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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

#811

Post by OJFord »

zb3 wrote: post #728
padolsey wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that OpenAI was founded on, which have just been – arguably – reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient compute to chase AGI… If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to…

By "for profit" you mean "available to use by people right now"? Well then I hope the "pure" OpenAI is over. I want to be able to use the AI for money, not for these models to be hoarded..

It could be entirely open source and still available hosted for use in exchange for money today though?

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

#812

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

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…

They will be ok. Research does not take that much GPUs compared to training huge commercial LLMs and hiring thousands of people to manually train them to be "safe". You'd prefer smaller models, but faster iterations.

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

#813

Post by kareaa »

facu17y wrote: post #559

Sam didn't create the breakthroughs behind the current GPT. He did not create the breakthroughs behind the next GPT. None of the people that may follow have the same handle on the tech as Ilya. I mean they built up Ilya's image in our mind so much, that he's one of a kind genius (or maybe Musk did that) and now we are to believe that his genius doesn't matter and that Microsoft already knows how to create AGI and tha…

Jakub Pachocki (the head of research of OpenAI) has already quit on Friday. Lots of other high-ups might follow.

Ilya might be a genius, but he's not the only genius that OpenAI had.

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

#814

Post by dalbasal »

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…

IDK. Let's proceed with caution in gauging intentions and interests. Altamans', Microsoft's, the Jedi council's.

"Humanity's interest at heart" is a mouthful. I'm not denigrating it. I think it is really important.

That said, as a proverbial human... I am not hanging my hat on that charter. Members of the consortium all also claim to be serving the common good in their other ventures. So do Exxon.

OpenAI haven't created, or even articulated a coherent, legible, and believable model for enshrining humanity's interests. The corporate structure flowchart of nonprofit, LLCs, and such.. it is not anywhere near sufficient.

OpenAI in no way belongs to humanity. Not rhetorically, legally or in practice... currently.

I'm all for efforts to prevent these new technologies from being stolen from humanity, controlled monopolistically... From moderate to radical ideas, I'm all ears.

What happened to the human consortium that was the worldwideWeb, gnu, and descendant projects like Wikipedia... That was moral theft, imo. I am for any effort to avoid a repeat. OpenAI is not such an effort, as far as I can tell.

If it is, it's not too late. Open AI haven't betrayed the generous reading of the mission in charter. They just haven't taken hard steps to achieving it. Instead, they have left things open, and I think the more realistic take is the default one.

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

#815

Post by cyanydeez »

cornholio wrote: post #366
ricardobeat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this kind of thinking seems to be the exact reason he was pushed away. “The future” as envisioned by a megacorp might not be that great.

I'm not sure I follow this chain of arguments, which I hear often. So, a technology becomes possible, that has the potential to massively disrupt social order - while being insanely profitable to those who employ it. The knowledge is already out there in scientific journals, or if it's not, it can be grokked via corporate espionage or paying huge salaries to the employees of OpenAI or whoever else has it. What exactl…

in theory, a nonprofit would demonstrate a government need and the nonprofit would be bought out by the government.

in America, nonprofits are just how rich people run around trying to get tax avoidance, plaudettes and now wealth transfers.

I doubt OpenAI is different not that Altman is anything but a figurehead.

but nonprofits in America is how the government has chosen to derelict it's duties.

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

#816

Post by alchemist1e9 »

meowkit wrote: post #542
belter wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when they did this? "Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion" - https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ To then write down their assets? "How Skype lost its crown to Zoom" - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/skype-coronavirus-pandemic Or when they did this ? Or how in 2014... "Microsoft buying Nokia's phone business in a $7.2 billion bid for its mobile future" - https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/2/46…

Pre Satya history is irrelevant to the current MSFT

For those of us not following Microsoft super close, would it possible to ready a summary of the successes of Satya?

I sense a lot of respect and appreciation for his role, but unfortunately I just don’t know many details and I’m curious about the highlights.

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

#818

Post by cyanydeez »

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.

demagoguery.

go read musks public statements leading up to Twitter purchase.

it's pretty clear they were fired because of profit motives. that's all I hear.

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

#819

Post by suslik »

shubhamjain wrote: post #99

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…

Was GPT4 a success due to the brilliance of OpenAI's tech team vs first movers advantage and good GPU deals with MS? I might be missing something here, but to me nothing about this technology feels like rocket science (obviously, there is a lot of nuance, yada yada, but nothing that seems intractable). I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good stuff.

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

#820

Post by mlrtime »

9dev wrote: post #357
imgabe wrote: post #340

Earlier 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.

Ha! Tell that to the species of primates that will happily squeeze even the last ounce of resources from the only habitable planet they have, to enrich said shareholders. Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family, and this is no exception.

>Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family

Agreed, and we're also bad at being told what to do. Especially when someone says they know better than us.

What we are extremely good at is adaptation and technological advancement. Since we know this already , why do we try to stop or slow progress.

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