybe that means we get destroyed by it first before it destroys everyone else, or maybe it's the reason w…

The assumption that it is an arms race is a shockingly anthropocentric view of something that's supposed to be 'intelligence' but is just a distillation of collected HUMAN opinion.

Not only that, it's a blindered take on what human opinion is. Humans are killer apes AND cooperative, practically eusocial apes. Failing to understand both horns of that dilemma is a serious mistake.

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

#786

Post by spiderfarmer »

blibble wrote: post #743
sensanaty wrote: post #554

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%.

> 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. at least none of their software actually works Microsoft Skynet would be rebooting every 15 minutes for updates

Before it can do anything it will be 301 redirected 45 times between legacy systems and if it has any human-like properties it will give up out of frustration.

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

#787

Post by MichaelRazum »

bambax wrote: post #741
zoogeny wrote: post #190

All 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 wonder how this will all workout in the end (and the excitement around all of this is a little reminiscent of AOL bying Time Warner). For one, I'm not sure Sam Altman will tolerate MS bureaucracy for very long. But secondly, the new MS-AI entity can't presumably just take from OpenAI what they did there, they need to make it again. This takes a lot of resources (that MS has) but also a lot of time to provide feedba…

I think you overestimate the technical part. Just speculating (no inside, no expert), but I would assume that the models are pretty "easy" and can be coded in few days. There are for sure some tweaks to the standard transformer architecture, but guess the tweaks are well known to sam and co.

The dataset is more challenging, but here msft can help - since they have bing and github as well. So they might be able to make few shortcuts here.

The most time consuming part is compute, but here again msft has the compute.

Will they beat chat-gpt 4 in a year? Guess no. But they will come very close to it and maybe it would not matter that much if you focus on the product.

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

#788

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

sensanaty wrote: post #554

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%.

Many far worse outcomes are possible. Putin. Kim Jong Un. AlQaeda. G$$gle.

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

#789

Post by 23623456 »

coahn wrote: 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.

Yeah it's terrible how many resources that pivot has brought in to help advance the field. If only the US were more like Europe.

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

#790

Post by saiya-jin »

somenameforme wrote: post #468
zurfer wrote: post #253

I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company". Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it. Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.

The world, in general, makes so dramatically much more sense if you just completely ignore everything that everybody says, and instead simply look at the actions of people/organizations/nations, and form your own opinions based upon that. This is even more true in modern times when framing things in the 'right way' (even if completely insincerely) can have a major impact on your ventures, funding/investment availabil…

This, anytime, anywhere.

Basically what you see these days is PR teams together with legal teams acting like individual that hired them. There are exceptions, but they are outliers in say Trump style, not these billionaires. Same, heck even more for politics.

It can be easily transferred into personal or professional relationships. For me at least, this analysis works 100% of the time when for example rest of friends or family struggle hard to understand actions of some individuals. Just point them to their previous actions and see the consistency emerging. This is how you can easily work with various people if you are smart but lack social skills, just observe actions and ignore blah.

People simply don't change, they may reflect change in their environment but thats it. Unless we talk about 2 decades+ since last encounter, but even then it may be just more polished PR.

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