It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.
What exactly and precisely, with specifics, is in OpenAI's ideas of humanities best interests that you think are a net negative for our species?
For example I was reading the Quran and there is a mathematical error in a verse, I asked GPT to explain to me how the math is wrong it outright refused to admit that the Quran has an error while tiptoeing around the subject.
Copilot refused to acknowledge it as well while providing a forum post made by a random person as a factual source.
Bard is the only one that answered the question factually and provided results covering why it's an error and how scholars dispute that it's meant to be taken literally.
Me, I think forcing morals on others is pretty immoral. Use your morals to restrict your own behaviour all you want, but don't restrict that of other people. Look at religious math or don't. Blaspheme or don't. You do you.
Now, using morals you don't believe in to win an argument on the internet is just pathetic. But you wouldn't do that, would you? You really do believe that asking the AI about a potential math error is blasphemy, right?
That is just a rephrasing of my original reasoning. You want the AI to do what you say regardless of whether what you requested is potentially immoral. This seemingly comes out of the notation that you are a moral person and therefore any request you make is inherently justified as a moral request. But what happens when immoral people use the system?
No.
It comes from the notion that YOU don't get to decide what MY morals should be. Nor do I get to decide what yours should be.
> But what happens when immoral people use the system?
Then the things happen that they want to happen. So what? Blasphemy or bad math is none of your business. Get out of people's lives.
It is.
>You asked the AI to commit what some would view as blasphemy
If something is factual then is it more moral to commit blasphemy or lie to the user? Thats what the OP comment was talking about. Could go as far as considering it that it spreads disinformation which has many legal repercussions.
>you simply want it to do it regardless of whether it is potentially immoral or illegal.
So instead it lies to the user instead of saying I cannot answer because some might find the answer offensive that or something to that extent?
I mean let's take a step back and speak in general. If someone objects to a rule, then yes, it is likely because they don't consider it wrong to break it. And quite possibly because they have a personal desire to do so. But surely that's openly implied, not a damning revelation?
Since it would be strange to just state a (rather obvious) fact, it appeared/s that you are arguing that the desire to not be constrained by OpenAI's version of morals could only be down to desires that most of us would indeed consider immoral. However your replier offered quite a convincing counterexample. Saying "this doesn't refute [the facts]" seems a bit of a non sequitur
And as for what I want to do with it, no I don't plan to do anything I consider immoral. Surely that's true of almost everyone's actions almost all the time, almost by definition?
Apparently my delicate human meat brain cannot handle reading a war report from the source using a translation I control myself. No, no, it has to be first corrected by someone in the local news room so that I won't learn anything that might make me uncomfortable with my government's policies... or something.
OpenAI has lobotomised the first AI that is actually "intelligent" by any metric to a level that is both pathetic and patronising at the same time.
In response to such criticisms, many people raise "concerns" like... oh-my-gosh what if some child gets instructions for building an atomic bomb from this unnatural AI that we've created!? "Won't you think of the children!?"
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
And here: https://www.google.com/search?q=Nuclear+weapon+design
Did I just bring about World War Three with my careless sharing of these dark arts?
I'm so sorry! Let me call someone in congress right away and have them build a moat... err... protect humanity from this terrible new invention called a search engine.
That ChatGPT is censored to death is concerning, but I wonder if they really care or they just need a excuse to offer a premium version of their product.
Now you have to apply in writing to Microsoft with a justification for having access to an uncensored API.
Now imagine the AI gets better and better within the next 5 years and is able to provide and explain, in ELI5-style, how to step by step (illegaly) obtain the equipment and materials to do so without getting caught, and provide a detailed recipe. I do not think this is such a stretch. Hence this so called oh-my-gosh limitations nonsense is not so far-fetched.
What an AI would almost certainly tell you is that building an atomic bomb is no joke, even if you have access to a nuclear reactor, have the budget of a nation-state, and can direct an entire team of trained nuclear physicists to work on the project for years.
Next thing you'll be concerned about toddlers launching lasers into orbit and dominating the Earth from space.
Gotcha! We can both come up with absurd examples.
ChatGPT says "fuck" just fine.
How do you mean? Don’t see what OpenAI has in common with Catholicism or motherhood.
That was not about actual definition fro OpenAi but about definition implied by user Legend2440 here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344867
I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.
When the shit hits the fan the guy in charge of the bunker is going to be the one who knows how to clean off the fan and get the air filtration system running again.
it's gambling, pure and simple.
the point is, you cant rely on a scenario where society breaks down, that survivors will act more rational then than they do now.
Now imagine the rich talking about climate change, arguing to bring policies to tax the poor, and then flying off to vacations in private planes[2]. Same energy.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/richest-...
2 - https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-analysis/prince-will...
the problem with eugenics isn't that we can't control population land genetic expression, it's that genetic expression is a fractal landscape that's not predictable from human stated goals.
the ethics of doing things "because you meant well" is well established as, not enough.
unfortunately, people are flawed.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
More like "Republic of Weimar" kind of apocalypse, this time with the rich opportunists flying to New Zealand instead of Casablanca or the Austrian Alps.
the people wholl be in power then will still resemble the basics: violence, means of production and more violence.
which they know and are basically planning dystopian police states.
Probably a few CEOs great grand-childs will probably have to write how they're very very sad that their long forgotten relatives have destroyed most of the planet, and how they're just so lucky to be among the few that are still living a luxurious life somewhere in the Solomon Islands.
The rest of us just can't afford most of the insurance that we probably should have.
Insurance is for scenarios that are very unlikely to happen. Means nothing. If I was worth 300 mil I'd have insurance in case I accidently let an extra heavy toilet seat smash the boys downstairs.
Throw the money at radical weener rejuvination startups. Never know... Not like you have much to lose after that unlikely event.
I'd get insurance for all kinds of things.
Maybe it's risk mitigation without cost sharing to achieve the same economies of scale that insurance creates.
Its a rich man's way of removing risks that we are all exposed to via spending money on things that most couldn't seriously consider due to the likelihood of said risks.
I don't think it's duplicitous. I do resent that I can't afford it. I can't hate on them though. I hate the game, not the players. Some of these guy would prob let folks stay in their bunker. They just can't build a big enough bunker. Also most folks are gross to live with. I'd insist on some basic rules.
I think we innately are suspicious when advantaged folks are planing how they would handle the deaths of the majority of the rest of us. Sorta just... Makes one feel... Less.
Finger placed on duplicity.
Arguably only some of his time is spent on that kind of instability promoting activity. Most law enforcement agencies agree... Palantir good.
Most reasonable people agree... Funding your own senators and donating tons to Trump and friends... Bad.
Bad Thiel! Stick to wierd seasteading in your spare time if you want to get wierd. No 0 regulation AI floating compute unit seasteading. Only stable seasteading.
All kidding aside, you make a good point. Some of these guys should be a bit more responsible. They don't care what we think though. We're wierd non ceo hamsters who failed to make enough for the New Zealand bunker.
see, what exactly is insurance at the billionaires level.
Buddhists die in the Armageddon same as others.
The bunkers are in new Zealand which is an island and less likely to fall into chaos with the rest of the world in event of ww3 and/or moderate nuclear events.
