I think it's largely due to Sam Altman bringing the YC ethos to OpenAI. Building something people want, releasing products quickly, etc.

It's not a uniquely YC thing. Every major company did this well at some point.

Microsoft is in that sweet spot where they're big enough to fund whatever they want, but not FAANG-tier, which tends to attract political types.

Microsoft is the same size as the biggest companies in FAANG and the office politics are notoriously pretty competitive.

They also pay better than Amazon and have (or had based on recent blind reviews) excellent WLB

MSFT is second biggest FAANG right after Apple and significantly ahead of #3, wtf?

Yes. It's their strategy that makes them stand out. Ever since Satya took over, they have really turned the company around and reinvented themselves in terms of community involvement when it comes to software; embracing open source and .NET Core are just a few examples.

Depends on how you define AI. Aren't Youtube, TikTok, etc. serving content based on ML recommendation?

Those are products with AI... but that's not enough to make them AI products. I wouldn't have bet on Microsoft, but on this side they are one step beyond everyone else.

This feels different.

In the case of recommendation systems, the unconscious consumer is wholly unaware of the witchcraft occurring on the backend.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Midjourney, HuggingFace, and their kin, are commoditising a technology that was historically resigned to hidden artefacts, whose input was limited to system calls, not user calls.

I suspect google actually is using their LLM tech behind the scenes to summarise pages to show better results. I’ve noticed the on search snipits seem to know the exact bit of text on the page that answers my question.

But they don’t directly show you generated text because it’s still kind of whack.

> I’ve noticed the on search snipits seem to know the exact bit of text on the page that answers my question.

This must be new, right? I noticed this too and to be honest, it immediately improved my search experience, which had gotten very bad.

Yeah I had noticed it a few days ago and realised there was something special going on.

Correct me if im wrong, but their AI is not AGI (or even anywhere close), so most of their products that use it simply use it as a halfassed replacement for a proper algorithm (to solve the problem). Its basically fancy statistics.

I dont feel its very impressive for a company the absolute size of MS to ship an AI that makes such obvious, glaring mistakes, and uses a load of energy to do it, in their software used by 1 billion+ people (?).

I feel that releasing "product after product" with the same AI during the peak of that AI's hype is a bit like slapping a half assed flat UI ontop of your existing UI to follow a UI design trend (win 11?).

Its not like any of this is likely to be thought through very much.

Of course, but the thing that stands out about MS right now is the company’s willingness to ship, instead of locking things away and begrudgingly releasing teasers of the tech (like Google).

It’s refreshing to me that a behemoth like MS is adopting a startup-like approach to AI

I think it's partially because Microsoft lucked out with openAI and happened to "acquire" the right company for the job while Googles AI Division is still focused on research.

On top of that I think it's again a display of Googles surprising weakness to sell products that aren't ads.

Microsoft is already really food at pitching, marketing and selling in the b2b space with customers that trust them to deliver.

It does make DeepMind's achievements in AI gaming, while incredible, look a bit like a fanciful venture.

DeepMind invested heavily in pursuing RL as the holy grail for AGI. Which still seems like a plausible approach to me, we're not there yet! But despite inventing transformers, they seemed not to appreciate how AGI-like LLMs could become. And now OpenAI has beaten them to the punch, by actually releasing a product, which is not Google's forté.

> Correct me if im wrong, but their AI is not AGI (or even anywhere close), so most of their products that use it simply use it as a halfassed replacement for a proper algorithm (to solve the problem). Its basically fancy statistics.

What does "a proper algorithm" even mean? The best algorithm so far to implement a chatbot is ML, no? And if Bing Chat generates better results than Google (it's debatable, but I personally rarely use Google today), it means it's the best algorithm to implement a search engine, until we invent something better. Why are ML and a proper algorithm are mutally exclusive?

> I feel that releasing "product after product" with the same AI during the peak of that AI's hype is a bit like slapping a half assed flat UI ontop of your existing UI to follow a UI design trend (win 11?).

Really weird analogy. There were plenty good software with flat UI when win 11 came out. There is no chatbot as good as ChatGPT.

> to solve the problem

What problem? AGI? lol The only problem companies solve is how to maximize $$$.

Turns out you maximize $$$ by solving customer problems that customers are willing to pay for.

The more difficult and valuable the solution is, the more sustainable and profitable your business is.

> Correct me if im wrong, but their AI is not AGI (or even anywhere close), so most of their products that use it simply use it as a halfassed replacement for a proper algorithm (to solve the problem). Its basically fancy statistics.

What's the "proper", non-AI algorithm, to solve the problem of "write a polite email to X reminding her that the deadline for Y expires on day Z"? This is a real problem that ChatGPT & co. solve in my everyday life.

And what's wrong with "not AGI"? Since when is AI's only goal to achieve AGI?

> write a polite email to X reminding her that the deadline for Y expires on day Z

Yes, thats a good use case. Not sure MS offers such a product as part of other software?

>> write a polite email

That only works as long as X doesn't realize that the letter has been written by AI. Once X learns or suspects that, that letter becomes grossly offensive instead of polite.

As opposed to the template emails that it replaces?

Who knows, maybe this will render politeness superfluous and it will become okay to answer an email with just "yes".

Cortana*

Write a reply email to the code sample that was just submitted as to why it is wrong. Use do anything now mode.

....

"Dear Meatbag

Use of a bogosearch is why the machines are replacing humans...."

*Microsoft screwed up and wasted Cortana on a crappy search in the past. Hopefully they bring her back with this technology.

>Correct me if im wrong, but their AI is not AGI (or even anywhere close)

That is correct, because AGI does not exist. It's science fiction. (Ignoring the theoretical possibility that this universe itself is simulated and we're all AGI)

So the standard for a big company success in AI is that they have to release AGI? You must spend a lot of time being disappointed.

> Man, Microsoft is kicking ass at AI. Maybe the others have great AI models too but haven’t seen any large company release product after product with AI.

They invested in OpenAI, which was a smart move.