24 ms·

Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

1119 points by gdb 7y ago

streetcat1 7y ago
So is this the open-ai exit?
- gdb 7y ago
  (I work at OpenAI.) Quite the opposite — this is an investment!
  - AbrahamParangi 7y ago
    Congrats to the team, excited to see what you guys do with the momentum
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    So you are now part of azure, no?. Like - azure-open-ai?
    - minxomat 7y ago
      Do you know what "investment" means?
      - streetcat1 7y ago
        Yes. You get money and give control.
        minxomat 7y ago
        Which is extremely well defined for OpenAI. One board seat, charter comes first. That's a legal agreement, not much open for interpretation.
        streetcat1 7y ago
        Not quite true, azure is now the only channel by which open ai innovation can be commercialise. This is the key control point. For example, if there is an hardware innovation which make DNN training 1000x faster (e.g. optical DNN), but it does not exist on azure, than by definition it cannot be offered on another cloud. To sum up, this deal assure the choking point of azure/MS on any innovation that would come up from open ai.
  - kuzehanka 7y ago
    Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity. As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI to the list so that nothing means anything any more?
    - Miraste 7y ago
      OpenAI is a for-profit corporation now. It's in their interest to use as many buzzwords as possible to attract that sweet venture capital, regardless of whether said buzzwords have any base in reality.
    - andreilys 7y ago
      At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There is a non-zero chance that we are a few breakthroughs away from creating a technology that far surpasses the nuclear bomb in terms of destructive potential. These breakthroughs may have a short window of time between each of them (once we know a, knowing b,c,d will be much easier) So given all of that, wouldn't it make sense to start working on these problems now? And the unfortunate part of working on these problems now is that you do need hype/buzzwords to attract tallent, raise money and get people talking about AGI safety. Sure it might not lead anywhere, but just like fire insurance might seem unnecessary if you never have a fire, AGI research may end up being a useless field altogether but at least it gives us that cushion of safety.
      - kuzehanka 7y ago
        Discussing the risks of AGI is always worthwhile and has been undertaken for several decades now. That's a bit different from the marketing fluff on the linked page: "We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI" Azure needs a few more years just to un-shit the bed with what their marketing team has done and catch up to even basic AWS/GCP analytics offerings. Them talking about AGI is like a toddler talking about building a nuclear weapon. This is the same marketing team that destroyed any meaning behind terms like 'real time', and 'AI'.
  - pmontra 7y ago
    $1B is not like investing $100 in a crowdfunded project, "nice toy and let's hope for the best." I expect that Microsoft is going to look very closely at what OpenAI does and possibly steer it into a direction they like. Unless you have a few other $1B investors. We'll see how it plays out.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    >(I work at OpenAI.) Humble understatement. *co-founded and co-run.
  - OrgNet 7y ago
    is all your code public?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mtgx 7y ago
I imagine this comes with a ton of strings attached, written or unwritten. This probably gives Microsoft control of the project's roadmap.
- gdb 7y ago
  The OpenAI board remains in charge of OpenAI’s AGI-relevant decisions. Microsoft has the right to appoint one board seat, which they have not yet exercised.
  - est31 7y ago
    I've written up my opinion on the deal that OpenAI gives to investors here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_openai_lp/eig4fj2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_o... TLDR either the public is being conned or Microsoft is. And assuming that Microsoft probably has used top lawyers to close the deal, I doubt it's them.
    - vasilipupkin 7y ago
      sorry, your opinion appears to be nonsensical. a cap of 100x on returns and limited voting power certainly changes the price investors are willing to pay for the shares, but doesn't invalidate anything or render shares worthless or anything of the sort.
      - est31 7y ago
        The difference between shares and a loan is that shares have a) no cap on the returns b) give you control over the company c) limited ability to sue if the company acts against shareholder interests d) no due date Differences a, b and c seem to be gone here. Would you give someone a loan where you have no ability to sue them if they never give you the money back? I wouldn't unless that person is very important to me or the money is insignificant. Neither is the case here.
    - dd36 7y ago
      Lawyers practice law not investment. Lawyers are involved in every bad and good deal.
chc4 7y ago
Well, gotta wonder how well their charter[1] will fare against Microsoft pressure...Microsoft isn't exactly well-known for their benevolence and cautious approach. 1: https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
albybisy 7y ago
OpenAI => CloseAI
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  So a highly sophisticated sales bot is the end goal :)
appstorelottery 7y ago
Embrace... extend.... and.... :-)
- lewisj489 7y ago
  Downvote
  - appstorelottery 7y ago
    My post got sent to the Minstry of Love. :-)
Pandabob 7y ago
Excellent way to reallocate some of that record breaking revenue they just announced.
codelemur 7y ago
Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive. Congrats to the team, and break a leg!
- gdb 7y ago
  Thank you!
  - applecrazy 7y ago
    The research that OpenAI’s doing is groundbreaking and the results are often beyond state-of-the-art. I aim to work in one of your research teams sometime!
    - chrshawkes 7y ago
      Watch the Kool-Aid intake and you'll be just fine. Dreams are great and an absolute necessity for success but create your own. Don't buy into everything you hear, especially Elon Musk talking about Artificial General Intelligence.
      - applecrazy 7y ago
        Oh, I'm well aware of the hype around AGI. My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Nevertheless, I would like to work on more pragmatic goals, like improving the current state-of-the-art language models and text generation networks. I'm actually starting by reimplementing Seq2Seq as described by Quoc Le et al.[1] for text summarization[2] (this code is extremely messy but it'll get better soon). It's been interesting to learn about word embeddings, RNNs and LSTMs, and data processing within the field of Natural Language Processing. Any tips on how to get up to speed within this field would be helpful, as I'm trying to get into research labs doing similar work at my university. [1]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learn... [2]: https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/ https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/
logicchains 7y ago
Hopefully this is good news for Bing.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Well, hopefully if someone creates a benevolent AGI then it should be good news for everyone.
  - codelemur 7y ago
    [EDIT]: friendly -> non-friendly oops. That's what seems so confusing about HN replies here. (Non-friendly) AGI is an extreme existential risk (depending on who you listen to). I'm perfectly fine with rewarding the org that's responsible for researching friendly AGI to do it _right_ (extremely contingent on that last bit).
    - modzu 7y ago
      the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.
      - arethuza 7y ago
        OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires some money so at one level it is a money problem.
        modzu 7y ago
        but this is alchemy isn't it? there isn't even a theoretical framework from which we can even begin to suggest how to keep any "general intelligence" benign. good old fashioned research notwithstanding, a billion dollars is not about to change this. it reads to more to me like this is an investment in azure (ie microsoft picking up some machine learning expertise to leverage in its future cloud services). that's not a judgement, and i'm sure lots of cool work will still come from this, given the strength of the team and massive backing they have. it just smells funny.
feral 7y ago
I want to take everything OpenAI says at face value (seem like good folk), but I can't help but wonder at the recent choice to keep GPT2 closed, on what seemed like pretty thin safety arguments to me. Now, the demonstrated ability to produce new models which are closed, but maybe can be used as services on a preferred partner's cloud, looks very commercially relevant? How will these conflicts be managed, or is it more like "we are just a commercial entity now, of course we'll do this"?
- pms 7y ago
  An earlier comment mentions that they are for-profit now (changed from non-profit a while ago).
- Veedrac 7y ago
  https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
- chibg10 7y ago
  Their handling of OpenAIFive rubbed me the wrong way as well. The whole operation smelled very PR-ish to me personally -- unnecessarily/unjustifiably HYPE representatives, complaining that the Dota community wanted to see OpenAIFive play a normal Dota match against pros rather a heavily constrained environment to benefit the bots, among other things.
  - rishav_sharan 7y ago
    Same. They left the OpenAI project half baked and thats very disappointing.
Tenoke 7y ago
Congrats! So what's OpenAI's current valuation?
ryanmercer 7y ago
OpenAi to for-profit OpenAI to billion dollar partnership with Microsoft doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feelings I had when I first heard of OpenAI. I saw it as "we're going to save the world by building an AGI before someone builds SkyNet" today it is "We've got in bed with a company that had one of the most famous anti-trust cases in the United States and one of the most famous anti-competition cases in the EU". And of course going after high school student Mike Rowe for registering MikeRoweSoft.com (Seriously Microsoft, exactly no one thought he was you). While Microsoft isn't inherently evil, I mean one could argue that via Windows Microsoft is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of computers, it definitely makes me feel slightly uneasy. I'd rather see OpenAI continue to be funded by donation, and eventually royalties/licensing of technologies it develops, not partnerships with companies like 'IBM 2: Electric Boogaloo'. But what do I know, I'm a Morlock not an Eloi.
- SahAssar 7y ago
  The whole MikeRoweSoft thing was 15 years ago. I don't think it's fair to judge the company now based on that.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    If it was the only instance, I'd say sure, but: - Lindows - Microwindows - wxWindows - Windows Commander - Suing Amish Shah - MikeRoweSoft Then all of the various anti-trust/anti-competition lawsuits against them by both companies and government entities (Be Inc, Nescape, the EU, Spain, the US Government, Caldera, Opera Software. Also individuals in numerous class actions). Plenty of reason to feel slightly concerned.
    - SahAssar 7y ago
      Are any of those recent? I agree that microsoft has been pretty dickish and I'm sure parts of it continue to be (see http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts as an example for why), but as a whole I feel that they are better with OSS now than they have every been.
neiman 7y ago
$1B dollar is a lot of money. Microsoft is not a charity foundation, so the suspicious is obvious. > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems. Maybe it's because I'm not an expert, but what does it really mean? Do people understand what "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider" means? OpenAI is great, but suspicious is understandable from the users side when so much commercial money is involved.