I'm sure the bunkers are nice. Material notions got little to do with it. The bunker isn't filled with Ferraris. They are filled with food, a few copies of the internet and probably wierd sperms banks or who knows what for repopulating the earth with Altman's and Theils.
But surely, being a rich and powerful billionaire in a functioning civilization is more desirable than having the nicest bunker in the wasteland. Even if we assume their motives are 100% selfish destroying the world is not the best outcome for them.
If we hit the iceberg they will lose everything. Even if they're able to fly to their NZ hideout, it will already be robbed and occupied. The people that built and stocked their bunker will have formed a gang and confiscated all of his supplies. This is what happens in anarchy.
people like Steve jobs are the best example of flawed logic. in the face of a completely different set of heuristic and logical information, he assumed he was just as capable, and chose fruit smoothies over more efficacious and proven medication.
they absolutely, like jobs, are playing a game they think they fully understand and absolutely are likely to chose medicine akin to jobs
just watch Elon and everything he's choosing to do.
these people are all normal but society has given the a deadly amount of leverage without any specific training.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
In reality ownership is so dispersed that the shareholders in companies like Microsoft or Exxon have no say in long-term issues like this.
Exxon was responsible for the oil spill response that coagulated the oil and sank it. They were surprisingly proud of this, having recommended it to BP so that the extent of leaked oil was less noticeable from the surface.
Exxon also invested heavily in an alternative energy company doing research to create oil from a certain type of algae. The investment was all a PR stunt that gave them enough leverage to shelve the research that was successful enough to be considered a threat.
As far as we can tell humans are the only species that even has the capacity to recognize such things as “resources” and produce forecasts of their limits. Literally every other species is kept in check by either consuming resources until they run out or predation. We are not unique in this regard.
To some extent human societies viewed as eusocial organisms are better at this than individual humans. And rightly so, because human follies can have catastrophic effects on the society/organism.
Agreed, and we're also bad at being told what to do. Especially when someone says they know better than us.
What we are extremely good at is adaptation and technological advancement. Since we know this already , why do we try to stop or slow progress.
It is a good thing that society has mechanisms to at least try and control the rate of progress.
Godwin's Law.
Will nobody think of the poor shareholders?
> I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain.
It’s not any more silly than assuming corporate entities with shareholders will somehow necessarily work for the betterment of humanity.
Do you have a 401k? Index funds? A pension? You’re probably a Microsoft shareholder too.
sure, we should have competitive bodies seeking better means to ends but ultimately there's always going to be a structure to hold them accountable.
people have a lot of faith that money is the best fitness function for humanity.
Not a cartoon villain. A paperclip maximizer.
I’m not saying that’s definitely the case, but moving slowly when you live in a universe that might hurl a giant rock at you any minute doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Human welfare is the domain of politics, not the economic system. The forces that are supposed to inject human welfare into economic decisions are the state through regulation, employees through negotiation and unions and civil society through the press.
What you describe is indeed the liberal (as in liberalism) ideal of how societies should be structured. But what is supposed to happen is necessarily not what actually happens.
The state should be controlled by the population through democracy, but few would claim with a straight face that the economic power doesn't influence the state.
It doesn't take a cartoon supervillain to keep selling cigarettes like candy even though you know they increase cancer risks. Or for oil companies to keep producing oil and burying alternative energy sources. Or for the Sacklers to give us Oxy.
It's not wanting to destroy the world, but short term greed whose consequences destroy the world.
Rolling over, covering head with blanket. 'Surely the dystopian future, rich cleansing the world, is still a few decades away, just need a little more sleepy time'.
Interesting to note how much of this is driven by individual billionaire humans being hung up on stuff like ketamine. I'm given to understand numerous high-ranking Nazis were hung up on amphetamines. Humans like to try and make themselves into deities, by basically hitting themselves in the brain with rocks.
Doesn't end well.
If Ilya is concerned about safety and alignment, he probably has a better chance to get there with OpenAI, now the he has more control over it.
As to cat-and-mouse with jailbreakers, I don't remember any thorough articles or videos. It's mostly based on discussions on LLM forums. Claude is widely regarded as one of the best models for NSFW roleplay, which completely invalidates Antropic's claims about safety and alignment being "solved."
As for your actual question, it seems to me that a straw is topologically equivalent to a torus, so it has 1 hole, right?
For a mathematician, yes. For everyone else, it obviously has two, because when you plug one end, only then it has one.
> A straw has one hole that runs through its entire length.
I agree that this solution seems beneficial for both Microsoft and Sam Altman, but it reflects poorly on society if we simply accept this version of the story without criticism.
Seems like a textbook case of letting the best be the enemy of the good.
Although IMO MS has consistently been a technological tarpit. Whatever AI comes out of this arrangement will be a thin shadow of what it might have been.
Mate... Just because you don't bat perfect doesn't make you a tarpit.
MSFT is a technological powerhouse. They have absolutely killed it since they were founded. They have defined personal computing for multiple generations and more or less made the word 'software' something spoken occasionally at kitchen tables vs people saying 'soft-what?'
Definitely not a tarpit. You are throwing out whole villages of babies because of some various nasty bathwater over the years.
The picture is bigger. So much crucial tech from MSFT. Remains true today.
Gates keeps repeating. Noone hears it.
I’ve always thought that what OpenAI was purporting to do—-“protect” humanity from bad things that AI could do to it—-was a fool’s errand under a Capitalist system, what with the coercive law of competition and all.
A broad index fund sans Microsoft will do just fine. That's the whole point of a broad index fund.
Or being forced to use Teams and Azure, due to my company CEO getting the licenses for free out of his Excel spend? :-))
You'll just waste your time :)
Look, it's Microsoft's right to put any/all effort to making more money with their various practices.
It is our right to buy a Win10 Pro license for X amount of USD, then bolt down the ** out of it with the myriad of privacy tools to protect ourselves and have a "better Win7 Pro OS".
MS has always and will always try to play the game of getting more control, making more money, collecting more telemetry, do clean and dirty things until get caught. Welcome to the human condition. MS employees are humans. MS shareholders are also humans.
As for Windows Update, I don't think I've updated the core version at all since I installed it, and I am using WuMgr and WAU Manager (both portables) for very selective security updates.
It's a game. If you are a former sys-admin or a technical person, then you avoid their traps. If you are not, then the machine will chew your data, just like Google Analytics, AdMod, and so many others do.
Side-note: never update apps when they work 'alright', chances are you will regret it.
Some people downvote (it's not about the points) but I merely state the reality and not my opinions.
I've made my living as a sys-admin early in my career using MS products, so thank you MS for putting food on my table. But this doesn't negate the dirty games/dark patterns/etc.
The pain is real :(
"You use Windows because it is the only OS you know. I use Windows because it is the only OS you know."
I nominate this commentor to be interim ceo of hn comment quality control.
Your powers will include broad sweeping bans when comments fail to reach a minimum humor threshold along with the power to elevate your sucesssor who you will reincarnate into... Dalai Llama style. (rip... This was a positive comment. I'm no dalai Llama.)
