Can't be a good thing for OpenAI. Even if Sam Altman doesn't start by taking half the company with him for this research team, I don't see why Microsoft should continue placing OpenAI on a pedestal when they can continue the work in house.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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We have no insight how much of a driving force for OpenAI's success Sam Altman has been, or would have continued to be.
it's not just sam, he's bringing talent with him. people like jakub pachocki.
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Yeah, they'll keep OpenAI on life support for a few months until the exfiltrated staff have built MSGPT5, at which point Microsoft will just cut them off.
Nobody's gonna use knockoff microsoft bing bong gpt "5" (or "bard" for that matter) - windows products have always been terribly unmarketable and Microsoft fails heavily in that regard
I mean
Do you use Bing's AI thing
OpenAI has the stage here, because they've got the product everybody's habituated to using
ChatGPT only exists because MS permit it. It's not financially viable otherwise.
um what in the holy hell duck sauce are you talking about
https://www.maginative.com/article/openais-revenue-skyrockets-to-1-3-billion-annual-rate/
do you want some sprinkles with that
It is way too early to say nobody will switch off Chat GPT.
And all of the points you made are managerial points, which they just brought the management team from OAI in.
Especially with all this being in the news, many people believe that the company face is the driving force between product quality, and now that face is in Microsoft
"ChatGPT" without performant models is just a brand name and a UX workflow. If Microsoft buys the brand name (or absorbs OpenAI's IP) then you'll use ChatGPT and not care that bing bong gpt 5 bard is under the hood... or it will suck and you'll find a new brand that's better.
Microsoft has an exclusive license to all OpenAI models. They also own the compute hardware. OpenAI cannot afford to train and operate without Microsoft, and there will be no other suitor because OpenAI is already tied to Microsoft with model licensing.
Customers are already migrating to Azure GPT API vs OpenAI.
EDIT: 505 of OpenAIs 700 employees will be leaving for Sam's Microsoft team if the board does not resign. https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775
unless .. the board ... appoints ... Will Hurd
This guy ?!? - https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/09/texas-will-hurd-2024-presidential-race/
Will Hurd, announced Monday he was suspending his longshot 2024 presidential campaign and endorsing Nikki Haley. ... former CIA officer a
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Interesting! Why is Ilya’s name on the list? Didn’t he orchestrate this whole thing?
enterprise already prefers to use gpt via azure. when ms replaces that with something else, as long as there’s feature parity nobody will care.
I think it's probably a bit of a stretch to say Microsoft products have always been unmarketable given they're one of the largest software companies in history
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I am skeptical that a lot of OpenAI staff are enthusiastic about going to work for Microsoft. They are going to scatter to the wind. Google, Anthropic, Cohere, everywhere.
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This was gonna be the end state of openai even with Sam Altman there, their deals with MS effectively look like MS owns them
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Hopefully this marks the start of the end of this derpy story
Smart move by Microsoft. But I will be curious to see how long Sam and Greg last?
It is going to be completely different for them. They are not going to have anywhere near the autonomy they enjoyed at OpenAI.
But this entire episode is a bit mind blowing.
One thing I find interesting is that Alphabet had two AI competitors. Cruise and OpenAI.
Both companies look to have self destructed. Cruise CEO resigned over the weekend.
In both cases it looks like it was about safety. AI is so different from other technologies.
There is such a huge safety aspect. It could be we will see a lot of stuff like this. Where people with AI thought they could move fast and break things and found out they really could not that someone is watching and not going to let them.
Neither Sam or Greg have ML background so idk why they are being hired for an essentially chief scientist role in this new lab. Altman basically has the skillset of a CEO, he's good at attracting talent, marketing himself and his company, and raising money. Not the skillset of a research lead. They'll probably stay just long enough to market it a bit and then move onto the next thing.
Altman basically has the skillset of a CEO, he's good at attracting talent
That's exactly what Microsoft wants.
Like when Microsoft attracted all the talent out of their competitor Borland in the 1990s
I totally agree with you. It was done to stop the sliding share price of Microsoft. Which is why it was a smart move as it accomplished that.
The average person is completely clueless. I have been watching CNBC this morning and it is hard to watch because I keep getting into laughing fits.
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i think people are genuinely bimodal in regards to ai safety. for some people if you ask the ai how to kill someone and it gives a list of genuine answers they freak out and for others they go “oh, nice, it works,” and there’s not much in between. either side finds the other very difficult to understand when discussing the topic.
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This has damaged AGI safety research massively.
If OpenAI goes to slow, others will over take it.
Other companies will look at any safety oriented researchers as potential "traitors".
If GPT is shuttered, people will turn to more ruthless competitors.
And last, they may even turn to open source directly, massively accelerating research there.
AGI safety research is the root cause of this mess.
Ignorant people wanting to steer the train of progression for their own interests.
