hckrnws

All: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: the one in our code—not the world) is a thing of the past.

I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads, but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of the page to read all the comments, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=4

etc...

Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure, but Microsoft can now capture even a bigger slice of THE FUTURE than it was possible with OpenAI investment.

Remember when they did this?

"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...

Remember when they did this?

"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.

"Has GitHub Been Down More Since Its Acquisition by Microsoft?" - https://statusgator.com/blog/has-github-been-down-more-since...

"... 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..."

Speaking as someone who uses github multiple times a day, I think I've only actually noticed 1-2 downtimes in the past year. On the other hand, I've used several of the beta features that have come out, including copilot and the evolving github actions.

GitHub is stronger now then it ever has been.

Wouldn't incident increase in forward movement of time where there would be a user increase as well?

Shipping code causes incidents. Microsoft has shipped more features on github in the year they acquired it than github did 5 years before that.

> 41% increase in status page incidents

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.

GitHub has been significantly less reliable since Microsoft bought it and Actions has been a disaster of an experience.

Linkedin has not improved its problems with spam or content quality since Microsoft took over.

That's quite a goalpost shift. The original claim was that Microsoft ruins companies. Your rebuttal to LinkedIn as a counterexample is that they haven't made it better. This does not support the claim that they've ruined it.

We found the Micro$oft bootlicker

> GitHub has been significantly less reliable since Microsoft bought it and Actions has been a disaster of an experience.

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?

The Activision purchase is still way too new to judge.

With the loyal customer base (aka addicts) for the bought IPs, the purchase can only be successful.

MS is destined to be substantially better than their previous owners. Your right in that it may be too early to predict the financial success, but I am very happy to see MS as the new owners of Activision, no matter what happens.

> only to enable GitHub to do greater things, without disrupting user experience?

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.

> didn't make it even 1% better for the users

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.

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Despite porting it from Java to C++, Bedrock (Microsoft's rewrite of Minecraft) somehow has worse performance and bugs than vanilla Minecraft. (Also, a bunch of it is somehow in JavaScript?)

I don’t believe that is entirely accurate, but even if it was — the bedrock port has been extremely successful for Microsoft.

All three parts of what I said are true. What you say is also true.

The problem with arguing with people like that who cherry pick is even after you provide examples, they will generally respond by just cherry-picking your examples instead of acknowledging the actual point you made

> Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps doing its thing

The fact that this is even news speaks of the absolute shit job they've done with acquisitions in the past.

It absolutely does not. Take a look around at acquisitions in general and count how many acquired teams are still doing their thing.

Maybe they learned their lesson?

Looking at the global track records of what happens after acquisitions, these don't seem too bad

Except the founders weren't included in the Skype deal. Microsoft has OpenAI's two founders and they're highly motivated to show that OpenAI is nothing without them which in time it may soon be. I openly await when Sam and Greg ship a product in say two years time.

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.

Satya was not responsible for those 2 purchases

Pre Satya history is irrelevant to the current MSFT

For those of us not following Microsoft super close, would it possible to ready a summary of the successes of Satya?

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.

- Github Purchase, Linkedin Purchase - Aligned Microsoft towards "openness" culturally - VS Code + Typescript - Partnership with Open AI which might make bing actually be used

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.

Did MS do anything with Linux before Sataya? At present I believe that the bulk of their Azure hosts are running Linux - their own distro. And AFAIK it is successful.

They did the bare minimum to let Linux based stuff run on Azure but other than that not much.

No mention of Azure? Also, anyone not already using Bing Chat is missing out. It's been a good while since I had to google anything.

Don't forget Microsoft buying aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007 and then taking a $6.2 billion dollar writedown 5 years later.

The Skype purchase was good for itself. It lead to Teams, which is dominating.

Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with their other services. In my personal opinion, as someone who loved Skype before Microsoft got involved with it, Teams is complete trash, and impossible to work with in a business environment.

> Teams is dominating only because they bundle it with their other services.

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.

So killing Skype was actually their goal? :(

The only people I know using Teams are the ones who are forced to by management fiat. I guess that's dominating, but not really in a positive way.

It was also good for the security state https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f...

And bad for users. Skype went downhill fast and Teams… well we all know what that’s like.

Seconded, teams winning is horrible for users in the long run (no competition allowed), but great for MS and IT managers.

Not every swing is going to be a home run. Billion dollar investments sound like a lot but not for companies of this size. They are small to medium sized bets.

They didn't buy OpenAI, they got the best part of their team to develop new products for MS.

What’s the evidence behind “they got the best part of their team?”

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?).

Go to Twitter (X?) and search for "OpenAI is nothing without its people" and prepare to be mind blown.

It's seems like a cult right now, tbh.

A bit culty but am I to interpret this as, “if I post that the people are important to this company, I am going to resign?”

Yes, it's how they pledge their alliance to @sama.

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.

Eh, seems like an ambitious read, and obviously if they actually wanted to give Sam leverage it would’ve required saying “I will leave if he’s not reinstated,” not a more generic statement of solidarity.

Ok here it is, lol.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775?s...

Yeah this is much much less ambiguous than the Twitter things. At least answers my question of, "is there actually that much support for Altman?" Now the second question, much more important and still ambiguous IMO, is whether these people will actually resign to do this. The letter just says they "may" resign, which leaves really the last thing you want in an ultimatum like this: ambiguity.

True, but that was when ballmer was at the helm

And despite the above track record, he somehow managed to not accidentally buy Yahoo as well.

he was going to until a time traveler told he Yahoo's actually get rich accidentally in the future after investing in Alibaba so he couldn't bear it /s

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I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team? I would wager a substantial sum that Altman has not touch anything technical (let alone related to AI) in a very long time. He certainly showed he is a very good operator, networker and executer, but that doesbt give you the technical expertise to build state of the art AI.

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?

> I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team?

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.

Looking at the list of people who have resigned it's quite obvious that the team goes where he goes.

Even if he does nothing, he keeps the team together and that is worth quite a bit.

If I was a SE/MLE at OpenAI , and I had a choice between the nonprofit OpenAI and MS, I'd follow Sam to MS. This is assuming I had profit sharing contracts in place.

There's a current fashion for tech "leaders" (bosses, really) to try to imbue in their staff a kind of cultish belief in the company and its leader. Personally, I find these efforts extremely offputting. I'm thinking of the kind of saccharine corporate presentations from people like Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes; it evidently appeals to some kinds of people, but I run a mile from cults.

My guess is that a lot of the people that will follow Sam and Gregg are that kind of cult-follower.

The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority, Yukio Mishima. You reveal more here about your own psychology than those who have a mission that they believe in and are passionate about. It's always easy to criticise from the sidelines.

Mishima was quite physically beautiful so this claim feels rather convenient for him.

I don’t get it too. It’s akin to claiming that by hiring an Oracle executive you can build the best database tech. A little stretch but still. Chances are I’ll never understand how things like that work, because there must be few truths about humans my mind resists to believe.

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.

> Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?

This sounds like hyperbole, but isn't that what China is doing?

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And this kind of thinking seems to be the exact reason he was pushed away. “The future” as envisioned by a megacorp might not be that great.

I'm not sure I follow this chain of arguments, which I hear often. So, a technology becomes possible, that has the potential to massively disrupt social order - while being insanely profitable to those who employ it. The knowledge is already out there in scientific journals, or if it's not, it can be grokked via corporate espionage or paying huge salaries to the employees of OpenAI or whoever else has it.

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.

I think the last couple decades have demonstrated the dangers of corporate leadership beholden to whims of shareholders. Jack Welch-style management where the quarterly numbers always go up at the expense of the employee, the company, and the customer has proven to be great at building a house of cards that stands just long enough for select few to make fortunes before collapsing. In the case of companies like GE or Boeing, the fallout is the collapse of the company or a “few” hundred people losing their lives in place crashes. In the case of AI, the potential for societal-level destructive consequences is higher.

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.

I don't think cherry-picked examples mean much. But even so, you don't seem to be answering the question, which was "how will being a non-profit stop other people behaving unethically?"

Look up the reason OpenAI was founded. The idea was exactly that someone would get there first, and it better be an entity with beneficial goals. So they set it up to advance the field - which they have been doing successfully - while having a strict charter that would ensure alignment with humanity (aka prevent it from becoming a profit-driven enterprise).

in theory, a nonprofit would demonstrate a government need and the nonprofit would be bought out by the government.

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.

In your world yes, but in another, nonprofits are able to work in research that the Government should not, cannot or is too inefficient at ever getting working.

I'm no embarrased billionaire, but there is a place for both.

Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI.

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.

> MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI

They were positioned that way by the OpenAI board, which has effectively committed corporate suicide and won’t be around much longer.

I am sure Sutskever knows openai as an economically competitive entity has been living on borrowed time. this is a global arms race and this tech will bleed out everywhere. implementing LLMs is not rocket science per se and there are multiple places in the world this work can be done.

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.

Microsoft does not prevent OpenAI from achieving their mission. OpenAI does not bind Microsoft to behave one way or another.

Since the board was never clear what Altman did, you could make flip the parties and your breach of contract argument holds about as much water. Plus MS can resort to the playground "they started it" argument.

Perhaps. Could be tied up in court for 2-3 years before we find out.

For Microsoft , 2% loss in stock value on this news on Friday was $60 billion, so writing off $10B and giving another $50B to form a team is still a great deal.

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.

> Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company?

Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?

That surely is no problem from the pov of said mega-corp.

24k gold shackles for a year or two and then onto the next thing.

10 billion was potential investment. They transfer that in tranches, so lot of it is still in MS bank. They already have access to GPT3/4/turbo + Dalle 2/3. Plus with its hordes of lawyers, it will be an uphill battle for OpenAI to make MS lose.

Make the model open source and lets see what MS can do with army of lawyers

Sure, they can but that would be against all the safe alignment values they are pushing. They'll lose billions in current and potential investment and will spend the life in lawsuits. Also, govt may not like giving away cutting age tech to China.

Yep, it's now time for MS to throw in the laywers.

yeah most likely they have like 6 billion left in the bank accounts which they'll redirect to the new AI lab

Satya simply had to move quickly to restore shareholder confidence. I'm not convinced that its actually desirable for Microsoft to be fully in the driving seat. Hopefully the new division will have autonomy.

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.

Agreed, Satya is a first rate executive, other than Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, I can't really think of anyone in the same league.

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.

Tim Cook is not in the same league?

Yes, oversight on my part, as a supply chain guy, he has really pivoted well in to a generalist leading Apple in to the entertainment biz.

I would say given the stock's performance lately, Mark has been handling business pretty well.

This whole weekend will probably be a case study in both Corporate Governance (Microsoft may look bad here for not anticipating the problem) and Negotiation (a masterclass by Satya: gave Ilya what he wanted and got most of OpenAI's commercial potential anyway).

As much as I dislike Microsoft: they played this exactly right. No boardseat: no culpability or conflict of interest, catch the falling pieces and reposition themselves stronger. What makes you say they didn't anticipate the problem? If they had anticipated it I don't see what else they could have done without making themselves part of the problem.

I based that opinion on two news that came out:

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...

Yes, but both of those are not Microsoft's doing but the OpenAI board's doing. You don't just get to name someone to a board without the board to agree to it and normally this happens as a condition of for instance an investment or partnership.

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.

Buying 49% of a company is a risky deal. You better make sure the other 51% have good governance.

Yes, that probably was a mistake, it should have come with more protections. But I haven't seen any documents on the governance other than what is in the media now and there is a fair chance that MS did have various protections but that the board simply ignored those.

>reposition themselves stronger.

We don't know that yet.

I can't see it in any other way.

Didn’t the negotiations fail?

He doesn’t have to write down the investment that came in the form of azure credits. He just doesn’t have to deliver.

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.

Don't forget, MS has a board as well. One Satya reports to the same way Sam reported to the OpanAI one. Potantially loosong 10 billion is nothing the board will just shrug off.

Microsoft’s share price swings about more than that on a daily basis

Market cap is not really real money.

Twitter?

Investors money =|= the companies money.

Yup back pats from the board to Satya. Only 10 billion to get their foot in the door at OpenAI and now they can ransack all their talent. How many billions would it cost to develop that independently? What a saving.

Plus if OpenAI implodes on itself they can write that investment down to zero.

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.

You seem to have missed the entire point of the comment you’re replying to.

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.

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I agree. 10B is peanuts for MSFT but its Satya's miscalculation. He didn't anticipate that and the board wouldn't be too happy about it.

If the board is unhappy about that they are idiots and should not be board members.

Absolutely no one could have predicted Sam being removed as CEO without anyone knowledge until it happened.

But regardless a 10b investment has yields huge results for MS. MS is using openAI tech, they aren’t dependent on the openAI api or infrastructure to provide their AI in every aspect of MS products.

That 10b investment has prob paid itself back already and MS is leveraging AI faster than anyone else and has a stronger foothold on the market.

If the board can’t look past what 10b got then. I wouldn’t have faith in the board.

Given it's Microsoft we're talking about, it's more likely they use it to find new and novel ways to shove Edge, OneDrive, Teams and Bing down your throat whenever you use any of their products.

TBH We are living in the outcome of the $10B investment. Google is in a weaker position in search, with egg on their face. Microsoft appears (with or without ChatGPT) uniquely positioned to monopolize on this new AI future we're heading into with or without OpenAI as a company.

Yes directly, the $10B investment in the company itself may be a write off. But it's not just about that.

Microsoft got Copilot. They were first to establish the brand. OpenAI technologies let them do it. I don't know how much Copilot brand cost, but right now when you're thinking about AI-assisted programming, Copilot is the first thing comes in mind. So probably they got something in return.

Not only Github copilot but the general copilot integrations announced at Ignite for Microsoft 365 and other apps means a much deeper full on assistant integration for whole ecosystem.

Yeah, Copilot has become a very nice branding.

For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or something.

> For business and for the consumer. They can retire Bing search at this point, making it Microsoft Copilot for Web or something.

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.

I would say this is a better outcome for what remains of OpenAI. a New startup would have created more exodus that Microsoft. Doubt many brilliant researchers would want to be Employee number 945728123 of Microsoft when the market is theirs at this moment.