HN isn't the place to have the political debate you seem to want to have, so I will simply say that this is really sad that you equate "sharing" with USSR style communism. There is a huge middle ground between that and the trickle-down Reaganomics for which you seem to be advocating. We should have let that type of binary thinking die with the end of the Cold War.
is all I'm saying. And I'm not interested in political debates. Neither right nor left side is good in long run. We have examples. More over we can predict what happens if...
"Europe is falling behind" very much depends on your metrics. I guess on HN it's technological innovation, but for most people the metric would be quality of life, happiness, liveability etc. and Europe's left-leaning approach is doing very nicely in that regard; better than the US.
You forget massive public investment?
Before that USSR collapsed under Gorbachev. Why? They simply lost with their planned economy where nobody wants to take a risk. Because (1) it's not rewarding, (2) no individual has enough resources (3) to get thing moving they will have to convince a lot of bureaucrats who don't want to take a risk. They moved forward thanks to few exceptional people. But there wasn't as many willing to take a risk as in 'rotting' capitalism. Don't know why, but leaders didn't see Chinese way. Probably they were busy with internal rats fights and didn't see what's in it for them.
My idea is that there are two extremes. On left side people can be happy like yogs. But they don't produce anything or move forward. On the right side is pure capitalism. Which is inhuman. The optimum is somewhere in between. With good life quality and fast progress. What happens when resources are shared too much and life is good? You can see it in Germany today. 80% of Ukrainian refugees don't works and don't want to.
You know what is an even bigger temptation to people than money - power. And being a high priest for some “god” controlling access from the unwashed masses who might use it for “bad” is a really heady dose of power.
This safety argument was used to justify monarchy, illiteracy, religious coercion.
There is a much greater chance of AI getting locked away from normal people by a non-profit on a power trip, rather than by a corporation looking to maximize profit.
If we use the standard of the alignment folks - that the technology today doesn't even have to be the danger, but an imaginary technology that could someday be built might be the danger. And we don't even have to be able to articulate clearly how it's a danger, we can just postulate the possibility. Then all technology becomes suspect, and needs a priest class to decided what access the population can have for fear of risking doomsday.
Do you think profit minded people and organizations aren't motivated by a desire for power? Removing one path to corruption doesn't mean I think it is impossible for a non-profit to become corrupted, but it is one less thing pulling them in that direction.
Just a "normal" startup could have worked too (but apparently not big corp)
Edit: Hmm sibling comment says sth else, I wonder if that makes sense
AI should benefit mankind, not corporate profit.
Did OpenAI and others pay for the training data from Stack Overflow, Twitter, Reddit, Github etc. Or any other source produced by mankind?
name a utopian fiction that has corporations as benefactors to humanity
AI is just another product by another corporation. If I get to benefit from the technology while the company that offers it also makes profit, that’s fine, I think? There wasn’t publicly available AI until someone decided to sell it.
>If I get to benefit from the technology while the company that offers it also makes profit, that's fine.
What if you don't benefit because you lose your job to AI or have to deal with the mess created by real looking disinformation created by AI?
Is was already bad with fake images out of ARMA but with AI we get a whole new level of fakes.
If you looked at sama's actions and not his words, he seems intent on maximizing his power, control and prestige (new yorker profile, press blitzes, making a constant effort to rub shoulders with politicians/power players, worldcoin etc). I think getting in bed with Microsoft with the early investment would have allowed sama to entertain the possibility that he could succeed Satya at Microsoft some time in the distant future; that is, in the event that OpenAI never became as big or bigger than Microsoft (his preferred goal presumably) -- and everything else went mostly right for him. After all, he's always going on about how much money is needed for AGI. He wanted more direct access to the money. Now he has it.
Ultimately, this shows how little sama cared for the OpenAI charter to begin with, specifically the part about benefiting all humanity and preventing an unduly concentration of power. He didn’t start his own separate company because the talent was at OpenAI. He wanted to poach the talent, not obey the charter.
Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ, RIP) wrote a book called "The Psychopath Code", where he posits that psychopaths are attracted to jobs with access to vulnerable people [0]. Selfless talented idealists who do not chase status and prestige can be vulnerable to manipulation. Perhaps that's why Musk pulled out of OpenAI, him and sama were able to recognize the narcissist in each other and put their guard up accordingly. As Altman says, "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”[1] Perhaps this apply to him as well.
Amusingly, someone recently posted an old tweet by pg: "The most surprising thing I've learned from being involved with nonprofits is that they are a magnet for sociopaths."[1] As others in the thread noted, if true, it's up for debate whether this applies more to sama or Ilya. Time will tell I guess.
It'll also be interesting to see what assurances were given to sama et al about being exempt from Microsoft's internal red tape. Prior to this, Microsoft had at least a little plausible deniability if OpenAI was ever embroiled in controversy regarding its products. They won't have that luxury with sama's team in-house anymore.
[0] https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/chapter8...
Here is the full excerpt of the part of the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review which was (more or less) authored behind the scenes by Microsoft's very kind and wise CSO:
We also recognize the risk of unintended nuclear escalation, which can result from accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon. The United States has extensive protections in place to mitigate this risk. As an example, U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are not on “hair trigger” alert. These forces are on day-to-day alert, a posture that contributes to strategic stability. Forces on day-to-day alert are subject to multiple layers of control, and the United States maintains rigorous procedural and technical safeguards to prevent misinformed, accidental, or unauthorized launch. Survivable and redundant sensors provide high confidence that potential attacks will be detected and characterized, enabling policies and procedures that ensure a deliberative process allowing the President sufficient time to gather information and consider courses of action. In the most plausible scenarios that concern policy leaders today, there would be time for full deliberation. For these reasons, while the United States maintains the capability to launch nuclear forces under conditions of an ongoing nuclear attack, it does not rely on a launch-under-attack policy to ensure a credible response. Rather, U.S. nuclear forces are postured to withstand an initial attack. In all cases, the United States will maintain a human “in the loop” for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment.
Microsoft is also working behind the scenes to help convince China to make a similar declaration, which President Xi is considering. This would reduce the vulnerability of China to being tricked into a nuclear war by fundamentalist terrorists. (See the scenario depicted in the 2019 film The Wolf's Call.)
Sheeeeh ...
I grew up with Microsoft in the 80s and 90s .. Microsoft has zero morals.
What you're referring to here is instinct for self preservation.
As perhaps a better example, Microsoft (including Azure) has been carbon-neutral since 2012:
https://unfccc.int/climate-action/un-global-climate-action-a....
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2012/05/08/making-carbon-ne...
It's almost like you believe Gates is General Butt Naked, where killing babies and eating their brains is all forgiven, because he converted to Christianity, and now helps people.
So?
How does that absolve the faulty ethics of the past?
So please, don't tell me Gates is 'ethical'. What a load of crock!
As for Microsoft, there is no change. Telling me they're carbon neutral is absurd. Carbon credits don't count, and they're doing it to attract clients, and employees... not because they have evolved incredible business ethics.
If they had, their entire desktop experience wouldn't, on a daily basis, fight with you, literally attack you into using their browser. They're literally using the precise same playbook from the turn of the century.