And then people like you who believe them.
What?
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For anybody who thinks this is a bombshell... well
Look at Twitter
It's still the same exact hell hole
Reality check - nothing changes
And what's come about with Dorsey's "thing"? People underestimate how quickly high-pressure CEOs just decompress in these kinds of situations. The guy's worth zillions and probably looking for an excuse to go out and spend it already. He had a lot of curiosity about the product, but not a whole lot of bond to it.
OpenAi is far more complex, but I agree with your POV. Actually, we are in the best case scenario (but the emotions obfuscated the analysis). Ilya and Wojciech are truest e/acc (not the trashy "laundry boy" style of larping). Everything is more than OK. Openai, Microsoft, the revived pleiad of new and old AI startups...
So the issue is that nothing is going to come out of this.
Microsoft is essentially absorbing the impact.
OpenAI 100% still has the stage here.
Nobody's gonna stop using ChatGPT
Especially if Altman, with literally zero dev experience, manages to somehow replicate half of GPT's algorithms somehow, with his... what... 3 devs now?
Who the hell is going to go "Yay, now let's use this FOR PROFIT ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US KNOCKOFF SOFTWARE BING BONG"
Especially if Altman, with literally zero dev experience, manages to somehow replicate half of GPT's algorithms somehow, with his... what... 3 devs now?
much of AI research is back-of-a-napkin ideas tested on room-sized computers. I wouldn't discount those few engineers joining MSFT: they'll have at least a general knowledge of the best techniques, and now even more even more compute to test them on. Also, Sama is a talent magnet and I have no doubts they'll build a team on par with OpenAIs.
Lol I always wanted to join OpenAI to work under Sutskevar. When Altman joined in 2019, my first thought was why is the YC guy running arguably the most important AI lab in the world.
He's probably a talent magnet, but he's not a talent magnet for ML researchers. Probably for tech people yes but more of the startup engineer types who are proud of not going to school. Not the academic researcher types who spent 10 years at university doing PhDs and PostDocs in ML.
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Brockman has real dev (not research) experience and has a lot of street cred in that direction. Don't forget that ChatGPT is as much an app as it is a LLM.
500+/700 OpenAI employees have signed a letter to threatening to resign and join Microsoft. That’s pretty much the whole company https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/
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Well going forward one can probably not accuse OpenAI of regulatory capture through AI safety anymore, as at least Ilya and board actually seem very serious about it.
This.
Let say that there is a strong push from one particular side at avoiding regulations in the AI space because they might put a serious ding into glorious profits.
Dude, you're being played if you think Ilya did this for 'the betterment of mankind'
This was a power play, pure and simple.
How do you know that? And how can you be so confident about it?
Did you see ilya's latest tweet? Did you notice that he hasn't shared a single valid reason for why he ousted Sam? If he had done so 80% of openAI's employees would not be planning on leaving openAI (fun fact, ilya is in that group LOL)
I mean it's obviously a power play. But the characters involved are this:
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Altman: entrepreneur extraordinaire, head of YC, CEO, investor, etc.
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Brockman: entrepreneur extraordinaire, former CTO of Stripe (e-commerce infra company), investor, etc.
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Nadella: CEO of Microsoft, nuff said.
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Sutskevar: researcher extraordinaire, academic
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McCauley: RAND Corp scientist (no idea what that means but it has scientist in the name)
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Toner: Georgetown academic.
All of the tech entrepreneur people and investors -- the people who are obsessed with just making money -- are on one side. And all of the academic, science people are on the other side. Recall that OpenAI was founded by a bunch of researchers and academics who explicitly made it a nonprofit, which Altman changed once he became CEO in 2019.
Idk if the academics really care about the betterment of mankind, but I know for a fact that the other guys' are driven by pure greed.
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if they can convince regulators and the public that "the apocalypse" is the greatest concern re: AI theyll never have to worry about regulation
Very surprising, an unexpected turn of events.
I'd wager they'll last less than a year under the Microsoft fold.
But maybe that's more than necessary. Sam & Greg will have made a proper plan, and Microsoft would've calmed down their clients and product pipeline.
This would be an Extinction Level Event. If it wasn't - you know - Microsoft.
Ask Chat GPT what it thinks?
Is Microsoft gonna just dump OpenAI now, lol?
wow he'll be able to visit that AI company Microsoft invested in. Maybe they can learn something from them.
They should change the name of Open AI GP, L.L.C back to the original SUMMERSAFE GP, L.L.C. It's more descriptive.
Well that’s one way to kill a company
I really wonder why the other companies can’t catch up with ChatGPT. It has to be more than compute and data right?
OpenAI must have found some algorithm that makes attention much better.
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Lol Microsoft's like "okay kids, yall both can have a game to play with".
^(Or is microsoft behind it the whole time....muahuhuahuahua)
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