6 ms·
$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 platfo
by 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 agoMaybe they will use that 1 Billion on Azure fees lol.
- kuzehanka 7y agoThat's like a month of CosmosDB storing a DVD worth of records!
- Quarrelsome 7y agoCosmos is throughput not size. So it would be a month of having the capacity to I/O a DVD worth of records.
- kuzehanka 7y agoIt's both. And storage cost is amplified by number of regions replicated to.
- aliswe 7y agoI 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.
- marketdroid933 7y agoThey don’t describe the terms of the deal. Is it $1 billion in cash/stock? Or $1 billion in Azure credits and engineering hours?
- neiman 7y agoit must be described somewhere, though not in the announcement. I don't think you're allowed to make $1B deals with a public company without specifying those things somewhere.
- marketdroid933 7y agoWell, sure it’s detailed somewhere. We in this thread don’t know, is what I was getting at. The comment I replied to may not be far off the mark in what this really is: computer/human time “worth $1 billion” or something. If it’s actual cash that says something different to me than a donation of resources with some value estimated by MS.
- strikelaserclaw 7y agoFrom some other comment, it says its a cash deal.
- stinkbug9o 7y ago$1 billion - costs of operating exclusively on Azure. Not that it’s a raw deal, but it smells a bit disingenuous to peddle it like this. MS gets a big chunk back thanks to that exclusive arrangement.
- kgraves 7y agoThis screams alarm bells of an acquisition to me.
- mattferderer 7y agoMy "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers. Also a great time to point out that while "Microsoft is not a charity foundation" it does offer a ton of free Azure to charities. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure This has been an awesome thing to use when helping small non-profits with little money to spend on "administrative costs".
- gdb 7y ago> My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. It's a cash investment. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though. > My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers. I'm flattered that you think our research is that valuable! (As I say in the blog post: we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.)
- mattferderer 7y agoThank you for taking the time to clarify & correct my statements!
- breck 7y agoIf your team ever gets frustrated by ARM, have them shoot me an email for my old proposal on how to fix it (source: used to work at Azure and perennially frustrated by ARM design)
- 323454 7y agoI'm interested to hear more about this proposal! What problems does it aim to fix? Would you be willing to share?
- Gpetrium 7y agoFor Microsoft, the investment will likely come from computing resources to support AI practices/tests, MS personnel and paying current OpenAI personnel (expensive due to their expertise). The findings and expertise will likely be used in the future to help drive improvements in Microsoft's stack (cloud computing, search engine, etc). OpenAI will be licensing some of its technologies to Microsoft For OpenAI, it means the availability of resources for their main mission for the foreseeable future, while potentially allowing founders and other investors with the opportunity to either double-down on OpenAI or reallocate resources to other initiatives (Think of Musk, for example). "Do people understand what "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider" means?" It likely means that computing power will be provided by Microsoft and that it may have access to the algorithms and results.
- thesausageking 7y ago"suspicious is understandable from the users side when so much commercial money is involved." OpenAI is a commercial entity. They restructured from a non-profit. This is a completely commercial deal to help Azure catch up with Google and Amazon in AI. OpenAI will adopt and make Azure their preferred platform. And Microsoft and Azure will jointly "develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies", which I assume is advancing their FGPA-based deep learning offering. Google has a lead with TensorFlow + TPUs and this is a move to "buy their way in", which is a very Microsoft thing to do.
- mratsim 7y agoI was always under the impression that Azure had a lead in ML-as-a-service. I really liked LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) back in 2017 and AFAIK only Alibaba had an offering similar to Azure at the time for ML-as-a-service.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoHow do we ensure OpenAI is still Open if they're exclusive with MSFT?
- jjeaff 7y agoAccording to some comments from openai employees in other comments, it's not really open already.
- PeterStuer 7y agoDoes that mean OpenAI will (co-)develop the Azure AI platform, and then pay Microsoft for using it?