This was a brilliant power move by Satya. I don't see any hope for OpenAI after this brain drainage.
"The OpenAI for-profit subsidiary was about to conduct a secondary at a $80 billion+ valuation. These 'Profit Participation Units' were going to be worth $10 million+ for key employees. Suffice it to say this is not going to happen now," chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis said."
Insane self own by OpenAI
My unfounded Internet opinion: OpenAI just removed or reduced a large source of reward and have shown fundamental instability. OpenAIs success is very much tied to Employees and Compute.
It's insane to see all these takes when we don't even know what caused the loss of trust in the first place.
creating ASI for money seems particularly asinine as the machine overlords won't care terribly much about dollars
We are very complicated creatures and things get out of control, both internally and externally. My armchair opinion is that they started to believe that all of it is so advanced and important, that they lost a bit of a grip on reality. Sutskever imagining planet covered with data centers and solar panels shows me that [0]. Every single person is limited in his/her view - I get a strange feeling when listening to him in this video. Also, they are not the only people left on this planet. Fortunately, this task of creating AI/AGI is not a task for a pack of ten, trying to save us from harm. Still, it may and probably will get rough. /rant
OpenAI, in contrast, will become more like an academic research unit at some university. Those who prefer life slow and steady, will select to stay there, making tech for effective altruists.
if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future AGI.
if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future "AGI".
Open source doesn’t necessarily imply good for humanity, for example distributing open source designs for nukes would probably be a net negative.
And even if it did, effective altruists wouldn’t need to prioritize the benefit provided by openness over all other possibilities.
Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their organizations up for unique success.
And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it. Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally distinct.
And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of smooth operator, apparently I was unfamiliar with the term in tech.
A business operator is like a machine operator. You're pulling levers on a machine that someone else built while optimizing and tweaking to get the best performance out of that machine as possible.
I think now, having tried to fill in my missing knowledge, that it comes from the same root as DevOps, which I erroneously thought was related to SpecOps. DevOps comes from IT Operations which comes from Operations Management, which yes, is like a machine operator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_management
Edit: here's a post with "Founder Operators". Which seems like maybe if you just heard "Operator" you would assume they're not a founder, but also that the term can be applied for those running businesses they founded: https://startupceo.com/2023/01/5-things-successful-founder-o...
Yes, this is probably the biggest self-own in corporate history.
Do you realize how hard it is to make something like GPT4? I think all the non-AI people posting about this all over X/HN have this idea that if you move everyone over you just "remake the AI" as if this were a traditional API.
There is no way MS catches up to OAI in a short period of time. During that time the rest of the market will be pressing the accelerator as hard as possible.
I think MS is in a really, really shit spot right now.
- all the code that created GPT-4
- all the weights for GPT-4
- all the people who created both of those things
then, y'know, I like their odds.
They have access to the first two already, per their licensing agreement with OAI; by the end of the week, they may very well have the third.
It reads like an orchestrated coup against the other three members of the board. Convince the board to do something you imagine will get this kind of blowback. Board is forced to resign due to their fiduciary obligations to the non-profit. And now you control the entire board.
What fiduciary obligations does a non-profit have? Isn't the board pretty successful already at not making money?
MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to blow up Google. They will set the world on fire to do that.
To me this is exactly why I’m skeptical of Microsoft’s strategy here. They seem to be convinced that their success at unseating Google is assured. Meanwhile, google’s share price has barely flinched. Also, the way this has played out just feels desperate to keep the whole thing going. Wouldn’t Microsoft want at least some clarity about what actually happened by the board up and fired the CEO on the spot before doubling down to bring him into a position of power within the company?
But I doubt MSFT will win this round.
1/ We still don't know why Sam Altman was fired; does MS know? or think they know?
2/ It will take the new team at MS a long time to recreate what they had at OpenAI (what does "MS has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP" actually mean and entails, legally speaking?); during that time anything can happen.
You don’t have to do a ton of diligence to know you want to keep the people you bet the farm on. If it turns out that Sam is actually a massive liability, Nadella will deal with that after this crisis passes.
So any idea how that translates into the profit sharing? They have no profit right now. Curious how employees get to that number
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-investment-m...
