https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7645482
frik on April 25, 2014:
> The Nokia fate will be remembered as hostile takeover. Everything worked out in the favor of Microsoft in the end. Though Windows Phone/Tablet have low market share, a lot lower than expected.
> * Stephen Elop the former Microsoft employee (head of the Business Division) and later Nokia CEO with his infamous "Burning Platform" memo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia
> * Some former Nokia employees called it "Elop = hostile takeover of a company for a minimum price through CEO infiltration": https://gizmodo.com/how-nokia-employees-are-reacting-to-the-...
For the record: I don't actually believe that there is an evil Microsoft master plan. I just find it sad that Microsoft takes over cool stuff and inevitably turns it into Microsoft™ stuff or abandons it.
What planet are you living on?
As for employees end masse acting publicly disloyal to their employer, usually not a good career move.
Wut?
This is software, not law. The industry is notorious for people jumping ship every couple of years.
The only part left of the non-profit was the board, all the employees and operations are in the for-profit entity. Since employees now demand the board should resign there will be nothing left of the non-profit after this. Puppets that are aligned with for-profit interests will be installed instead and the for-profit can act like a regular for-profit without being tied to the old ideals.
Besides, considering it was four against two, they would’ve needed him for the decisive vote anyway.
I’m not sure why you wouldn’t trust Sam Altman‘s account of what Ilya did and didn’t do considering Ilya himself is siding with Sam now.
Altman showed nothing why he would or wouldn’t lie. If he is really wanted to do things against the board, or the mission, or whatever, then it is in his interest to lie. However, we still don’t know anything, so we can’t exclude any possibilities. That means that interested parties’ statements’ value is almost nothing. It’s easy to lie in muddy waters.
Furthermore, it's consistent with all available information that they would prefer to continue without Sam, but they would rather have Sam than lose the company, and now that Microsoft has put its foot down, they'd rather settle.
This is an argumentum ad odium fallacy
Which is to say, what's your alternative for a better explanation? (other than the "cui bono?" one, that is).
also known as "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence", which to my gut sounds at least as likely as a cui bono explanation tbh (which is not to be seen as an endorsement of the view that cui bono = conspiracy...)
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (1), but don't rule out malice. (2)
Nevertheless I agree with you and think (2) is wise to always keep in mind. I love Hanlon's Razor but people definitely should take it literally as written and/or as law.
Yeah M$ hasnt had a good reputation. I finally left Windows this year because I'm afraid of them after Win11.
2023/4 will be the year of the Linux Desktop in retrospect. (or at least my family's religion deemed it)
They're a $2+ trillion dollar company. They're doing something right.
The idea that Microsoft is going to control OpenAI does not exactly fill me with confidence.
I've been using Linux for a while. Since 2010 I sort of actively try to avoid using anything else. (On desktops/laptops.)
Minecraft teaches phonics. Anyway, my 4 year old can read books. He doesnt even practice the homework in his preschool because he just reads the words that everyone else sounds out.
I don't see a trajectory to "head of Microsoft Research".
Their asset isn't some kind of masterful operations management and reign in cost and management structure as far as I see. But about the fact they simply put, have the leading models.
So I'm very confused why would people want to following the CEO? And not be more attached to the technical leadership? Even from investor point of view?
Why would anyone in their right mind invite such a man to lead a commercial research team, when he's demonstrated quite clearly that he'd spend all his time trying to sabotage it?
This idea that he's one of the world's best researchers is also somewhat questionable. Nobody cared much about OpenAI's work up until they did some excellent scaling engineering, partnered with Microsoft to get GPUs and then commercialized Google's transformer research papers. OpenAI's success is still largely built on the back of excellent execution of other people's ideas more than any unique breakthroughs. The main advance they made beyond Google's work was InstructGPT which let you talk to LLMs naturally for the first time, but Sutskever's name doesn't appear on that paper.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=x04W_mMAAAAJ...
Does OpenAI still need Sutskever? A guy with his track record could have coasted for many, many years without producing much if he'd stayed friends with those around him, but he hasn't. Now they have to weigh the costs vs benefits. The costs are well known, he's become a doomer who wants to stop AI research - the exact opposite of the sort of person you want around in a fast moving startup. The benefits? Well.... unless he's doing a ton of mentoring or other behind the scenes soft work, it's hard to see what they'd lose.
Search and Business Tools were misses, but they more than made up for it with Cloud, Infra, and Security.
Also, Nadella was Ballmer's pick.