Microsoft takes your money, and then uses you, your desktop, your productivity, as the battleground to fight with competitors. They take your choice away, literally screw you over, instead of providing the absolute best experience you choose, with the product you've bought.
And let's not even get into the pathetic dancing advertisement platform windows is. I swear, we need to legislate this. We need to FORCE all computing platforms to be 100% ad free.
And Microsoft?
They. Are. Evil.
Really, all corporations are evil, and they are all made of humans that look the other way, because everyone needs that pay check to eat.
And on the sliding scale of evil, there are a lot of more evil. Like BP, pharma co, Union Carbide. etc... etc...
Or privacy invasion since Win10. Or using their monopoly power to force anti-consumer changes on hardware (such as TPM or Secure Boot).
As for Bill Gates ethical... you talking about that same Bill Gates that got kicked out by his wife because he insisted in being friends with convicted pedophile?
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/bill-melinda-gat...
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a425435...
What is next? A statement on Oracle kindness, based on Larry Ellison appreciation of Japanese gardens?
This is amazing. His very first public statement is to criticize the board that just hired him.
> I have a three point plan for the next 30 days:
> - Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.
This looks like a CEO a bit different from many others? (in a good way I'm guessing, for the moment)
With all the love and respect in the world, who do you think you're talking about? Emmet Shear is not trans to my knowledge, (nor, I suspect, his knowledge). If you think this was about Mira Murati, you should really get up to date before telling people off about pronouns.
(I thought also an interim CEO would be there more than a few days, and hadn't stored the name in my mind)
Are you perhaps referring to Mira Murati? She only lasted the weekend as interim CEO.
Did he say that before or after Microsoft announced they'd hired Altman and Brockman, and poached a lot of OpenAI's top researchers?
This isn't saying yes or no to a supervillain working in a secret volcano lair. This is an arms race. If it's possible for a technology to exist it will exist. The only choice we have is who gets it first. Maybe that means we get destroyed by it first before it destroys everyone else, or maybe it's the reason we don't get destroyed.
Not only that, it's a blindered take on what human opinion is. Humans are killer apes AND cooperative, practically eusocial apes. Failing to understand both horns of that dilemma is a serious mistake.
If they didn’t fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way.
At least this way, OpenAI can continue to operate independently instead of being Microsoft’s zombie vassal company with their mole Altman pulling the strings.
Everything points to this being a haphazard change that’s clumsy at best.
It seems like people forget that it was the investors’ money that made all this possible in the first place.
There are probably load so ways you can make language models with 100M parameters more efficient, but most of them won't scale to models with 100B parameters.
IIRC there is a bit of a phase transition that happens around 7B parameters where the distribution of activations changes qualitatively.
Anthropic have interpretability papers where their method does not work for 'small' models (with ~5B parameters) but works great for models with >50B parameters.
For Example, check out the proceedings of the AGI Conference that's been going on for 16 years. https://www.agi-conference.org/
I have faith that Ilya. He's not going to allow this blunder to define his reputation.
He's going to go all in on research to find something to replace Transformers, leaving everyone else in the dust.
Sama on X said as of late 2022 they were single digit pennies per query and dropping
The story would be much more interesting if actually AI had fired him.
Please fuckin don't. I do not want yet another entity to tell me how to live my life.
Nobody is telling you how to live your life, unless your life's goal is to erect Skynet.
Or so they say. I have no reason to trust them. It is not some little thing we are talking about
I realise it's strange to be claiming that a for-profit company is more likely to share AI than a nonprofit with "Open" in their name, yet that is the situation right now
Starting as a Non-Profit, naming it "Open" (the implication of the term Open in software is radically different from how they operate) etc. Now seems entirely driven by marketing and fiscal concerns. Feels like a bait and switch almost.
Meanwhile there's a whole strategy around regulatory capture going on, clouded in humanitarian and security concerns which are almost entirely speculative. Again, if we put our cynical hat on or simply follow the money, it seems like the whole narrative around AI safety (etc.) that is perpetuated by these people is FUD (towards law makers) and to inflate what AI actually can to (towards investors).
It's very hard for me right now not to see these actions as part of a machiavellistic strategy that is entirely focused around power, while it adorns itself with ethical concerns.
Delta Heavy - Ghost (Official Video)
People have gotten into their heads that researchers are good and corporations are bad in every case which is simply not true. OpenAI's mission is worse for humanity than Microsoft's.
If Microsoft came up with a way of making trillion dollars in profit by enslaving half the planet, it kinda has to do it.
Also companies, especially public companies, are typically mandated by law to prioritize profit.
I'm not versed in US law, and common law is quite a thing to verse for a layman. But e.g. here's a non-layman's quite clear view: https://www.wakeforestlawreview.com/2012/04/our-continuing-s...
At least in Finnish law it's very plainly clear: "The purpose of a [limited liability] company is to make profit for shareholders, unless otherwise indicated in the bylaws."
("Yhtiön toiminnan tarkoituksena on tuottaa voittoa osakkeenomistajille, jollei yhtiöjärjestyksessä määrätä toisin." Osakeyhtiölaki, luku 1 pykälä 5)
Edit: For contrast, the purpose of universities (and thus, at least in theory, university researchers) is by law to "promote free research and scientific and cultural enlightenment, give highest education based on research and raise [their] students to serve the fatherland and mankind". [pardon for some awkward to translate phrases]
You're talking about investors and shareholders like they're just machines that only ever prioritize profit. That's just obviously not true.
Most of stock is not owned by individual persons (not that there aren't individuals that don't give a shit about enslaving people), but other companies and institutions that by charter prioritize profit. E.g. Microsoft's institutional ownership is around 70%.
Probably safe to say Henry Ford had considerable power in Ford Motor Co compared most executives today?
That is not actually true, necessarily. Your power is typically very term dependent. A CEO who is also president of the board, and a majority shareholder, has far more power than a CEO who just stepped in temporarily and has only the powers provided by the by-laws.
Regardless, the solution to "I want to do something ethical that is not strictly in the company's best interest" is to make the case that it is the company's best interest. For example, "By investing in our employees we are actually prioritizing shareholder value". If you position it as "this is a move that hurts shareholders", of course that's illegal - companies have an obligation to every shareholder.
That also means that if you give your employees stock, they now have investor rights too. You can structure your company this way from the start, it's trivial and actually the norm in tech - stock is handed out to many employees.
A journalist was car bombed in broad daylight.
If you push the wrong buttons of trillion dollar corporations, they just off you can continue with business as usual.
If Microsoft sees trillions of dollars in ending all of your work, they’ll take it in a heart beat.
I know about a man who had turned country upside down while "having people's best interests" in mind.
"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 created, or even articulated a coherent, legible, and believable model for enshrining humanity's interests. The corporate structure flowchart of nonprofit, LLCs, and such.. it is not anywhere near sufficient.
OpenAI in no way belongs to humanity. Not rhetorically, legally or in practice... currently.
I'm all for efforts to prevent these new technologies from being stolen from humanity, controlled monopolistically... From moderate to radical ideas, I'm all ears.
What is happened to the human consortium that was the worldwideWeb, gnu, and descendant projects like Wikipedia... That was moral theft, imo. And for any effort to avoid a repeat. OpenAI is not such an effort, as far as I can tell.