- strikelaserclaw 7y ago
  Maybe they will use that 1 Billion on Azure fees lol.
  - kuzehanka 7y ago
    That's like a month of CosmosDB storing a DVD worth of records!
    - Quarrelsome 7y ago
      Cosmos is throughput not size. So it would be a month of having the capacity to I/O a DVD worth of records.
      - kuzehanka 7y ago
        It's both. And storage cost is amplified by number of regions replicated to.
    - aliswe 7y ago
      I actually made up a pun today, CostMostDB. Hehe... But seriously, it's not that expensive. A client is using it quite heavily and they don't reach any particarly high level of spend at all for a corporation, but ymmv.
  - 7y ago
Myja 7y ago
<sponsored content> This shows that Microsoft has reformed and is not the same company as under Ballmer. Nadella has understood the importance of open source. Interesting times ahead. <sponsored content/>
option_greek 7y ago
Genuine question: In what sense is OpenAI open ?
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Its just like the bag of sugar I have in my cabinet that claims to be low calorie. It says "ONLY 16 CALORIES (per 4 grams in tiny letters)". I mean, sugar is pretty much the definition of a high calorie food. Its like, pure calories. And can affect insulin regulation, etc. That's why they need to put some marketing on it.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    Off topic, I know, however, this reminded me of TV adverts we used to have in my country when I was young where they were saying how great sugar is because it has 0% fat... If only the butter companies responded with adverts about how they're 0% sugar, that would have been fun. :/
    - rapind 7y ago
      Low carb / no carb is gaining in popularity (and some products label it). Sugar is finally becoming the bad guy despite enormous lobbying efforts over a very long time (since the 60s?).
  - EForEndeavour 7y ago
    Super nitpicky: sugar is 4 kcal/gram, but so is protein, and fats is 9 kcal/g, over double the caloric content. By saying sugar is "pure calories," I guess you mean that it doesn't contain any fibre or micronutrients that might give it redeeming qualities (besides its taste), which is true.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      Most people are not putting spoonfuls of beef in their coffee. Sugar is, quite literally, pure carbohydrates. Most sources of protein are not, unless you're consuming refined amino acids (pro tip: they taste awful).
pron 7y ago
Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien working on a problem would be able to see connections across disciplines that no human could. But even though I'm known as the warp-drive-guy, I don't actually know how to build a warp drive, so in the meantime I am building increasingly powerful transportation technology in the hope this would lead to a warp drive one day soon, and have decided to focus on bicycles. They're really good bikes, though, and unlike others who make bicycles, I like to consider those I build to merely be pre-warp, a necessary step towards warp technology. So when you buy my bikes [1], you are literally helping me change the trajectory of human history and meet aliens (did I mention Curie, Turing and Bach?) This is truly a fine specimen of Silicon Valley prose. It's got something for everyone: human history, a wild-eyed dream of a bright future, a connection to the arts, name-dropping, the trajectory of humanity, and, of course, lots of money in cloud services (integrated platform). They even showed some restraint in stopping short of ending all war and curing all disease. "Making the world a better place" is really too mundane. [1]: The Warp Drive Corporation®'s Pre-Warp Bike™️ is now on sale on Amazon.
- ppod 7y ago
  Your analogy would be accurate if people had spent the last century claiming that artificial transport was impossible, and then continually redefining what counted as transport until the concept was incoherent.
  - kyruzic 7y ago
    Are you claiming that people claimed AI was impossible and openAi (or any other "AI") has proven those people wrong. If so please provide some evidence of this happening.
    - wpasc 7y ago
      I believe the comment is referring to beliefs that certain achievements like beating humans at chess and go, tagging objects in images, etc. were all at one point another considered to be AI and impossible feats. And each time one of those previously unattainable achievements is completed, critics regard it as "Well that's not true artificial intelligence, its just dueling GAN's that got really good at go". Meaning that once a breakthrough in ML is reached, there are some that move the goal posts of what is an achievement of AI
Quarrelsome 7y ago
Can we talk about the usage of the term "AGI" here? Considering its connotations in popular culture it sounds terrifically inappropriate in terms of what we can feasibly build today. Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?
- pure-awesome 7y ago
  The purpose of OpenAI is to eventually lead to safe AGI. It's part of their core business purpose. Whatever they do with Machine Learning today is merely instrumental in leading up to that goal. We certainly cannot feasibly build AGI today, hence OpenAI's use of the term "pre-AGI technologies".
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    I can't see how pure AGI can be "safe". Huge part of human intellect revolves around the need to survive,be it danger,lack of food,or less rational choices based on emotions.If computers can rationalise positive behaviour of humans,they may not be able to do so well with greed, jealousy, hunger for power,that aren't very logical processes but create a lot of positive and negative nonetheless.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Open AI has always had AGI as their real mission as far as I know. And always been serious about it. It is a research mission. No one "feasibly" knows exactly how to build AGI yet. But still we have many groups publicly pursuing it today. If Microsoft is giving them a billion dollars in this context, I assume that Open AI engineers and scientists will build out services for Azure ML that will then be sold to developers or consumers. This type of thing is actually pretty normal for just about every company that is seriously pursuing AGI, since they eventually need some kind of income and narrow AI is the way for those types of teams to do that.
howard941 7y ago
Here's hoping Microsoft applies some of these funds to inhibiting the source-IP-veiled bitcoin sextortions facilitated by its outlook.com offering.
Eduardo3rd 7y ago
Exciting announcement for the OpenAI team. The wording in the press release reminds me of a question I haven't been able to answer for a while now. Can anyone point me to the moment in time when general purpose artificial intelligence was re-branded to artificial general intelligence? Is GAI that much worse of an acronym than AGI? What's the deal here?
tosh 7y ago
New York Times has a bit more context > Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai-micros...
- gdb 7y ago
  (I work at OpenAI.) > It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!
  - tosh 7y ago
    Thanks for the clarification gdb! excited about the announcement.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - lelima 7y ago
    >>"We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!" That's great, one question where can I use GYM or universe in the cloud with the render() option. I've spend many hours trying to set up the environment in cloud [1] without success. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run-openai-gym-render-over-a-server/48237220 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run-open...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - pastafarianist 7y ago
      Check out this example: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/yandexdataschool/Practical_RL/blob/81981aa/week01_intro/seminar_gym_interface.ipynb https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/yandexdataschool/Practic...
bhouston 7y ago
Hmmm.... it reads to me that someone has co-opted an open standard. How much of this is really an investment and how much is an in-kind contribution of Azure resources? Also this sounds dangerous: "exclusive cloud provider". When an OpenAI group starts to make exclusively partnerships with one vendor, I wonder how "Open" it is. I can not imagine Khronos Group, which runs similarly named OpenGL, etc having a "exclusive" graphics card supported for their open standards. Cloud computing is to OpenAI as graphics cards are to OpenGL/Vulkan.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  How open is the computer world anyway? Not very. At the hardware level not at all. So yes take it with a grain of salt. It’s still the product of billionaires and tech giants.
- Voloskaya 7y ago
  When was OpenAI an open standard? Comparing OpenAI to OpenGL makes zero sense.
hootan 7y ago
I'm not a genius. But, it was 2015 when Microsoft announced that, MS <3 Linux !!! And said, it's own Linux distribution is on the way. I never heard about it's release. In that time I said, MS will move towards open source, because he realized that it's a winning and correct strategy for software distribution. It didn't take long that MS aquired GitHub with 8M$. His team foundation was a failure, he tried to get a good one. But He also took control over all the source codes, and their histories. It wasn't dangerous in my opinion, before I realized that due to one-sided US sanctions, repos of some nationalities (like Iranians) got dissactivated !!! It's not the defenition of open source, as far as I know... MS is a corporation, hence, it has to obey the government. But open source belongs to no one. These kind of investment might intended to bound the potential open source communities!!! It is obvious that accepting these sort of money, without open access agreement is a horrible mistake that one can do. (We should learn from the story of GitHub) In my opinion, when it's not clear what kind of right these investments brings for enterprises, ppl should stop contributing to them. Maybe it's good idea to ask what Linus and Richard see in these movements!
- aliswe 7y ago
  Ms linux distro ... Are you talking about this: https://wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based-distrowindows-10-1809/ https://wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based-distrowindows-... Or this https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/microsoft-linux-custom-kernel-azure-sphere https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/microsoft-linux-custom-k... ?
auvi 7y ago
anybody knows what happened to Elon Musk's pledge of $1B to OpenAI?
- gdb 7y ago
  OpenAI Nonprofit’s initial funding commitment was to be consumed over many years! When we started, we didn't know just how fast things would be moving (e.g. https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/ https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/), and we've needed to scale much faster than planned when starting OpenAI.
deleted 7y ago
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dkersten 7y ago
> We think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom to pursue what they find most fulfilling, creating new opportunities for all of our lives that are unimaginable today. The cynic in me thinks this will never happen, that instead it will make a small subset of the population super rich, while the rest are put to work somewhere to make them even more money. Microsoft will ultimately want a return on their billion, at least.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  Well, the super rich getting richer is the status quo, so I kind of feel like nothing much changes if this never happens. Now, riding that happy PR wave and failing to deliver would be lame, but perhaps they really believe this. I think it will depend entirely on how much really gets open sourced in the end. I want to believe they’ll really do it.
