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
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.