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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

#821

Post by ctvo »

The only shocking thing about this whole episode was how many people in the media failed to understand just how much power this board had.

They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8 hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.

Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little leverage. Reading the news you’d think otherwise.

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

#822

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> a council that actually has humanities interests in mind

It's interesting that "Effective Altruism" enthusiasts all seem to be mega-rich grifters.

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

#823

Post by cyanydeez »

skilled wrote: post #484
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…

You do realize that Microsoft uses OpenAI IP for all of its AI products, of which there are at least two dozen that they released this year. In what universe do you make the connection that they would write it off and go to a different, less superior/reliable, model provider? It would never happen.

right, they'll just steal it and watch a nonprofit try to enforce anything about it.

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

#824

Post by voitvodder »

Arainach wrote: post #336
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.

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.

Most people in tech to me seem to be suckers looking to buy a bridge IMO.

"I am not into money or power man, I just want to be a good person and save the world man"

I just can't believe such simplistic, transparent, bullshit works so consistently as to become standard PR.

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

#825

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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…

> recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles

Or at least the most hyped AI team in the world. The level of cult of personality around OpenAI is reaching pretty nauseating levels.

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

#826

Post by kilroy123 »

waihtis wrote: post #8

Anyone else find it strange that startup founders of the magnitude of Sam & Greg would join a gigantic corporation as employees? It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.

A little bit, but I highly doubt it'll last long. I predict most of them will end up in a startup sooner rather than later.

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

#827

Post by duhast »

MichaelRazum wrote: post #787
bambax wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

You lost me at "can be coded in few days".

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

#828

Post by DrBazza »

hughesjj wrote: post #548
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…

True, but that was when ballmer was at the helm

And despite the above track record, he somehow managed to not accidentally buy Yahoo as well.

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

#829

Post by [deleted] »

nopromisessir wrote: post #329
TechnicolorByte wrote: post #50

Incredible how much has changed in one weekend… or not? Confused what this really means. So Microsoft still has access to OpenAI’s pre-AGI tech that Sam and Greg can leverage for their more product-focused visions. More than that, it looks like Microsoft has become a major AI player (internal research) overnight up with the likes of Meta, Google, and OpenAI. Incredible.

Just FYI... Microsoft was already set to spent 27 billion usd on research for 2023. They dedicate huge standout double digit percentages of budget to research every year. Their in house AI research division was already huge. They didn't become a major AI player overnight... They already were long ago. OpenAI is small, in raw numbers of AI researchers, compared to the big players in the space. That's a major reason wh…

[deleted]

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

#830

Post by Mentlo »

gtirloni wrote: post #378
Joeri wrote: post #49

This might turn out to be a lot more stable structure long term: the commercialization of AI under Microsoft's brand, with Microsoft's resources, and the deep research into advanced AI under OpenAI. This could shield the research division of OpenAI from undue pressure from the product side, in a way that it probably couldn't when everything was under one roof.

I find your theory more plausible. Microsoft, Google and Amazon were lagging in AI. You can simply look at their voice assistants for an example. That's why they started investing billions in OpenAI and other think tanks in this space. Now capital turns things around to be as they should (from their perspective) and reacquires control. Anthropic is probably next in line.

MS/G/A didn’t put this into voice assistants not because they don’t have it, but because it doesn’t scale to fit the commercials at the moment. Google invented transformers and Deepmind had GPT scale LLM’s at least a year before CGPT came out.

Altman just rushed everyone’s hand by publishing it into the world at cost

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