> Doubt many brilliant researchers would want to be Employee number 945728123 of Microsoft when the market is theirs at this moment.

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

I did not say the don't have and it's precisely because the do have that is less likely to attract the kind of people that make a difference. Less room to move and less room to be distinguished. Case in point these did not join that renowned group in the first place but joined OpenAI an obscure not renowned group and I guarantee you it's not because MS was not interested.

Microsoft is now the for-profit arm of OpenAI.

https://imgur.com/a/ZjehzHY

> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

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.

I have the complete opposite perspective. Their initial api went live sometime late 2020. They have done a fantastic job scaling, releasing features while growing the business at a rate we have not seen many times before.

Maybe the next move is an open offer to any OpenAI employees to join Sam’s team at their current compensation or better.. call it the ‘treacherous 500’ or something.

Wow I even got the number right.

I dunno man. Doing innovation from inside Microsoft might be more difficult than if they had just formed a new startup. Microsoft as a brand has the stench of mediocracy upon it. Large companies are where ideas and teams go to die, or just rest and vest.

If there's one thing we should have learned over the last 45 years in this industry - it's never underestimate Microsoft.

Was GPT4 a success due to the brilliance of OpenAI's tech team vs first movers advantage and good GPU deals with MS? I might be missing something here, but to me nothing about this technology feels like rocket science (obviously, there is a lot of nuance, yada yada, but nothing that seems intractable). I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good stuff.

>I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good stuff.

Google has been hyping gemini since the spring (and not delivering it)

Amazon's Titan Model is not quite there yet.

> recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles

Or at least the most hyped AI team in the world. The level of cult of personality around OpenAI is reaching pretty nauseating levels.

> possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B

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.

Depends on the term sheet behind that. That, and how MS is accounting for its minority stake in OpenAI. If they have to write off the vakue, it doesn't how they paid for it.

> recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company

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.

MS also has its own ML teams and is probably capable of replicating a lot of OpenAI without OpenAI.

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.

> can capture a bigger slice of THE FUTURE History says that the future is actually written by the nerds and not the drumbeaters (ah read CXOs).

In all this drama, the deep work interruption of the nerds is the net loss (and effectively slight deceleration) for the future.

I'm wondering how Sam is going to work with Demis. Two master cooks in a kitchen/

What choice did Satya have? Nothing much else he could have done in the present situation.

Choice? Are you framing this as though the whole situation didn't go pretty well toward msft's favor?

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.

It's pretty naive IMO to think Google isn't going to come out with something that threatens OpenAI or Microsoft. It seems to be "they didn't do it yet so they won't ever" is the majority opinion here, but they have a ton of advantages when they finally do

What? I didn't say anything about the likelyhood of competition to state of the art.

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

I basically agree - and it’s a weird cognitive shift to think that going to Microsoft is the best place for tech innovation today.

Credit to Nadella for making a big cultural shift over the past several years.

> most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure

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.

However it's a nice way to deal with the whole "open" AI issue: first you create a non-profit to create open AI systems; then when you hit a marketable success it turns into a "capped profit"; and finally, all the people from that capped profit leave en masse and transfer their acquired know how to a for-profit company.

> for-profit company

Slashdot literally used to call them M$

It's more than that, OpenAI had many people aligned with the decel agenda, MSFT managed to take the accel leadership and likely their supporters. Does anyone know any large AI competitors that don't have a big decel contingent? Also interesting that META took the opportunity to close one of their decel departments on Saturday.

This might have been a reasonable and workable solution for all parties involved.

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

Really? These two did not do the technical work but hired, managed, and fund raised.

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?

If I had to make a list of companies that need shackles of that sort, Microsoft would definitely be top three or so.

> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

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.

Side note, the 10B investment is less than a half a percent of MSFT's 2.75T market cap.

> Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

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

My understanding was that a large tranche of that $10B consisted of Azure compute credits, not actual cash.

You do realize that Microsoft uses OpenAI IP for all of its AI products, of which there are at least two dozen that they released this year. In what universe do you make the connection that they would write it off and go to a different, less superior/reliable, model provider? It would never happen.

right, they'll just steal it and watch a nonprofit try to enforce anything about it.

You are looking forward to a self-aware, self-replicating, unregulated Clippy?

At least it will be a broken paperclip maximizer.

>>There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles...

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.

All of the naysayers here seem convinced this is Altman and Microsoft looking to destroy OpenAI.

Normally I am the cynic but this time I’m seeing a potential win-win here. Altman uses his talent to recruit and drive forward a brilliant product focused AI. OpenAI gets to refocus on deep research and safety.

Put aside cynicism and consider Nadella is looking to create the best of all worlds for all parties. This might just be it.

All of the product focused engineering peeps have a great place to flock to. Those who believe in the original charter of OpenAI can get back to work on the things that brought them to the company in the first place.

Big props to Nadella. He also heads off a bloodbath in the market tomorrow. So big props to Altman too for his loyalty. By backing MS instead of starting something brand new he is showing massive support for Nadella.

Reading the statement, I am doubtful that Microsoft and OpenAI can continue their business relationship. I think the most aggressive part of this is the "[they will be joining] together with colleagues" sub sentence. He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with. This situation seems especially difficult since Microsoft basically houses all of openai's infrastructure. How can they continue a trust-based relationship like this?

In the end it’s all about business, and it’s not in Microsoft’s interest to destroy OpenAI. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep the relationship warm, because it’s basically two different philosophies that are at odds with each other, one of which is now being housed under Microsoft R&D.

For all we know, OpenAI may actually achieve AGI, and Microsoft will still want a front row seat in case that happens.

Microsoft specifically does not get a front row seat (in any meaningful sense) to and OpenAI AGI event, per their agreement.

> He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with

Not doing that would be participating in illegal wage suppression. I'm not sure how following the law means OpenAI and MSFT can't continue a business relationship.

Because they need the chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Microsoft's commercial interests will push them do whatever is needed to make it work.

They don't. He's a smart guy but he's far from having the reins of AI in his hands as some people blindly believe.

Exhibit A: this weekend, lol.

I know I’m not qualified to make that observation, but what exactly makes you think you are? Can you share what information you’re using to make such a confident determination?

My simple take would be the credits for GPT-3.5/GPT-4/GPT-5. The key engineers were part of those that have seemingly moved to Microsoft. I personally think Ilya is brilliant. I absolutely don't think he's the _sole_ brilliant mind behind OpenAI. He wasn't even one of the founders. He's a very brilliant and powerful mind and likely will be critical in the breakthroughs that lead to AGI. That said, AGI feels like one of those "way off in the distance ideas" that might be 5,10, or 100 years away. I tend to think that GPT-x is several orders of magnitude from AGI and this drama was silly and unneeded. GPT-5/6/7/8 aren't likely to destroy the world.

Agreed, I think this is an awesome outcome. We now have an extremely capable AI product organization in-house at each of Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and a couple strong research-oriented organizations in Anthropic and OpenAI. This sounds like a recipe for a thriving competitive industry to me.

I wonder how this will all workout in the end (and the excitement around all of this is a little reminiscent of AOL bying Time Warner).

For one, I'm not sure Sam Altman will tolerate MS bureaucracy for very long.

But secondly, the new MS-AI entity can't presumably just take from OpenAI what they did there, they need to make it again.

This takes a lot of resources (that MS has) but also a lot of time to provide feedback to the models; also, copyright issues regarding source materials are more sensitive today, and people are more attuned to them: Microsoft will have a harder time playing fast and lose with that today, than OpenAI 8 years ago.

Or, Sam at MS becomes OpenAI biggest customer? But in that case, what are all those researchers and top scientists that followed him there, going to do?

Interesting times in any case.

Altman reporting to Nadella is certainly going to be a fascinating political struggle!

Part of me thinks that Nadella, having already demonstrated his mastery over all his competitor CEOs with one deft move after another over the past few years, took this on because he needed a new challenge.

I'd wager Altman will either get sidelined and pushed out, or become Nadella's successor, over the course of the next decade or so.

It's an interesting time!

I think you overestimate the technical part. Just speculating (no inside, no expert), but I would assume that the models are pretty "easy" and can be coded in few days. There are for sure some tweaks to the standard transformer architecture, but guess the tweaks are well known to sam and co.

The dataset is more challenging, but here msft can help - since they have bing and github as well. So they might be able to make few shortcuts here.

The most time consuming part is compute, but here again msft has the compute.

Will they beat chat-gpt 4 in a year? Guess no. But they will come very close to it and maybe it would not matter that much if you focus on the product.

You lost me at "can be coded in few days".

Haha, agree, it would take longer for sure.

What I meant is, most likely assuming that you are using pytorch / jax you could code down the model pretty fast. Just compare it to llama, sure it is far behind, but the llama model is under 1000 lines of code and pretty good.

There is tons of work, for the training, infra, preparing the data and so on. That would result guess in millions lines of code. But the core ideas and the model are likely thin I would argue. So that is my point.

Seems like it will create a Deepmind/Google Brain style split within MS.

MSR leadership is probably a little shaken at the moment.

I don't think so, MSR is more like OpenAI, a research think tank. MSR doesn't create products, they create concepts. I think Sam wants to create products. I think it would also be a difference in velocity to market.

What about the people who got paid equity for the past few years of work and now might see all of their equity intentionally vaporized? They essentially got cheated into working for a much lower compensation than they were promised.

I get that funny money startup equity evaporates all the time, but usually the board doesn’t deliberately send the equity to zero. Paying someone in an asset you’re intentionally going to intentionally devalue seems like fraud in spirit if not in law.

There is probably a lawsuit here, I would not disagree, but I don't think the board will have too much trouble arguing that they didn't intentionally send the equity to zero. I certainly haven't seen any of them state that that was their intention here. But the counter argument that theyshould have known that their actions would result in that outcome may be a strong one.

But I think it is probably sufficient to point to the language in the contracts granting illiquid equity instruments that explicitly say that the grantee should not have any expectation of a return.

But I think this is an actual problem with the legal structure of how our industry is financed! But it's not clear to me what a good solution would even be. Without the ability to compensate people with lottery tickets, it would just be even more irrational for anyone to work anywhere besides the big public companies with liquid stock. And that would be a real shame.

The board would counter that that equity was for a stake in a non-profit open source research company and the board was simply steering the ship back towards those goals.

I suppose I don't see the case where large numbers of OpenAI employees follow these two to Microsoft. Microsoft can't possibly cover the value of the OpenAI employees equity as it was (and imminently to be), let alone what could have potentially been. There is a big difference between being on a rocket ship and just a good team at a megacorp.

Damn was looking forward to picking up some cheap MSFT

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that going forward there won’t be much investor interest in OpenAI.

And if you separate out the products from OpenAI, that leaves the question of how an organization with extremely high compute and human capital costs can sustain itself.

Can OpenAI find more billionaire benefactors to support it so that it can return to its old operating model?

I think openAI will become the research lab, while the new group in Microsoft lead by Sam will focus on creating products.

I personally expect the chat.openai.com site to just become a redirect to copilot.microsoft.com.

Wouldn't all Microsoft competitors be interested in boosting OpenAI?

No, because OpenAI is still Microsoft somehow. And also, all the other big players already have their own thing.

This is sorta brilliant.

Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And now Altman and Brockman will have that access too.

Meanwhile, I imagine their tenure at MSFT will be short-lived, because hot-shot startup folks don’t really want to work there.

They can stabilize, use OpenAI’s data and models for free, use Microsoft’s GPUs at cost, and start a new company shortly, of which Microsoft will own some large share.

Altman doesn’t need Microsoft’s money - but Microsoft has direct access to OpenAI, which is currently priceless.

Satya will probably allow them to run a startup under the MS umbrella without interference and with full MS backing.

I really don’t think that’s in the Microsoft DNA to do

As I was saying, Satya justt confirmed it: https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569

Saying it and doing it are very different things. Many huge, lumbering companies have a “startup” lab. Few have done anything of note, and typically it’s because the reasons that made the company move slow and not take risks don’t magically disappear because you’re in a different part of the org chart.

Microsoft is not just any huge, lumbering company, though. It has probably the best history of research of any pure software company (leaving aside IBM etc): Microsoft Research funded Haskell behind the scenes for years, they had a quantum computing unit in 2006, and already in 2018 were beating the field in AI patents and research:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/01/06/micros...

Believing that OpenAI is MSFT's sole move in the AI space would be a serious error.

100% agree

If anything, the examples in that tweet shows the opposite. GitHub and Mojang both done lots of things that wouldn't happen if they weren't now Microsoft, especially GitHub which is only "GitHub" by name at this point, none of the original spirit is still there.

This was inevitable and the only path forward.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38318205

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337522

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342882

I believe Microsoft R&D has always been a widely respected and culturally “different” org than the rest of the Microsoft org.

This is not Ballmer era. It's Satya.

This is not Melkor era. It's Sauron.

Sure but this situation overrrides that. Sam has a lot of bargaining power.

Yeah... Not really how a mega-corp like MSFT does things. They LOVE to have control.

Source for the below: Worked at Skype before and after the MS acquisition.

MSFT's control isn't as "hard" as you portray it to be. At the senior leadership level they're pretty happy to allow divisions quite a lot of autonomy. Sure there are broad directives like if you support multiple platforms/OSes then the best user experience should be on "our" platform. But that still leaves a lot of room for maneuverability.

Soft control via human resources and company culture is a whole other beast though. There are a lot of people with 20+ years of experience at Microsoft who are happy to jump on job openings for middle-management roles in the "sexy" divisions of the company - the ones which are making headlines and creating new markets. And each one that slides on in brings a lot of the lifelong Microsoft mindset with them.

So yeah working within MS will be a very different experience for Altman, but not necessarily because of an iron grip from above.

Funny that you mention Skype as this is my prime example of extremely accelerated product disintegration.

My view on that (which was from very low on the totem pole) is that the acquisition happened at a time where Skype's core business model (paid calling minutes) was under existential threat. Consumer communications preferences had started to go from synchronous (calling) to async (messaging) even before the acquisition came through. While Skype had asynchronous communications in a decent place (file transfer in the P2P days was pretty shaky but otherwise consumer Skype was a solid messaging platform), there was no revenue there for us.

