The core thing he is 100% focused on is not having a massive stock drop Monday morning. That’s it that’s his reason to exist all weekend long.
After that. He has time to figure it out.
Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?
In all this drama, the deep work interruption of the nerds is the net loss (and effectively slight deceleration) for the future.
What exactly can a foundation in charge of OpenAI do to prevent this unethical use of the technology? If OpenAI refuses to use it to some unethical goal, what prevents other, for profit enterprises, from doing the same? How can private actors stop this without government regulation?
Sounds like Truman's apocryphal "the Russian's will never have the bomb". Well, they did, just 4 years later.
The argument would go something like this:
MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and its mission.
"Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion" -https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
To then write down their assets?
"How Skype lost its crown to Zoom" - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/skype-coronavirus-pandemic Or when they did this ?
Or how in 2014...
"Microsoft buying Nokia's phone business in a $7.2 billion bid for its mobile future" - https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/2/4688530/microsoft-buys-nok...
Then in 2016 sold it for 360 million?
"Nokia returns to the phone market as Microsoft sells brand" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-ret...
Microsoft will not have actually paid $10B as a single commitment, in fact the financials of OpenAI appear to be alarming from the recent web chatter. OpenAI are possibly close to collapse financially as well as organizationally.
Whatever Satya does will be aimed at isolating Microsoft and its roadmap from that, his job is actually also on the line for this debacle.
The OpenAI board have ruined their credibility and organization.
By all accounts, OpenAI is not a going concern without Azure. I could see Tesla acquiring the bankrupt shell for the publicity, but the worker bees seem to be more keen on their current leader (as of last week) than their prior leader. OpenAI ends with a single owner.
"Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion" - https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without disrupting user experience?
"Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps doing its thing" - https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/four-years-after-being-acq...
or when they acquired LinkedIn before that?
"Microsoft buys LinkedIn" - https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-buys-linke...
which turned out to be fine too?
How about Minecraft? Activision?
It's easy to cherry-pick examples from an era where Microsoft wasn't the most successful. The current leadership seems competent and the stock growth of the company reflects that.
1. When they invested in Open AI it had a more mature board (in particular Reid Hoffman) and afterwards they lost a few members without replacing them. That was probably something Microsoft could have influenced without making themselves part of the problem.
2. They received a call one minute before the decision was made public. That shouldn't happen to a partner that owns 49% of the company you just fired a CEO from.
Sources:
1 - https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
2 - https://www.axios.com/2023/11/17/microsoft-openai-sam-altman...
Hiring Altman makes sure that MSFT is still relevant to the whole Altman/OpenAI deal, not just a part of it. Hiring Altman thus decreases such possibility to write-off its investment.
The fact that this is even news speaks of the absolute shit job they've done with acquisitions in the past.
They were positioned that way by the OpenAI board, which has effectively committed corporate suicide and won’t be around much longer.
If he manages to get a significant amount of the OpenAI engineers to jump ship maybe, but even for those who are largely motivated by money, how is MS going to offer the same opportunity as when they joined for equity with OpenAI? Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
Looking at the global track records of what happens after acquisitions, these don't seem too bad
Nadella was rightly furious about this, the tail wagged the dog there. And this isn't over yet: you can expect a lot of change on the OpenAI side.
There was a lot of discussion on HN the past few days regarding the importance (or lack thereof) of a CEO to an organization. It may be the case that most executives are interchangeable and attributing success to them is not merited, but in the case of the aforementioned, I think it is merited.
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft has one of the most renowned industry research groups or something like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
There was an article that came out over the weekend that stated that only a small part of that $10B investment was in cash, the vast majority is cloud GPU credits, and that it has a long time horizon with only a relatively small fraction having been consumed to date. So, if MSFT were to develop their own GPT4 model in house over the next year or so they could in theory back out of their investment with most of it intact.
"... In the two years since the acquisition announcement, GitHub has reported a 41% increase in status page incidents. Furthermore, there has been a 97% increase in incident minutes, compared to the two years prior to the announcement..."
My uneducated guess is that OpenAI really screwed up the PR part and the current Microsoft’s claims are more on the overall damage control / fire suppression side.
How so? I don't get the hype.
OpenAI trained truly ground breaking models that were miles ahead of anything the world had seen before. Everything else was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at best, average. They called their flagship product "ChatGPT", a term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a random string of letters to the average person. They had no mobile app for a long time. Their web app had some major bugs.
Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success by far and large hinges on their game-changing models. And by extension, the bulk of the credit goes to their AI research/tech teams.
For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or something.
the bottleneck right now is mostly compute I think, and openai does not have the resources or expertise to allieviate that bottleneck on a timescale that can save them.
Now they get 40 percent of open ai talent and 50 percent of the for profit openai subsidiary.
Pretty sure when the market opens you'll see confirmation that they came out on top.