  - stevens32 7y ago
    Open sourcing still may not level the playing field if it turns out it requires corporate (or state) level resources to operate
deleted 7y ago
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H8crilA 7y ago
Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.
- BigChiefSmokem 7y ago
  Because Microsoft has calculated a reasonable ROI to make it worth it.
  - one2know 7y ago
    Or management wants to exfiltrate $1B of shareholder dollars.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    Yeah but how's the return exactly going to come about (dividends? merger and talent takeover?), that's the question. I can see it returning itself via better ML sales on Azure.
- gdb 7y ago
  The investment is in OpenAI LP: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/!
- cma 7y ago
  I think they decided to go ahead and not be a charity in addition to not being open.
throwaway713 7y ago
Well, this is about the surest confirmation that AGI is going to happen within the next few years. Why? Because whenever HN responds with a bunch of negative sentiment, whatever was sharply criticized ends up doing really well: see the post announcing Dropbox or the post announcing Instagram’s acquisition.
crudbug 7y ago
How much of this is Azure Computing Credit ? :)
phonebucket 7y ago
great news! can OpenAI please open an office in London now :)
symmteric 7y ago
I am interested in working at OpenAI and similar companies. What skill sets is the company looking for? What areas of AI would you recommend graduate students focus in to be competitive for such positions?
RIMR 7y ago
Can we actually expect OpenAI to remain "open" with investments like this getting dumped into the project? I'm still waiting for the 1.5G GPT-2 set to get released, but they're still going with that "too dangerous for society" BS that they're using to get journalists' attention...
- anchpop 7y ago
  They need to prove it's safe for society before releasing it. If they don't believe it is then not releasing it is of course the smart thing to do. Furthermore, anyone else in the future who creates something they think might be dangerous now has a better argument, because they can point to OpenAI playing it safe and say "I'm just doing the same thing"
  - RIMR 7y ago
    I think you're making a silly mistake actually giving this "too dangerous for society" line any validity. I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human writing... The choice to keep their "too powerful model" unreleased is more an attempt to stoke sensationalism out of journalists eager to report on "The AI too dangerous to release" than it is actually an earnest attempt at protecting society. The dangerous rogue-AI is a Hollywood trope. We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about it.
    - anchpop 7y ago
      > I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human writing... When, in any OpenAI communication, have they ever implied GPT2 is world ending tech? > We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about it. Are you sure it won't be used to automatically post fake news or create artificial group cohesion by bad state actors? We can already do stuff like that, but this allows you to do it faster and cheaper. Don't you think that's at least a little scary?
block_square 7y ago
I am interested in working at OpenAI and similar companies. What background would you recommend? What skills should graduate students focus in to be competitive?
- FartyMcFarter 7y ago
  CS and/or ML and/or Neuroscience and/or Maths (including statistics).
clishem 7y ago
Embrace extend extinguish.
- tim333 7y ago
  Hopefully not humanity in this case.
robomartin 7y ago
I could be wrong on this. I think the AI/AGI problem isn’t so much about money and more about not having discovered the unique insight that will make it happen. In other words, someone in a garage might be far more likely to find how to trigger the proverbial inflection point. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t always produce solutions. It can sure accelerate a project down the path it is on...but, if the path is wrong... In some ways it reminds me of the battle against cancer. Not being critical of this project or donation, just stating a point of view on the general problem of solving AI, a subject I have been involved with to one degree or another since the early 80’s.
- codingslave 7y ago
  I dont think this is true at all. I think that NLP models, especially the state of the art ones (in the coming years), will cost a few million to train. Massive volumes of data sucked up by a model.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    That is exactly the issue that supports my perspective on this. The fact that we need millions of dollars and massive volumes of data is an indication that we might be going down the wrong path. Think about how far we are from being able to even get close to what an ant can do. Work it backwards from there.
ptah 7y ago
this is still microsoft. are they going to drop the "open" from their name?
deleted 7y ago
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adamsmith 7y ago
Congrats on the fundraise Greg and team! Does this mean that OpenAI may not disclose progress, papers with details, and/or open source code as much as in the past? In other words, what proprietary advantage will Microsoft gain when licensing new tech from OpenAI? I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense.
- gdb 7y ago
  We'll still release quite a lot, and those releases won't look any different from the past. > I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense. That's exactly how we think about it. We're interested in licensing some technologies in order to fund our AGI efforts. But even if we keep technology private for this reason, we still might be able to eventually publish it.
  - DSingularity 7y ago
    Eventually open ai?
    - oaeide 7y ago
      Maybe eventually openAI
      - apetrov 7y ago
        maybe eventually open maybe ai
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      "maybe" eventually openAI
    - ru999gol 7y ago
      does anyone serious (non-encumbered) actually believe that?
lukaa 7y ago
I'm quite suspicious about private companies helping open source.It seems to me that by relying on private companies open source is tailored to create standards that work best in platforms that are doing financing and cementing monopolies and oligopolies.In my opinion open source should have same status as science and be financed by government.
- schnable 7y ago
  I dunno, Google has made hugely important contributions to open source and the practice of software engineering in general. Would we have all that if it was purely government backed? Like Bell Labs, having an effective monopoly on a new tech product has spun off a ton of innovation for technology in general.
  - pms 7y ago
    I think there is a difference between public funding for research (it's how majority of research is funded) and public funding for open-source software (isn't happening yet, to my knowledge, so it's an interesting and potentially powerful unexplored idea).
al2o3cr 7y ago
"It looks like you're trying to build an army of robots to extinguish humanity, would you like help?"
intrasight 7y ago
I'm skeptical that AGI will exist on our planet in my lifetime. I've no doubt that it exists elsewhere in the galaxy. If an alien species does come to visit some day, I think it more likely than not that it'll be an AGI.
- Jach 7y ago
  You piqued my interest, what makes you think there's any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, anywhere else but here in the Milky Way?
  - intrasight 7y ago
    Space is big and time is long. You may have been thrown by a typo in my comment. Was "I've do doubt" but meant "I've no doubt"
    - Jach 7y ago
      That's precisely why I don't believe there is any interesting intelligent life out there, at least in our neck of the woods (the Milky Way). Mostly the time aspect. The galaxy is big, but not so big that it would take more than 200 million years to send a von-neumann probe to every star. The galaxy itself is only slightly younger than the universe, over 10 billion years. In all that time not a single intelligence has arisen and advanced just a bit beyond our level to at least start a mapping project, let alone anything like megascale structures and other projects we would expect instrumental convergence on? That only makes sense to me if we live in a mostly dead galaxy that has always been mostly dead (whether the filter is ahead or behind us makes little difference apart from judging our own prospects), or if we're so deluded about the nature of reality that we might as well say God has tricked us into thinking we're alone until we're spiritually ready or whatever.
      - sytelus 7y ago
        The problem is that evolution up to human stage requires 1B years. Let's break this 1B years in thousand 1M year blocks. Assume that probability that all life terminates at each 1M year block is 1% due to events like super volcanos, astroid hits, solar flairs, ice ages, magnetic pole reversals etc. This leaves chance of only 0.004% that life will continue to exist after 1B years on a planet that was already viable. If probability of life serviving after each 1M year block was 90% instead of 99% then completing full 1B year would be astonishingly small 10^-44%. Current estimate in milyway galaxy is 20 billion Earth-like planets. However if probability for completing full evolution cycle was so small than intelligent human-like life indeed would be extra-ordinarily rare. Another thing to think about: Any sufficiently advanced life form would eventually do long term space travel and face with the fact that life is super rare. This will lead to them seeding life with their own genetic material to other planets. This will eventually lead to millions of planets full of life in span of few million years. However this hasn't appeared to have happened indicating that we might be the one who do this.
houzertuch 7y ago
I don’t understand how there can be no comments regarding the fatal flaw of AGI which is that it will completely ruin the economics of the world. The world is the way it is now because humans are the only source of intelligent signal processing. That’s the only reason why humans enjoy the limited rights and privileges that they do. That’s the only reason why life has gotten better and better with advancing medicine and so on. This is a fundamental principle that cannot be escaped. It doesn’t matter how you slice it. But people defer everything to “ubi will work out somehow” or “nah humans will never be replaced.” Bringing god-like super-intelligent beings online is a fundamentally stupid thing to do. And preventing their development, relative to how disastrous their development would be, is very easy. I have made many predictions here on HN and they all have outlined that cloud computing would be the substrate from which AGI will spring. Now we see this announcement. There is a reason why OpenAI is making a deal like this with a very large cloud compute vendor: it’s because I’m right. And that means I’m probably also right in saying that we can stop this if we want to. You can’t just build a computer in your bad yard. And the internet is very fragile. Some simple regulation and global awareness and initiative could control what comes out of fabs and shut down the infrastructure necessary for cloud computing. It would be very easy relative to the size of the problem.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- richardwhiuk 7y ago
  Is your alternative "Don't invent general AI?"? If so that seems unbelievably naive. Things generally can't be un-invented, and it's unimaginably hard to prevent people inventing things, especially with such a large economic upside for inventing it.
  - houzertuch 7y ago