Then the acquisition happened at a time when Microsoft presented a lot of opportunities to ship Skype "in the box" to pretty much all of MS' customers. Windows 8, Xbox One and Windows Phone (8) all landed at more or less the same time. Everybody's eyes became too big for their stomachs, and we tried to build brand new native experiences for all of these platforms (and the web) all at once. This hampered our ability to pivot and deal with the existential risks I mentioned earlier, and we had the rug pulled out from under us.

So yes I think the acquisition hurt us, but I also never once heard a viable alternative business strategy that we might have pivoted to if the acquisition hadn't happened.

That's a completely new take for me on how things went down. Thanks for sharing.

The game studios under Xbox run quite independently with the most extreme example being Mojang with Minecraft which still releases all their games on Playstation/Nintendo consoles too. But the other studios are also very independent based on all the interviews (though they don't in general release their games on Playstation or Switch)

As I understand Github is also run very independently from Microsoft in general.

It's not really how MSFT does things though?

Github operates independently of Microsoft. (To Microsoft's detriment... they offer Azure Devops which is their enterprisey copy of Github, with entirely different UX and probably different codebase.) They shove the copilot AI now everywhere but it still seems to operate fairly differently.

They didn't really fold LinkedIn in into anything (there are some weird LinkedIn integrations in Teams but that's it)

Google seems to me much worse in this aspect, all Google aquisitions usually become Googley.

Skype sort of became Teams thought, that's true.

> Github operates independently of Microsoft. (To Microsoft's detriment... they offer Azure Devops which is their enterprisey copy of Github, with entirely different UX and probably different codebase.)

GitHub Actions is basically Azure Pipelines repackaged with a different UI, so I don't think they mind much.

It is Satya we are talking about, I won't bet against him.

It’s not 1998 anymore, you’d be surprised

These are incorrect priors, especially when the mega-corp in question is Microsoft under Satya Nadella.

Microsoft seems to be the best of the mega-corps at that.

Microsoft is not a pyramid organization, but distributed into teams - like Google, for better or for worse.

[dead]

Was not the Xbox team kinda run like that?

How will equity and compensation work

AI peeps are not cheap

multiple ways to make that work. LTIPs, share options, direct equity in subsidiary etc

MSFT comp is shit though

OAI comp was high based on equity and its crazy valuations

For us maybe, but they have pulled off some high profile hires in the past… Brendan Burns (one of the main k8s guys) for example.

Microsoft comp is actually not bad at higher levels, which I assume will be given to all OAI people that will join.

Is Microsoft compensation for top AI talent also bad?

Received wisdom has been “not competitive”. I wonder how the MSR folk feel about all of this, too.

OpenAI never gave equity.

Highly unlikely. Instead they'll be working on internal Windows AI tools for chatbots and random AI features in Windows. We all lose in this situation.

There’s no chance Sam is joining Microsoft to be some “VP of AI” to drive strategy like that. He’s going to be driving some new business where he’ll be able to move quickly and have a ton of control.

As I was saying, Satya just confirmed it: https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569

Optimization of Microsoft Edge (tm) icon placement to win the browser wars.

"brilliant"

I think "predictable" is more apt.

It makes perfect sense for Satya, Sam, and Greg, but I doubt many of us thought deeply enough to have predicted it in advance.

I've read a decent amount of predictions about this and had not actually seen this one or considered it until I read about it happening.

I think the predictable thing would have been a new company with new investment from Microsoft. But this is better; it a bit like magical thinking that MS would want to just throw more money after a new venture and essentially write off the old one. This solution accomplished similar things, but gives more to Microsoft in the trade by bringing that "new company" fully in house.

link to your prediction?

I mean there weren't a lot of options.

Yes but I didn't see this one discussed at all. Did you? Curious to see those threads if you have links. I might have just missed them.

Lets assume the whole structure works, 1-2 years later, Sam becomes the apparent CEO candidate after Satya.

I said this elsewhere, but think the timeline is longer than that. Either Sam and Satya will butt heads and Altman will be sidelined, or it will be a good partnership, and he'll be on the shortlist as a successor when Nadella's run naturally comes to a close. But that second path is longer than a couple years.

That would be very bad.

> Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And now Altman and Brockman will have that access too.

Microsoft still has to deal with OpenAI as an entity to keep the existing set up intact. The new team has to kinda start from zero. Right?

That was my first thought too: Didn't occur to me as a solution, and it seems to square the circle brilliantly. It struck me that this is why people who are CEOs of mammoth companies have the jobs they have, and not me :)

if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would they even go there? If you're flat broke, you need a job; they're not flat broke, they don't need a job. The deal at MS is worth it, or it's not, it's not something they need to decide over the course of a weekend... unless it's what they were already not being candid about.

It is the only way they can continue the work they have already contributed at OpenAI. Otherwise, it would mean they spend months or up to a year training their own model which in this arms race isn't feasible with viable competitors like Anthropic closing the gap quickly. This was the only way forward. I'm sure Sam Altman + Greg were offered an incredibly lucrative deal and autonomy.

it's been 2 days, they haven't even heard all the possible offers. Microsoft hasn't offered anybody autonomy since billg granted it to himself. Even Myhyrvold never did anything autonomous till he resigned and wrote a cookbook. The closest thing to autonomous in Microsoft was neilk breathing enough new life into 16bit Windows to get them to abandon OS/2

> if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would they even go there

MSFT may have offered them a lucrative offer to join (for the time being) in order to alleviate the potential stock dump.

Sam is already post money rich. Lucrative isn’t in this equation

>Sam is already post money rich. Lucrative isn’t in this equation

i totally agree, except stupid-lucrative is still in the equation, like Elon Musk rich, not because of the money, but because it says "my electric cars did more to stop global warming than anything you've done"

whether this round of AI turns into AGI doesn't precisely matter, it's on the way and it's going to be big, who wouldn't want their name attached to it.

Microsoft have access to the gold mine and with a bit of time Altman can get enough gold to open a jewelry business

How? It's not like he expect to just walk out of there with models or data?

If it’s under Microsoft’s umbrella - sure he can

Seems like in the minority here, but for me this is looking like a win-win-win situation for now.

1. OpenAI just got bumped up to my top address to apply to (if I would have the skills of a scientist, I am only an engineer level), I want AGI to happen and can totally understand that the actual scientists don't really care for money or becoming a big company at all, this is more a burden than anything else for research speed. It doesn't matter that the "company OpenAI" implodes here as long as they can pay their scientists and have access to compute, which they have do.

2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.

3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI. Working for Sam now is straightforward commercialization without the "open" shenaningans, and working for OpenAI can now become the idealistic thing again that also attracts people.

4. Satya Nadella is becoming celebrated and MSFT shareholder value will eventually rise even further. They actually don't have any interest in "smashing OAI" but the new setup actually streamlines everything once the initial operational hurdles (including staffing) are solved.

5. We outsiders end up with a OpenAI research focussed purely on AGI (<3), some product team selling all steps along the way to us but with more professionality in operations (<3).

6. I am really waiting for when Tim Cook announces anything about this topic in general. Never ever underestimate Apple, especially when there is radio silence, and when the first movers in a field have fired their shots already.

That is just a matter of perspective. It's clearly a win-win if you're on team Sam. But if you're on team Ilya, this is the doomsday scenario: With commercialisation and capital gains for a stock traded company being the main driving force behind the latest state of the art in AI, this is exactly what OpenAI was founded to prevent in the first place. Yes, we may see newer better things faster and with better support if the core team moves to Microsoft. But it will not benefit humanity as a whole. Even with their large investment, Microsoft's contract with OpenAI specifically excluded anything resembling true AGI, with OpenAI determining when this point is reached. Now, whatever breakthrough in the last weeks Sam was referring to, I doubt it's going to move us to AGI immediately. But whenever it happens, Microsoft now has a real chance to sack it for themselves and noone else.

Thinking this is clearly a big win for MSFT is like thinking it's easy to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

There's been a lot of uncertainty created.

It's interesting that others see so much "win" certainty.

From Microsoft's perspective, they have actually lowered uncertainty. Especially if that OpenAI employee letter from 500 people is to be believed, they'll all end up at Microsoft anyways. If that really happens OpenAI will be a shell of itself while Microsoft drives everything.

OpenAI already has the best models and traction.

So MSFT still needs to compete with OpenAI - which will likely have an extremely adversarial relationship with MSFT if MSFT poaches nearly everyone.

What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?

Doesn't seem like a win for MSFT at all.

> What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?

Then they would be on roughly equal footing with Microsoft, since they'd have an abundance of engineers and a cloud partner. More or less what they just threw away, on a smaller scale and with less certain investors.

This is quite literally the best attainable outcome, at least from Microsoft's point of view. The uncertainty came from the board's boneheaded (and unrepresentative) choice to kick Sam out. Now the majority of engineers on both sides are calling foul on OpenAI and asking for their entire board to resign. Relative to the administrative hellfire that OpenAI now has to weather, Microsoft just pulled off the fastest merger of their career.

OAI will still modulate the pace of actual model development though

Little pet peeve of mine.

Engineers aren’t a lower level than scientists, it’s just a different career path.

Scientists generate lots of ideas in controlled environments and engineers work to make those ideas work in the wild real world.

Both are difficult and important in their own right.

> Engineers aren’t a lower level than scientists, it’s just a different career path.

I assume GP is talking in context of OpenAI/general AI research, where you need a PhD to apply for the research scientist positions and MS/Bachelors to apply for research engineer positions afaik.

They’re still different careers, not “levels” or whatever.

A phd scientist may not be a good fit for an engineering job. Their degree doesn’t matter.

An phd-having engineer might not be a good fit for a research job either… because it’s a different job.

Well I am an engineer but I have no problems in buying that in case of forefront tech like AI where things are largely algorithmically exploratory, researchers with PHDs will be considered 'higher' than regular software devs. I have seen similar things happen in chip startups in olden days where relative importance of professional is decided by the nature of problem being solved. but sure to ack your point its just a different job, though the phd may be needed more at this stage of business. one way to gauge relative importance is if the budget were to go down 20% temporarily for a few quarters, which jobs would suffer most loss with least impact to business plan.

researchers are paid 2x what engineers are paid at OAI, even if it's not the same job there's still one that is "higher level" than the other.

In terms of pay at OAI, sure.

But being an engineer isn’t just a lesser form of being a researcher.

It’s not a “level” in that sense. Like OAI isn’t going to fire an engineer and replace them with a researcher.

Engineers tend to earn a lot more.

> 3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI.

This one's not right - Altman famously had no equity in OpenAI. When asked by Congress he said he makes enough to pay for health insurance. It's pretty clear Sam wants to advance the state of AI quickly and is using commercialization as a tool to do that.

Otherwise I generally agree with you (except for maybe #2 - they had the right to commercialize GPTs anyway as part of the prior funding).

Someone suggested earlier that he probably had some form of profit sharing pass-through, as has become popular in some circles.

I think it makes more sense to take him at the spirit of what he said under oath to Congress (think of how bad it would look for him/OpenAI if he said he had no equity and only made enough for health insurance but actually was getting profit sharing) over some guy suggesting something on the internet with no evidence.

Sam Altman is a businessman through and through based on his entire history. Chances are, he will have found an alternative means to make profit on OpenAI and he wouldn't do this on "charity". Just as how many CEOs say, I will "cut my salary" for example, they will never say "I cut my stocks or bonuses" which can be a lot more than their salary.

Either way based on many CEOs track records healthy skepticism should be involved and majority of them find ways to profit on it at some point or another.

I dunno, the guy has basically infinite money (and the ability to fundraise even more). I don't find it tough to imagine that he gets far more than monetary value from being the CEO of OpenAI.

He talked recently about how he's been able to watch these huge leaps in human progress and what a privilege that is. I believe that - don't you think it would be insane and amazing to get to see everything OpenAI is doing from the inside? If you already have so much money that the incremental value of the next dollar you earn is effectively zero, is it unreasonable to think that a seat at the table in one of the most important endeavors in the history of our species is worth more than any amount of money you could earn?

And then on top of that, even if you take a cynical view of things, he's put himself in a position where he can see at least months ahead of where basically all of technology is going to go. You don't actually have to be a shareholder to derive an enormous amount of value from that. Less cynically, it puts you in a position to steer the world toward what you feel is best.

I think that would be consistent with his testimony. Profit sharing is not a salary and it is not equity. I don’t believe he ever claimed to have zero stake in future compensation.

> reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others

With a poor security track record [0], miserable support for office 365 products and lack of transparency on issues in general, I doubt this is something to look forward to with Microsoft.

[0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_c...

> 2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.

OpenAI already runs all its infrastructure on Azure.

I don't think one of biggest tech giants in control of the "best" AI company out there is beneficial to customers...

How does this separation help scientists at OpenAI if there is no money to fund the research? At the end of the day, you need funding to conduct research and I do not see if there is going to be any investors willing to put large sums of money just to make researchers happy.

I'm with you on this. Also, this hopefully brings the "Open"AI puns to an end. And now there's several fun ways to read "Microsoft owns OpenAI". :)

If OpenAI gets back to actually publishing papers to everyone's benefit, that will be a huge win for humanity!

>whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI

The true researchers will go to who pays them most. If OpenAi loses funding they will go to Microsoft with Altman or back to Google.

I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.

We really are entering the dystopia of the cartoonishly evil megacorp enslaving all of humanity to make the graph go up by 1.2%.

> I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.

at least none of their software actually works

Microsoft Skynet would be rebooting every 15 minutes for updates

Before it can do anything it will be 301 redirected 45 times between legacy systems and if it has any human-like properties it will give up out of frustration.

If they really build AGI (I doubt it), the AGI might be able to bring Microsoft under its control. This could be bad news for a lot of businesses.

That's a lot of code to be purged, even for a superintelligent AI.

Could have been worse. Could have been google. This way at least there are two big dogs

Microsoft and OpenAI? Microsoft and Anthropic?

I don’t even care who just as long as it’s two. But yeah one google camp one Microsoft camp.

With a bit of luck Amazon too. This space just really can’t become a monopoly

Many far worse outcomes are possible. Putin. Kim Jong Un. AlQaeda. G$$gle.