Customers are sticky and MSFT had a strong channel sales and enterprise sales org. Who cares if the product is shit if there are enough goodies to maintain inertia.
Spending billions on markets that will grow into 10s or 100s of Billions is a better bet than billions on a stagnant market.
> he was hands-off on existing products in a way that Bill Gates wasn't
Ballmer had an actual Business education, and was able to execute on scaling. I'm sure Bill loves him too now that Ballmer's protege almost 15Xed MSFT stock.
A good example of how just having your foot in the door creates serendipitous opportunity in life.
Sounds like Altman's biography.
Altman - private school, Stanford, dropped out to f*ck around in tech. "Failed" startup acquired for $40M. The world is full of Sam Altmans who never won the birth lottery.
Could he have squandered his good fortune - absolutely, but his life is not exactly per ardua ad astra.
I grew up poor in the 90s and had my own computer around ~10yrs old. It was DOS but I still learned a lot. Eventually my brother and I saved up from working at a diner washing dishes and we built our own Windows PC.
I didn't go to college but I taught myself programming during a summer after high school and found a job within a year (I already knew HTML/CSS from high school).
There's always ways. But I do agree partially, YC/VCs do have a bias towards kids from high end schools and connected families.
My point is that I did not have the luxury of dropping out of school to try my hand at the tech startup thing. If I came home and told my Dad I abandoned school - for anything - he would have thrown me out the 3rd-floor window.
People like Altman could take risks, fail, try again, until they walked into something that worked. This is a common thread almost among all of the tech personalities - Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk. None of them ever risked living in a cardboard box in case their bets did not pay off.
Altman reminds me of Sam Bankman-Fried but dropping out.
Not to say that he hasn't done a ton with OpenAI, I have no clue, but it seems that he has a knack for creating these opportunities for himself.
Everyone just assumes AGI is inevetible but it is a non-zero chance we just passed the ai peak this weekend.
So no, we’re nowhere near max capability.
My first thought was the scenario I called Altman's Basilisk (if this turns out to be true, I called it before anyone ;) )
Namely, Altman was diverting computing resources to operate a superhuman AI that he had trained in his image and HIS belief system, to direct the company. His beliefs are that AGI is inevitable and must be pursued as an arms race because whoever controls AGI will control/destroy the world. It would do so through directing humans, or through access to the Internet or some such technique. In seeking input from such an AI he'd be pursuing the former approach, having it direct his decisions for mutual gain.
In so training an AI he would be trying to create a paranoid superintelligence with a persecution complex and a fixation on controlling the world: hence, Altman's Basilisk. It's a baddie, by design. The creator thinks it unavoidable and tries to beat everyone else to that point they think inevitable.
The twist is, all this chaos could have blown up not because Altman DID create his basilisk, but because somebody thought he WAS creating a basilisk. Or he thought he was doing it, and the board got wind of it, and couldn't prove he wasn't succeeding in doing it. At no point do they need to be controlling more than a hallucinating GPT on steroids and Azure credits. If the HUMANS thought this was happening, that'd instigate a freakout, a sudden uncontrolled firing for the purpose of separating Frankenstein from his Monster, and frantic powering down and auditing of systems… which might reveal nothing more than a bunch of GPT.
Rosko's Basilisk is a sci-fi hypothetical.
Altman's Basilisk, if that's what happened, is a panic reaction.
I'm not convinced anything of the sort happened, but it's very possible some people came to believe it happened, perhaps even the would-be creator. And such behavior could well come off as malfeasance and stealing of computing resources: wouldn't take the whole system to run, I can run 70b on my Mac Studio. It would take a bunch of resources and an intent to engage in unauthorized training to make a super-AI take on the belief system that Altman, and many other AI-adjacent folk, already hold.
It's probably even a legitimate concern. It's just that I doubt we got there this weekend. At best/worst, we got a roughly human-grade intelligence Altman made to conspire with, and others at OpenAI found out and freaked.
If it's this, is it any wonder that Microsoft promptly snapped him up? Such thinking is peak Microsoft. He's clearly their kind of researcher :)
There is also all the questions for RLHF, and the pipelines to think around that.
Their development and QA process is either disorganized to the extreme, or non-existent.
It seems obvious Microsoft has a license to use them in Microsoft's own products. Microsoft said so directly on Friday.
What is less obvious is if Microsoft has a license to use them in other ways. For example, can Microsoft provide those weights and code to third parties? Can they let others use them? In particular, can they clone the OpenAI API? I can see reasons for why that would not have been in the deal (it would risk a major revenue source for OpenAI) but also reasons why Microsoft might have insisted on it (because of situations just like the one happening now).