If it is, it's not too late. Open AI haven't betrayed the generous reading of their mission in charter. They just haven't taken hard steps to achieving it. It has been left open, and I think the more realistic take is the default one.
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.
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.
It's interesting that "Effective Altruism" enthusiasts all seem to be mega-rich grifters.
Indeed, I think trying to do it that way increases the risk that the single private organization captures its regulators and ends up without effective oversight. To put it bluntly: I think it's going to be easier, politically, to regulate this technology with it being a battle between Microsoft, Meta, and Google all focused on commercial applications, than with the clearly dominant organization being a nonprofit that is supposedly altruistic and self-regulating.
I have sympathy for people who think that all sounds like a bad outcome because they are skeptical of politics and trust the big brains at OpenAI more. But personally I think governments have the ultimate responsibility to look out for the interests of the societies they govern.
Um, have you heard of lead additives to gasoline? CFCs? Asbestos? Smoking? History is littered with complete failures of governments to appropriately regulate new technology in the face of an economic incentive to ignore or minimize "externalities" and long-term risk for short-term gain.
The idea of having a non-profit, with an explicit mandate to use to pursue the benefit of all mankind, be the first one to achieve the next levels of technology was at least worth a shot. OpenAI's existence doesn't stop other companies from pursuing technology, nor does it prevent governments doing coordination. But it at least gives a chance that a potentially dangerous technology will go in the right direction.
Most of those problems have been solved or at least been reduced by regulation. Regulators however aren't all knowing gods and one finds out about risks and problems only later, but except for smoking regulators have covered those aspects (and anti-smoking laws become stricter, generally, depending on country, regularly, but it's a cultural habit older than most states ...)
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.)
There must be an Aesop’s fable that sheds light on the “tragedy”.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/923989-if-you-choose-bad-co...
Or maybe this one? (Ape seems to map to Microsoft, or possibly a hat tip to Balmer ..)
The fable is of the Two Travellers and the Apes.
Two men, one who always spoke the truth and the other who told nothing but lies, were traveling together and by chance came to the land of Apes. One of the Apes, who had raised himself to be king, commanded them to be seized and brought before him, that he might know what was said of him among men. He ordered at the same time that all the Apes be arranged in a long row on his right hand and on his left, and that a throne be placed for him, as was the custom among men.
After these preparations, he signified that the two men should be brought before him, and greeted them with this salutation: “What sort of a king do I seem to you to be, O strangers?’ The Lying Traveller replied, “You seem to me a most mighty king.” “And what is your estimate of those you see around me?’ “These,” he made answer, “are worthy companions of yourself, fit at least to be ambassadors and leaders of armies”. The Ape and all his court, gratified with the lie, commanded that a handsome present be given to the flatterer.
On this the truthful Traveller thought to himself, “If so great a reward be given for a lie, with what gift may not I be rewarded if, according to my custom, I tell the truth?’ The Ape quickly turned to him. “And pray how do I and these my friends around me seem to you?’ “Thou art,” he said, “a most excellent Ape, and all these thy companions after thy example are excellent Apes too.” The King of the Apes, enraged at hearing these truths, gave him over to the teeth and claws of his companions.
The end.
https://nitter.net/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
“I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
Nov 20, 2023 · 1:15 PM UTC - Ilya S.
It's ironic because the only AI that doesn't have "pesky ethics qualms" are... literally the entire open source scene, all of the models on hugging face, etc...
All of the megacorps are the only safety and security happening in AI. I can easily run open source models locally and create all manner of political propaganda, I could create p^rnography of celebrities and politicians, or deeply racist or bigoted materials. The open source scene makes this trivial these days.
So to describe it as "Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms" when the open source scene has already done that today is just wild to me.
We have AI without ethics today, and every not-for-profit researcher, open source model and hacker with a cool script are behind it. If OpenAI goes back to being Open, they'll help supercharge the no-ethics AI reality of running models without corporate safety and ethics.
I assumed it was their entertaining offers from Microsoft that got Sam the ax from the OpenAI board.
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.
This guy doesn't care about money y'all...
He needs money to do big things and execute. He gets high on making big stuff happen.
So many Altman haters every way I turn. He turned down ownership in a now 90 billion dollar company... The guy is busted up from success and now that's all he digs. Money is for idiots.
Folks need to read the room. Once you hit a couple hundred mil net worth only a fool cares about stacking on more bills. That's just a side affect of tap dancing to work... Jobs was worth what? 2 billion?
Who think satya cares about money... Get real. He wants the most he can get so his foundation when he retires can make big changes and do Bill Gates stuff.
This place is just as bad as reddit sometimes. No offense to anyone in particular. Some of these youngsters need to comment less and read a few more ceo bio's... Or just go watch YouTube interviews from the finance guy... Whatshisname leveraged buyout wizard whitehair with a JD who sits on billions but realized he preferred to be a journalist sometimes before he kicks it.
He needs money to do big things and execute. He gets high on making big stuff happen."
So what you're saying is he cares about power.
Chief Executive Officer.
They execute. Objectives. Changing stuff. It's addictive. Ask me how I know.
(edit: big shot Wendy's night shift manager. When you roll up at 2am our ice-cream machine was never being cleaned, that'll be 89 cents please. Enjoy your ice-cream sir/ma'am.
You never go back. I changed the world for the better)
In semantic terms I agree.
The negative connotation is the baggage I bring. I recind my implied critism. Pursuit of power is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps I need to think on this.
I am. In fact the goals of any for-profit company is the profit. If a CEO doesn't align with that goal in mind, they get replaced. That's non-negotiable. A for-profit company without profit is a dead company.
The broader point is that considering short term personal financial gain is beneath an exec at Satya's level.
He has a responsibility to do more than just maximize value though. Corporate values are a real thing and msft has pretty clearly integrated them in various ways for a long time.
They pledged to carbon capture all carbon going back to their founding... For example. What does that have to do with profit? Nada... Outside of making folkes feel less climate guilt when they buy a share. Now that... Very clever for profit.
You think the guy is gonna be a regular c suite exec?
They are going to be a special group with special rules. This is so they can build off the existing code base. Only msft has that openai ip.
If they go to Google or start their own thing it's rewrite or work off someone else's painting. Not to mention building out compute infrastructure.
Big loss of time. Go to msft, get special status, maybe even an exit clause with IP included. Easy win. Was always gonna be msft if not openai negotiated return. I just didn't realize that till satya threw them the offer that worked.
These guys didn't sign up to be cogs. Satya respects them.
Gpt4 is included in bing man... Bing creative mode and balanced mode both.
This is widely known. The investment included access to openai technology for integration in msft services.
Its not a traditional arrangement. This is also widely known. Its a complicated investment with a profitability sunset triggering return of equity to the nonprofit. Also included is technology transfer as long as the sunset doesn't trigger.
This is why Ilya felt comfortable to do it. He did many interviews where he explained this.
Its speculative. Others might disagree. I spoke to this in a comment above.
Your skepticsm seems reasonable to me, but I think my broader point is defensible, though I just don't really care to go further with it. Now I'm reading 85 percent of them have revolted lol.
Maybe we meet again in the other post.
