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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

#971

Post by rrr_oh_man »

ctvo wrote: post #821

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 dec…

Yup. It all reads like a well executed psyop — or one could think so if one was paranoid.

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

#972

Post by novia »

NanoYohaneTSU wrote: post #956
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…

The Skype purchase was good for itself. It lead to Teams, which is dominating.

Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with their other services. In my personal opinion, as someone who loved Skype before Microsoft got involved with it, Teams is complete trash, and impossible to work with in a business environment.

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

#975

Post by dalbasal »

dorfsmay wrote: post #939
dalbasal wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 crea…

Can you explain what you mean in your second to last paragraph? The GNU project and the Wikimedia Foundation are still non profit today, and even if you disagree with their results their goal is to server humanity for free.

I'm not criticizing these projects, their current legal structure.

What I mean is that these were created as public goods and functioned as such. Each had unique way of being open, spreading the value of their work as far as possible.

They were extraordinary. Incredible quality. Incredible power. Incredible ability to be built upon.. particularly the WWW.

All achieved things that simply could not have been achieved, by being a normal commercial venture.

Google,fb and co essentially stole them. They built closed platforms built a top open ones. Built bridges between users and the public domain, and monopolize them like bridge trolls.

Considering how part of the culture, a company like Google was 20 years ago this is the treason.

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

#976

Post by sanderjd »

gwd wrote: post #880
sanderjd wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These concerns are in the hands of voters and their representatives in governments now, and really, they always were. A single private organization was never going to be able to solve the coordination problem of balancing progress in a technology against its impact on society. Indeed, I think trying to do it that way increases the risk that the single private organization captures its regulators and ends up without e…

> These concerns are in the hands of voters and their representatives in governments now, and really, they always were. A single private organization was never going to be able to solve the coordination problem of balancing progress in a technology against its impact on society. Um, have you heard of lead additives to gasoline? CFCs? Asbestos? Smoking? History is littered with complete failures of governments to appr…

Your response is exactly what I had in mind when I referred to people who are "skeptical of politics and trust the big brains at OpenAI more".

You aren't wrong that government regulation is not a great solution, but I believe it is - like democracy, and for the same reasons - the worst solution, except for all the others.

I don't disagree that using a non-profit to enforce self-regulation was "worth a shot", but I thought it was very unlikely to succeed at that goal, and indeed has been failing to succeed at that goal for a very long time. But I'm not mad at them for trying.

(I do think too many people used this as an excuse to argue against any government oversight by saying, "we don't need that, we have a self-regulating non-profit structure!", I think mostly cynically.)

> But it at least gives a chance that a potentially dangerous technology will go in the right direction.

I know you wrote this comment a full five hours ago and stuff has been moving quickly, but I think this needs to be in the past tense. It appears to be clear now that something approaching >90% of the OpenAI staff did not believe in this mission, and thus it was never going to work.

If you care about this, I think you need to be thinking about what else to pursue to give us that chance. I personally think government regulation is the only plausible option to pursue here, but I won't begrudge folks who want to keep trying more novel ideas.

(And FWIW, I don't personally share the humanity-destroying concerns people have; but I think regulation is almost always appropriate for big new technologies to some degree, and that this is no exception.)

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

#977

Post by ricardobeat »

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…

Look up the reason OpenAI was founded. The idea was exactly that someone would get there first, and it better be an entity with beneficial goals. So they set it up to advance the field - which they have been doing successfully - while having a strict charter that would ensure alignment with humanity (aka prevent it from becoming a profit-driven enterprise).

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

#978

Post by dehrmann »

leobg wrote: post #408
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…

Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI. The argument would go something like this: MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for wha…

Since the board was never clear what Altman did, you could make flip the parties and your breach of contract argument holds about as much water. Plus MS can resort to the playground "they started it" argument.

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

#979

Post by andai »

alsodumb wrote: post #566
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…

Remember when they did this? "Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion" - https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g... only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without disrupting user experience? "Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps doing its thing" - https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/four-years-after-being-acq... or when they acquired LinkedIn before that? "Microsoft…

Despite porting it from Java to C++, Bedrock (Microsoft's rewrite of Minecraft) somehow has worse performance and bugs than vanilla Minecraft. (Also, a bunch of it is somehow in JavaScript?)

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

#980

Post by andai »

cycomanic wrote: post #602
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…

I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team? I would wager a substantial sum that Altman has not touch anything technical (let alone related to AI) in a very long time. He certainly showed he is a very good operator, networker and executer, but that doesbt give you the technical expertise to build state of the art AI. If he manages to get a significant amount o…

> Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?

This sounds like hyperbole, but isn't that what China is doing?

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