What is actually in the deal is not public as far as I know, so we can only speculate.
Makes what the world would look like if, say, the Manhattan Project would have been managed the same way.
Well, a younger me working at OpenAI would resign latest after my collegues stage a coup againstvthe board out of, in my view, a personality cult. Propably would have resigned after the third CEO was announced. Older me would wait for a new gig to be ligned up to resign, with beginning after CEO number 2 the latest.
The cyckes get faster so. It took FTX a little bit longer from hottest start up to enter the trajectory of crash and burn, OpenAI did faster. I just hope this helps ro cool down the ML sold as AI hype a notch.
Not that I had any illusions about this being a fig leaf in the first place.
If it is just ML sold as AI hype, are you really worried about the threat of AI?
The danger of generative AI is that it disrupts all kinds of things: arts, writers, journalism, propaganda... That threat already exists, the tech being no longer being hyped might allow us to properly adress that problem.
Priceless. The modern version of Pascal's wager.
It was not possible for a war-time government crash project to have been managed the same way. During WW2 the existential fear was an embodied threat currently happening. No one even was even thinking about a potential for profits or even any additional products aside from an atomic bomb. And if anyone had ideas on how to pursue that bomb that seemed like a decent idea, they would have been funded to pursue them.
And this is not even mentioning the fact that security was tight.
I'm sure there were scientists who disagreed with how the Manhattan project was being managed. I'm also sure they kept working on it despite those disagreements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_program
Hey, maybe this means the AGIs will fight amongst themselves and thus give us the time to outwit them. :D
No one knows why the board did this. No one is talking about that part. Yet every one is on twitter talking shit about the situation.
I have worked with a lot of PhD's and some of them can be, "disconnected" from anything that isn't their research.
This looks a lot like that, disconnected from what average people would do, almost childlike (not ish, like).
Maybe this isn't the group of people who should be responsible for "alignment".
Any reason good enough to fire him is good enough to share with the interim CEO and the rest of the company, if not the entire world. If they can’t even do that much, you can’t blame employees for losing faith in their leadership. They couldn’t even tell SAM ALTMAN why, and he was the one getting fired!
The fact that Altman and Brockman were hired so quickly by Microsoft gives a clue: it takes time to hire someone. For one thing, they need time to decide. These guys were hired by Microsoft between close-of-business on Friday and start-of-business on Monday.
My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline a few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on Thursday, and went ballistic, understandably (lack of candidness). My guess is there's more shenanigans to uncover - I suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer they couldn't refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed by Thursday. So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they figured "we might as well blow it all up".
This is not an interview process for hiring a junior dev at FAANG.
If you're Sam & Greg, and Satya gives you an offer to run your own operation with essentially unlimited funding and the ability to bring over your team, then you can decide immediately. There is no real lower bound of how fast it could happen.
Why would they have been able to decide so quickly? Probably because they prioritize the ability to bring over the entire team as fast as possible, and even though they could raise a lot of money in a new company, that still takes time, and they view it as critically important to hire over the new team as fast as possible (within days) that they accept whatever downsides there may be to being a subsidiary of Microsoft.
This is what happens when principles see opportunity and are unencumbered by bureaucratic checks. They can move very fast.
I don't know anything about how executives get hired. But supposedly this all happened between Friday night and Monday morning. This isn't a simple situation; surely one man working through the weekend can't decide to set up a new division, and appoint two poached executives to head it up, without consulting lawyers and other colleagues. I mean, surely they'd need to go into Altman and Brockman's contracts with OpenAI, to check that the hiring is even legal?
That's why I think this has been brewing for at least a week.
There may be drawbacks to the "instant hiring" model.
That is, I think Greg and Sam were likely fired because, in the board's view, they were already running OpenAI Global LLC more as if it were a for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft driven by Microsoft's commercial interest, than as the organization able to earn and return profit but focussed on the mission of the nonprofit it was publicly declared to be and that the board very much intended it to be. And, apparently, in Microsoft's view, they were very good at that, so putting them in a role overtly exactly like that is a no-brainer.
And while it usually takes a while to vet and hire someone for a position like that, it doesn't if you've been working for them closely in something that is functionally (from your perspective, if not on paper for the entity they nominally reported to) a near-identical role to the one you are hiring them for, and the only reason they are no longer in that role is because they were doing exactly what you want them to do for you.
It takes time if you're a normal employee under standard operating procedure. If you really want to you can merge two of the largest financial institutions in the world in less than a week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Credit_Suisse_b...