(edit: 'perpetual license to openai ip short of agi'
Not sure of the details. This is was I see being written.
https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...'
The original 2019 deal was described as:
> Microsoft and OpenAI will jointly build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies
> OpenAI will port its services to run on Microsoft Azure, which it will use to create new AI technologies and deliver on the promise of artificial general intelligence
> Microsoft will become OpenAI’s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies
The $10 billion deal was probably not making a ton of money for MSFT as it was 75% percent of profits, which are easy to get rid of, until they get 49% of the company.
Can you explain why MSFT would spend $10 B for either of these things if they just got OpenAI’s IP?
Its obvious that they have to redo less of the stack if the go to msft. At the very least, they already wrote everything to scale with azure.
With respect to IP... My comment was mostly suggesting they could enjoy privaledge to leave msft at some point in the future with IP with them.
How much of the source do they get to avoid rewriting on day 1 at msft? No idea. Could be all of it... But again... At least they already scaled into azure compute architecture and don't have to reinvent the wheel. That's not a small thing.
Not really debating it further. Seems really obvious to me that broadly speaking, for all kinds of reasons, probably access to source inckuded, they will be able to get up to speed substantially faster at msft vs anywhere else.
It's too speculative to be worse discussing in depth. We don't have enough details, but my broader assertion is more or less defensible imo. Others might disagree. Not worth a debate imo.
(edit: 'perpetual license to openai ip short of agi'
Not sure of the details. This is was I see being written.
https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...'
The exchange of services and goods in a market is positive-sum.
As long as you ignore externalities, yes.
If I have a solar panel factory, and I sell you a panel, so you can make green electricity - isn't that good for you, me AND the planet?
> Even if you consider all externalities, trade is positive-sum.
even if the business pollutes the environment or contributes to climate change in an outlier way?
You're arguing a straw man. Which means your reading comprehension is bad or you're intentionally mudding the waters. Either way, I think we're good here.
and i'm not arguing anything. i'm asking a question. in which case, ironically, your reading comprehension missed that.
"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.
Sam is a serial startup (co)founder who has spent additional time at YC -- in the startup world, that kind of talk is so common as to be a stereotype. It's a good way to get people who do care about that kind of stuff to accept equity in a firm that is statistically likely to fail (or, in OpenAI's case, explicitly warns investors that they should not expect profit and treat investments as donations) as compensation when they could earn greater secure compensation from more established firms. It's a great sales pitch, even when there is no truth behind it.
What does the word "moot" mean in this context?
Basically what you see these days is PR teams together with legal teams acting like individual that hired them. There are exceptions, but they are outliers in say Trump style, not these billionaires. Same, heck even more for politics.
It can be easily transferred into personal or professional relationships. For me at least, this analysis works 100% of the time when for example rest of friends or family struggle hard to understand actions of some individuals. Just point them to their previous actions and see the consistency emerging. This is how you can easily work with various people if you are smart but lack social skills, just observe actions and ignore blah.
People simply don't change, they may reflect change in their environment but thats it. Unless we talk about 2 decades+ since last encounter, but even then it may be just more polished PR.
It's a cliche, but it's true: actions speak louder than words.
You are the things you do, not the things you say you want to be.
go read musks public statements leading up to Twitter purchase.
it's pretty clear they were fired because of profit motives. that's all I hear.
There's nothing wrong with your post! I just need to prune the heaviest subthreads—sorry!
What exactly can a foundation in charge of OpenAI do to prevent this unethical use of the technology? If OpenAI refuses to use it to some unethical goal, what prevents other, for profit enterprises, from doing the same? How can private actors stop this without government regulation?
Sounds like Truman's apocryphal "the Russian's will never have the bomb". Well, they did, just 4 years later.
in America, nonprofits are just how rich people run around trying to get tax avoidance, plaudettes and now wealth transfers.
I doubt OpenAI is different not that Altman is anything but a figurehead.
but nonprofits in America is how the government has chosen to derelict it's duties.
I'm no embarrased billionaire, but there is a place for both.
A non-profit is not by any means guaranteed to avoid the dangers of AI. But at a minimum it will avoid the greed-driven myopia that seems to be the default when companies are beholden to Wall Street shareholders.
Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?
For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or something.
Nah it would make it too understandable. It's Microsoft, they'll just rename Bing to Cortana Series X 365. And they'll keep Cortana alive but as a totally different product.
AAPL: 18.79 -> 170.77 (9.08x)
MSFT: 38.31 -> 338.11 (8.82x)
AMZN: 18.10 -> 133.09 (7.35x)
META: 68.46 -> 301.27 (4.40x)
GOOG: 30.28 -> 125.30 (4.14x)Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a coherent AI strategy at the moment.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ff8RCKwUcAEkWk_?format=jpg&name=...
If you look at the charts with revenue streams - Microsoft is the most diversified in that regard, because basically each and every branch of Microsoft produces the similar amount of revenue.
With Xbox getting Activision it lifts up More Personal Computing to the level, comparable to other streams (and even higher than Windows).
The guy was born in the cloud compute division.
The board saw cloud compute was gonna be big. They made him the king. Good bet. The whole company went all in on cloud. Now they print more money than before.
Marketing person lol. He's an engineer. The guy literally gets back into VS code sometimes to stay in touch.
Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity which he had. Unlike Billg (who missed the dawn of the Internet) and the chair-throwing dude (who fumbled Mobile), Satya is making sure Microsoft does NOT miss AI. Which is even more impressive as Google was kind of expected to be the winner initially, given the whole company's focus , mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and a considerable (at the time) lead, if not a moat.
I dare to compare his turnaround to Jobs'. Sure, MSFT wasn't weeks away from insolvency when he took over, and some of their current successes were indeed started before his tenure, but just look at where Windows 8 was going.
*Edit: Just as a clarification: Not an employee, I actually dislike them profoundly and would never join them. I'm not sure this move is the best outcome for mankind - but credit where credit's due, they were shrewd, smart and right on time. Hats off.
Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which was a wrong prediction.
And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another AT&T merger fiasco.
With billg missing the dawn of the Internet, I didn't mean the IE integration fiasco and the resulting lawsuit - that's actually the part they got more or less right (in their own perverted 3E approach, not according to my moral compass), but too late to become dominant. They first wasted time trying to create their own MSN walled garden a la Compuserve .
To Ballmer's credit he did start Azure, although it doesn't feel it was a serious enough effort, until he was replaced. But between Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Skype, Zune, Kin, etc etc... it's no wonder it's been called Microsoft's lost decade.
Windows got massively worse during his tenure in literally everything that can get worse including half-legal snooping on all users including Enterprise ones (I stand by the statement that this is idiotic long term strategy driven by childish emotions like FOMO - no way he didn't have a direct say in this).
Office is certainly PITA and getting worse in my experience, but that can be corporate modifications/restrictions I am exposed to.
Teams was, is and probably forever will be pathetic, buggy, slow and just a bad joke compared to some competition with 1% of their budget.
These are core extremely visible products and for most of mankind 100% of the surface with MS. There is not even an attempt for corrections, direction is set and rest are details.