    Prove me wrong if it is so obvious. As the people at OpenAI have rightly said, AGI is a compute-gated problem. It is a problem that can only be solved with very, very large amounts of compute. The world has some total amount of computing power in terms of silicon based computation. For AGI to happen, there are two requirements: that this total be equal or greater than some theoretical threshold value for AGI and that the computing power is consolidated. So in layman’s terms, you have to have a lot of computers and they have to be connected in such a way as to efficiently share their compute. AGI will never come about if every individual computer were used to do research by separate entities but if all of those computers were connected into a single virtual computer, AGI might be discovered with them. So clearly in order to prevent AGI, the best thing to do would be to address these two aspects. Prevent the total computing power of the world from growing and prevent computers from forming virtual meta-computers. Both of these tasks are in principle extremely easy. Chip fabs are huge and expensive. Nobody is fabricating chips in their garage. This is just a hard fact. There aren’t that many fabs in the world and they are all highly susceptible to regulation. This isn’t prohibition of alcohol so please don’t confuse yourself. Nobody will be brewing chips in their cellar. Let’s imagine that you could not regulate cloud computing. Let’s say the only way to prevent computers from offering their compute on a virtual market was to shut down the internet. This by default is the hardest way to solve the second aspect of the AGI problem and even it is very easy. This is because the internet is a large fragile collection of infrastructure that depends heavily on government cooperation. Nobody is going to string a fiber backbone for black market internet. ISPs cannot exist without regulatory approval. If there were political awareness and motivation, and it was a global phenomenon, yes, it would be extremely easy to do what I’ve described. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally all people, it is not a far fetched scenario. And unlike alcohol in the United States, bootlegging would not be a problem. People in the USA think that banning anything whatsoever doesn’t work. It’s just fuzzy thinking, I can assure you.
georgewsinger 7y ago
Does anyone have any thoughts on Vicarious, the non-deep-learning competitor to OpenAI?
- atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  I'm also curious about this, haven't heard anything about them in a while
nutanc 7y ago
How much of the $1B is in Azure credits?
pinouchon 7y ago
What do they mean by: "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider"? Being forced to use Azure for all your ML workloads seems a stupid constraint. For example, you might be comfortable with tensorflow/TPU and changing frameworks/tooling might be costly.
- chirau 7y ago
  Azure has full support for Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch and the rest of the popular stuff. Shouldn't be a problem at all
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
benl 7y ago
If you strip out the AGI hype then this just sounds like OpenAI is now moving to monetizing their tech. This makes sense for them but probably not for the philanthropists who originally backed them. Sadly for them, AGI is metaphysically impossible - this will be realized eventually but a lot of waste and possibly harm will happen first. We are not just super sophisticated machines, so the fact that we can think doesn’t tell us anything about what’s possible for machines. But philosophy does - and it tells us you can’t get mind from matter, no matter what configuration you put it in.
- mitchellgoffpc 7y ago
  I would ask for evidence to support your claim, but I think Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword probably applies in this case.
  - benl 7y ago
    Yes, I used to hold that view too. But actually it turns out that the null hypothesis is that mind is at least partly immaterial, because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. I’ve found that the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, when explained by modern philosophers, best explains to me why that’s the case.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      > ... because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. Can you give at least a rough sketch or gist of the argument you are referring to?
      - benl 7y ago
        I’ll try because you asked me to, but i think I’ll do a bad job. You’ll get a much better understanding by reading on the topics of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Here goes, though: 1. Purely immaterial things exist. Think of mathematics or the laws of logic or physics - these things exist as ideas or concepts, not arrangements of matter. 2. Some abstract concepts cannot be embodied in matter at all. For example, you can make a shoe, you can draw a shoe, but you can’t draw shoe-ness. You can understand and reason about what makes something a shoe in the abstract, but you can only make or draw an individual shoe. 3) the mind contains these purely immaterial things when we think about and reason about them. 4) If we can use the abstract concepts, but the abstract concepts can’t be embodied in matter, then the mind must be at least partly immaterial in order for the concepts to be in our mind. I hope that helps a but please don’t rely on my exposition of the case - a real philosopher would do it justice.
thrax 7y ago
Revenge of Microsoft Bob!
appstorelottery 7y ago
I'm surprised to see the amount of downvotes that follow negativity pointed at Microsoft. What's going on here? EDIT: Oh. I see. I wasn't aware that OpenAI was a YC thing. I've been a member of Hacker News through various accounts for countless years, however this is the first time I've seen moderation pushing towards an obvious YC agenda. Very interesting... EDIT2: Actually, after reading the comments - I find it more likely that Microsoft/OpenAI stakeholders are participating heavily. Over 800 upvotes for this post makes it quite remarkable... I'll leave my tinfoil hat over there...
- dang 7y ago
  I can't really tell what you're saying, but if you're insinuating foul play, I haven't seen evidence of that in this thread. In any case, the site guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with concerns instead of posting comments about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - appstorelottery 7y ago
    My apologies - you are correct. >Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data.
adammenges 7y ago
This is excellent, happy for both sides
JabavuAdams 7y ago
I think I can develop GAI for less, in a shorter time-frame. Doubt anyone believes me enough to give me $$$.
- nradov 7y ago
  Self fund your project and build a prototype. If you can demonstrate even some limited progress the investor community will drown you in funding.
  - JabavuAdams 7y ago
    Once it becomes clear to non specialists that AGI is possible, and possibly imminent, that greatly changes the equation, though. This isn't a technology like any other. Why wouldn't governments and other groups just seize the prototype? You'd have a hot-potato on your hands and figuring out how to survive might be your biggest concern. Like imagine you suddenly came into possession of a trillion dollars in bearer bonds. If that leaks out, people will come after you, not just by legal means. All of this skews the calculus towards immediate public disclosure, rather than trying to gain advantage by delaying release. EDIT> Or going first, and attempting to neutralize all possible competitors. This is a terrible calculus.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - nradov 7y ago
      We're discussing reality here, not paranoid fantasies and conspiracy theories.
carapace 7y ago
Given their stated mission: > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. I'm struck by the homogeneity the OpenAI team. https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team-offsite-2019.jpg https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team-offsit... It seems to be mostly white people and a few Asians, without a single black or Hispanic person.
- distdev89 7y ago
  How does that matter? Does diversity for the cause of diversity lead to better results? Is there any data around this? Hiring the most qualified people is the most important thing. As long as there isn't an inherent bias for not hiring someone who is hispanic, black, or brown, it should b e fine.
  - warent 7y ago
    What you're posing is an age-old counterargument based around an irrational fear of white people experiencing prejudice and losing out on opportunities to underqualified people they would have otherwise had. There have been studies done around diversity, conducted both privately and publicly, which consistently conclude that increased diversity does result in enhanced decision-making, collaboration, and organizational value-add due to the different perspectives having a net positive influence rather than neutral or negative. Beyond pragmatism, from an idealist perspective aiding in increasing organizational diversity is the morally right thing to do. That doesn't mean hiring underqualified people; it means refusing to fill the position until the right person is found, which is a whole other problem on its own. Here are some resources to get started: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-performance https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p... https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556374 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556374
    - hanselot 7y ago
      Can you tell me how much diversity juice I need to add to my team to make it perfect? Do I need to hire 1 black person for every white person? Please, provide me the ratio required to avoid marginal returns. I would need to undergo DNA testing for each person to avoid hiring anyone that is too much of one race. Do I get better returns if I hire someone that has 25% of 4 different races? Please elaborate on your very empirically verifiable and obviously logically cohesive argument. If you don't understand where my skepticism originates from, please turn your attention to the results of Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa (where racial quotas are enforced to ensure the blackest candidate is hired, not the best candidate). Look at the performance of the South African sports teams that have been forced to recruit players not based on merit, but on the colour of their skin.
danielcampos93 7y ago
Any plan for a Seattle/Redmond office?
quocble 7y ago
Everyone: AI will one day destroy the human race. Microsoft: Let's invest $1 Billion in it.
terrycody 7y ago
Musk + Gates world is end, welcome to the apocalypse
ipsum2 7y ago
I feel pretty bad for people working in ML/AI at Microsoft Research right now. Microsoft is sending a clear signal that they would pay $1B in outside AI research than spend the same amount internally.
kirillzubovsky 7y ago
Azure has a supercomputer emulator, and even if OpenAI doesn't get a full $1B in cash but gets to use it as credits on the emulator, that could be huge.
doctorstupid 7y ago
What's this "Pre-AGI" arrogance? Why are they so certain that it "will scale to AGI"? Is it an attempt at branding, or have they forgotten that AI is a global effort? And do people really want to be "actualized" by "Microsoft and OpenAI’s shared value of empowering everyone"?
uvictor 7y ago
Azure is the worst...open AI better take that in cash....
mikedh 7y ago
Here's to hoping some of that goes to acquiring and open sourcing Mujoco, or to switching OpenAI Gym's default physics to something open source.
laxatives 7y ago
> As the waitress approached the table, Sam Altman held up his phone. That made it easier to see the dollar amount typed into an investment contract he had spent the last 30 days negotiating with Microsoft. > “$1,000,000,000,” it read. Wow, Sam Altman sounds like an asshole.
programmer2090 7y ago
Does this news mean that if I learn to develop applications in the languages of Dot Net and benefit from the possibilities of Azuro, this will also benefit me in AI in the future better than learning to grow applications in Python
programmer2090 7y ago
I do not know yet the best to learn Azure or Google Cloud

