Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#821

Post by sethops1 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 10:38 AM UTC

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #732

Dylan16807 wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The basic 5x revenue valuation" doesn't work for businesses that aren't profitable.

It is also unclear to me how much real debt they carry. They have famously been signing many deals: RAM, datacenters, maybe nuclear power plants -I no longer know what is a joke or not. They must be carrying hundreds of billions in paper debt obligations, which is tough to payback at $20B revenue.

I'm giddy about reading their S1 in the near future. We're about to have another "We What the Fuck" moment.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#822

Post by Xunjin » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 10:39 AM UTC

signatoremo wrote: post #703

dijit wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I buy oranges for $1 and sell them for $0.50 and I sell a lot of oranges, can I reasonably say that I've found a market? Hrm..

Were you around here ten years ago when that exact argument was regularly regurgitated about Uber? Notice that argument is no longer popular? The point is that losing money isn't a sure sign that a business is doomed. Who knows where OpenAI will end up, but people still line up to invest. Those investors have billions reasons to be due diligent. Unlike what's claimed around here, most of investors aren't stupid. You…

Not saying you are wrong, but let's not forget the famous crashes of 1929, .com, and 2008 bubbles.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#823

Post by hansmayer » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 10:45 AM UTC

wonderwallaus wrote: post #585

wg0 wrote: post #413

A wise man from Google said in an internal memo to the tune of: "We do not have any moat neither does anyone else." Deepseek v4 is good enough, really really good given the price it is offered at. PS: Just to be clear - even the most expensive AI models are unreliable, would make stupid mistakes and their code output MUST be reviewed carefully so Deepseek v4 is not any different either, it too is just a random token…

What a crock of bs. A brain is "just" electrochemistry and a novel is "just" arrangements of letters. The question isn't the substrate, it's what structure emerges on top of it. Anthropic's own interpretability work has surfaced internal features that look like learned concepts, planning, and something resembling goal-directed reasoning. Calling the outputs random is wrong in a specific way, the distribution is extra…

> internal features that look like learned concepts, planning, and something resembling goal-directed reasoning.

It's always so un-specific. Resembles this, seems that, almost such, danger that... A lot of magical thinking coming from AI-researchers who have hit the ceiling with a legacy technology that exists since 1940s and simply won't start reasoning on it's own, no matter how much GPUs they burn.

> Calling the outputs random is wrong in a specific way, the distribution is extraordinarily structured.

No, it's actually very correct in a very specific way. Ask any programmer using the parrots, and lately the "quality" has deteriorated so much, that coupled with the incoming price hikes, many will just forfeit the technology, unless someone else is carrying the cost, such as their employer. But as an employer, I also don't want to carry the costs for a technology which benefits as ever less.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#824

Post by sayYayToLife » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:17 AM UTC

alexdoesstuff wrote: post #385

sayYayToLife wrote: post #228

Alright my theory: OpenAI has public models that are pretty 'meh', better than Grok and China, but worse than Google and Anthropic. They still cost a ton to run because OpenAI offers them for free/at a loss. However, these people are giving away their data, and Microsoft knows that data is going to be worthwhile. They just dont want to pay for the electricity for it.

Small nitpick: the models probably make some money on actual inference. Might not be a massive amount, but hard to see them not having a positive contribution margin purely on inference. What's losing OpenAI money is paying for the whole of R&D, including training and staff. Microsoft doesn't pay that, so they get the money making part of AI without the associated costs.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#825

Post by wongarsu » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

_vertigo wrote: post #723

nl wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is somewhat out of date (Dec 2024), but gives you some idea of how far behind AMD was then: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200... Pull quotes: AMD’s software experience is riddled with bugs rendering out of the box training with AMD is impossible. We were hopeful that AMD could emerge as a strong competitor to NVIDIA in training workloads, but, as of today, this is unfortunately not the…

That’s insane. There should be a big team of people at AMD whose whole job is just to dogfood their stuff for training like this. Speaking of which, Amazon is in the same boat, I’m constantly surprised that Amazon is not treating improving Inferentia/Trainium software as an uber-priority. (I work at Amazon)

Hardware companies being terrible at software is the norm. Nvidia is one of the rare companies that can successfully execute both.