Anyone else find it strange that startup founders of the magnitude of Sam & Greg would join a gigantic corporation as employees?

It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.

Their alternative is to start a new AI company.

At this point in time a new AI company would be bottle-necked by lack of NVIDIA GPUs. They are sold out for the medium term future.

So if Sam and Greg were to start a new AI company, even with billions of initial capital (very likely given their street cred) they would spend at a minimum several months just acquiring the hardware needed to compete with OpenAI.

With Microsoft they have the hardware from day one and unlimited capital.

At the same time their competitor, OpenAI, gets most of the money from Microsoft (a deal negotiated by Sam, BTW).

So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI.

This is the worst possible outcome for OpenAI: they loose talent, pretty much loose their main source of cash (not today but medium to long term) and get cash rich and GPU-rich competitor who's now their main customer.

> So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI

They already do, though, has everyone forgot they got a Microsoft Research division?

Nope, VirtualWiFi looked promising in 2006.

They could get a infra deal with AWS, Google, NVidia or AMD even :-).

Or they write the AI that runs on your M3

That said the Microsoft offer came quickly than Amazon can deliver a 3090 to your house so…

Would have been amazing if they joined Intel. No tsmc bottleneck, Intel probably having trouble offloading their arc gpus, etc

Some components of some Intel CPUs are made by TSMC. So, I’m not convinced that there wouldn’t be “TSMC bottleneck”.

Or just accept that their image is overinflated just because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Ofcourse they had a hand on building that successful team but do not underestimate the fact that, that successful team was build with the promise of nonprofit, AI for the benefit of all And few of them would have joined Microsoft out of principle.

Nope. They're following the path to power, money, and maybe continued fame. That's all.

I'll bet Microsoft offered him a very sweet deal, which for Sam means lots of autonomy.

Microsoft is happy. They get to wrap this movie before the markets open.

Edit: I also agree with bayindirh below. These things can both be true.

They had to.

Also, that doesn't mean Microsoft won't collect the outcome of this deal with its interest over time. Microsoft is the master of that craft.

Microsoft did not offer this because they're some altruistic company which wanted to provide free shelter to a unfairly battered, homeless ex-CEO.

Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn’t buy at the scale/speed they need: GPUs. Both time on Azure’s cloud, as well as promise of some of the first Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips.

Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn’t buy at the scale/speed they need: OpenAI models & future work. Altman wouldn't have had (legal) access to these anywhere else, and Microsoft wouldn't have had Sam Altman controlling OpenAI tech in any other arrangement. This arrangement may be the best for all involved: Microsoft gets it's LLM geegaws based on OpenAI tech, Altman gets to build GPT marketplaces and engage whatever growth-hacking schemes he can dream of that may have been found distasteful by colleagues at OpenAI, and OpenAI can focus on the core mission and fulfilling contractual obligations to Microsoft

I foresee this new group building on top of (rather than completing with) OpenAI tech in the near-to-mid term, maybe competing in the long term of they manage to gather adequate talent, but it's going to be going against the cultural corporate headwinds.

I wonder if Microsoft will tolerate the hardware side-gig and if this internal-startup will succeed or if it will end up being a managed exit to paper over OpenAIs abrupt transition (by public company standards). I guess we'll know in a year if he'll transition to an advisory position

I bet there was no hardware side-gig. More likely it was a ruse to trigger the push from openai, so they can exfiltrate gpt5 to MS. Openai won't exist soon, since they rely on vouchers from MS to run. I can't see MS being a very forgiving partner, after being publicly blindsided, can you?

Plus continued access to OpenAI technology.

Technical debt.

Azure was already second nature for OpenAI and so there is very little friction in moving their work and infrastructure. The relationships are already there and the personnel will likely follow easily as well.

They are also likely enticed by the possibility of being heads of special projects and AI at the second largest tech company, meaning deep pockets, easy marketing and freedom to roam.

Oh, and those GPUs.

I think Sam's goal is to create AGI, same as most of the other founders of OpenAI. If he just wanted money and power, he probably would have continued with YC or some other startup instead of joining the nonprofit and unproven OpenAI at the time.

His opinion on the ideal path differs from Ilya's, but I'm guessing his goal remains the same. AGI is the most important thing to work on, and startups and corporations are just a means of getting there.

>I think Sam's goal is to create AGI

Supposedly his goal was the same as OpenAi --> AGI that benefits society instead of shareholders.

Seems like a hard mission to accomplish within Microsoft.

Just because that's the goal they have written on the tin doesn't mean that that is/was their actual goal.

Especially in the early days where the largest donor to OpenAI was Musk who was leading Tesla, a company way behind in AI capabilities, OpenAI looked like an obvious "Commoditize Your Complement" play.

For quite some time where they were mainly publishing research and they could hide behind "we are just getting started" that guise held up nicely, but when they struck gold with Chat(GPT), their was more and more misalignment between their actions and their publicly stated goal.

I imagine Sam's vision, both before and after this company change, is that he'll keep improving GPTs, while also setting up a thriving ecosystem through APIs, and AI will become a trillion dollar industry with him at the center.

From there, maybe someone will come up with the revolutionary advance necessary to reach AGI. It may not necessarily be under his company, but he'll be the super successful AI guy and in a pretty strong position to influence things anyway.

Like Cyberdyne Systems was just a means of getting there.

Satya is saying they'll be an independent "startup" within Microsoft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344811

corporate startups are an oxymoron

Maybe Sam thinks OpenAI will be so important he has a shot at CEO of Microsoft in a couple years?

Lol, maybe. Ballmer was a friend of Gates, was 44 years old and had worked at Microsoft for 20 years (2000-1980) already when he became CEO. Nadella was also forty-something and had worked at Microsoft for 22 years (2014-1992) when he got the job.

But Satya is making a few 100 mil a year, tops. Sam could easily make himself a billionaire with one raise. And who wants to control all of Microsoft, that's a whole lot of headaches

And if governments squeeze on AI your start up is worth pennies over night. Earning 100 MILLION per year already removes any possible financial restrictions you had. Why do you need to have 10x that? Heck even earning "just" 10 millions per year will make all of your financial concerns go away.

Greed is hell of a thing

I suspect for people like Sam who are compulsively ambitious and competitive, it's not about the dollars. It's about winning.

Further, based on anecdotes from friends and Twitter who know Sam personally, I'm inclined to believe he's genuinely motivated by building something that "alters the timeline", so to speak.

Being the guy who built AGI will alter the timeline the most, so I think he'll be much more interested in that than being CEO of Microsoft.

AGI is decades if not centuries away. Cranking a plausible sentence generator to be even more plausible will not get there. I do not understand how people suddenly completely lost their minds.

The hype wave really is something else, eh? People are suddenly talking as if these advanced chatbots are on the precipice of genuine AGI that can run any system you throw at it, it's absolute lunacy

> The hype wave really is something else, eh?

I am old enough to remember the "How Blockchain Is Solving the World Hunger Crisis" articles but this new wave is even crazier.

>I am old enough to remember

So, like 15 year old?

Here's one from 2019: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/12/26/ho...

If he was, he signed up to HN at 2!

I do think it's funny how the Blockchain Consultants have become AI Consultants though.

According to [1], Nadella's base salary was $2.5m and stock awards and other compensation brought the total to ~$55m in 2022.

[1] https://microsoft.gcs-web.com/node/31056/html

I believe his total comp since becoming CEO passed 1B this summer, 9 years or so.

What's the functional difference between a billion and a hundred million?

Approximately 1 billion.

A billion means you can fund yourself for a really big idea. Not that you should!

Exactly, he could just launch a new company, most of the current OpenAI staff would follow him.

The new models and data would stay at OpenAI. You can have thousands of researchers and compute, but if you don’t have “it”, you are behind (ask Google).

In Microsoft he still has access to the models, and that’s all he needs to execute his ideas.

Should tell you something that he didn't. And no, I am not talking about ethics here.

They could, but they'd be massively hamstrung by lack of GPU's. Pretty much all supply is locked up for a good few years right now.

Assuming a MAG wont offer it.

> most of the current OpenAI staff would follow him

Source please? This just keeps getting repeated but there’s extremely limited public support and neither Sam’s nor the board’s decisions indicate he has a whole lot of leverage.

There must be an insane number of non-competes though, to stop that? Especially with the amount of VC funding - that must have been included?

Non-competes are not legally enforcable in California, or so I hear.

I think the only edge cases are for executives of companies, and even then it's pretty limited, but I imagine this could be one of the examples. IANAL though - it's just from what I've seen discussed elsewhere.

https://www.ottingerlaw.com/blog/executives-should-not-ignor...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Yes, however they’ll be shielded from lawsuits from OpenAI at Microsoft.

As in liquidate a billion in one raise? Is that kosher these days?

Sam is rich, I assume being CEO of one of the worlds largest companies is a far greater award than extra money when you're at the billionaire level, especially at 38. But I do think this is probably non-compete related too.

Sam already is a billionaire

Sam is not a billionaire. By all industry accepted accounts (easily googlable), his net worth is in the range of 500 to 700 million.

Do you have a source for your assertion?

He’s definitely a billionaire

He is not on Forbes billionaire list.

All the other somewhat reliable sources do not have him as one.

So what is your source for your assertion?

The only meaningful thing here that makes sense to me is that the “secret sauce” that openAI has is exclusively licensed to Microsoft.

Which means, starting a competing startup means they can’t use it.

Which makes their (potential) competing startup indistinguishable from the (many) other startups in this space competing with OpenAI.

Does Sam really want to be a no-name research head of some obscure Microsoft research division?

I don’t think so.

Can’t really see any other reason for this that makes sense.

They're likely going to be the ones who manage the OpenAI relationship...what better way to fuck the people who fucked them than by becoming the ones who literally control the resources that they need?

OpenAI can also jump ship and get a nice deal with amazon or google. In fact, right now they are ripe for the taking.

Hilarious. The look on Ilyas face when these two show up at the office for their "sync", or perhaps he's ordered to travel to a location of the owner/client's choosing.

Sounds desperate to me, a bit like that 'I'm in the office' photo-op. A bit like having access to the models or whatever is sustaining him somehow lol

Lol

Desperate... Right...

The guy met with the Arabs a few weeks back about billions in financing for a new venture. The guys desperate like I'm Donald duck.

So he passed up billions to go work for microsoft ...

Special unit mate... Gonna have special rules. You think these cats are gonna be in the basement pushing papers? This is grade AAA talent that can go anywhere including a fresh outfit with 1 billion in the bank VC money day 1.

Don't believe me? Check out the VC tweets... Sand hill pulled the checkbook the moment these guys might have been on the market.

Desperate

Wonder if they'll take his call today!

Literally the president would take Altman's call.

What moon are y'all on.

He can secure billions with a text message.

Love ya anyway, cya this evening for the fuzzy meetup.

Sam had no stake in OpenAI. So, any potential deca billion value is hypothetical. He would have to do a U-turn and fight with the board to get his cut. Now he'll get his cut from MS. This AI division will have some further restructuring.

Edit: Sam is CEO of the new AI division.

Curious to see how long Sam lasts as an employee.

It's gonna be a special unit. He's not gonna be an employee.

Once you lead at that level... It's max autonomy going forward. Source: Elon. Guy hates a board with power as much as Zuckerberg. Employee? Ha .. Out of the question.

So as a result Elon actually isn’t an employee… whereas Sam will be an employee, ultimately

There are more structures available than simply gobbling something up and everyone is your employee.

See openai investment with technology transfers and sunset clauses. They just did a new dance.

They'll prod do something special for these guys.

They would never be employees. That's for non Sam Altman's and non Brockmans. Brockman is prob already a billionaire from openai shares. No employees here. Big boys.

Presumably they’ll both get their C-level positions out of the gate (for that AI entity MS is setting up specially for this) so not just “mere” employees.

But, yeah, kind of confusing, especially for Altman.

He was the kind of guy on the way to become worth $100 billion and more, with enough luck, meaning to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg of AI, but if he chooses to remain inside a behemoth like MS the “most” that he can aspire to is a few hundred millions, maybe a billion or two at the most, but nothing more than that.

> He was the kind of guy on the way to become worth $100 billion and more, with enough luck,

Was he though? If I understand correctly he didn’t have any equity in the for profit org. Of OpenAI.

IIRC he also publicly said that he doesn’t “need” more than a few hundred million (and who knows, not inconceivable that he might actually feel that).

I bet MS probably bankrolls a subsidiary or lightweight spinoff for AGI if they are under MS, they can keep the original research and code.

> It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.

Except if Sam and Greg have some anti-compete clauses. If they join MS, they have a nice 10 billion USD leverage against any lawsuites.

non-competes are extremely hard to enforce in California. Sam would literally have to download Open AI trade secrets into a USB drive to get in trouble.

That is only the case for rank and file employees. From my understanding executives, particularly ones with large equity stakes, are not exempt from non-competes. Sam doesn't have equity though, and I am not sure if non-profit status changes anything, but regardless I suspect any non-compete questions would need to be settled in court. Probably not something to stop Sam from starting a competitor as he could afford the lawyers and potential settlement. I suspect the MSFT move has more to do with keeping the ball rolling and keeping Satya happy.

> From my understanding executives, particularly ones with large equity stakes, are not exempt from non-competes.

Your understanding is incorrect. There are some exceptions where noncompetes are allowed in California, but they mostly involve the sale or dissolution of business entities as such. There is no exception for executives, and none for people who happen to have equity stakes of any size.

And now he doesn’t even need to. He can get access to all their models legally as a Microsoft employee.

In California the anti-compete clauses are not enforceable, afaik

It's complicated. In the case of the CEO it is possibly enforceable. But going to the primary funder, after being fired in a move without notification of that same funder? Likely with long complicated contracts that may contemplate the idea of notification of change of executive staff?

I don't know, even of strictly "enforceable" I doubt we will see it enforced. And if so. I'm sure the settlement will be fairly gentle.