To entertain your theory, Let’s say they were planning on hiring him prior to that firing. If that was the case, why is everybody so upset that Sam got fired, and why is he working so hard to try to get reinstated to a role that he was about to leave anyway?
If this incident is representative, I'm not sure there was ever a possibility of good governance.
People keep talking about this. That was never going to happen. Look at Sam Altman's career: he's all about startups and building companies. Moreover, I can't imagine he would have agreed to sign any kind of contract with OpenAI that required exclusivity. Know who you're hiring; know why you're hiring them. His "side-projects" could have been hugely beneficial to them over the long term.
How can you make a claim like this when, right or wrong, Sam's independence is literally, currently, tanking the company? How could allowing Sam to do what he wants benefit OpenAI, the non-profit entity?
Let's take personalities out of it and see if it makes more sense:
How could a new supply of highly optimized, lower-cost AI hardware benefit OpenAI?
Honestly, I think they did that to themselves.
Before the boards' actions this friday, the company was on one of the most incredible success trajectories in the world. Whatever Sam's been doing as a CEO worked.
And maybe it’s not. The big mistake people make is hearing non-profit and think it means there’s a greater amount of morality. It’s the same mistake as assuming everyone who is religious is therefore more moral (worth pointing out that religions are nonprofits as well).
Most hospitals are nonprofits, yet they still make substantial profits and overcharge customers. People are still people, and still have motives; they don't suddenly become more moral when they join a non-prof board. In many ways, removing a motive that has the most direct connection to quantifiable results (profit) can actually make things worse. Anyone who has seen how nonprofits work know how dysfunctional they can be.
I've only really been close to one (the owner of the small company i worked at started one), and in the past I did some consulting work for anther, but that describes what I saw in both situations fairly aptly. There seems to be a massive amount of power and ego wrapped up in the creation and running these things from my limited experience. If you were invited to a board, that's one thing, but it takes a lot of time and effort to start up a non-profit, and that's time and effort that could be spent towards some other existing non-profit usually, so I think it's relevant to consider why someone would opt for the much more complicated and harder route than just donating time and money to something else that helps in roughly the same way.
They don't make large profits otherwise they wouldn't be nonprofits. They do have massive revenues and will find ways to spend the money they receive or hoard it internally as much as they can. There are lots of games they can play with the money, but experiencing profits is one thing they can't do.
This is a common misunderstanding. Non-profits/501(c)(3) can and often do make profits. 7 of the 10 most profitable hospitals in the U.S. are non-profits[1]. Non-profits can't funnel profits directly back to owners, the way other corporations can (such as when dividends are distributed). But they still make profits.
But that's besides the point. Even in places that don't make profits, there are still plenty of personal interests at play.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/nonprofit-hospita...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization
"Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations"
However, many other forms of organizations can be non-profit, with utterly no implied morality.
Your local Frat or Country Club [ 501(c)(7) ], a business league or lobbying group [ 501(c)(6), the 'NFL' used to be this ], your local union [ 501(c)(5) ], your neighborhood org (that can only spend 50% on lobbying) [ 501(c)(4) ], a shared travel society (timeshare non-profit?) [ 501(c)(8) ], or your special club's own private cemetery [ 501(c)(13) ].
Then where do these profits go?
Employees might suddenly feel they deserve to be paid a lot more. Suppliers will play a lot more hardball in negotiations. A middle manager may give a sinecure to their cousin.
And upper managers can extract absolutely everything trough lucrative contracts to their friends and relatives. (Of course the IRS would clamp down on obvious self-dealings, but that wouldn't make such schemes disappear. It'll make them far more complicated and expensive instead.)
Profit is money that ends up in the bank to be used later. Compensation is what gets spent on yachts. Anything spent on hospital supplies is an expense. This stuff matters.
So yeah, Mayo Cinic makes a $2B profit. That is not money going to shareholders though, that's funds for a future building or increasing salaries or expanding research or something, it supposedly has to be used for the mission. What is the outrage of these orgs making this kind of profit?
Are you talking about American hospitals?
In addition, public hospitals still charge for their services, it's just who pays the bill that changes, in some nations (the government as the insuring body vs a private insuring body or the individual).
Outside of the US, private hospitals tend to be overtly for-profit. Price-gauging "non-profit" hospitals are mostly an American phenomenon.
That just sounds like a biased and overly emotive+naive response on your part.