1119 points by gdb 7y ago

streetcat1 7y ago

So is this the open-ai exit?

gdb 7y ago
(I work at OpenAI.) Quite the opposite — this is an investment!
- AbrahamParangi 7y ago
  Congrats to the team, excited to see what you guys do with the momentum
- streetcat1 7y ago
  So you are now part of azure, no?. Like - azure-open-ai?
  - minxomat 7y ago
    Do you know what "investment" means?
    - streetcat1 7y ago
      Yes. You get money and give control.
      - minxomat 7y ago
        Which is extremely well defined for OpenAI. One board seat, charter comes first. That's a legal agreement, not much open for interpretation.
        streetcat1 7y ago
        Not quite true, azure is now the only channel by which open ai innovation can be commercialise. This is the key control point. For example, if there is an hardware innovation which make DNN training 1000x faster (e.g. optical DNN), but it does not exist on azure, than by definition it cannot be offered on another cloud. To sum up, this deal assure the choking point of azure/MS on any innovation that would come up from open ai.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity. As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI to the list so that nothing means anything any more?
  - Miraste 7y ago
    OpenAI is a for-profit corporation now. It's in their interest to use as many buzzwords as possible to attract that sweet venture capital, regardless of whether said buzzwords have any base in reality.
  - andreilys 7y ago
    At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There is a non-zero chance that we are a few breakthroughs away from creating a technology that far surpasses the nuclear bomb in terms of destructive potential. These breakthroughs may have a short window of time between each of them (once we know a, knowing b,c,d will be much easier) So given all of that, wouldn't it make sense to start working on these problems now? And the unfortunate part of working on these problems now is that you do need hype/buzzwords to attract tallent, raise money and get people talking about AGI safety. Sure it might not lead anywhere, but just like fire insurance might seem unnecessary if you never have a fire, AGI research may end up being a useless field altogether but at least it gives us that cushion of safety.
    - kuzehanka 7y ago
      Discussing the risks of AGI is always worthwhile and has been undertaken for several decades now. That's a bit different from the marketing fluff on the linked page: "We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI" Azure needs a few more years just to un-shit the bed with what their marketing team has done and catch up to even basic AWS/GCP analytics offerings. Them talking about AGI is like a toddler talking about building a nuclear weapon. This is the same marketing team that destroyed any meaning behind terms like 'real time', and 'AI'.
- pmontra 7y ago
  $1B is not like investing $100 in a crowdfunded project, "nice toy and let's hope for the best." I expect that Microsoft is going to look very closely at what OpenAI does and possibly steer it into a direction they like. Unless you have a few other $1B investors. We'll see how it plays out.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >(I work at OpenAI.) Humble understatement. *co-founded and co-run.
- OrgNet 7y ago
  is all your code public?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mtgx 7y ago

I imagine this comes with a ton of strings attached, written or unwritten. This probably gives Microsoft control of the project's roadmap.

gdb 7y ago
The OpenAI board remains in charge of OpenAI’s AGI-relevant decisions. Microsoft has the right to appoint one board seat, which they have not yet exercised.
- est31 7y ago
  I've written up my opinion on the deal that OpenAI gives to investors here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_openai_lp/eig4fj2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_o... TLDR either the public is being conned or Microsoft is. And assuming that Microsoft probably has used top lawyers to close the deal, I doubt it's them.
  - vasilipupkin 7y ago
    sorry, your opinion appears to be nonsensical. a cap of 100x on returns and limited voting power certainly changes the price investors are willing to pay for the shares, but doesn't invalidate anything or render shares worthless or anything of the sort.
    - est31 7y ago
      The difference between shares and a loan is that shares have a) no cap on the returns b) give you control over the company c) limited ability to sue if the company acts against shareholder interests d) no due date Differences a, b and c seem to be gone here. Would you give someone a loan where you have no ability to sue them if they never give you the money back? I wouldn't unless that person is very important to me or the money is insignificant. Neither is the case here.
  - dd36 7y ago
    Lawyers practice law not investment. Lawyers are involved in every bad and good deal.

chc4 7y ago

Well, gotta wonder how well their charter[1] will fare against Microsoft pressure...Microsoft isn't exactly well-known for their benevolence and cautious approach. 1: https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

albybisy 7y ago

OpenAI => CloseAI

tiborsaas 7y ago
So a highly sophisticated sales bot is the end goal :)

appstorelottery 7y ago

Embrace... extend.... and.... :-)

lewisj489 7y ago
Downvote
- appstorelottery 7y ago
  My post got sent to the Minstry of Love. :-)

Pandabob 7y ago

Excellent way to reallocate some of that record breaking revenue they just announced.

codelemur 7y ago

Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive. Congrats to the team, and break a leg!

gdb 7y ago
Thank you!
- applecrazy 7y ago
  The research that OpenAI’s doing is groundbreaking and the results are often beyond state-of-the-art. I aim to work in one of your research teams sometime!
  - chrshawkes 7y ago
    Watch the Kool-Aid intake and you'll be just fine. Dreams are great and an absolute necessity for success but create your own. Don't buy into everything you hear, especially Elon Musk talking about Artificial General Intelligence.
    - applecrazy 7y ago
      Oh, I'm well aware of the hype around AGI. My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Nevertheless, I would like to work on more pragmatic goals, like improving the current state-of-the-art language models and text generation networks. I'm actually starting by reimplementing Seq2Seq as described by Quoc Le et al.[1] for text summarization[2] (this code is extremely messy but it'll get better soon). It's been interesting to learn about word embeddings, RNNs and LSTMs, and data processing within the field of Natural Language Processing. Any tips on how to get up to speed within this field would be helpful, as I'm trying to get into research labs doing similar work at my university. [1]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learn... [2]: https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/ https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/

logicchains 7y ago

Hopefully this is good news for Bing.

arethuza 7y ago
Well, hopefully if someone creates a benevolent AGI then it should be good news for everyone.
- codelemur 7y ago
  [EDIT]: friendly -> non-friendly oops. That's what seems so confusing about HN replies here. (Non-friendly) AGI is an extreme existential risk (depending on who you listen to). I'm perfectly fine with rewarding the org that's responsible for researching friendly AGI to do it _right_ (extremely contingent on that last bit).
  - modzu 7y ago
    the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires some money so at one level it is a money problem.
      - modzu 7y ago
        but this is alchemy isn't it? there isn't even a theoretical framework from which we can even begin to suggest how to keep any "general intelligence" benign. good old fashioned research notwithstanding, a billion dollars is not about to change this. it reads to more to me like this is an investment in azure (ie microsoft picking up some machine learning expertise to leverage in its future cloud services). that's not a judgement, and i'm sure lots of cool work will still come from this, given the strength of the team and massive backing they have. it just smells funny.

feral 7y ago

I want to take everything OpenAI says at face value (seem like good folk), but I can't help but wonder at the recent choice to keep GPT2 closed, on what seemed like pretty thin safety arguments to me. Now, the demonstrated ability to produce new models which are closed, but maybe can be used as services on a preferred partner's cloud, looks very commercially relevant? How will these conflicts be managed, or is it more like "we are just a commercial entity now, of course we'll do this"?

pms 7y ago
An earlier comment mentions that they are for-profit now (changed from non-profit a while ago).
Veedrac 7y ago
https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
chibg10 7y ago
Their handling of OpenAIFive rubbed me the wrong way as well. The whole operation smelled very PR-ish to me personally -- unnecessarily/unjustifiably HYPE representatives, complaining that the Dota community wanted to see OpenAIFive play a normal Dota match against pros rather a heavily constrained environment to benefit the bots, among other things.
- rishav_sharan 7y ago
  Same. They left the OpenAI project half baked and thats very disappointing.

Tenoke 7y ago

Congrats! So what's OpenAI's current valuation?

ryanmercer 7y ago

OpenAi to for-profit OpenAI to billion dollar partnership with Microsoft doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feelings I had when I first heard of OpenAI. I saw it as "we're going to save the world by building an AGI before someone builds SkyNet" today it is "We've got in bed with a company that had one of the most famous anti-trust cases in the United States and one of the most famous anti-competition cases in the EU". And of course going after high school student Mike Rowe for registering MikeRoweSoft.com (Seriously Microsoft, exactly no one thought he was you). While Microsoft isn't inherently evil, I mean one could argue that via Windows Microsoft is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of computers, it definitely makes me feel slightly uneasy. I'd rather see OpenAI continue to be funded by donation, and eventually royalties/licensing of technologies it develops, not partnerships with companies like 'IBM 2: Electric Boogaloo'. But what do I know, I'm a Morlock not an Eloi.