Maybe Amazon is an example how this happens even to hardware divisions within software/logistics companies

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#826

Post by intrinsicallee » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:34 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #566

intrinsicallee wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure what people declaring that they equate human cognition with large language models think they are contributing to the conversation when they do so. Nevermind the fact that they are literally able to introspect human cognition and presumably find non verbal and non linear cognition modes.

> Nevermind the fact that they are literally able to introspect human cognition and presumably find non verbal and non linear cognition modes. Are they, though? Or are they just predicting their own performance (and an explanation of that performance) on input the same way they predict their response to that input? Humans say a lot of biologically implausible things when asked why they did something.

I said introspect, not talk about introspection.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#827

Post by willy_k » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:42 AM UTC

everforward wrote: post #403

lesuorac wrote: post #318

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Why? FaceBook largely requires an Apple iPhone, Apple computer, "Microsoft" computer, "Google" phone, or a "Google" computer to use it. At any point one of those companies could cut FaceBook off (ex. [1]). The Metaverse was a long term goal to get people onto a device (Occulus) that Meta controlled. While I think an AR device is much more useful than VR; I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not be…

I think this is sane washing their idea in the modern context of it having failed. I think at the time, they thought VR would be the next big thing and wanted to become the dominant player via first mover advantage. The headsets don’t really make sense to me in the way you’re describing. Phones are omnipresent because it’s a thing you always just have on you. Headsets are large enough that it’s a conscious choice to…

It’s premature to say that the idea failed; The flashy controversial “metaverse” angle where you can live your whole life on the Quest or whatever isn’t happening, but their investment into AR/VR has definitely started to show real payoff potential with their glasses.

They address the friction of use issue being discussed, they’re even more discrete and available than a phone. And they are getting a lot of general public recognition, albeit not for the best reasons (people discretely filming, for genuine social media reactions but also for other reasons..).

Their tech is improving at a decent pace and they’ve recently put out a product that is both ready for consumer (at least with select use cases) adoption, and actually reasonably available to the public.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#828

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:06 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #760

nl wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 class model is 5 trillion parameters[1]. To run a 8 bit quantized version of that you need roughly 5TB of RAM. Today that is around 18 NVidia B300. That's around $900,000, without including the computers to run them in. It's true that the capability of open source models is improving, but running actual frontier models on your MPB seems a way off. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/204212356166685523…

Do that will only be possible with something like better 3D NAND flash memory, needs a new hardware. People are already trying to bring that the market. Contemplated taking a compiler position in such a company.

HBF is a non-starter, it runs way too hot compared to DRAM (which only pays for refresh at idle) for the same memory traffic. Only helps for extremely sparse MoE models - probably sparser than we're seeing today.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#829

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:18 PM UTC

dnadler wrote: post #667

0-_-0 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I hear is that getting your network to work on AMD is a huge pain.

Yeah, historically it’s been software that’s limited AMD here. Not surprised to hear that may still be the issue. NVidia’s biggest edge was really CUDA.

CUDA is a complete and utter piece of shit software. It's just that it is a tiny bit less of a shitshow than the alternatives.

Re: Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

#830

Post by turtlesdown11 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:19 PM UTC

arcanemachiner wrote: post #616

Yajirobe wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when it's indistinguishable from a human speaker (in any conceivable test that makes sense)? It's like a philosophical zombie - imagine that you can't distinguish it from a human mind, there's no test you can make to say that it is NOT conscious/intelligent. So at some point, I think, it makes no sense to say that it's not intelligent.

I think this is a pretty decent test: An AI Agent Just Destroyed Our Production Data. It Confessed in Writing. https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248 > Deleting a database volume is the most destructive, irreversible action possible — far worse than a force push — and you never asked me to delete anything. I decided to do it on my own to "fix" the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first o…

So a prediction machine chose a particular predicted path, and then came up with phrases to ameliorate it and you're swooning? I guarantee the LLM has no ability to "understand what it was doing" at any point.