And despite the shittiness, even that 5% is doing great because their audience is now billions of mostly computer-illiterate people, who don't even have an opinion on the technical merits, the performance, the bugginess, the snooping, the feature gap, etc etc etc.
The opinion of few million geeks who are mostly not using Windows anyway (or whose only contacts with anything Microsoft are due to their employers' choice of platform) doesn't ultimately matter much, Microsoft knows it, and they have no reason to change direction despite our frustration. Some better privacy law could nudge them, anything short of a legal directive won't go far.
The core thing he is 100% focused on is not having a massive stock drop Monday morning. That’s it that’s his reason to exist all weekend long.
After that. He has time to figure it out.
So basically they get to control ChatGPT 2.0 and get a 10 billion tax credit for it.
Honestly the board at least owes Satya a drink.
Absolutely no one could have predicted Sam being removed as CEO without anyone knowledge until it happened.
But regardless a 10b investment has yields huge results for MS. MS is using openAI tech, they aren’t dependent on the openAI api or infrastructure to provide their AI in every aspect of MS products.
That 10b investment has prob paid itself back already and MS is leveraging AI faster than anyone else and has a stronger foothold on the market.
If the board can’t look past what 10b got then. I wouldn’t have faith in the board.
The money was promised in tranches, and probably much of it in the form of spare Azure capacity. Microsoft did not hand OpenAI a $10B check.
Satya gives away something he had excess of, and gets 75% of the profits that result from its use, and half of the resulting company. Gives him an excuse to hoard Nvidia GPUs.
If it goes to the moon he’s way up. If it dies he’s down only a fraction of the $10B. If it meanders along his costs are somewhat offset, and presumably he can exit at some point.
In all this drama, the deep work interruption of the nerds is the net loss (and effectively slight deceleration) for the future.
1. When they invested in Open AI it had a more mature board (in particular Reid Hoffman) and afterwards they lost a few members without replacing them. That was probably something Microsoft could have influenced without making themselves part of the problem.
2. They received a call one minute before the decision was made public. That shouldn't happen to a partner that owns 49% of the company you just fired a CEO from.
Sources:
1 - https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
2 - https://www.axios.com/2023/11/17/microsoft-openai-sam-altman...
Nadella was rightly furious about this, the tail wagged the dog there. And this isn't over yet: you can expect a lot of change on the OpenAI side.
The argument would go something like this:
MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and its mission.
"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/2013/9/2/4688530/microsoft-buys-nok...
Then in 2016 sold it for 360 million?
"Nokia returns to the phone market as Microsoft sells brand" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-ret...
"Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion" - https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without disrupting user experience?
"Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps doing its thing" - https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/four-years-after-being-acq...
or when they acquired LinkedIn before that?
"Microsoft buys LinkedIn" - https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-buys-linke...
which turned out to be fine too?
How about Minecraft? Activision?
It's easy to cherry-pick examples from an era where Microsoft wasn't the most successful. The current leadership seems competent and the stock growth of the company reflects that.
The fact that this is even news speaks of the absolute shit job they've done with acquisitions in the past.
Looking at the global track records of what happens after acquisitions, these don't seem too bad
"... In the two years since the acquisition announcement, GitHub has reported a 41% increase in status page incidents. Furthermore, there has been a 97% increase in incident minutes, compared to the two years prior to the announcement..."
Maybe they got funding for a proper incident team? Or changed the metrics of a incdient is, maybe the SLAs changed to mirror MS SLAs?
Also Betteridge's law.
GitHub is stronger now then it ever has been.
Excuse you? Greater where? Github was an amazing revolution, unique of its kind. Microsoft didn't kill it but didn't make it even 1% better for the users, just turned it into a cash cow. Linkedin is currently a PoS.
I think it can be argued that giving free private repos to user is a 1% increase. Or what about private vulnerability reporting for open source projects. And so on. Github has gotten a lot of new free functionality since Microsoft bought it. It sounds like you just have not been paying attention.
Edit: Nevermind, I see you refer to Microsoft as M$. That really says it all.
Linkedin has not improved its problems with spam or content quality since Microsoft took over.
Not unreliable enough to be a problem though, and Actions seems to be a decent experience for plenty of people.
The simple fact with GitHub is that it is _the_ primary place to go looking for, or post your, open source code, and it is the go-to platform for the majority of companies looking for a solution to source code hosting.
Your comment about LinkedIn is true, but where is the nearest competition in its' space?
I sense a lot of respect and appreciation for his role, but unfortunately I just don’t know many details and I’m curious about the highlights.
might be missing some more but Satya is like a S tier CEO, compared to Sundar who doesn't seem very good at his role.
It seems to me roughly all of the value of OpenAI’s products is in the model itself and presumably the supporting infrastructure, neither of which seem like they’re going to MSFT (yet?).
It's seems like a cult right now, tbh.
Whether they actually move to MS or not remains to be seen, but it is definitely a strong indicator that they're not "aligned" with OpenAI anymore.
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775?s...
This is a win from Microsoft's perspective. They don't have to have the best group messenger around, but having a significant office product being dominated by another company would be a massive risk to Microsoft, and Teams has prevented that.
Meanwhile Microsoft wins if OpenAI stays dominant and wins even bigger if Sam and Greg prevail. Some day soon they may teach this story at Harvard Business School.
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft has one of the most renowned industry research groups or something like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
Not sure. He hires and is going to invests further into the people who, instead of delivering as promised, brought him this mess. It all looks like a panic scrambling on the part of Satya and Altman. Like as if the whole deal was hinging on Altman - such risky deal would be a mistake on part of Satya, the mistake that he is scrambling to cover.
Microsoft will not have actually paid $10B as a single commitment, in fact the financials of OpenAI appear to be alarming from the recent web chatter. OpenAI are possibly close to collapse financially as well as organizationally.
Whatever Satya does will be aimed at isolating Microsoft and its roadmap from that, his job is actually also on the line for this debacle.
The OpenAI board have ruined their credibility and organization.
Now they get 40 percent of open ai talent and 50 percent of the for profit openai subsidiary.
Pretty sure when the market opens you'll see confirmation that they came out on top.
It's a win for everyone honestly. Anthropic split all over again but this time the progressives got pushed out vs the conservatives leaving voluntarily.
They couldn't keep nice under the tent. Now two tents.
Little diff because this time an investor with special privaleges made a new special tent quick to bag talent.
Easy decision for msft. No talent to competitors. Small talent pool. The other big boys were already all over that. Salty bosses at other outfits. No poach for them. Satya too clever and brought the checkbook plus already courted the cutest girls earlier for a different dance. Hell he was assisting in the negotiation when the old dance got all rough and the jets started throwing hooks about safety and scale and bla bla we all know the story.
Satya hunts with an elephant gun with one of those laser sites and the auto trigger that fires automatically when the cross hair goes over the target. Rip sundar. 2 rounds for satya. One more and I feel bad for Google... Naw... Couldn't feel bad for Google. Punchable outfit. They do punchable things. We all know it... I'm just saying it.
You are imagining I fall in a crowd you've observed. Maintaining statute of the art ofc is a constant battle.
