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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#91

Post by klelatti »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #81
echelon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no moat in models (OpenAI). There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave). There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda). Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)

What moat does Nvidia have. AMD could have ROCm perfected if they really want to. Also most of pytorch, specially those relevant to transformers runs perfectly on Apple Silicon and TPUs and probably other hardware as well. If anyone has moat related to Gen AI, I would say it is the data(Google, Meta).

> AMD could have ROCm perfected if they really want to.

It's not an act of will or CEO dictat. It's about hiring and incentivising the right people, putting the right structures in place etc all in the face of competing demands.

Nvidia have a huge head start and by the time AMD have 'caught up' Nvidia with it's greater resources will have moved further ahead.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#92

Post by optimalsolver »

asciii wrote: post #42

Clear as day when he said this during the openai fiasco: "we have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. we are below them, above them, around them." -- satya nadella

Sounds like just the kind of person you'd want in command of a powerful AGI.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#94

Post by yifanl »

zombiwoof wrote: post #40
laughingcurve wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just not correct. As someone who has done the budgets for PhD hiring and funding, you are just wildly underestimating the overhead costs, benefits, cost of raising money, etc.

Respectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them.

Right, which is substantially less than the stated $20k/month.

edit: I see we're actually in agreement, sorry, I read the indentation level wrong.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#95

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jimbokun wrote: post #49
only-one1701 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sincerely think we're < 5 years away from this?

Is there some fundamental constraint keeping it from happening? What cognitive capability do humans have that machines won't be able to replicate in that time frame? Each remaining barrier has been steadily falling.

We don't even have AI which can do useful things yet. The LLMs these companies make are fun toys, but not useful tools (yes, I know that hype-prone people are using them as such regardless). It beggars belief that we will go from "it's a fun toy but can't do real work" to "this can do things without even needing human supervision" without a major leap in capabilities.

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#96

Post by [deleted] »

bsimpson wrote: post #34
only-one1701 wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the document…

There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#97

Post by roland35 »

only-one1701 wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the document…

Unfortunately I don't think there is any real metric-based way to prevent this type of behavior, it just has to be old fashioned encouraged from the top. At a certain size it seems like this stops scaling though

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#99

Post by mattmaroon »

paxys wrote: post #36
DebtDeflation wrote: post #31

A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll…

It's pretty funny that OpenAI wants to sell access to a "PhD level" model at a price with which you can hire like 3-5 real human PhDs full-time.

1. Don't know where you live that the all-in costs on someone with a PhD are $4k-$7k/mo. Maybe if their PhD is in anthropology.

2. How many such PhD people can it do the work of?

Re: Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI

#100

Post by rdtsc »

thewebguyd wrote: post #87
rdtsc wrote: post #20

They probably saw the latest models like gpt 4.5 not being as revolutionary as expected and deepseek and others catching up.

I think Microsoft isn't buying the AGI hype from OpenAI, and wants to move to be more model agnostic, and instead do what Microsoft (thinks) it does best, and that's tooling, and enterprise products. MS wants to push Copilot, and will be better off not being tied to OpenAI but having Copilot be model agnostic, like GH Copilot can use other models already. They are going to try and position Azure as "the" place to run…

> instead do what Microsoft (thinks) it does best, and that's tooling, and enterprise products.

Definitely, but I think it's because they saw OpenAI's moat get narrower and shallower, so to speak. As the article mentions it's still looking like a longer timeline [quote] "but Microsoft still holds exclusive rights to OpenAI’s models for its own products until 2030. That’s a long timeline to unravel."

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