Edit: Actually, a quick skim of the relevant code, the only relevant exception seems to be about owners selling their ownership interest. Seemingly, since Sam doesn't own OpenAI shares, this exception would seem to not apply.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

I guess that’s more applicable to ordinary employees. Using trade secrets obtained from your previous employer would still be problematic

So Sam & Greg can stay focus on their work rather than getting distracted by all the lawsuits. It isn’t a bad thing. Just not sure how they can get they want under the corporate culture?

Do anti-compete clauses work when you’ve been ousted? Greg resigned, actually, but Sam was ejected.

> Do anti-compete clauses work when you’ve been ousted?

In jurisdictions where they are enforceable, yes, they generally are not limited based on the manner the working relationship terminated (since they are part of an employment contract, they might become void if there was a breach by the employer.)

They will probably run a subsidiary under the MS umbrella and profit hugely in the next few years. Also, MS could easily dump OAI in the next few months to year.

We don't know the structure of their new unit, do we? Sometimes "startup in a big corp" may really bring the best of both worlds (although in reality, 90% of such initiatives bring the worst of the two worlds).

For many years, Microsoft Research had a reputation for giving researchers the most freedom. Probably even that's the reason why it hasn't been as successful as other bigcorp research labs.

Seems like a good compromise?

OpenAI continues to develop core AI offered over API. Microsoft builds the developer ecosystem around it -- that's Sam's expertise anyway. Microsoft has made a bunch of investment in the developer ecosystem in GitHub and that fits the theme. Assuming Sam sticks around.

Also, the way the tweet is worded (looking forward to working with OpenAI), seems like its a truce negotiated by Satya?

This is Microsoft starting a copy machine to replace OpenAI with in-house tech in medium to long term.

Apparently Microsoft already had plans to spend $50 billion on cloud hardware.

Now they are getting software talent and insider knowledge to replace OpenAI software with in-house tech built by Sam, Greg and others that will join.

Satya just pulled a kill move on OpenAI.

Does Microsoft (under the OpenAI agreement) have access to the model code etc or just the output? If not, they would have to rebuild it.

Not sure if its obvious that people would leave OpenAI in troves to join Microsoft just to be with Sam.

I doubt it would be hard for Microsoft to rebuild, Microsoft Research has made many excellent contributions to transformers for many years now, DeepSpeed is a notable example.

I don’t think they’ve had the will/need to have done this but they most likely already have the talent.

Embrace…

Yeah agree, this feels like a very big hug.

Hug of death?

It's a no lose situation for Microsoft.

Either there in house team wins out and Microsoft wins.

Or OpenAI wins out and Microsoft wins with there exclusive deal and 75% of OpenAI profits.

Better to have two horses in the race in something so important, makes it much harder than one of the other companies will be the one to come out top.

> in something so important,

Much as LLM is essentially industrial strength gaslighting, so is the meta around it.

It's not so important. There's not much there. No it's not going to take your jobs.

I am old enough to remember not only the How Blockchain Is Solving World Hunger articles but the paperless office claims as well -- I was born within a few weeks of the publication of the (in)famous "The Office of the Future" article from BusinessWeek.

Didn't happen.

No, a plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype.

In fact some of the hustlers behind it are the same as those who have hustled crypto. Someone got to hold the bag on that one but it wasn't the rich white techbros. So it'll be here. Once enough companies get burned when the stochastic parrot botches something badly enough to get a massive fine from a regulator or a devastating lawsuit, everyone will run for the hills. And again... it won't be the VCs holding the bag. Guess who will be. Guess why AI is so badly hyped.

If you think the ChatGPT release happening within a few weeks of the collapse of FTX is a coincidence I have ... well, not a bridge but an AI hype to sell to you and in fact you already bought it.

OpenAI is doing a lot more work than just a LLM, despite that being there headline product for now. I'd rather have OpenAI leading the way than Microsoft or Google in this stuff. Despite it's own issues.

I get your pessimism, but the same has been said about a lot of tech that did go on to change the world, just because a lot of people made a lot of noise about previous tech that failed to come to anything doesn't mean to say this is the same thing, it's completely different tech.

A lot of OpenAI's products are out in the real world and I use them everyday, I never touched Crypto, now maybe LLM's won't live up to the hype, but OpenAi's stuff is already been used in a lot of products, used by millions of users, even Spotify.

'A plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype' - Maybe, but AI goes far beyond LLM as does the products OpenAI produces.

Have you even used it?

While it can’t plug and play replace and employee yet in my experience at least every dev I see now has it open on their second screen and send it problems all day.

Comparing it to crypto and building that weird narrative you have is just not at all connected to the reality of what the product can actually do right now today.

It's probabilistic and not factual and so everything it outputs must be treated as something the actual answer might sound like and needs to be counterchecked anyways. If I am researching the actual answer already then why bother?

No. They need a lot of money and computation resources to work on. In order to continue their work, they either A). raise a massive fund B). be employed by a big corp. There's no surprise they chose the latter. After all, MS has a research department on this domain.

They won't have to worry about raising capital or getting access to GPUs, and they've likely been promised a high degree of autonomy, almost certainly reporting directly to Nadella.

In the end it's just labels. What matters is what kind of funds will they be given, what they can work on, what sort of control they have over it.

A little bit, but I highly doubt it'll last long. I predict most of them will end up in a startup sooner rather than later.

I think the employees part is probably wrong here. Can’t imagine they’ll need to act like ones even if they are on paper

It depends on what they are allowed to do as employees, which is probably in the process of being figured out right now.

Guess who'll be running Microsoft after Satya, and what Microsoft's core offering / cash cow will be.

Never gonna happen.

Satya runs the biggest race track.

Altman trains pure breds trying to win the Kentucky derby repeatedly.

Totally diff games. Both big bosses. Not equivalent and never will be. Totally diff career tracks.

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They must be getting a king's ransom. Turns out sama didn't need equity, he got paid by getting fired.

Worked(?) for Carmack and Luckey

They need computers. I'd assume this came with a substantial budget promise.

Isn't the exit exactly what you'd expect from startup founders?

From the sounds of it they're starting a new company within MSFT.

It certainly sounds out of line with all the reporting that Altman was talking about starting a new company and could trivially fundraise for it. Was that just as much kayfabe as the idea of bringing him back?

I guess they were fired exactly for this reason: more money, less research and being actually "open". A "non-profit" called "Open"AI hiding GPT-4 behind a paywall with no source code with just a few hints in the papers, surreal.

What? If anything a startup founder (in general) wants to become a gigantic corporation. The bigger the better.

There's an infinite difference between turning your startup into a giant corporation and getting a job at one.

I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still there because they can offer them money and equity.

The company will probably still exist, but the company isn't going to be worth what it is today.

There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that OpenAI was founded on, which have just been – arguably – reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient compute to chase AGI… If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to get all the GPUs. There are engineers, and increasingly, non-VC money, that have larger stakes in outcomes for humanity who I feel will back a 'purer' OpenAI.

Do they really believe the path to AGI is through LLMs though? In that case they might be in for a very rude awakening.

Imo sam altman and team believed more in the llm because it took the world by storm and they just couldn’t wait to milk it. Msft has also licensed these type of services from open ai on azure. The folks really motivated by values at open probably want to move on from the llm hype and continue their research and pushing the boundaries of AI further.

They don't, they know it very well. But people has being buying in this AGI bullshit (pardon the language) for a while, and they wanted a piece of the cake.

I'm sure they care. The question is how will they stay liquid if there is a similar or better offer by another party? The kind of interface they use makes it trivial to move from one supplier to another if the engine is better.

OpenAI existed for years before ChatGPT. Granted, at much smaller size and with hundreds fewer employees.

I imagine that the board wants to go back to that or something like it.

The past is not on the menu for any of us, also not for OpenAI. They can't undo that which has been done without wiping out the company in its entirety. Unless they aim to become the Mozilla of AI. Which is a real possibility at this point.

Doesn't seem so from Emmett's tweet which suggests they will continue to pursue commercial interests.

By "for profit" you mean "available to use by people right now"? Well then I hope the "pure" OpenAI is over. I want to be able to use the AI for money, not for these models to be hoarded..

It could be entirely open source and still available hosted for use in exchange for money today though?

OAI is dead.

In the name of safety, the board has gifted OAI to MS. Even Ilya wants to jump ship now that the ship is sinking (I'll be real interesting if Sama even lets him on board the MS money train).

Calling this a win for AI safety is ludicrous. OAI is dead in all be name, MS basically now owns 100% of OAI (the models, the source, and now the team) for pennies on the dollar.

and those values will make them go bankrupt before creating AGI

If I would be betting, I would bet on Altman and Microsoft as well, because in the real world, evil usually wins, but I'm just really astonished by all this rhetoric here on HN. Like, firing Altman is a horrible treason, and people wouldn't want to work with those traitors anymore. Altman is the guy, who is responsible for making OpenAI "closed", which was a constant reason for complaints since it happened. When it all started, the whole vibe sure wasn't "the out-source Microsoft subsidiary ML-research unit that somehow maintains non-profit status", which was basically what happened. I'm not going to argue if it's good or bad — it is entirely possible, that this is the only realistic way to do business and Sutskever, Murati et al are just delusional trying to approach this as a scientific research project. Honestly, I sort of do believe it myself. But since when Altman is the good guy in this story?

Murati was interim ceo for 2 days.

She's going with Altman in all likelyhood.

Ilya is the one changing tac.

Another way of framing this would be that Altman was one of the only people there with their head far enough from the clouds to realize they had to adapt if they were going to have the resources needed to survive. In the real world you need more than a few Tony Starks in a cave to maintain a longterm lead even if the initial output is exceptional with nothing but what's in the cave.

I, for one, never gave a flying shit about OpenAI’s “openness”, which always felt like a gimmick anyway. They gave me a tool that has cut my work down 20-40% across the board while making me able to push out more results. I care about that.

Also AGI will never happen IMO. I’m not credentialed. Have no real proof to back it up and won’t argue one way or the other with anyone, but deep down I just don’t believe it’s even physically possible for AGI. I’ll be shocked if it is, but until then I’m going to view any company with that set as its goal as a joke.

I don’t see a single thing wrong with Altman either, primarily because I never bought into the whole “open” story anyway.

And no, this isn’t sarcasm. I just think a lot of HN folks live with rosy-tinted glasses of “open” companies and “AGI that benefits humanity”. It’s all an illusion and if we ever somehow manage to generate AGI it WILL be the end of us as a species. There’s no doubt.

On the contrary - I will now be actively looking for opportunities to join OpenAI, while I wasn't particularly interested beforehand.

What makes you think you’re more competent than the type of people who were interested in joining OpenAI before?

What if the type of people who made the company successful are leaving and the type of people who have no track record become interested?

A bit surprised by this pseudo ad hominem, but just for one data point I have (now ex-)coworkers in the same role as me who've recently moved to OpenAI. I'm not suggesting I'm more competent than them, but I don't think my hiring was based on luck while they got it on merit either.

> What if the type of people who made the company successful are leaving and the type of people who have no track record become interested?

What if it's the opposite? What if sama was basically a Bezos who was in the right place/time but could've realistically been replaced by someone else? What if Ilya is irreplaceable? Not entirely sure what the point of this is - if you want to convey that your conjecture is far more likely than the opposite, then make a convincing argument for why that's the case.

The Microsoft team going to churn out ChatGPT versions - which are the current valuation-makers. OpenAI is going to chase what comes after ChatGPT, pushing yet another ChatGPT is probably one of the reasons the researchers got fed up.

In my opinion. Best outcome for everyone involved.

I think the reality is the opposite. Sam has said that he doesn't think Transformers/GPT architecture will be enough for AGI where Ilya claims it might be enough.

It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the mission and working with or learning from the existing team will still want to work there.

I didn't believe that OpenAI was being honest in their mission statement before - I thought it was just the typical bay area "we want to make the world a better place" bs.

This entire situation changed my mind radically and now I put the non-profit part in my personal top 3 dream jobs :)

Please disregard my last comment, it was a premature opinion on a situation that is still developing and very unclear from the outside

I wouldn't be so sure. There are a whole lot of people that want absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.

The flip side perspective is people will love focusing on doing it right, without being rushed to market for moat building and max profit.

Does that not only work long-term with investment?

Unless they get philanthropic backers (maybe?), who else is going to give them investment needed for resources and employees that isn't going to want a return on investment within a few years?

They will be ok. Research does not take that much GPUs compared to training huge commercial LLMs and hiring thousands of people to manually train them to be "safe". You'd prefer smaller models, but faster iterations.

They're going to have to give up control of the board to get more investment. No investor wants these loose cannons in charge of their investments.

> No investor wants these loose cannons in charge of their investments.

The board just proved to stay on the companys core values.

If Ilya is there many will. If Karpathy stays many more. If Alec Radford stays then ...

I agree, any potential hire who has the choice between OpenAI and the new team at MSFT will now choose the latter. And a lot of the current team will follow as well. This is probably the end of OpenAI. Can't say I'm too sad, finally a chance to erase that misleading name from history.

Do leading AI researchers at Google/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic/HuggingFace want to work at Microsoft?

Yes, for most AI researchers the umbrella organization (or university) doesn't matter nearly as much as the specific lab. These people are not going to work at Microsoft, they are going to work at whatever that new org is going to be called, and that org is going to have a pretty high status.

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It's really telling of US tech culture, how AI hype quickly turned from "Open" and "we're doing it for humanity" into a mega-corp cash grab *show.

I understand what money does to principles, but this is comical.

> I understand what money does to principles,

That's kind of the point, we all do. What is harder to understand are the low stakes whims of academics bickering over their fiefdoms.

This move is bringing the incentives back to a normal and understood paradigm. And as a user of AI, will likely lead to better, quicker, and less hamstringed products and should be in our benefit.

All parties involved are already millionaires or more. It gets even more comical.

What’s ironic is how backwards people here have the narrative. Not sure you’re fully aware of what happened at OpenAI.

The “Open” types, ironically, wanted to keep LLMs hidden away from the public (something something religious AGI hysteria). These are the people who think they know better than you, and that we should centralize control with them for our own safety (see also, communism).

The evil profit motive you’re complaining about, is what democratized this tech and brought it to the masses in a form that is useful to them.

The “cash grab show” is the only incentive that has been proven to make people do useful things for the masses. Otherwise, it’s just way too tempting to hide in ivory towers and spend your days fantasizing about philosophical nonsense.