OpenAI employees have no equity? Well, then where exactly is that $86B of "existing employees' shares" coming from?
> ChatGPT creator OpenAI is in talks to sell existing employees' shares at an $86 billion valuation, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-talks-sell-shares-...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-86-bln-share-sale...
A random OpenAI eng job page clearly states: "Total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits."
https://openai.com/careers/software-engineer-leverage-engine...
This morning at OpenAI offices will be talent asking current leadership, "What have you done for me lately?"
Their pay is majority equity, so its worthless now with a board that says it hates profits and money. OpenAI is probably worth 80% less than it did a weekend ago, so the equity pay is also worth 80% less.
Microsoft is perfectly willing to pay those typical AI salaries, because Nvidia and Google are literally doing a recruitment drive on twitter right now. Apple and Amazon are also probably looking to scoop up the leftovers. So Microsoft has to pay properly, and Sam will demand them to, to get the OpenAI team moved over intact. There aren't that many core engineers at OpenAI, maybe 200-300, so it is trivial for Microsoft to afford it.
Investors loved Satya's investment into OAI, not sure how we can qualify it as one of the worst investments in the history of SV?
How can we even compare the risk concerns of MSFT with OpenAI? The impression we have of OpenAI is the risk concerns are specifically about the profit drive. From a business standpoint, LLMs have huge potential at reducing costs and increasing profit in multiples.
This isn’t personally against you but they never had the $1M/year they flaunted when Sam the savior was their CEO
I don't know exactly how employee contracts are drawn up there but OpenAI has been pretty vocal that all the for-profit sides have caps which eventually lead back to 100% going into the non-profit after hitting the cap or the initial investment amount. So I am not quite clear what you are saying? Salary is cash, equity is stock. There has always been profit caps on the stock.
My only point was that you made an argument about employees giving up their equity for "mediocre" MSFT stock. It is just a misinformed statement that I was clearing up for you. 1) MSFT has been doing amazing as a stock 2) Employee equity has profit caps. 3) Employees who actually care about equity profit would most likely be more interested in joining MSFT.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.nytim...
If this was never true, that’s on the OpenAI team that misled their engineers
https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-recruiters-luring-goo...
Their job postings even specifically mention “generous equity” - again if there is no equity in the contract - that’s OpenAI misleading its recruits
Llms do stuff that has value. I can use Rfdiffusion with motif scaffolding to create a fusion protein with units from enzymes that have no crystal or cryoem structures with as high as a 5-10% success rate!!!!!! That's absolutely insane! I only need to print 20 genes to have a chance of getting a variant that works. Literal orders of magnitude improvement. And if you don't have a good multisequence alignment for getting a good folks from alphafold? Pure llm based esmfold can fill in the gaps. Evodiff is out here generating functional proteins with disordered regions. Also, to bring it back to openai, if I ask chatgpt to write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. If I give it a bunch of PDFs and ask it to give me a summary, it gives me a summary. I don't buy the agi end of the world hype so a shift that means that we get more focus on d eveloping useful tools that make my life easier that I'm totally willing to pay 20 a month for? Yeah I'm down. Get this cool tech and product into a form that's easy to use and useful and keep improving it!
-I'm literally drinking a coffee I bought with bit coin right now.
-I was able to send large sums of money to my grandma in another country while paying a fraction of the fees going through banks
-It's a stable store of value for people in volatile countries with unstable currency
-It's an investment available to the small timers, normally only the wealthy have these opportunities
-It lets me pay artists for their art directly and bypass the corrupt middlemen
this is a forum coding so i have no idea what any of that biology mumbo jumbo means, but everything you mentiond about chatgtp is conveniently missing a lot of details.
>write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. Is it trivial code? Is it code that shows up on the first page of any search engine with the same terms?
>it gives me a summary. Is it an accurate summary? Is it any better than just reading the first and last section of the report directly?
In terms of writing code, yeah it's pretty simple code. I'm paying 20 bucks a month not 200k a year. I've found it really useful to dive into open source code bases for papers (just upload the repo and associated paper) - academics write pretty garbage code and even worse documentation. It's able to easily and correcttly extend modules, explain weird uncommented and untyped code (what exactly is xyz data structure? Oh it's a tensor with shape blah where each dimension represents abc value. Great saved me 2 hours of work).