Google could be top dog in 2 weeks. Never insinuated otherwise. (though I predict otherwise, if we're gonna speculate)
Its not even relevant because each big firm is specializing to a degree. Anthropic is going for context window and safety... Bard is all about Google priorities... Ect
By all accounts, OpenAI is not a going concern without Azure. I could see Tesla could acquire the bankrupt shell for the publicity, but the worker bees seem to be more keen on their current leader (as of last week) than their prior leader. Either way, OpenAI ends with a single owner.
Hiring Altman makes sure that MSFT is still relevant to the whole Altman/OpenAI deal, not just a part of it. Hiring Altman thus decreases such possibility to write-off its investment.
If he manages to get a significant amount of the OpenAI engineers to jump ship maybe, but even for those who are largely motivated by money, how is MS going to offer the same opportunity as when they joined for equity with OpenAI? Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
My uneducated guess is that OpenAI really screwed up the PR part and the current Microsoft’s claims are more on the overall damage control / fire suppression side.
Even if he does nothing, he keeps the team together and that is worth quite a bit.
My guess is that a lot of the people that will follow Sam and Gregg are that kind of cult-follower.
The problem is if we had a time machine and could run it back the exact same team wouldn't come up with the same result. The number of decisions that lead to the outcome are mind blogging.
Sam Altman is the type that wasn't motivated by money. So many fucking suckers in tech.
Recruiting. At the end of the day, that's the most important job a CEO has. If they can recruit the best AI people, they're the most formidable AI team.
> Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
I would wager very heavily that they are. My guess is Satya more or less promised Sam that he'd match comp for anybody who wants to leave OpenAI.
This sounds like hyperbole, but isn't that what China is doing?
There was a lot of discussion on HN the past few days regarding the importance (or lack thereof) of a CEO to an organization. It may be the case that most executives are interchangeable and attributing success to them is not merited, but in the case of the aforementioned, I think it is merited.
Slashdot literally used to call them M$
There was an article that came out over the weekend that stated that only a small part of that $10B investment was in cash, the vast majority is cloud GPU credits, and that it has a long time horizon with only a relatively small fraction having been consumed to date. So, if MSFT were to develop their own GPT4 model in house over the next year or so they could in theory back out of their investment with most of it intact.
How so? I don't get the hype.
OpenAI had such ground breaking models that they would have been successful with just about any management in place. Everything outside the models was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at best, average. They called their flagship product "ChatGPT", a term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a random string of letters to the average person. They had no mobile app for a long time. Their web app had some pretty major bugs.
Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success by far and large hinges on their game-changing models.
That's a slightly flamboyant reading.. but I agree with the gist.
A slim chance of total right off doctor off.. that was always the case. This decision does not affect it much. The place in the risk model, where most of the action happens... Is less dramatic effects on more likely bans of the probability curve.
Msft cannot be kicked off the team. They still have all of the rights to their openai investment no matter who the CEO is.
Meanwhile, is clearly competing, participating, and doing business with openai. The hierarchy of paradigms, is flexible... Competing appears to have won.
I agree that direct financial returns, are the lesser part of the investment case for msft.. and the other participants. That's pretty much standard in consortium-like ventures.
At the base level, openai's IP is still largely science, unpatentable know how and key people. Msft have some access to (I assume) of openAI' defendable IP via their participation in the consortium, or 49% ownership of the for-profit entity. Meanwhile, openai is not so far ahead that pacing them from a dead start is impossible.
I also agree, that this represents a decision to launch ahead aggressively in the generative AI space.
In the latter 2000s, Google have the competence, technology, resources and momentum to smash anyone else on anything worldwideWeb.
They won all the "races." Google have never been good at turning wins into businesses, but they did acquire the wins handily. Microsoft wants to be that for the 2020s.
Able to replicate everything, for the new paradigm OpenAI's achievments probably represents.
The AI spreadsheet. The LLM email client. GPT search. Autobot jira. Literally and proverbially.
At least in theory... Microsoft is or will be in a position to start executing on all of these.
Sama, if he's actually motivated to do this.. it's pretty much the ideal person on planet earth for that task.
I'm sure takes a lot to motivate him. Otoh, CEO of Microsoft is it realistic prize if he wins this game. The man is basically Microsoft the person. I mean that as a compliment.. sort of.
One way or another, I expect that implementing OpenAI-ish models in applications is about commence.
Companies have been pleading chatbot customer support for years. They may get it soon, but so will the customers. That makes for a whole new thing in the place where customer support used to exist. At least, that is the bull case.
That said, I have said a lot. All speculative. I'll probabilistic, even where my speculations are correct. These are not really predictions. I'm chewing the cud.
Google has been hyping gemini since the spring (and not delivering it)
Amazon's Titan Model is not quite there yet.
Or at least the most hyped AI team in the world. The level of cult of personality around OpenAI is reaching pretty nauseating levels.
Yes directly, the $10B investment in the company itself may be a write off. But it's not just about that.
I also assume there will be heavy litigation about what Sam et al can bring with them, and what they cannot.
For Sam , he got more than what he was asking and a better prospect to become CEO of Microsoft when Satya leaves. Satya lead cloud division, which was the industry growth market at that time before becoming CEO and now sam is leading AI division , the next growth market.
Ilya still lost in all of this , he managed to get back the keys of a city from sam , who now got this keys to the whole country . Eventually sam will pull everyone out of the city in to rest of his country. Microsoft just needs a few openai employees to join them . They just need data and GPU , openai has reached its limits for getting more data and was begging for more private data while Microsoft holds worlds data, they will just give a few offers to business or free Microsoft products in return of using their data or use their own. I think it’s the end for openAI.
They won’t necessarily be able to attract similar technical talent because they no longer have the open non profit mission not the lottery ticket startup PPO shares.
Working on AI at Microsoft was always an option even before they were hired, not sure if they tip the scale?
Credit to Nadella for making a big cultural shift over the past several years.
Not sure why you didn’t research before saying that! It was $10B committed and not a cash handover of that amount. Also, majority of that’s Azure credits
Context:
---------
1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level
1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition.
1.3/ Microsoft, after investing $10+ Billions do not want this fight enable slow progress of AI Commercialization and fall behind Google AI etc..
a workable solution:
--------------------
2.1/ @sama @gdb form a new AI company, let us call it e/acc Inc.
2.2/ e/acc Inc. raises $3 Billions as SAFE instrument from VCs who believed in Sam Altman's vision.
2.3/ Open AI and e/acc Inc. reach an agreement such that:
a) GPT-4 IP transferred to e/acc Inc., this IP transfer is valued as $8 Billion SAFE instrument investment from Open AI into e/acc Inc.
b) existing Microsoft's 49% share in Open AI is transferred to e/acc Inc., such that Microsoft owns 49% of e/acc Inc.
c) the resulted "Lean and pure non-profit Open AI" with Ilya Sukhar and Board can steer AI progress as they wish, their stake in e/acc Inc. will act as funding source to cover their future Research Costs.
d) employees can join from Open AI to e/acc Inc. as they wish with no antipoaching lawsuits from OpenAI
Like some googlers have mentioned - aside from GPU requirements, there isn't much else of a moat since a lot of ML ideas are presented and debated relatively freely at NEURIPS, ICML and other places.