"Open"AI indeed was, and is, ironic, but in reality, MS acquisition of Altman and co is not going to change anything for anybody besides a bunch of California socialites. Not sure what sort of democratisation you are referring to, but I can bet my firstborn that whatever product MS develops will be just as open as GPT4.

Yeah it's terrible how many resources that pivot has brought in to help advance the field. If only the US were more like Europe.

In 1990 Microsoft hired all of the important talent from Borland who up until that point had been outpacing them in terms of product development.

We got Access, Visual Studio, and .Net / C# as a direct result.

Borland faded into obscurity.

Hard not to feel like there will be a parallel here.

Microsoft also acquired LinkedIn and Github.

Both of which have been run as largely seperate entities.

Yep, if you wanted to move to MSFT from LinkedIn or vice versa, you needed to re-interview although finding a job rec and internal hiring manager was easier.

Yep. LinkedIn has a completely different pay scale and perks than regular Microsoft employees.

Is it true for Zenimax and Mojang as well?

Coming soon : Activision

That was 33 years ago. What's the point of lingering on a potential parallel there? If it does go that way, how could you call it anything but a coincidence considering all the counter examples in Microsoft's history?

Sataya's 5D chess is to save world from AGI by turning whatever OpenAI had into crap?

Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...

Sorry I should have phrased that as starting in 1990...

In 1990 they poached Brad Silverberg who then spent the next 7 years poaching all of Borland's top talent in the most prominent example of a competitive 'brain drain' strategy that I'm aware of.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Borland-Says-Microso...

Fair point!

>Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...

The point of the comment wasn't the specific date, it was the impact of hiring a competitor's team AND equipping that team to be even more impactful.

I worked with Delphi for many years, and from what I saw Borland dug their own grave. I did commercial work with Turbo Pascal last century, and I can say that even that far back Borland was run horribly. And they've gone a long way downhill since 2000 (I have a friend still using Delphi and Embarcadero is terrible). Microsoft with VB spanked Delphi 2 (a Borland highlight) back in mid 90s.

I really think you don't know what you are talking about. Delphi 7 was released in 2002 and you were "in high school in the early 2000s". We all love a good narrative, but yours has no base to belong to.

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have very similar backgrounds. They are both highly intelligent, both dropped out of college and lack any advanced education. They are classic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: well-networked, great at fund raising, maybe even good managers. Potential contribution to advanced AI research: zero.

What, exactly, does Microsoft want to do with them? Best guess: Use their connections and reputation to poach talent from OpenAI.

This is such a weird take. Sam and Greg were at OpenAI for 8 years! Why is it assumed that their “potential contribution to advanced AI research” is contingent on their having spent (no/more/less) time at academic institutions decades ago?

Yeah but Greg is not community college dropout, but (both) MIT and Harvard dropout.

Someone who could qualify to go to both Harvard and MIT will be better at anything they set their mind to than the regular grad with four year of education after the said four years.

I too would be salty to see people who didn't fork over $120k to have professors dispense freely available information be successful.

Go read the gpt3 and gpt3 tech report and see for yourself.

Wow. This sounds like an amazing coup for Microsoft. They are getting Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, "together with colleagues". With this team, they will be able to rebuild GPT in-house. I fear that with this development, the commercial side of the OpenAI is pretty much gone. Which sounds like what the OpenAI board has intended to do all along. I think this will also spark a big exodus from OpenAI.

I am also curious about how OpenAI board is planning to raise the money for non-profit for further scaling. I don't think it would be that easy now.

An internet meme from Lord of the Rings comes to mind: "One does not simply fire Sam Altman."

Presumably they still have the deal with MS and will continue to receive funding as long as they meet their obligations? (Of course no clue what they are..)

Presumably yes, depending on what's in the legal documents. I am guessing that Microsoft will transition slowly, in order to provide continuity to the Azure customers. But OpenAI will not "thrive" from this deal anymore. Partnerships tend to only work when both sides are interested, regardless of the agreements. If OpenAI needs several more $billion to train GPT-5, this will get sabotaged.

The scaling party is basically over. Or rather, it has moved to Redmond.

This is where other big tech giants need to move. MSFT provides nothing extra which Google/Amazon/Meta can not move. Make it multi platoform and make it more open source.

This looks like a short term compromise to defend MSFT before the market opens. A number of members will follow Sam and Greg, but I doubt if it will be the majority given it's yet another big tech rather than a brand new startup. And what would be their roles? Yet another VP/SVP? Those folks are not really AI guys and don't fit very nicely into all the bureaucracy rampant in big techs. Satya will of course try to give them as much room as possible, but it will be considerably smaller and slower thanks to all those corporate politics and external regulations.

Satya just tweeted saying that Sam Altman would be the CEO of this new group.

Can you share the tweet?

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569

Yep feels like a desperate attempt by nadella to restore confidence in him and Microsoft’s massive investment and news like this can easily change on a dime

I think people underestimate how much of a company’s value is in their key leadership, select talent, and technology. When a company is acquired those are typically the reasons to do so other than pure revenue acquisition. Microsoft already has their technology, now has the key leadership, and will soon have the select talent.

Satya wins, OpenAI is walking dead.

Satya really goated here.

He takes advantage of this situation and make OpenAI's assets in his control more than ever.

He is the genius, scary even.

Pirate more like. He's not just poaching "talent" he has likely stolen IP and will hope to destroy OpenAI in court costs. Microsoft is a terrible company and I hope this backfires on them.

> When a company is acquired those are typically the reasons to do so other than pure revenue acquisition

Large companies are primarily purchased for their moats

[dead]

Satya wins

Sam wins

Ilya and the board continue to look like fools

This might turn out to be a lot more stable structure long term: the commercialization of AI under Microsoft's brand, with Microsoft's resources, and the deep research into advanced AI under OpenAI. This could shield the research division of OpenAI from undue pressure from the product side, in a way that it probably couldn't when everything was under one roof.

I find your theory more plausible. Microsoft, Google and Amazon were lagging in AI. You can simply look at their voice assistants for an example. That's why they started investing billions in OpenAI and other think tanks in this space. Now capital turns things around to be as they should (from their perspective) and reacquires control.

Anthropic is probably next in line.

MS/G/A didn’t put this into voice assistants not because they don’t have it, but because it doesn’t scale to fit the commercials at the moment. Google invented transformers and Deepmind had GPT scale LLM’s at least a year before CGPT came out.

Altman just rushed everyone’s hand by publishing it into the world at cost

"just" is an understatement.

My friends and family had an awful opinion of AI in general because it was the voice assistants were sold to them as the best example of AI. That changed with ChatGPT.

Google invented really useful AI but failed to deliver. OpenAI did so in record time. Now it's Google that's playing catching up with the technology they invented themselves, ironically.

But my comment applies more to Microsoft and Amazon, tbh.

This wasn’t a result of product genius in this case - OAI just didn’t have the regulatory and PR oversight that big tech has - I know for a fact Meta and Google had CGPT equivalent models ready but couldn’t launch them as they’d get rightfully berated for the model being racist or hallucinating. Things OpenAI avoided because it’s a startup non-profit.

And OAI delivered with enormous per-user cost that doesn’t scale - in an app that is a showcase and doesn’t really have latency requirements as people understand it’s a prototype.

And the vas majority of people play with CGPT, they don’t use it for anything useful. Incidental examples of friends and family of tech workers to the side.

Ugh. I’m not keen on AGI being an eventual Microsoft product, or after this circus, even the hangers on at Open AI. Hope it’s still decades off and this all is a silly side show footnote.

Satya just pulled best move of 2023. Gets the hot names, whoever will follow Sam and Greg, to work in a startup like cocoon. Throws money at them, which is peanuts to Microsoft, both stock to keep them and unlimited compute. Sam wants to do custom chips? Do it with Microsofts money, size and clout. All doors are open. The new Maia100 chip can soon be followed by Sam200. Brings innovation and makes the company more attractive to future hires. Who cares if Same leaves after 2 years? Maybe that was part of the discussions, Satya wont be around forever and doesn't really have a good allround replacement inhouse. MSFT stock meanwhile goes from sideways movement to another all time high and onto 400. Genius move, would have never thought Sam accepts such arrangement but it makes sense.

The only shocking thing about this whole episode was how many people in the media failed to understand just how much power this board had.

They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8 hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.

Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little leverage. Reading the news you’d think otherwise.

No one would really resign until they had another branch to grab onto. You wouldn't expect anyone to resign this weekend. It would happen in the months afterwards.

If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what does OpenAI have left? If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?

That may have been the leverage Microsoft and other investors tried to use, but OpenAI leadership thinks won't happen. We'll see what unfolds.

> If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what does OpenAI have left?

This is a real possibility and something I'm sure Ilya and the board thought through. Here's my guess:

- There's been a culture rift within OpenAI as it scaled up its hiring. The people who have joined may not have all been mission driven and shared the same values. They may have been there because of the valuation and attention the company was receiving. These people will leave and join Altman or another company. This is seen as a net good by the board.

- There's always been a sect of researchers who were suspicious of OpenAI because of its odd governance structure and commercialization. These people now have clear evidence that the company stands for what it states and are MORE likely to join. This is what the board wants.

> If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?

I don't think this is an actual problem. Anthropic can secure funding just fine. Emmet is an ex-Amazon / AWS executive. There's possibility that AWS will be the partner providing computing in exchange for OpenAI's models being exclusively offered as part of Amazon Bedrock, for example, if this issue with Microsoft festers. I know Microsoft sees this as a clear warning: We can go to AWS if you push us too hard here.

I don't see how the partnership with MSFT isn't dissolved in some way in the coming week as Altman and co. openly try to poach OpenAI talent. And again, maybe dissolving the MSFT ties was something the board wanted. It's hard to imagine they didn't think it was a possibility given the way they handled announcing this on Friday, and it's hard to imagine it wasn't intentional.

Yup. It all reads like a well executed psyop — or one could think so if one was paranoid.

This actually seems like a decent compromise. Sam and Greg can retain velocity on the product side without having to spin up a whole new operation in direct competition with their old levers of power, and Ilya + co can remain in possession of the keys to the kingdom.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me it is us framed as if they won't be working on GPT-based products, but on research.

The whole thing reads like this to me: "In hindsight, we should've done more due diligence before developing a hard dependency on an organization and its product. We are aware that this was a mistake. To combat this, we will do damage control and continue to work with OpenAI, while developing our in-house solution and ditching this hard dependency. Sam & Co. will reproduce this and it will be fully under our control. So rest assured dear investors."

How do you conduct research with sales people? even if they manage to bring in researchers from OpenAI, the only gain here is microsoft getting some of the researchers behind the products and/or product developers.

Ah yes, Greg Brockman, former CTO of Stripe (amongst other things)... sales person.

Well, the same way a man with drive, discipline and money but very little in the way of technical expertise can build a company.

Sometimes you need someone who can drive a project and recruit the right people for the project. That person does not always need to be a subject matter expert.

Who are these "sales people" you're referring to? Surely not Greg Brockman, one of the most talented engineers in the world.

> Greg Brockman, one of the most talented engineers in the world.

Can you help me understand how you came to the conclusion?

People who worked with him at OpenAI and Stripe.

He has technical skill, you don't need to oversell him. He's not Ilya.

Except they only had AI model velocity and not product velocity. The user-side implementation of chatGPT is actually quite below what would be expected based on their AI superiority. So the parts that Sam & Greg should be responsible for are actually not great.

Sam and Greg were responsible for everything including building the company, deciding on strategy, raising funding, hiring most of the team, coordinating the research, building the partnership with Microsoft and acquiring the huge array of enterprise customers.

To act like they were just responsible for the "UI parts" is ridiculous.

I'm the first to defend CEOs and it's not a popular position to be in usually, believe me. But in this case, they did an experiment and it blew up based on their model's superiority alone.

Product-wise, however, it's looking like good enough AI is being commoditized at the pace of weeks and days. They will be forced to compete on user experience and distribution vs the likes of Meta. So far OpenAI only managed to deliver additions that sound good on the surface but prove not to be sticky when the dust settles.

They have also been very dishonest. I remember Sam Altman said he was surprised no one built something like chat GPT before them. Well... people tried but 3rd parties were always playing catch-up because the APIs were waitlisted, censored, and nerfed.

a) Meta is not competing with OpenAI nor has any plans to.

b) AI is only being commoditised at the low-end for models that can be trained by ordinary people. At the high-end there is only companies like Microsoft, Google etc that can compete. And Sam was brilliant enough to lock in Microsoft early.

c) What was stopping 3rd parties from building a ChatGPT was the out of reach training costs not access to APIs which didn't even exist at the time.

You're wrong about A & C but B is more nuanced.

a) Meta is training and releasing cutting-edge LLM models. When they manage to get the costs down, everyone and their grandma is going to have Meta's AI on their phone either through Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp.

b) Commoditization is actually mostly happening because companies (not individuals) are training the models. But that's also enough for commoditization to occur over time, even on higher-end models. If we get into the superintelligence territory, it doesn't even matter though, the world will be much different.

c) APIs for GPT were first teased as early as 2020s with broader access in 2021. They got implemented into 3rd party products but the developer experience of getting access was quite hostile early on. Chat-like APIs only became available after they were featured in ChatGPT. So Sam feigning surprise about others not creating something like it sooner with their APIs is not honest.

It's typical HN/engineer brain to discount the CEO and other "non-technical" staff as leeches.

If I recall correctly, Mira Murati was actually the person responsible for productizing GPT into a Chatbot. Prior to that, OpenAI's plan was just to build models and sell API access until they reach AGI.

I know there's a lot of talk about Ilya, but if Sam poaches Mira (which seems likely at this point), I think OpenAI will struggle to build things people actually want, and will go back to being an R&D lab.

This is kind of true, I think programming even codellama or gpt3.5 is more than enough and gpt-4 is very nice but what is missing is good developer experience, and copy-pasting to the chat window is not that.

Just curious what do you think is bad about the user side experience of chatgpt? It seems pretty slick to me and I use it most days.

Not being able to define instructions per “chat” window (or having some sort of a profile) is something I find extremely annoying.