SahAssar 7y ago
The whole MikeRoweSoft thing was 15 years ago. I don't think it's fair to judge the company now based on that.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  If it was the only instance, I'd say sure, but: - Lindows - Microwindows - wxWindows - Windows Commander - Suing Amish Shah - MikeRoweSoft Then all of the various anti-trust/anti-competition lawsuits against them by both companies and government entities (Be Inc, Nescape, the EU, Spain, the US Government, Caldera, Opera Software. Also individuals in numerous class actions). Plenty of reason to feel slightly concerned.
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    Are any of those recent? I agree that microsoft has been pretty dickish and I'm sure parts of it continue to be (see http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts as an example for why), but as a whole I feel that they are better with OSS now than they have every been.

neiman 7y ago

$1B dollar is a lot of money. Microsoft is not a charity foundation, so the suspicious is obvious. > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems. Maybe it's because I'm not an expert, but what does it really mean? Do people understand what "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider" means? OpenAI is great, but suspicious is understandable from the users side when so much commercial money is involved.

strikelaserclaw 7y ago
Maybe they will use that 1 Billion on Azure fees lol.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  That's like a month of CosmosDB storing a DVD worth of records!
  - Quarrelsome 7y ago
    Cosmos is throughput not size. So it would be a month of having the capacity to I/O a DVD worth of records.
    - kuzehanka 7y ago
      It's both. And storage cost is amplified by number of regions replicated to.
  - aliswe 7y ago
    I actually made up a pun today, CostMostDB. Hehe... But seriously, it's not that expensive. A client is using it quite heavily and they don't reach any particarly high level of spend at all for a corporation, but ymmv.
- 7y ago

Myja 7y ago

<sponsored content> This shows that Microsoft has reformed and is not the same company as under Ballmer. Nadella has understood the importance of open source. Interesting times ahead. <sponsored content/>

option_greek 7y ago

Genuine question: In what sense is OpenAI open ?

ilaksh 7y ago
Its just like the bag of sugar I have in my cabinet that claims to be low calorie. It says "ONLY 16 CALORIES (per 4 grams in tiny letters)". I mean, sugar is pretty much the definition of a high calorie food. Its like, pure calories. And can affect insulin regulation, etc. That's why they need to put some marketing on it.
- dkersten 7y ago
  Off topic, I know, however, this reminded me of TV adverts we used to have in my country when I was young where they were saying how great sugar is because it has 0% fat... If only the butter companies responded with adverts about how they're 0% sugar, that would have been fun. :/
  - rapind 7y ago
    Low carb / no carb is gaining in popularity (and some products label it). Sugar is finally becoming the bad guy despite enormous lobbying efforts over a very long time (since the 60s?).
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Super nitpicky: sugar is 4 kcal/gram, but so is protein, and fats is 9 kcal/g, over double the caloric content. By saying sugar is "pure calories," I guess you mean that it doesn't contain any fibre or micronutrients that might give it redeeming qualities (besides its taste), which is true.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    Most people are not putting spoonfuls of beef in their coffee. Sugar is, quite literally, pure carbohydrates. Most sources of protein are not, unless you're consuming refined amino acids (pro tip: they taste awful).

pron 7y ago

Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien working on a problem would be able to see connections across disciplines that no human could. But even though I'm known as the warp-drive-guy, I don't actually know how to build a warp drive, so in the meantime I am building increasingly powerful transportation technology in the hope this would lead to a warp drive one day soon, and have decided to focus on bicycles. They're really good bikes, though, and unlike others who make bicycles, I like to consider those I build to merely be pre-warp, a necessary step towards warp technology. So when you buy my bikes [1], you are literally helping me change the trajectory of human history and meet aliens (did I mention Curie, Turing and Bach?) This is truly a fine specimen of Silicon Valley prose. It's got something for everyone: human history, a wild-eyed dream of a bright future, a connection to the arts, name-dropping, the trajectory of humanity, and, of course, lots of money in cloud services (integrated platform). They even showed some restraint in stopping short of ending all war and curing all disease. "Making the world a better place" is really too mundane. [1]: The Warp Drive Corporation®'s Pre-Warp Bike™️ is now on sale on Amazon.

ppod 7y ago
Your analogy would be accurate if people had spent the last century claiming that artificial transport was impossible, and then continually redefining what counted as transport until the concept was incoherent.
- kyruzic 7y ago
  Are you claiming that people claimed AI was impossible and openAi (or any other "AI") has proven those people wrong. If so please provide some evidence of this happening.
  - wpasc 7y ago
    I believe the comment is referring to beliefs that certain achievements like beating humans at chess and go, tagging objects in images, etc. were all at one point another considered to be AI and impossible feats. And each time one of those previously unattainable achievements is completed, critics regard it as "Well that's not true artificial intelligence, its just dueling GAN's that got really good at go". Meaning that once a breakthrough in ML is reached, there are some that move the goal posts of what is an achievement of AI

Quarrelsome 7y ago

Can we talk about the usage of the term "AGI" here? Considering its connotations in popular culture it sounds terrifically inappropriate in terms of what we can feasibly build today. Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?

pure-awesome 7y ago
The purpose of OpenAI is to eventually lead to safe AGI. It's part of their core business purpose. Whatever they do with Machine Learning today is merely instrumental in leading up to that goal. We certainly cannot feasibly build AGI today, hence OpenAI's use of the term "pre-AGI technologies".
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  I can't see how pure AGI can be "safe". Huge part of human intellect revolves around the need to survive,be it danger,lack of food,or less rational choices based on emotions.If computers can rationalise positive behaviour of humans,they may not be able to do so well with greed, jealousy, hunger for power,that aren't very logical processes but create a lot of positive and negative nonetheless.
ilaksh 7y ago
Open AI has always had AGI as their real mission as far as I know. And always been serious about it. It is a research mission. No one "feasibly" knows exactly how to build AGI yet. But still we have many groups publicly pursuing it today. If Microsoft is giving them a billion dollars in this context, I assume that Open AI engineers and scientists will build out services for Azure ML that will then be sold to developers or consumers. This type of thing is actually pretty normal for just about every company that is seriously pursuing AGI, since they eventually need some kind of income and narrow AI is the way for those types of teams to do that.

howard941 7y ago

Here's hoping Microsoft applies some of these funds to inhibiting the source-IP-veiled bitcoin sextortions facilitated by its outlook.com offering.

Eduardo3rd 7y ago

Exciting announcement for the OpenAI team. The wording in the press release reminds me of a question I haven't been able to answer for a while now. Can anyone point me to the moment in time when general purpose artificial intelligence was re-branded to artificial general intelligence? Is GAI that much worse of an acronym than AGI? What's the deal here?

tosh 7y ago

New York Times has a bit more context > Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai-micros...

gdb 7y ago
(I work at OpenAI.) > It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!
- tosh 7y ago
  Thanks for the clarification gdb! excited about the announcement.
- deleted 7y ago
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- lelima 7y ago
  >>"We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!" That's great, one question where can I use GYM or universe in the cloud with the render() option. I've spend many hours trying to set up the environment in cloud [1] without success. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run-openai-gym-render-over-a-server/48237220 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run-open...
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - pastafarianist 7y ago
    Check out this example: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/yandexdataschool/Practical_RL/blob/81981aa/week01_intro/seminar_gym_interface.ipynb https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/yandexdataschool/Practic...

bhouston 7y ago

Hmmm.... it reads to me that someone has co-opted an open standard. How much of this is really an investment and how much is an in-kind contribution of Azure resources? Also this sounds dangerous: "exclusive cloud provider". When an OpenAI group starts to make exclusively partnerships with one vendor, I wonder how "Open" it is. I can not imagine Khronos Group, which runs similarly named OpenGL, etc having a "exclusive" graphics card supported for their open standards. Cloud computing is to OpenAI as graphics cards are to OpenGL/Vulkan.

Synaesthesia 7y ago
How open is the computer world anyway? Not very. At the hardware level not at all. So yes take it with a grain of salt. It’s still the product of billionaires and tech giants.
Voloskaya 7y ago
When was OpenAI an open standard? Comparing OpenAI to OpenGL makes zero sense.

hootan 7y ago

I'm not a genius. But, it was 2015 when Microsoft announced that, MS <3 Linux !!! And said, it's own Linux distribution is on the way. I never heard about it's release. In that time I said, MS will move towards open source, because he realized that it's a winning and correct strategy for software distribution. It didn't take long that MS aquired GitHub with 8M$. His team foundation was a failure, he tried to get a good one. But He also took control over all the source codes, and their histories. It wasn't dangerous in my opinion, before I realized that due to one-sided US sanctions, repos of some nationalities (like Iranians) got dissactivated !!! It's not the defenition of open source, as far as I know... MS is a corporation, hence, it has to obey the government. But open source belongs to no one. These kind of investment might intended to bound the potential open source communities!!! It is obvious that accepting these sort of money, without open access agreement is a horrible mistake that one can do. (We should learn from the story of GitHub) In my opinion, when it's not clear what kind of right these investments brings for enterprises, ppl should stop contributing to them. Maybe it's good idea to ask what Linus and Richard see in these movements!

aliswe 7y ago
Ms linux distro ... Are you talking about this: https://wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based-distrowindows-10-1809/ https://wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based-distrowindows-... Or this https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/microsoft-linux-custom-kernel-azure-sphere https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/microsoft-linux-custom-k... ?

auvi 7y ago

anybody knows what happened to Elon Musk's pledge of $1B to OpenAI?

gdb 7y ago
OpenAI Nonprofit’s initial funding commitment was to be consumed over many years! When we started, we didn't know just how fast things would be moving (e.g. https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/ https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/), and we've needed to scale much faster than planned when starting OpenAI.