Again, most hospitals in the world operate the same way as the US. You can go almost anywhere in SE Asia, Latín América, África, etc and see this. There's a lot more to "outside the US" than Western+Central Europe/CANZUK/Japan. The only difference is that there are strong business incentives to keep the system in place since the entire industry (in the US) is valued at more than most nations' GDP.
But feel free to keep twisting the definition or moving goalposts to somehow make the American system extra nefarious and unique.
I totally agree. I don't think this is universally true of non-profits, but people are going to look for value in other ways if direct cash isn't an option.
To be clear, these are still an asset OpenAI holds. It should at least let them continue doing research for a few years.
"Sorry OpenAI, but those credits are only valid in our Nevada datacenter. Yes, it's two Microsoft Surface PC™ s connected together with duct tape. No, they don't have GPUs."
To be clear, these don't go away. They remain an asset of OpenAI's, and could help them continue their research for a few years.
Experience leads to pattern recognition, and this is the tech community equivalent of a David Attenborough production (with my profuse apologies to Sir Attenborough). Something about failing to learn history and repeating it should go here too.
If you can take away anything from observing this event unfold, learn from it. Consider how the sophisticated vs the unsophisticated act, how participants respond, and what success looks like. Also, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Do not rush when the consequences of a misstep are substantial. You learning from this is cheaper than the cost for everyone involved. It is a natural experiment you get to observe for free.
Being able to watch the miss steps and the maneuvers of the people involved in real time is remarkable and there are valuable lessons to be learned. People have been saying this episode will go straight into case studies but what really solidifies that prediction is the openness of all the discussions: the letters, the statements, and above all the tweets - or are we supposed to call them x's now?
Now up to 600+/770 total.
Couple janitors. I dunno who hasn't signed that at this point ha...
Would be fun to see a counter letter explaining their thinking to not sign on.
Even they prob had some friend come flying over and jump out of some autonomous car to knock on their door in sf.
This is AAA talent. They can always land elsewhere.
I doubt there would even be hard feelings. The team seems super tight. Some folks aren't in a position to put themselves out there. That sort of thing would be totally understandable.
This is not a petty team. You should look more closely at their culture.
The hubris, indeed.
Yes, know thyself. I've turned down offers that seemed lucrative or just cooperative, and otherwise without risk - boards, etc. They would have been fine if everything went smoothly, but people naturally don't anticipate over-the-horizon risk and if any stuff hit a fan I would not have been able to fulfill my responsibilities, and others would get materially hurt - the most awful, painful, humiliating trap to be in. Only need one experience to learn that lesson.
> People that grow up insulated from the consequences of their actions can do very dumb stuff and expect to get away with it because that's how they've lived all of their lives.
I don't think you need to grow up that way. Look at the uber-powerful who have been been in that position or a few years.
Honestly, I'm not sure I buy the idea that's a prevelant case, the people who grow up that way. People generally leave the nest and learn. Most of the world's higher-level leaders (let's say, successful CEOs and up) grew up in stability and relative wealth. Of course, that doesn't mean their parents didn't teach them about consequences, but how could we really know that about someone?
The current position of others may have much more to do with power than their personal judgments. Altman, Microsoft, their friends and partners, wield a lot of power over the their future careers.
> Incredible, really. The hubris.
I read that as mocking them for daring to challenge that power structure, and on a possibly critical societal issue.
I've definitely come out worse on some of the screw ups in my life.
I know the probability is low, but wouldn't it be great if they accidentally built a benevolent basilisk with no off switch, one which had access to a copy of all of Microsoft's internal data as a dataset fed into it, now completely aware of how they operate, uses that to wipe the floor and just in time to take the US Election in 2024.
Wouldn't that be a nicer reality?
I mean, unless you were rooting for the malevolent one...
But yeah, coming back down to reality, likelihood is that MS just bought a really valuable asset for almost free?
But then we'd never give such an AGI the power to do what it needs to do. Just imagining an all-powerful machine telling the 1% that they'll actually have to pay taxes so that every single human can be allocated a house/food/water/etc for free.
Commercialisation is a good way to achieve stability & drive adoption and even though the MS naysayers think "OAI will go back to open sourcing everything afterwards". Yeah, sure. If people believe that a non-MS-backed, noncommercial OAI will be fully open source and they'll just drop the GPT3/4 models on the Internet then I just think they're so, so wrong and long as OAI are going on their high and mighty "AI safety" spiel.
As with artists and writers complaining about model usage, there's a huge opposition to this technology even though it has the potential to improve our lives, though at the cost of changing the way we work. You know, like the industrial revolution and everything that has come before us that we enjoy the fruits of.