For the summaries - uhh yeah obviously the summaries are accurate and better than reading the first and last sections. Spend the 20 bucks and try it yourself or borrow someone else's account or something. Especially useful if you're dealing with nature papers and similar from journals that refuse to give proper respect for the methods section and shove all the information in a random way into supplementary info. Make a knowledgebase on both and ask it to connect the dots, saves plenty of time. I don't give a damn about the flowery abstract in the first part of the report and the tryhard conclusion in the last part of the report, I want the details.
It's comical that these useless hype bros can convince folks that a genuine computational breakthrough and a pretty solid 20 dollar a month consumer product with actual users must be bunk because the bros are shilling it, but luckily the baker lab doesn't seem to care. Can't wait to play around with all atom so I don't have to model a zinc atom with a guide potential and can just model the heteroatom directly in the functional motif instead! Not sure it'll work for the use case I have in mind until I try it out and print a gene or two of course but I'm glad folks are building these tools to make life easier and let me engineer proteins that were out of budget 3 years ago.
tell me... how much would it cost to develop a system that did this with pre-GPT OCR technologies? I know the answer. Do you?
SEC does not have the power to arrest anyone. Their investigations are civil.
will researchers that were lured into OpenAI under this pretense jump ship to explictly work on extending microsoft's tendrils into more of people's lives?
(essentially the opposite of "benefit humanity")
no doubt some will
Not a bad moment for a rich patron to swoop in and capitalise the non-profit. If only there were a billionaire with a grudge against Altman and historic link to the organisation…
At least it's not sci-fi-risk averse ;)
Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging that at best they were fooling themselves into believing they were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed looks to be dying.
Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of profit in about a month.
Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.
So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
Microsoft also “has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights.” If you’re a scientist, OpenAI is a fine place to be, though less differentiated than before. If you’re an engineer interested in making money, Microsoft seems the way to go.
Non-profit boards have no incentive to be rational.
Microsoft stock is up in the pre-market, because they basically got half of the OpenAI team for free.
The majority of top researchers at OpenAI are expressing solidarity for Sam and basically signalling they want to move too, just check out twitter. That also includes like the majority of the execs tehre.
Ilya just said he will do everything he can to reunite the company. If that’s the case the easiest way to do it is to resign and join MS
This is where I see the win. Newcomer’s concerns about Altman are valid [1]. It is difficult to square the reputation he nurtured as OpenAI’s CEO with the reckless lawlessness of his crypto start-up.
Microsoft knows how to play ball with the big boys. It also knows how to constrain big personalities.
[1] https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the
What do you mean? MS employees are getting bonuses on a yearly basis, this year included.
That’s fine for corporate employees, but OAI employees were promised mountains of money to leave Google/Meta, they might not be as happy
OAI is a startup. All these OAI employees who were playing up their million dollar salaries should know that startups come with risk. How many times has it been said that equity is worth nothing until (and if) it is?
In the grand scheme of the current IT economy, top of the queue for sympathy to me is not "people making seven digit salaries at startup who may have to put up with only making $500K+ at MSFT".
What long term prospects do those employees have of raises, profit-sharing, equity, etc. at OAI if the board is willing to destroy value to maintain their non-profit goals?
I think the whole point of this piece is that OAI's entire organizational structure is built against generating a large startup valuation that would provide a large payout to employees and investors.
OAI has cash from ChatGPT revenue that it could use to offer competitive pay, but also this entire situations is based around the board being uncomfortable with the decisions that led to this revenue or attempts to expand it.
The Open AI board has taken the keys of Paradise and willingly handed them directly to the devil;)
* Tigris is DOA - If because it would piss off the MSFT board but mostly because the SEC would arrest Sam assuming he’s an officer at MSFT. He could maybe be a passive investor, but that’s it
* People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board forced headcount reductions?
* Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3 trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than the OpenAI one
* there was a ton of fan fiction yesterday online about Satya forcing a move on the board. This was never really a thing. He made one of the worst investments in the history of SV in terms of keeping power to make sure your money is used correctly. $10B for 0 votes or any power to change votes