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.
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.
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.
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?
Good luck trying to find H100 80s on the 3 big clouds.
I've definitely come out worse on some of the screw ups in my life.
The hubris, indeed.
Even they prob had some friend come flying over and jump out of some autonomous car to knock on their door in sf.
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?
I presume their deal is something different to the typically Azure experience and more direct / close to the metal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?