That's exactly what the recently released GPT Builder does for you!

I wonder if they'll get bored working on Copilot in PowerPoint

Ilya and co are going to get orphaned, there’s no point to the talent they have if they intend to slow things down so it’s not like they’ll remain competitive. The capacity that MSFT was going to sell to OpenAI will go to the internal team.

Maybe they want it that way and want to move on from all the LLM hype that was distracting them from their main charter of pushing the boundaries of AI research? If yes, then they succeeded handsomely

"Don't get distracted by the research which actually produces useful things"

The GPT Golden Goose consists of 2 parts: 1. Smart people with the knowledge and motivation to build the Goose. 2. The compute required to create Eggs. MSFT now has both.

I don't see how any regulatory framework could have prevented this now or in the future.

I thought for sure the only two outcomes were that Altman raises money for a new startup or he comes back to OpenAI with a new governance structure (which is still a wild and crazy outcome, but crazier things have happened). Now that this happened though, I feel stupid for not considering this as a possible outcome at all.

The whole timeline of events over the last two events still leaves me scratching my head though.

It's confusing because no one beyond the direct negotiating parties knows exactly why any of this is happening in the first place. The media scoops about commercialization disputes don't seem that important to warrant such a dramatic showdown

What is Sam's actual value re: AI and not just as a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.

Leadership - To stay top of the game, you can't just rely on brunch of engineers, but a person/team to pull everything into shape. Seeing how many employees are leaving for sama, you get the sense.

what leadership? what examples of his leadership have been visible to the outside world? as far as I can tell, his entire career was:

1. failed startup 1. YC staff member 1. very creepy cryptocurrency grifter 1. openai ceo

where has he demonstrated such enormous value?

In the last day this site has been all about him. That goes to tell you the mindshare he commands. This was a major victory orchestrated by Satya.

That just means he is popular in HN, doesn't say much more than that in regards to leadership, etc.

Being popular doesn't mean someone is efficient, or even has any merits apart from being able to become popular (Kardashians come to mind).

> In the last day this site has been all about him.

I don't know what you mean? having lots of HN posts about you doesn't show leadership, it at most shows fanboyism amongst HN posters.

the last one in your list

what observable value has he displayed?

he's just the ceo, he's not designing or implementing products, and I don't think I've ever even seen him say anything particularly insightful in public.

can you link me to something particularly impressive?

I must be missing something based on the huge amount of praise people heap on him, but no one ever seems to elaborate on why.

To pull out engineers from OpenAI?

The exodus of personnel behind him.

Leadership

People believe his vision of AI

That is it

At the least, probably a good PR move for MS. It's a good move to counter whatever weight would be going against the MS stock price given they made a huge investment into OpenAI.

Precisely why this was all announced into the early morning hours of Monday.

Makes sense why this was posted now.

I hope openai knows what they are doing. They have angered the man that turned microsoft from the dinosaur into the asteroid.

There's an implication that he's more of a leader than just pure lucky. Sort of more like Bill Gates than Zuck I guess.

Public perception and connections.

Likely being groom to take over Satya 10 years from now.

that is what i thought, when Sam was fired, i think he is kind of people can be replaced by AI generated something ( ai-ceo ), not that complicate compare to engineer or scientist. and another replaceable one is Satya Nadella. and the ai-ceo maybe much less evil than them, since they are the one convert ( i am not sure if they committed fraud ) the non-profit, open source entity to for-profit and closed source entity.

yeah, Elon Musk invested tons of money to start openai as non-profit to make sure this openai thing is for all, not for couple of people to shine themself.

OpenAI is destined to learn the story of Xerox PARC the hard way. I commend them.

If your goal is to produce a lot of value and you don’t care about others capturing it, then it may actually be a good way to go, especially with the non-profit setup.

I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee are...quite different.

It's not gonna be Microsoft employee, it's gonna be a subsidiary like GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. A lot more independence.

Exactly. I'm not so sure that most of OpenAI's employees would be very excited to join Microsoft.

Incredible how much has changed in one weekend… or not?

Confused what this really means. So Microsoft still has access to OpenAI’s pre-AGI tech that Sam and Greg can leverage for their more product-focused visions.

More than that, it looks like Microsoft has become a major AI player (internal research) overnight up with the likes of Meta, Google, and OpenAI. Incredible.

Just FYI...

Microsoft was already set to spent 27 billion usd on research for 2023. They dedicate huge standout double digit percentages of budget to research every year. Their in house AI research division was already huge.

They didn't become a major AI player overnight... They already were long ago.

OpenAI is small, in raw numbers of AI researchers, compared to the big players in the space. That's a major reason why it's so compelling that they have been able to consistently set the bar for state of the art.

They were a dream team... But small. Msft is adding AAA+ talent to their existing A+ deck. Also they won't have to rewrite the code base. Can hit the ground running.

Lastly, there is no evidence that openai has the greatly quoted and so hard to define 'agi'. That's Twitter hearsay and highly unlikely... If folkes can even agree what that is. By the overwhelming percentage of definitions... Even gpt-5 is unlikely to meet that bar. Highly speculative. Twitter is a cesspool of conspiracy theory... Don't believe everything you read.

Can someone help me understand what Sam's actual value is? He doesn't seem to be a particularly important practitioner/researcher re: AI and is "just" a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.

Microsoft would at least like him not to do that job for a competitor.

Given they paid for a big stake in the market leader, and their stock price movements when this drama erupted, keeping these people in-house can be seen as damage control.

Sure. But Sam Altman is an ambitious man. Why would he accept this instead of fundraising and creating another company? I think there would be more details of this arrangement surfacing these coming days. It is unlikely a traditional team within a large corporation.

Maybe he needs a salary!

A lot of experienced OpenAI engineers/scientists apparently want to come with him. Those people clearly have a lot of value to Microsoft since they've invested heavily in OpenAI. Imagine having poured billions in to that firm to discover half the reason you invested is walking out the door...

The people that would rather have him as boss.

I know several people that keep changing company when their favourite leardership changes into another one.

It feels more like face saving and to keep balance with investors and stocks etc..

Hiring famous well known big names of the industry (even if they're useless and will just coast for crazy money) sends a strong signal to investors and will most likely boost MSFT stock price during this ongoing AI bubble.

And once the AI bubble pops as everyone learns AGI indeed NOT 'around the corner', Microsoft will silently let him go with a golden parachute in the 8 figure ballpark.

At least that's what I learned from watching the Silicon Valley satire.

These things just show over and over again how irrational the "market" behaves. Most of all it's a big hype train and you better be lucky on the time to hop on or off.

If you are the lucky CEO of a company during the phase of success, investors will associate you with success. It's just easier to identify than understanding what the company does in detail and why it is successful or will/won't be in the future.

Good for Sam.

This is a good point. I hadn't noticed Microsoft's share price dropping 20% on the initial announcement.

Microsoft's board made the right call when they promoted Satya to CEO. Their share price on the day he became CEO was $36.35 and is now $369.84 (and likely to increase again on this news).

Putting together a deal like this whilst maintaining the relationship with OpenAI is impressive enough, but to do it as a cricket tragic when India was losing to Australia is even better.

In retaliation Ilya/team should just open source everything OpenAI has. The only way to make genAI(GPT the can opener) safe is to make it democratic and available for everyone. Then others can pick it up and make it more efficient. At least MS servers will get a break.

They can’t anymore if Microsoft has exclusive licence?

I live in a completely different world.

When this all went down, I just felt really bad for all those involved, in any situation like this, I feel horrible for the person, imaging what it must of felt for Sam, as if his situation was really bad, yet of course he was always likely to land somewhere on his feet and always in a much better situation than me personally.

Then by the late hours of Sunday, he has already negotiated with OpenAI and then joined Microsoft. Crazy to me that such decisions are made at breakneck speed and everything unfolds so quickly, when I take much longer to make much simpler choices.

People overvalue Sam Altman role. He is not a technological mastermind, he is primarily a superb execution and business guy.

It's not like he and Greg are brilliant mathematicians and coders that will sit down in a cubicle at Redmond and churn out code for AGI in six months.

I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs. On the balance this probably slows things down, so: good.

Not sorry about Sam, first off I'm not assuming we know everything and second I'm more inclined to trust the board. Also it seems he was trying to do a secret hardware venture on the side, which would be several kinds of unethical. Again: good.

> I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.

People will sell their souls and the souls of others for power and greed.

>I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.

It's simple: He who wins first place writes the rules, for everyone.

If Microsoft gets the first place win, they (and more broadly the USA) are who get to write the rulebook.

We are already witnessing this with "AI", it's OpenAI/Microsoft and the USA who dragged the rest of the west into the rules that they wrote because they got past the finish line first.

Hopefully this motivates a lot of people who don't want Microsoft to be the AI company. Slowing down research would mean Microsoft wins everything.

MS now has both the accelerationists and the deccelerationists. They can keep accelerating themselves when pushing for regulatory capture through their deccelerationist branch to slow down any competition.

Wonder how long this will last. This team doesn't seem like a good fit for big corp Microsoft.

Good get by MS though!

What value does Sam bring now? They have all the money they could want. All the connections they’d need.

Weird situation for him.

Agreed. Sam isn’t some AI visionary, he’s a startup guy. Unless he’s leading a team that’s going to spin out a new company, I don’t get it.

He was the face of OpenAI, MSFT is basically trying to signal: Business as usual, nothing to see here, move along and please don't tank our stock

It really does feel like that. Like it’s mutually beneficial for Sam and MSFT to team up in the short term while Sam figures out his next move and MSFT tries to keep OpenAI afloat for the time being

>please don't tank our stock

ding ding ding

It's mind boggling that a corporation of that size would care about stock fluctuations on the order of minutes, hours, and days.

I guess he'll make the consumer hardware product he's been developing with Jony Ive, and also spin up the chip company he was working on anyway.

Researchers can not be 'AI visionaries', almost by definition, as you focus on depth instead of breadth as a competent researcher.

Someone like Sam Altman is indeed more of a visionary than every hardcore AI researcher. The job here is to not push the boundaries of science, it is to figure out and predict the cascading effects of a new invention.

Additional info from a Linked-in follow-up comment by Satya: "I’m super excited to have Sam join as CEO of this new group, setting a new pace for innovation. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having Sam and team do the same."

Microsoft is swiftly moving on to the third "E" with OpenAI. First time I get to witness this process first-hand.

I don't see how this is applies. OpenAI fired the CEO themselves. What extinguishing is Microsoft doing here?

Nadella was heavily involved in the talks to get Altman et al. back in OpenAI. This must have been brought up, so I’m guessing the OpenAI board made their decision knowing this would be the outcome?

Purely business-wise, it sure does seem like it's a race down to the bottom. A disproportionate amount of the sharpest minds are working on this, burning ungodly amounts of money but no one has so far has really managed to capture that value in a profitable way either.

The public positions of these people are opaque, inconsistent, and intellectually dishonest too. They're apparently not here to make money but they need a lot of it until they create a superintelligence (but money will be obsolete by then, apparently). And AI may destroy humanity so we will try to build it faster than anyone else so it doesn't..? WTF.

It's okay to want to make money and cement your name in history, but what is up with these public delusions?

Presumably Sam and Greg now get to pick up where they left off and keep productizing GPT-4 since Microsoft has the IP and is hosting their own GPT-4 models on Azure, right?

The more interesting thing is whether or not they'll be able to build and release something equivalent to GPT-5, using Microsoft's immense resources, before OpenAI is able to.

GPT-5 is almost certainly already done. But considering they sat on 4 for 8 months with Altman as head, who knows if it'll see the light of day.

5 months ago they said they hadn't started training: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/07/openai-gpt5-sam-altman/ and had no intention to do so within the next 6 months: https://the-decoder.com/gpt-5-is-nowhere-close-says-openai-c...

They just started development in the last week or so: https://decrypt.co/206044/gpt-5-openai-development-roadmap-g...

The little secret is that the training run (meaning, creating the raw autocompleting multimodal token weights) for 5 ran in parallel with 4.

Do you think Microsoft gets access to it?

They will unless the board declares it AGI. I'm not joking lol. That was part of the agreement.

Have fun defining and proving AGI lol

They already defined it - a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.

There's some vagueness here sure but if they can demonstrate something to that effect, fair play to them i guess.

This was expected. Who would possibly think Sam would join MS to be a "senior research" or "VP of engineering"? They get to form a company and run a startup within Microsoft with full Microsoft backing.

OpenAI is so over.

And by seeing how Satya praise it ``` We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap ... We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team ```

You know OpenAI is now overly done. I'd say it's now in archive.

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

I was expecting MSFT to get a board seat and bring them back tbh

Just give it a few months and they can probably get back IP and the remaining OAI assets for nothing.

Yeah, the current board has to go if they want to raise money again.

Satya is the best CEO in tech and it isnt even close

Honest question, why is he the best CEO?

He performed an unbelievable turnaround. His predecessor, famed for sweating a lot, yelling (sometimes positively, not necessarily in anger), throwing chairs and insisting on giving the keynote speech every year at MWC while being irrelevant, was driving the company into the ground.

Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity which he had. Unlike Billg (who missed the dawn of the Internet) and the chair-throwing dude (who fumbled Mobile), Satya is making sure Microsoft does NOT miss AI. Which is even more impressive as Google was kind of expected to be the winner initially, given the whole company's focus , mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and a considerable (at the time) lead, if not a moat.

I dare to compare his turnaround to Jobs'. Sure, MSFT wasn't weeks away from insolvency when he took over, and some of their current successes were indeed started before his tenure, but just look at where Windows 8 was going.

*Edit: Just as a clarification: Not an employee, I actually dislike them profoundly and would never join them. I'm not sure this move is the best outcome for mankind - but credit where credit's due, they were shrewd, smart and right on time. Hats off.

The problem with Google is that it is being run by the bunch of nerds. Sure, they are smart but without ad revenue they would gave gone down long time ago...

Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which was a wrong prediction.

And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another AT&T merger fiasco.

The problems with Google in my own personal experience and POV indeed pretty much coincide with the end of Eric Schmidt's tenure as CEO. It's sad, as a nerd, but it started going to shit when the nerds got in the driving seat, and of course much worse once they stopped caring altogether and left Sundar at the helm.