Hell, why don't we bring horseback couriers, knocker-uppers, streetlight lamp lighters, etc back? They had to change careers as new technologies came about.
I've actually had a discussion with Microsoft on this subject as they were offering us an EA with a certain license subscription at $X.00 for Y,000 calls per month. When we asked if they couldn't just make the Azure resource that does the exact same thing match that price point in consumption rates in our tenant they said unfortunately no. I just chalked this up to MSFT sales tactics, but I was told candidly by some others that worked on that Azure resource that they were getting 0 enterprise adoption of it because Microsoft couldn't adjust (specific?) consumption rates to match what they could offer on EA licensing.
Good luck trying to find H100 80s on the 3 big clouds.
I presume their deal is something different to the typically Azure experience and more direct / close to the metal.
If you’re making like 250k cash and were promised $1M a year in now-worthless paper, plus you have OpenAI on the resume, are one of the most in-demand people in the world? It would be rediculously easy to quit.
Personally I've got enough IOU's alive that I may be rich one day. But if someone gave me retirement in 4 years money, guaranteed, I wouldn't even blink before taking it.
*I think before MS stepped in here I would have agreed w/ you though -- unlikely anyone is jumping ship without an immediate strong guarantee.
The details here certainly matter. I think a lot of people are assuming that Microsoft will just rain cash on anyone automatically sight unseen because they were hired by OpenAI. That may indeed be the case but it remains to be seen.
Sounds a bit low for these people, unless I am misunderstanding.
Also all these cats arn't petty. They are friends. I'm sure Ilya feels terrible. Satya is a pro... Won't be hard feelings.
The guy threw in with the board... He's not from startup land. His last gig was Google. He's way over his head relative to someone like Altman who was in this world the moment out of college diapers.
Poor Ilya... It's awful to build something and then accidentally destroy it. Hopefully it works out for him. I'm fairly certain he and Altman and Brockman have already reconciled during the board negotiations... Obviously Ilya realized in the span of 48hrs that he'd made a huge mistake.
was
There are lots of people doing excellent research on the market right now, especially with the epic brain drain being experienced by Google. And remember that OpenAI neither invented transformers nor switch transformers (which is what GPT4 is rumoured to be).
That team had set state of the art for years now.
Every major firm that has a spot for that company's chief researcher and can afford him would bid.
This is the team that actually shipped and continues to ship. You take him every time if you possibly have room and he would be happy.
Anyone whose hired would agree in 99 percent of cases, some limited scenarios such as bad predicted team fit ect set aside.
Including their head researcher.
I'm not continuing this. Your position is about as tenable as the boards. Equally rigid as well.
If what he regrets is realizing the divergence between the direction Sam was taking the firm and the safety orientation nominally central to the mission of the OpenAI nonprofit and which is one of Ilya's public core concerns too late, and taking action aimed at stopping it than instead exacerbated the problem by just putting Microsoft in a position to take poach key staff and drive full force in the same direction OpenAI Global LLC had been under Sam but without any control fromm the OpenAI board, well, that's not a regret that makes him more attractive to Microsoft, either based on his likely intentions or his judgement.
And any regret more aligned with Microsoft's interests as far as intentions is probably even a stronger negative signal on judgement.
Almost certainly not. Remember, Microsoft wasn’t the sole investor. Reneging on those credits would be akin to a bank investing in a start-up, requiring they deposit the proceeds with them, and then freezing them out.
If tomorrow it's Donald Trump or Sam Altman or anyone else, and it works out, the investors are going to be happy.
There's your "credit".
Which I don't think is impossible at some level (probably less than Microsoft was funding, initially, or with more compromises elsewhere) with the IP they have if they keep some key staff -- some other interested deep-pockets parties that could use the leg up -- but its not going to be a cakewalk in the best of cases.
They bought their IP rights from OpenAI.
I’m not a fan of MS being the big “winner” here but OpenAI shit their own bed on this one. The employees are 100% correct in one thing - that this board isn’t competent.
MSFT looks classy af.
Satya is no saint... But evidence seems to me he's negotiating in good faith. Recall that openai could date anyone when they went to the dance on that cap raise.
They picked msft because of the value system the leadership exhibited and willingness to work with their unusual must haves surrounding governance.
The big players at openai have made all that clear in interviews. Also Altman has huge respect for Satya and team. He more or less stated on podcasts that he's the best ceo he's ever interacted with. That says a lot.
Couldthe 13b could be considerably less cost
Which is a phenomenal deal for MSFT.