deleted 7y ago

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dkersten 7y ago

> We think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom to pursue what they find most fulfilling, creating new opportunities for all of our lives that are unimaginable today. The cynic in me thinks this will never happen, that instead it will make a small subset of the population super rich, while the rest are put to work somewhere to make them even more money. Microsoft will ultimately want a return on their billion, at least.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
Well, the super rich getting richer is the status quo, so I kind of feel like nothing much changes if this never happens. Now, riding that happy PR wave and failing to deliver would be lame, but perhaps they really believe this. I think it will depend entirely on how much really gets open sourced in the end. I want to believe they’ll really do it.
- stevens32 7y ago
  Open sourcing still may not level the playing field if it turns out it requires corporate (or state) level resources to operate

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H8crilA 7y ago

Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

BigChiefSmokem 7y ago
Because Microsoft has calculated a reasonable ROI to make it worth it.
- one2know 7y ago
  Or management wants to exfiltrate $1B of shareholder dollars.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Yeah but how's the return exactly going to come about (dividends? merger and talent takeover?), that's the question. I can see it returning itself via better ML sales on Azure.
gdb 7y ago
The investment is in OpenAI LP: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/!
cma 7y ago
I think they decided to go ahead and not be a charity in addition to not being open.

throwaway713 7y ago

Well, this is about the surest confirmation that AGI is going to happen within the next few years. Why? Because whenever HN responds with a bunch of negative sentiment, whatever was sharply criticized ends up doing really well: see the post announcing Dropbox or the post announcing Instagram’s acquisition.

crudbug 7y ago

How much of this is Azure Computing Credit ? :)

phonebucket 7y ago

great news! can OpenAI please open an office in London now :)

symmteric 7y ago

I am interested in working at OpenAI and similar companies. What skill sets is the company looking for? What areas of AI would you recommend graduate students focus in to be competitive for such positions?

RIMR 7y ago

Can we actually expect OpenAI to remain "open" with investments like this getting dumped into the project? I'm still waiting for the 1.5G GPT-2 set to get released, but they're still going with that "too dangerous for society" BS that they're using to get journalists' attention...

anchpop 7y ago
They need to prove it's safe for society before releasing it. If they don't believe it is then not releasing it is of course the smart thing to do. Furthermore, anyone else in the future who creates something they think might be dangerous now has a better argument, because they can point to OpenAI playing it safe and say "I'm just doing the same thing"
- RIMR 7y ago
  I think you're making a silly mistake actually giving this "too dangerous for society" line any validity. I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human writing... The choice to keep their "too powerful model" unreleased is more an attempt to stoke sensationalism out of journalists eager to report on "The AI too dangerous to release" than it is actually an earnest attempt at protecting society. The dangerous rogue-AI is a Hollywood trope. We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about it.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    > I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human writing... When, in any OpenAI communication, have they ever implied GPT2 is world ending tech? > We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about it. Are you sure it won't be used to automatically post fake news or create artificial group cohesion by bad state actors? We can already do stuff like that, but this allows you to do it faster and cheaper. Don't you think that's at least a little scary?

block_square 7y ago

I am interested in working at OpenAI and similar companies. What background would you recommend? What skills should graduate students focus in to be competitive?

FartyMcFarter 7y ago
CS and/or ML and/or Neuroscience and/or Maths (including statistics).

clishem 7y ago

Embrace extend extinguish.

tim333 7y ago
Hopefully not humanity in this case.

robomartin 7y ago

I could be wrong on this. I think the AI/AGI problem isn’t so much about money and more about not having discovered the unique insight that will make it happen. In other words, someone in a garage might be far more likely to find how to trigger the proverbial inflection point. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t always produce solutions. It can sure accelerate a project down the path it is on...but, if the path is wrong... In some ways it reminds me of the battle against cancer. Not being critical of this project or donation, just stating a point of view on the general problem of solving AI, a subject I have been involved with to one degree or another since the early 80’s.

codingslave 7y ago
I dont think this is true at all. I think that NLP models, especially the state of the art ones (in the coming years), will cost a few million to train. Massive volumes of data sucked up by a model.
- robomartin 7y ago
  That is exactly the issue that supports my perspective on this. The fact that we need millions of dollars and massive volumes of data is an indication that we might be going down the wrong path. Think about how far we are from being able to even get close to what an ant can do. Work it backwards from there.

ptah 7y ago

this is still microsoft. are they going to drop the "open" from their name?

deleted 7y ago

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adamsmith 7y ago

Congrats on the fundraise Greg and team! Does this mean that OpenAI may not disclose progress, papers with details, and/or open source code as much as in the past? In other words, what proprietary advantage will Microsoft gain when licensing new tech from OpenAI? I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense.

gdb 7y ago
We'll still release quite a lot, and those releases won't look any different from the past. > I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense. That's exactly how we think about it. We're interested in licensing some technologies in order to fund our AGI efforts. But even if we keep technology private for this reason, we still might be able to eventually publish it.
- DSingularity 7y ago
  Eventually open ai?
  - oaeide 7y ago
    Maybe eventually openAI
    - apetrov 7y ago
      maybe eventually open maybe ai
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    "maybe" eventually openAI
  - ru999gol 7y ago
    does anyone serious (non-encumbered) actually believe that?

lukaa 7y ago

I'm quite suspicious about private companies helping open source.It seems to me that by relying on private companies open source is tailored to create standards that work best in platforms that are doing financing and cementing monopolies and oligopolies.In my opinion open source should have same status as science and be financed by government.

schnable 7y ago
I dunno, Google has made hugely important contributions to open source and the practice of software engineering in general. Would we have all that if it was purely government backed? Like Bell Labs, having an effective monopoly on a new tech product has spun off a ton of innovation for technology in general.
- pms 7y ago
  I think there is a difference between public funding for research (it's how majority of research is funded) and public funding for open-source software (isn't happening yet, to my knowledge, so it's an interesting and potentially powerful unexplored idea).

al2o3cr 7y ago

"It looks like you're trying to build an army of robots to extinguish humanity, would you like help?"

intrasight 7y ago

I'm skeptical that AGI will exist on our planet in my lifetime. I've no doubt that it exists elsewhere in the galaxy. If an alien species does come to visit some day, I think it more likely than not that it'll be an AGI.

Jach 7y ago
You piqued my interest, what makes you think there's any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, anywhere else but here in the Milky Way?
- intrasight 7y ago
  Space is big and time is long. You may have been thrown by a typo in my comment. Was "I've do doubt" but meant "I've no doubt"
  - Jach 7y ago
    That's precisely why I don't believe there is any interesting intelligent life out there, at least in our neck of the woods (the Milky Way). Mostly the time aspect. The galaxy is big, but not so big that it would take more than 200 million years to send a von-neumann probe to every star. The galaxy itself is only slightly younger than the universe, over 10 billion years. In all that time not a single intelligence has arisen and advanced just a bit beyond our level to at least start a mapping project, let alone anything like megascale structures and other projects we would expect instrumental convergence on? That only makes sense to me if we live in a mostly dead galaxy that has always been mostly dead (whether the filter is ahead or behind us makes little difference apart from judging our own prospects), or if we're so deluded about the nature of reality that we might as well say God has tricked us into thinking we're alone until we're spiritually ready or whatever.
    - sytelus 7y ago
      The problem is that evolution up to human stage requires 1B years. Let's break this 1B years in thousand 1M year blocks. Assume that probability that all life terminates at each 1M year block is 1% due to events like super volcanos, astroid hits, solar flairs, ice ages, magnetic pole reversals etc. This leaves chance of only 0.004% that life will continue to exist after 1B years on a planet that was already viable. If probability of life serviving after each 1M year block was 90% instead of 99% then completing full 1B year would be astonishingly small 10^-44%. Current estimate in milyway galaxy is 20 billion Earth-like planets. However if probability for completing full evolution cycle was so small than intelligent human-like life indeed would be extra-ordinarily rare. Another thing to think about: Any sufficiently advanced life form would eventually do long term space travel and face with the fact that life is super rare. This will lead to them seeding life with their own genetic material to other planets. This will eventually lead to millions of planets full of life in span of few million years. However this hasn't appeared to have happened indicating that we might be the one who do this.

houzertuch 7y ago

I don’t understand how there can be no comments regarding the fatal flaw of AGI which is that it will completely ruin the economics of the world. The world is the way it is now because humans are the only source of intelligent signal processing. That’s the only reason why humans enjoy the limited rights and privileges that they do. That’s the only reason why life has gotten better and better with advancing medicine and so on. This is a fundamental principle that cannot be escaped. It doesn’t matter how you slice it. But people defer everything to “ubi will work out somehow” or “nah humans will never be replaced.” Bringing god-like super-intelligent beings online is a fundamentally stupid thing to do. And preventing their development, relative to how disastrous their development would be, is very easy. I have made many predictions here on HN and they all have outlined that cloud computing would be the substrate from which AGI will spring. Now we see this announcement. There is a reason why OpenAI is making a deal like this with a very large cloud compute vendor: it’s because I’m right. And that means I’m probably also right in saying that we can stop this if we want to. You can’t just build a computer in your bad yard. And the internet is very fragile. Some simple regulation and global awareness and initiative could control what comes out of fabs and shut down the infrastructure necessary for cloud computing. It would be very easy relative to the size of the problem.