With billg missing the dawn of the Internet, I didn't mean the IE integration fiasco and the resulting lawsuit - that's actually the part they got more or less right (in their own perverted 3E approach, not according to my moral compass), but too late to become dominant. They first wasted time trying to create their own MSN walled garden a la Compuserve .

To Ballmer's credit he did start Azure, although it doesn't feel it was a serious enough effort, until he was replaced. But between Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Skype, Zune, Kin, etc etc... it's no wonder it's been called Microsoft's lost decade.

As a user and not shareholder, I simply can't agree with this sentiment.

Windows got massively worse during his tenure in literally everything that can get worse including half-legal snooping on all users including Enterprise ones (I stand by the statement that this is idiotic long term strategy driven by childish emotions like FOMO - no way he didn't have a direct say in this).

Office is certainly PITA and getting worse in my experience, but that can be corporate modifications/restrictions I am exposed to.

Teams was, is and probably forever will be pathetic, buggy, slow and just a bad joke compared to some competition with 1% of their budget.

These are core extremely visible products and for most of mankind 100% of the surface with MS. There is not even an attempt for corrections, direction is set and rest are details.

I fully, fully concur with the experience as a user. Sadly that's irrelevant to their financials - first of all this is now what, 5% of their revenue stream?

And despite the shittiness, even that 5% is doing great because their audience is now billions of mostly computer-illiterate people, who don't even have an opinion on the technical merits, the performance, the bugginess, the snooping, the feature gap, etc etc etc.

The opinion of few million geeks who are mostly not using Windows anyway (or whose only contacts with anything Microsoft are due to their employers' choice of platform) doesn't ultimately matter much, Microsoft knows it, and they have no reason to change direction despite our frustration. Some better privacy law could nudge them, anything short of a legal directive won't go far.

I will never forget something I read in his "Hit Refresh" book(I'm Microsoft employee)... He wrote something along the lines, Office should write best app for iPhone, Mac or even Linux if that helps them grow. They should not help Windows sell Windows copies by doing better Office features on Windows, it is up to Windows team to make Windows best operating system, it should not rely and keep back Office team... This makes Windows and Office better, because it allows Office to be free and do what they need to grow, and it forces Windows to improve OS and not rely on others... Just one example where CEO can help teams grow...

That's a nice vision, but as someone who transitioned from a windows to mac a few years ago, I'm sad to report that reality isn't anything like it. Office for mac is lightyears behind what windows has. Both excel and outlook miss critical features (just last week I was looking to change the background of an email - seems that's impossible on mac), or are so much worse in terms of performance (~20mb file with pivot tables) that I'm not sure if I'm running Excel on my m1 mac or if it's a raspberry pi.

That's definitely a shift from the "platform" thinking Microsoft had, thanks for the inside view.

It's not like MS could do any other thing after being wiped out of the smartphone market. Locking Office to Windows in an age where virtually everybody is using a smartphone or a tablet with either Android or iOS is useless. The situation of Office in either Mac or Linux never improved, it just got turned into a cloud service like almost any other software suite and tried to cash in the legacy name to compete with Google Docs and Zoho. I don't really see any brilliant move there.

'eat your own lunch before someone else does'

For a quick overview, google Microsoft stock and take a look at what happened to it after he became CEO in February 2014. It had been farting along at $24-35 a share with little lasting change since 2000. As soon as he got involved it started rising stratospherically and is now at about $360. Partnering with openAI turned out to be a brilliant idea that has helped them corner a brand new market. And poaching perhaps half their staff after an unforced error by their board is even shrewder.

February 2014 -> October 2023:

  AAPL: 18.79 -> 170.77 (9.08x)

  MSFT: 38.31 -> 338.11 (8.82x)

  AMZN: 18.10 -> 133.09 (7.35x)

  META: 68.46 -> 301.27 (4.40x)

  GOOG: 30.28 -> 125.30 (4.14x)

Need to account for splits and reinvesting dividends.

That doesn’t tell the whole story due to stock splits etc changing the unit stock price.

No, stock splits are included.

I stand corrected :)

Presumably because MSFT is the most highly diversified tech company on the planet and he's overseeing multiple billion dollar businesses there without breaking a sweat.

Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a coherent AI strategy at the moment.

To be fair, MSFT was the most diversified tech company prior to his arrival - Google had Search, Facebook had Facebook, Apple had hardware. Microsoft by then had perhaps a dozen products with a billion dollars or more of revenue (Windows, Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, XBox, Azure, Surface, among others). Satya did well to focus on the cloud and grow opportunities there, but he hasn't significantly increased the diversity of the product lineup.

I would say it has more or less equal revenue streams in comparison to other tech giants.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ff8RCKwUcAEkWk_?format=jpg&name=...

If you look at the charts with revenue streams - Microsoft is the most diversified in that regard, because basically each and every branch of Microsoft produces the similar amount of revenue.

With Xbox getting Activision it lifts up More Personal Computing to the level, comparable to other streams (and even higher than Windows).

He managed to make the whole open source world forget who enemy #1 is and got them to give him privileged access to all of their work product on his terms. That's no mean feat.

He was a marketing person I believe when Bill was in MSFT. To become the CEO of MSFT is a huge political and competence firewall already. Then to do the most spectacular transformation of a mega-corp is next-level. MSFT is now the leading player in AI, while before it was still fucking around with office and Windows licenses. People who are young (not saying you are), and don't remember what MSFT was before Satya, don't really get that MSFT would be like Oracle and IBM if not for Satya.

As far as I know, he actually came from an engineering background, making his career even more impressive. Despite my views on Microsoft and shareholder-oriented capitalism, he certainly seems like a brilliant and genuinely interesting guy.

Marketing person? LOL

The guy was born in the cloud compute division.

The board saw cloud compute was gonna be big. They made him the king. Good bet. The whole company went all in on cloud. Now they print more money than before.

Marketing person lol. He's an engineer. The guy literally gets back into VS code sometimes to stay in touch.

The CEO's job is to enrich the shareholders and by that metric he has done a pretty good job. More qualitatively, being able to change Microsoft's trajectory from boring enterprise tech company to a tech leader with strategic deals (OpenAI, Github) is very impressive.

Why is Teams on mac so bad then?

That's a strawman and you know it. I'm not going to necessarily concur's OP's point, but it's inarguable given MSFT's last half decade the positive stewardship Nadella has done.

Where did you get that strange idea?

Reality is indeed stranger than fiction. I don't have an opinion on whether this is good or bad for whomsoever. But it's entertaining for sure. Best tech weekend I have ever had.

Others from OpenAI team, maybe can lead the AI research, but how does Sam can lead a research group?

IMO, to lead a research group you need some decent research skills, Sam is good at business

My guess:

This is no research group, this is OpenAI 2.0, Sam/Greg will have enormous autonomy. It will be foolish to think Satya just recruited them to tangle them in MSFT bureaucracy

BigCos generally have a hard time keeping their autonomous groups actually isolated from bureaucracy. Lab126 has been thoroughly corporatized, and Area 120 got outright reabsorbed.

He did lead together with greg at openai. Not as researchers. For that they hired the initial research team.

It will be an applied research group obviously to develop products based on AI

Sam might be a good product manager.

Sauron declares: Saruman to join Mordor.

Why are people so excited about Sam and Greg joining Microsoft?

The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding. But that's not something Microsoft needs, so what value does Sam give them?

Putting on my lateral thinking hat, by hiring Altman and Brockman they ensure that they cannot compete against them in whatever enterprise they were thinking of doing. It gives the corporation incredible breathing room of at least a year to catch up while also being able to mine them for their knowledge. Additionally they will serve as beacons for hiring devs into their corporation.

> The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding

OpenAI was last week a $100b company.

You need to do more than just "build an AI model" for that to happen.

They're bringing the talent with them, I'm sure that's part of it.

Will be interesting to see how many OpenAI employees leave OpenAI to work at Microsoft.

So we have OpenAI, Microsoft, a whole bunch of capital, and a few "rock stars" moving. And it's these people holding the keys to the AI kingdom where they go to work to achieve AGI.

Finally they got rid of this pesky idea of "safety". We're back in "break things" mode.

Does nobody recognize the stakes here? AGI, which soon would accelerate into something far more capable, ends civilization. I'm not saying it would kill us, I'm saying it makes us cognitively obsolete and all meaning is lost.

AI Safety isn't a micro bias in the training set. It's existential at planetary scale. Yet we let a bunch of cowboys just go "let's see what happens" with zero meaningful regulation in sight. And we applaud them.

I know AGI isn't here yet. I know Microsoft would not allow for zero safety. I'm just saying that on the road to AGI, about two dozen people are deciding on our collective faith. With as ultimate chief the guy behind shit coin "world coin".

if AGI is as close as autonomous cars, I think we are going to be ok.

November 17th OpenAI blog post: "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

The fact that they agreed to join as MS employees kinda proves that money was a big motivator.

Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money. He needs GPU compute and MSFT has mountains of it

> Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money.

Needing more money and wanting more money aren't at all the same thing.

I mean he's proven he's not in it for the money. He had zero equity in OpenAI.

This confirms that Sam and Greg don't belong as heads of a non-profit who's sole objective is to develop AGI for the benefit of all of humanity. Because if your Plan B is to join Microsoft, whose mission is to make profit for shareholders, then your heart wasn't really in it, as that won't achieve your original goal.

Yeah, this is a huge validation of what Ilya and the Board did. If Sam and Greg had started another company with similar aims, even if it wasn't non-profit, they would probably keep arguing that what they were doing was only to get enough resources to be able to solve the problem of AGI with a broad benefit to humanity, and it probably would have turned into a big ideological schism between Sam's side insisting that a profit-seeking company was okay to pursue the goal, and OpenAI insisting on pursuing the goal and not getting distracted by greed.

Sam and Greg joining up with Microsoft settles that debate cleanly, they clearly aren't serious about developing AGI without a profit motive or military control determining the development process if they're docking with Microsoft. I don't think Ilya and the Board would have had any doubts about Sam if they fired him, but if they did this would remove them.

OMG, it is 12am in SF. I need to sleep.

But what a play, MSFT the winner here.

They now owns the actual OpenAI

Edit: PM->am

Or they just acquired sales people

Greg Brockman has already announced some of the others on the leadership team -- https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1726530200484372688

Maybe lunch and a coffee could help?

Sam and Greg obviously haven’t heard that Microsoft Research doesn’t get any GPU access (:

Haven't worked at Microsoft, but usually, when folks up high have their balls at stake, resources and budgets magically start getting approved faster than the Concorde.

More like this is a PR stunt and Sam will launch a startup once the furore dies down

Amazing to see this on the front page multiple times and reposted every 20 minutes, each time as the highest performer on new. I've never seen such story velocity before.

This is probably the biggest single weekend in tech ever?

And crazy news just keeps on coming…

Probably the biggest story since the last one. And until the next one.

If this is supposed to be the biggest single weekend in tech ever I don't know what to say

Some shitty crypto bro got fired and it's the biggest weekend in tech ever? ffs...

Hacker News is so dumb it's actually hilarious.

There's a high likelihood that MS is going to start poaching top AI talent aggressively, with Altman's help. This will be to the significant detriment of OpenAI.

If this is how it plays out, OpenAI's board will be famous for decades to come for their boneheaded handling of this situation.

Altman's value is in business, how does bringing him to Microsoft to lead a research team help?

He can court developers he has existing relationships with.

How many is that gonna be? 20% of the devs would be a generous estimate imo.

According to the latest developments, "nearly 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman unless the startup's board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO". That seems like it's probably higher than your 20% estimate. https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-al...

Maybe some will come out of loyalty. But then again, when you look at the choice of becoming a MS employee vs. being poached by FAIR, Google Brain or Deepmind, it's no guarantee all 500 will come over to follow the sales guys.

Many of them game from Google. Furthermore, if the choice is "create AI that no one ever uses" vs "create AI that people use" then it's a no-brainer to go with Microsoft. Compute + products + research freedom.

I suspected this. OpenAI was always going towards Microsoft and Sam was leading that charge. Who else but them to bankroll his next vision.

Great pickup by MSFT. The exodus is only beginning and MSFT will not have to buy OpenAI for the billions in valuation it was getting. East win.

Developing: OpenAI is nothing without its people https://twitter.com/search?q=OpenAI%20is%20nothing%20without...

Plot twist: it was Satya who planted the idea in the OpenAI's board's mind to fire Sam in the first place... Inception-style.

"damn its interesting Sam is raising money in the Middle East, you think he's contracting with Neom?"

"whoops wrong person"

Or he planted the idea in Sam's head that he actually wants a for-profit AI.

Still the aftermath leaves a bitter taste in my mouth about Sam and Greg joining MS. Regardless of whether the AI development in OpenAI was responsible, I think they succeeded in making a product and a culture I have not 'felt' since the early Google days.

Naively, I had really hoped for Sam and Greg to start their own and not join MS. I think a lot of the value was being coherent and to some extent independent. I can't help to think that the same will happen to the 'new' OpenAI as what happend to DeepMind once they became Google DeepMind (again).

It takes billions to get this off the ground. Next stop: if this is going to be an independent entity they may well go around the usual suspects to give them much more money. I wonder if any of the VCs that have invested in OpenAI have something in their charter about investing in competing entities.

Would Altman shine within Microsoft? Seems like raising capital is his main skill set, and theres no need for that now. But from Microsofts point of view this prevents a new competitor from popping up.

This isnt the win people seem to think it is, at least not for end users. Micosoft dont buy companies and people to keep releasing free standalone products. They buy them to integrate into Windows.

Cortana 2.0 incoming.

I think the whole problem that sparked all this was that Sam & Co. wasn't enough about being open and research, but more into closed products. I'm surprised over this particular solution because they enter Microsoft with a ton of knowledge of OpenAI internals which seems to open the floodgates for an array of lawsuits if they so much touch their codebases, unless it is under mutual and friendly terms. But now THAT it happened, I'm not surprised Sam is willing to build for Microsoft Copilot.

Who’s talking about free? And I think it’s Azure rather than Windows these days.