Time will tell whether they ever reach more than $1.3 in profits.
No enterprise employee gets fired for using Microsoft.
It is a power play to pull enterprises away from AWS, and suffocating GCP.
75% of profits of a company controlled by a non profit whose goals are different to yours. By the way a normal company this cap would be ∞.
Crypto in general you could maybe get $200M worth from $1B in credits. You would likely tank the markets for mineable currencies with just $1B though let alone $13B
If they let msft "loot" all their IP then they lose any type of leverage they might still have, and if they did it due to some ideological reason I could see why they might prefer to choose a scorched earth policy.
Given that they refused to resign seems like they prefer to fight rather than give it to Sam Altman, which what the msft maneuver looks like defacto.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/pentagon-splits-giant-cloud-co...
My stomach just turned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_SQL_Serve...
Open AI implements and releases ChatGPTs (Poe competitor) but fails to tell D’Angelo ahead of time. Microsoft will have access to code (with restrictions, sure) for essentially a duplicate of D’Angelo’s Poe project.
Poe’s ability to fundraise craters. D’Angelo works the less seasoned members of the board to try to scuttle OpenAI and Microsoft’s efforts, banking that among them all he and Poe are relatively immune with access to Claude, Llama, etc.
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
Quora data likely made a huge difference in the quality of those GPT responses.
Although it would be beautiful if they name it Clippy and finally make Clippy into the all-powerful AGI it was destined to be.
Finally the paperclip maximizer
So I mean proper AGI.
Naming the product Clippy now is perfectly fine while it’s just an LLM and will be more excellent over the years when it eventually achieves AGI ness.
At least in this forum can we please stop misinterpreting things in a limited way to make pedantic points about how LLMs aren’t AGI (which I assume 98% of people here know). So I think it’s funny you assume I think chatgpt is an AGI.
(I'm in the latter camp).
Either way, I think GGP’s comment was not applicable based on my comment as written and certainly my intent.
LLMs and GenAI are clever parlor tricks compared to the necessary science needed for AGI to actually arrive.
Considering how it required no scientific understanding at all, just random chance, a very simple selection mechanism and enough iterations (I'm talking about evolution)?
It's my belief that we're not special; us humans are just meat bags, our brains just perform incredibly complex functions with incredibly complex behaviours and parameters.
Of course we can replicate what our brains do in silicon (or whatever we've moved to at the time). Humans aren't special, there's no magic human juice in our brains, just a currently inconceivable blob of prewired evolved logic and a blank (some might say plastic) space to be filled with stuff we learn from our environs.
Indeed, normal people are quite wise and understand that a chat bot is just an augmentation agent--some sort of primordial cell structure that is but one piece of the puzzle.
It could be a first step, sure, but we need many many more breakthroughs to actually get to AGI.
I imagine us actually reaching AGI, and people will start saying, "Yes, but it is not real AGI because..." This should be a measure of capabilities not process. But if expectations of its capabilities are clear, then we will get there eventually -- if we allow it to happen and do not continue moving the goalposts.
> [...]
> Premise 1: LLMs can realistically "mimic" human communication.
> Premise 2: LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text data.
> Conclusion: The structure that allows LLMs to realistically "mimic" human communication is its intelligence.
"If P then Q" is the Material conditional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional
Does it do logical reasoning or inference before presenting text to the user?
That's a lot of waste heat.
(Edit) with next word prediction just is it,
"LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353285
"Misalignment and Deception by an autonomous stock trading LLM agent" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353880#38354486
Especially since you have to explain how "just mimicking" works so well.
As I've mentioned in other comments, it's like yelling at someone for bringing up fusion when talking about nuclear power.
Of course it's not possible yet, but talking & thinking about it is how we make it possible? Things don't just create themselves (well maybe once we _do_ have AGI level AI he he, that'll be a fun apocalypse).
Maybe they can come up with a personification for the YouTube algorithm. Except he seems like a bit of a bad influence.
Why acquire rights to thousands of different character favourites when you can build the bot underneath and then licenses to skin and personalise said bot can be negotiated by the media houses to own 'em.
Same as GPS voices I guess.
I've had Cortana shut off for so long it took me a minute to remember theyve used the name already.
Yes, though end result would probably be more like IE - barely good enough, forcefully pushed into everything and everywhere and squashing better competitors like IE squashed Netscape.