deleted 7y ago
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richardwhiuk 7y ago
Is your alternative "Don't invent general AI?"? If so that seems unbelievably naive. Things generally can't be un-invented, and it's unimaginably hard to prevent people inventing things, especially with such a large economic upside for inventing it.
- houzertuch 7y ago
  Prove me wrong if it is so obvious. As the people at OpenAI have rightly said, AGI is a compute-gated problem. It is a problem that can only be solved with very, very large amounts of compute. The world has some total amount of computing power in terms of silicon based computation. For AGI to happen, there are two requirements: that this total be equal or greater than some theoretical threshold value for AGI and that the computing power is consolidated. So in layman’s terms, you have to have a lot of computers and they have to be connected in such a way as to efficiently share their compute. AGI will never come about if every individual computer were used to do research by separate entities but if all of those computers were connected into a single virtual computer, AGI might be discovered with them. So clearly in order to prevent AGI, the best thing to do would be to address these two aspects. Prevent the total computing power of the world from growing and prevent computers from forming virtual meta-computers. Both of these tasks are in principle extremely easy. Chip fabs are huge and expensive. Nobody is fabricating chips in their garage. This is just a hard fact. There aren’t that many fabs in the world and they are all highly susceptible to regulation. This isn’t prohibition of alcohol so please don’t confuse yourself. Nobody will be brewing chips in their cellar. Let’s imagine that you could not regulate cloud computing. Let’s say the only way to prevent computers from offering their compute on a virtual market was to shut down the internet. This by default is the hardest way to solve the second aspect of the AGI problem and even it is very easy. This is because the internet is a large fragile collection of infrastructure that depends heavily on government cooperation. Nobody is going to string a fiber backbone for black market internet. ISPs cannot exist without regulatory approval. If there were political awareness and motivation, and it was a global phenomenon, yes, it would be extremely easy to do what I’ve described. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally all people, it is not a far fetched scenario. And unlike alcohol in the United States, bootlegging would not be a problem. People in the USA think that banning anything whatsoever doesn’t work. It’s just fuzzy thinking, I can assure you.

georgewsinger 7y ago

Does anyone have any thoughts on Vicarious, the non-deep-learning competitor to OpenAI?

atlasunshrugged 7y ago
I'm also curious about this, haven't heard anything about them in a while

nutanc 7y ago

How much of the $1B is in Azure credits?

pinouchon 7y ago

What do they mean by: "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider"? Being forced to use Azure for all your ML workloads seems a stupid constraint. For example, you might be comfortable with tensorflow/TPU and changing frameworks/tooling might be costly.

chirau 7y ago
Azure has full support for Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch and the rest of the popular stuff. Shouldn't be a problem at all
- deleted 7y ago
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benl 7y ago

If you strip out the AGI hype then this just sounds like OpenAI is now moving to monetizing their tech. This makes sense for them but probably not for the philanthropists who originally backed them. Sadly for them, AGI is metaphysically impossible - this will be realized eventually but a lot of waste and possibly harm will happen first. We are not just super sophisticated machines, so the fact that we can think doesn’t tell us anything about what’s possible for machines. But philosophy does - and it tells us you can’t get mind from matter, no matter what configuration you put it in.

mitchellgoffpc 7y ago
I would ask for evidence to support your claim, but I think Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword probably applies in this case.
- benl 7y ago
  Yes, I used to hold that view too. But actually it turns out that the null hypothesis is that mind is at least partly immaterial, because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. I’ve found that the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, when explained by modern philosophers, best explains to me why that’s the case.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    > ... because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. Can you give at least a rough sketch or gist of the argument you are referring to?
    - benl 7y ago
      I’ll try because you asked me to, but i think I’ll do a bad job. You’ll get a much better understanding by reading on the topics of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Here goes, though: 1. Purely immaterial things exist. Think of mathematics or the laws of logic or physics - these things exist as ideas or concepts, not arrangements of matter. 2. Some abstract concepts cannot be embodied in matter at all. For example, you can make a shoe, you can draw a shoe, but you can’t draw shoe-ness. You can understand and reason about what makes something a shoe in the abstract, but you can only make or draw an individual shoe. 3) the mind contains these purely immaterial things when we think about and reason about them. 4) If we can use the abstract concepts, but the abstract concepts can’t be embodied in matter, then the mind must be at least partly immaterial in order for the concepts to be in our mind. I hope that helps a but please don’t rely on my exposition of the case - a real philosopher would do it justice.

thrax 7y ago

Revenge of Microsoft Bob!

appstorelottery 7y ago

I'm surprised to see the amount of downvotes that follow negativity pointed at Microsoft. What's going on here? EDIT: Oh. I see. I wasn't aware that OpenAI was a YC thing. I've been a member of Hacker News through various accounts for countless years, however this is the first time I've seen moderation pushing towards an obvious YC agenda. Very interesting... EDIT2: Actually, after reading the comments - I find it more likely that Microsoft/OpenAI stakeholders are participating heavily. Over 800 upvotes for this post makes it quite remarkable... I'll leave my tinfoil hat over there...

dang 7y ago
I can't really tell what you're saying, but if you're insinuating foul play, I haven't seen evidence of that in this thread. In any case, the site guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with concerns instead of posting comments about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- appstorelottery 7y ago
  My apologies - you are correct. >Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data.

adammenges 7y ago

This is excellent, happy for both sides

JabavuAdams 7y ago

I think I can develop GAI for less, in a shorter time-frame. Doubt anyone believes me enough to give me $$$.

nradov 7y ago
Self fund your project and build a prototype. If you can demonstrate even some limited progress the investor community will drown you in funding.
- JabavuAdams 7y ago
  Once it becomes clear to non specialists that AGI is possible, and possibly imminent, that greatly changes the equation, though. This isn't a technology like any other. Why wouldn't governments and other groups just seize the prototype? You'd have a hot-potato on your hands and figuring out how to survive might be your biggest concern. Like imagine you suddenly came into possession of a trillion dollars in bearer bonds. If that leaks out, people will come after you, not just by legal means. All of this skews the calculus towards immediate public disclosure, rather than trying to gain advantage by delaying release. EDIT> Or going first, and attempting to neutralize all possible competitors. This is a terrible calculus.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - nradov 7y ago
    We're discussing reality here, not paranoid fantasies and conspiracy theories.

carapace 7y ago

Given their stated mission: > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. I'm struck by the homogeneity the OpenAI team. https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team-offsite-2019.jpg https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team-offsit... It seems to be mostly white people and a few Asians, without a single black or Hispanic person.

distdev89 7y ago
How does that matter? Does diversity for the cause of diversity lead to better results? Is there any data around this? Hiring the most qualified people is the most important thing. As long as there isn't an inherent bias for not hiring someone who is hispanic, black, or brown, it should b e fine.
- warent 7y ago
  What you're posing is an age-old counterargument based around an irrational fear of white people experiencing prejudice and losing out on opportunities to underqualified people they would have otherwise had. There have been studies done around diversity, conducted both privately and publicly, which consistently conclude that increased diversity does result in enhanced decision-making, collaboration, and organizational value-add due to the different perspectives having a net positive influence rather than neutral or negative. Beyond pragmatism, from an idealist perspective aiding in increasing organizational diversity is the morally right thing to do. That doesn't mean hiring underqualified people; it means refusing to fill the position until the right person is found, which is a whole other problem on its own. Here are some resources to get started: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-performance https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p... https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556374 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556374
  - hanselot 7y ago
    Can you tell me how much diversity juice I need to add to my team to make it perfect? Do I need to hire 1 black person for every white person? Please, provide me the ratio required to avoid marginal returns. I would need to undergo DNA testing for each person to avoid hiring anyone that is too much of one race. Do I get better returns if I hire someone that has 25% of 4 different races? Please elaborate on your very empirically verifiable and obviously logically cohesive argument. If you don't understand where my skepticism originates from, please turn your attention to the results of Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa (where racial quotas are enforced to ensure the blackest candidate is hired, not the best candidate). Look at the performance of the South African sports teams that have been forced to recruit players not based on merit, but on the colour of their skin.

danielcampos93 7y ago

Any plan for a Seattle/Redmond office?

quocble 7y ago

Everyone: AI will one day destroy the human race. Microsoft: Let's invest $1 Billion in it.

terrycody 7y ago

Musk + Gates world is end, welcome to the apocalypse

ipsum2 7y ago

I feel pretty bad for people working in ML/AI at Microsoft Research right now. Microsoft is sending a clear signal that they would pay $1B in outside AI research than spend the same amount internally.

kirillzubovsky 7y ago

Azure has a supercomputer emulator, and even if OpenAI doesn't get a full $1B in cash but gets to use it as credits on the emulator, that could be huge.

doctorstupid 7y ago

What's this "Pre-AGI" arrogance? Why are they so certain that it "will scale to AGI"? Is it an attempt at branding, or have they forgotten that AI is a global effort? And do people really want to be "actualized" by "Microsoft and OpenAI’s shared value of empowering everyone"?

uvictor 7y ago

Azure is the worst...open AI better take that in cash....

mikedh 7y ago

Here's to hoping some of that goes to acquiring and open sourcing Mujoco, or to switching OpenAI Gym's default physics to something open source.

laxatives 7y ago

> As the waitress approached the table, Sam Altman held up his phone. That made it easier to see the dollar amount typed into an investment contract he had spent the last 30 days negotiating with Microsoft. > “$1,000,000,000,” it read. Wow, Sam Altman sounds like an asshole.

programmer2090 7y ago

Does this news mean that if I learn to develop applications in the languages of Dot Net and benefit from the possibilities of Azuro, this will also benefit me in AI in the future better than learning to grow applications in Python

programmer2090 7y ago

I do not know yet the best to learn Azure or Google Cloud