It's a win for everyone honestly. Anthropic split all over again but this time the progressives got pushed out vs the conservatives leaving voluntarily.
They couldn't keep nice under the tent. Now two tents.
Little diff because this time an investor with special privaleges made a new special tent quick to bag talent.
Easy decision for msft. No talent to competitors. Small talent pool. The other big boys were already all over that. Salty bosses at other outfits. No poach for them. Satya too clever and brought the checkbook plus already courted the cutest girls earlier for a different dance. Hell he was assisting in the negotiation when the old dance got all rough and the jets started throwing hooks about safety and scale and bla bla we all know the story.
Satya hunts with an elephant gun with one of those laser sites and the auto trigger that fires automatically when the cross hair goes over the target. Rip sundar. 2 rounds for satya. One more and I feel bad for Google... Naw... Couldn't feel bad for Google. Punchable outfit. They do punchable things. We all know it... I'm just saying it.
That's a slightly flamboyant reading.. but I agree with the gist.
A slim chance of total right off doctor off.. that was always the case. This decision does not affect it much. The place in the risk model, where most of the action happens... Is less dramatic effects on more likely bans of the probability curve.
Msft cannot be kicked off the team. They still have all of the rights to their openai investment no matter who the CEO is.
Meanwhile, is clearly competing, participating, and doing business with openai. The hierarchy of paradigms, is flexible... Competing appears to have won.
I agree that direct financial returns, are the lesser part of the investment case for msft.. and the other participants. That's pretty much standard in consortium-like ventures.
At the base level, openai's IP is still largely science, unpatentable know how and key people. Msft have some access to (I assume) of openAI' defendable IP via their participation in the consortium, or 49% ownership of the for-profit entity. Meanwhile, openai is not so far ahead that pacing them from a dead start is impossible.
I also agree, that this represents a decision to launch ahead aggressively in the generative AI space.
In the latter 2000s, Google have the competence, technology, resources and momentum to smash anyone else on anything worldwideWeb.
They won all the "races." Google have never been good at turning wins into businesses, but they did acquire the wins handily. Microsoft wants to be that for the 2020s.
Able to replicate everything, for the new paradigm OpenAI's achievments probably represents.
The AI spreadsheet. The LLM email client. GPT search. Autobot jira. Literally and proverbially.
At least in theory... Microsoft is or will be in a position to start executing on all of these.
Sama, if he's actually motivated to do this.. it's pretty much the ideal person on planet earth for that task.
I'm sure takes a lot to motivate him. Otoh, CEO of Microsoft is it realistic prize if he wins this game. The man is basically Microsoft the person. I mean that as a compliment.. sort of.
One way or another, I expect that implementing OpenAI-ish models in applications is about commence.
Companies have been pleading chatbot customer support for years. They may get it soon, but so will the customers. That makes for a whole new thing in the place where customer support used to exist. At least, that is the bull case.
That said, I have said a lot. All speculative. I'll probabilistic, even where my speculations are correct. These are not really predictions. I'm chewing the cud.
in America, nonprofits are just how rich people run around trying to get tax avoidance, plaudettes and now wealth transfers.
I doubt OpenAI is different not that Altman is anything but a figurehead.
but nonprofits in America is how the government has chosen to derelict it's duties.
I sense a lot of respect and appreciation for his role, but unfortunately I just don’t know many details and I’m curious about the highlights.
Or at least the most hyped AI team in the world. The level of cult of personality around OpenAI is reaching pretty nauseating levels.
Maybe they got funding for a proper incident team? Or changed the metrics of a incdient is, maybe the SLAs changed to mirror MS SLAs?
Also Betteridge's law.
Even if he does nothing, he keeps the team together and that is worth quite a bit.
I'm no embarrased billionaire, but there is a place for both.
Yes directly, the $10B investment in the company itself may be a write off. But it's not just about that.
This massively increases the odds we’ll see AI regulated. That isn’t what Altman et al intended with their national press tour—the goal was to talk up the tech. But it should be good in the long run.
I also assume there will be litigation about what Sam et al can bring with them, and what they cannot.
For Sam , he got more than what he was asking and a better prospect to become CEO of Microsoft when Satya leaves. Satya lead cloud division, which was the industry growth market at that time before becoming CEO and now sam is leading AI division , the next growth market.
Ilya still lost in all of this , he managed to get back the keys of a city from sam , who now got this keys to the whole country . Eventually sam will pull everyone out of the city in to rest of his country. Microsoft just needs a few openai employees to join them . They just need data and GPU , openai has reached its limits for getting more data and was begging for more private data while Microsoft holds worlds data, they will just give a few offers to business or free Microsoft products in return of using their data or use their own. I think it’s the end for openAI.
It seems to me roughly all of the value of OpenAI’s products is in the model itself and presumably the supporting infrastructure, neither of which seem like they’re going to MSFT (yet?).
The money was promised in tranches, and probably much of it in the form of spare Azure capacity. Microsoft did not hand OpenAI a $10B check.
