Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

Re:Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft by sigmoid10 on Monday November 20, 2023 @08:04AM (#38347393)

That is just a matter of perspective. It's clearly a win-win if you're on team Sam. But if you're on team Ilya, this is the doomsday scenario: With commercialisation and capital gains for a stock traded company being the main driving force behind the latest state of the art in AI, this is exactly what OpenAI was founded to prevent in the first place. Yes, we may see newer better things faster and with better support if the core team moves to Microsoft. But it will not benefit humanity as a whole. Even with their large investment, Microsoft's contract with OpenAI specifically excluded anything resembling true AGI, with OpenAI determining when this point is reached. Now, whatever breakthrough in the last weeks Sam was referring to, I doubt it's going to move us to AGI immediately. But whenever it happens, Microsoft now has a real chance to sack it for themselves and noone else.

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Re:Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft by ethanbond on Monday November 20, 2023 @08:40AM (#38347854)

OAI will still modulate the pace of actual model development though

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Re:Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft by onlyrealcuzzo on Monday November 20, 2023 @08:36AM (#38347790)

Thinking this is clearly a big win for MSFT is like thinking it's easy to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

There's been a lot of uncertainty created.

It's interesting that others see so much "win" certainty.

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Re:Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft by sigmoid10 on Monday November 20, 2023 @09:09AM (#38348370)

From Microsoft's perspective, they have actually lowered uncertainty. Especially if that OpenAI employee letter from 500 people is to be believed, they'll all end up at Microsoft anyways. If that really happens OpenAI will be a shell of itself while Microsoft drives everything.

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Re:Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft by onlyrealcuzzo on Monday November 20, 2023 @11:53AM (#38350407)

OpenAI already has the best models and traction.

So MSFT still needs to compete with OpenAI - which will likely have an extremely adversarial relationship with MSFT if MSFT poaches nearly everyone.

What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?

Doesn't seem like a win for MSFT at all.

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Re:Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft by smoldesu on Monday November 20, 2023 @01:29PM (#38352161)

> What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?

Then they would be on roughly equal footing with Microsoft, since they'd have an abundance of engineers and a cloud partner. More or less what they just threw away, on a smaller scale and with less certain investors.

This is quite literally the best attainable outcome, at least from Microsoft's point of view. The uncertainty came from the board's boneheaded (and unrepresentative) choice to kick Sam out. Now the majority of engineers on both sides are calling foul on OpenAI and asking for their entire board to resign. Relative to the administrative hellfire that OpenAI now has to weather, Microsoft just pulled off the fastest merger of their career.

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