When OpenAI went in with MSFT it was like they have ignored the 40 years of history of what MSFT has been doing to smaller technology partners. What happened to OpenAI pretty much fits that pattern of a smaller company who developed great tech and was raided by MSFT for that tech (the specific actions of specific persons aren't really important - the main factor is MSFT's gravitational force of a black hole, and it was just a matter of time before its destructive power manifests itself like in this case where it just tore apart the OpenAI with tidal forces)
The key ingredient appears to be mass GPU and infra, tbh, with a collection of engineers who know how to work at scale.
I wouldn’t count on that if Microsoft’s legal team does a review of the training data.
The problem right now with GPT4 is that it's not citing its sources (for non search based stuff), which is immoral and maybe even a valid reason to sue over.
somehow everybody seems to assume that the disgruntled OpenAI people will rush to MSFT. Between MSFT and the shaken OpenAI, I suspect Google Brain and the likes would be much more preferable. I'd be surprised if Google isn't rolling out eye-popping offers to the OpenAI folks right now.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/technology/openai-microso...
Why does he need to do that? He doesn't need to make any such public statement!
2. Satya spoke on Kara Swisher's show tonight and essentially said that Sam and team can work at MSFT and that Microsoft has the licensing to keep going as-is and improve upon the existing tech. It sounds like they have pretty wide-open rights as it stands today.
That said, Satya indicated he liked the arrangement as-is and didn't really want to acquire OpenAI. He'd prefer the existing board resign and Sam and his team return to the helm of OpenAI.
Satya was very well-spoken and polite about things, but he was also very direct in his statements and desires.
It's nice hearing a CEO clearly communicate exactly what they think without throwing chairs. It's only 30 minutes and worth a listen.
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726782065272553835
Caveat: I don't know anything.
I'm wondering why that option hasn't been used yet.
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
Not coincidentally, exactly what Google Brain, DeepMind, FAIR etc were doing up until OpenAI decided to ignore that trust-like agreement and let people use it.
Ah, OpenAI is closed source stuff. Non-profit, but "we will sell the company" later. Just let us collect data, analyse it first, build a product.
War is peace, freedom is slavery.
at first that meant the opposite of monopolization: flood the world with limited AIs (GPT 1/2) so that society has time to adapt (and so that no one entity develops asymmetric capabilities they can wield against other humans). with GPT-3 the implementation of that mission began shifting toward worry about AI itself, or about how unrestricted access to it would allow smaller bad actors (terrorists, or even just some teenager going through a depressive episode) to be an existential threat to humanity. if that's your view, then open models are incompatible.
whether you buy that view or not, it kinda seems like the people in that camp just got outmanuevered. as a passionate idealist in other areas of tech, the way this is happening is not good. OpenAI had a mission statement. M$ manuevered to co-opt that mission, the CEO may or may not have understood as much while steering the company, and now a mass of employees is wanting to leave when the board steps in to re-align the company with its stated mission. whether or not you agree with the mission: how can i ever join an organization with a for-the-public-good type of mission i do agree with, without worrying that it will be co-opted by the familiar power structures?
the closest (still distant) parallel i can find: Raspberry Pi Foundation took funding from ARM: is the clock ticking to when RPi loses its mission in a similar manner? or does something else prevent that (maybe it's possible to have a mission-driven tech organization so long as the space is uncompetitive?)
But they probably allowed this to get derailed far too long ago to do anything about it now.
Sounds like their only options are:
a) Structure in a way Microsoft likes and give them the tech
b) Give Microsoft the tech in a different way
c) Disband the company, throw away the tech, and let Microsoft hire everybody who created the tech so they can recreate it.
GPT is cool and whatnot, but for a big tech company it's just a matter of dollars and some time to replicate it. Real value is in push things forward towards what comes next after GPT. GPT3/4 itself is not a multibillion dollar business.
What? That's even better played by Microsoft so than I'd originally anticipated. Take the IP, starve the current incarnation of OpenAI of compute credits and roll out their own thing
MS can only win because there are only viable options: OpenAI survives under MS's control, OpenAI implodes, and MS gets the assets relatively cheaply.
Everything else won't benefit competitors.
If only I had done kept a copy of 10.whateverMojaveWas so I could, by means of a simple network disconnect and reboot, sidestep the removal of 32-bit support. (-:
Microsoft's policies really suck. Mandatory updates and reboots, mandatory telemetry. Mandatory crapware like edge and celebrity news everywhere.
If Microsoft does this, the non-profit OpenAI may find the action closest to their original charter ("safe AGI") is a full release of all weights, research, and training data.
If they want to go full bell labs/deep mind style, they might not need the majority of those 700.
Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits.
So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...