Satya gives away something he had excess of, and gets 75% of the profits that result from its use, and half of the resulting company. Gives him an excuse to hoard Nvidia GPUs.
If it goes to the moon he’s way up. If it dies he’s down only a fraction of the $10B. If it meanders along his costs are somewhat offset, and presumably he can exit at some point.
They won’t necessarily be able to attract similar technical talent because they no longer have the open non profit mission not the lottery ticket startup PPO shares.
Working on AI at Microsoft was always an option even before they were hired, not sure if they tip the scale?
A non-profit is not by any means guaranteed to avoid the dangers of AI. But at a minimum it will avoid the greed-driven myopia that seems to be the default when companies are beholden to Wall Street shareholders.
My guess is that a lot of the people that will follow Sam and Gregg are that kind of cult-follower.
It's seems like a cult right now, tbh.
Nah it would make it too understandable. It's Microsoft, they'll just rename Bing to Cortana Series X 365. And they'll keep Cortana alive but as a totally different product.
Google has been hyping gemini since the spring (and not delivering it)
Amazon's Titan Model is not quite there yet.
So basically they get to control ChatGPT 2.0 and get a 10 billion tax credit for it.
Honestly the board at least owes Satya a drink.
Credit to Nadella for making a big cultural shift over the past several years.
Excuse you? Greater where? Github was an amazing revolution, unique of its kind. Microsoft didn't kill it but didn't make it even 1% better for the users, just turned it into a cash cow. Linkedin is currently a PoS.
Recruiting. At the end of the day, that's the most important job a CEO has. If they can recruit the best AI people, they're the most formidable AI team.
> Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?
I would wager very heavily that they are. My guess is Satya more or less promised Sam that he'd match comp for anybody who wants to leave OpenAI.
Whether they actually move to MS or not remains to be seen, but it is definitely a strong indicator that they're not "aligned" with OpenAI anymore.
Not sure why you didn’t research before saying that! It was $10B committed and not a cash handover of that amount. Also, majority of that’s Azure credits
GitHub is stronger now then it ever has been.
might be missing some more but Satya is like a S tier CEO, compared to Sundar who doesn't seem very good at his role.
This is a win from Microsoft's perspective. They don't have to have the best group messenger around, but having a significant office product being dominated by another company would be a massive risk to Microsoft, and Teams has prevented that.
I think it can be argued that giving free private repos to user is a 1% increase. Or what about private vulnerability reporting for open source projects. And so on. Github has gotten a lot of new free functionality since Microsoft bought it. It sounds like you just have not been paying attention.
Edit: Nevermind, I see you refer to Microsoft as M$. That really says it all.
This sounds like hyperbole, but isn't that what China is doing?
Meanwhile Microsoft wins if OpenAI stays dominant and wins even bigger if Sam and Greg prevail. Some day soon they may teach this story at Harvard Business School.
Context:
---------
1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level
1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition.
1.3/ Microsoft, after investing $10+ Billions do not want this fight enable slow progress of AI Commercialization and fall behind Google AI etc..
a workable solution:
--------------------
2.1/ @sama @gdb form a new AI company, let us call it e/acc Inc.
2.2/ e/acc Inc. raises $3 Billions as SAFE instrument from VCs who believed in Sam Altman's vision.
2.3/ Open AI and e/acc Inc. reach an agreement such that:
a) GPT-4 IP transferred to e/acc Inc., this IP transfer is valued as $8 Billion SAFE instrument investment from Open AI into e/acc Inc.
b) existing Microsoft's 49% share in Open AI is transferred to e/acc Inc., such that Microsoft owns 49% of e/acc Inc.
c) the resulted "Lean and pure non-profit Open AI" with Ilya Sukhar and Board can steer AI progress as they wish, their stake in e/acc Inc. will act as funding source to cover their future Research Costs.
d) employees can join from Open AI to e/acc Inc. as they wish with no antipoaching lawsuits from OpenAI
Linkedin has not improved its problems with spam or content quality since Microsoft took over.
Not unreliable enough to be a problem though, and Actions seems to be a decent experience for plenty of people.
The simple fact with GitHub is that it is _the_ primary place to go looking for, or post your, open source code, and it is the go-to platform for the majority of companies looking for a solution to source code hosting.
Your comment about LinkedIn is true, but where is the nearest competition in its' space?
Like some googlers have mentioned - aside from GPU requirements, there isn't much else of a moat since a lot of ML ideas are presented and debated relatively freely at NEURIPS, ICML and other places.
You are imagining I fall in a crowd you've observed. Maintaining statute of the art ofc is a constant battle.
Google could be top dog in 2 weeks. Never insinuated otherwise. (though I predict otherwise, if we're gonna speculate)
Its not even relevant because each big firm is specializing to a degree. Anthropic is going for context window and safety... Bard is all about Google priorities... Ect