4 ms·

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit. As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the right time, that they hit a gold mine with that investment as ChatGPT took off, but otherwise this would have been just one of their many investments that disappeared into the ether. The most surprising thing to me is how hard and fast Microsoft pivoted once they realized they had a golden goose on their hands, with the Bing / Edge and other integrations they are doing. Never though I would see them move that fast, kudos.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fnbr 4y ago
It was very impressive for an org the size of Microsoft to pivot as quickly as they did.
paxys 4y ago
One reason why Microsoft was able to execute so fast was that they had nothing to lose in doing so. The entirety of the Bing product and brand is mostly immaterial to the company's bottom line. What better way to try and revitalize it than by taking a huge leap with some hot new tech that is capturing the public imagination? If that leap is successful, you get to open up a huge new line of business and challenge Google. If not, well it just...goes back to being Bing. For Google – whose entire business is tied up in that one search box – it is a very different equation. Any reduction of consumer confidence in their search engine is an existential threat to the company. Changes have to be rolled out slowly and with an immense amount of deliberation and testing. Microsoft would be stuck in the same dilemma if, say, someone came up up with a futuristic-looking disruption in the spreadsheet space and Google Sheets was quick to adapt to it.
- textninja 4y ago
  How about… 3D spreadsheets, man. You finish tallying up all your credits and debits, and then wham! You’re sprung into another dimension. It’s Google Tensorsheets, man, Microsoft won’t even know what hit them.
  - komali2 4y ago
    This is what got me into programming way back when. I was a recruiter and doing things in spreadsheets, and I was like, I need a way to link data in a 3rd dimension, not just on the x and y axis. And then I was like actually if 3 dimensions why not 4 or more? So I asked on like, stackoverflow or something, do spreadsheets like that exist, and someone answered "you're basically describing a database with linking between tables," which led to me rabbitholing, learning more, getting into programming, and changing careers.
- dmonitor 4y ago
  > Microsoft would be stuck in the same dilemma if, say, someone came up up with a futuristic-looking disruption in the spreadsheet space and Google Sheets was quick to adapt to it. I feel like they basically are. It’s probably been close to a decade and Google’s online collaborative features in their office suite is far and above what Microsoft has managed to cobble together.
nirui 4y ago
I hope they eventually give the word Open another meaning, for example, they can make their technology and method more open (source, maybe), and/or create a standardized platform to allow people to freely play with and extent their technology without the fear of big daddy restriction. On the other hand, if they ended up chooses a different route, go patented everything and starts suing, then maybe it's better off for them to remove "Open" in their title just to make things more clear.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  They take the mathematicians meaning. Open does not mean not closed.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  I hope their api pricing goes down over time.
  - nirui 4y ago
    It depends on how many competitors will enter the market. At current stage, I would say the chance of them to increase the price is high. The current price is so cheap, it might as well work for a saturated market, which is not what the actual market is currently at. I guess their current pricing is designed to attract new users to bring use cases/ideas to them, which would be a field where their the imagination is lacking.
rgbrenner 4y ago
I don't know if I buy the whole Microsoft got lucky part. I can remember years ago seeing Azure ads pushing machine learning. Github Copilot is now almost 2 years old (since the first "tech preview" announcement). Copilot is built on OpenAI/GPT-3 just like ChatGPT... and then a few months after Copilot, they made it available on Azure's OpenAI service. This is all in 2021. So they've been working on this and collecting data for a while through Azure and Github. Edit: Azure ML launched in 2015.
- m463 4y ago
  They also did a course correction for "the internet" years ago... I have to give them credit, but the other side of the equation is that though they react quickly, they tend to duct-tape feature and products together. I'm thinking of how office went online yet has always lacked cohesion. Or how teams competes with zoom/slack/etc, yet is frustrating to work with.
  - flanked-evergl 4y ago
    Microsoft treats working software as secondary to marketing. They only build software to the point where it makes their marketing plausible to people who will never use the software and don't understand what it does, or what characteristics matter for it.
bambax 4y ago
Non-profit to for-profit is one thing, but it shouldn't prevent them to actually open their technology. There are scores and scores of for-profit companies that do exactly that. Continuing to call themselves "OpenAI" is disingenuous and frankly ridiculous at this point.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fnbr 4y ago

It was very impressive for an org the size of Microsoft to pivot as quickly as they did.

paxys 4y ago

One reason why Microsoft was able to execute so fast was that they had nothing to lose in doing so. The entirety of the Bing product and brand is mostly immaterial to the company's bottom line. What better way to try and revitalize it than by taking a huge leap with some hot new tech that is capturing the public imagination? If that leap is successful, you get to open up a huge new line of business and challenge Google. If not, well it just...goes back to being Bing. For Google – whose entire business is tied up in that one search box – it is a very different equation. Any reduction of consumer confidence in their search engine is an existential threat to the company. Changes have to be rolled out slowly and with an immense amount of deliberation and testing. Microsoft would be stuck in the same dilemma if, say, someone came up up with a futuristic-looking disruption in the spreadsheet space and Google Sheets was quick to adapt to it.

textninja 4y ago
How about… 3D spreadsheets, man. You finish tallying up all your credits and debits, and then wham! You’re sprung into another dimension. It’s Google Tensorsheets, man, Microsoft won’t even know what hit them.
- komali2 4y ago
  This is what got me into programming way back when. I was a recruiter and doing things in spreadsheets, and I was like, I need a way to link data in a 3rd dimension, not just on the x and y axis. And then I was like actually if 3 dimensions why not 4 or more? So I asked on like, stackoverflow or something, do spreadsheets like that exist, and someone answered "you're basically describing a database with linking between tables," which led to me rabbitholing, learning more, getting into programming, and changing careers.
dmonitor 4y ago
> Microsoft would be stuck in the same dilemma if, say, someone came up up with a futuristic-looking disruption in the spreadsheet space and Google Sheets was quick to adapt to it. I feel like they basically are. It’s probably been close to a decade and Google’s online collaborative features in their office suite is far and above what Microsoft has managed to cobble together.

nirui 4y ago

I hope they eventually give the word Open another meaning, for example, they can make their technology and method more open (source, maybe), and/or create a standardized platform to allow people to freely play with and extent their technology without the fear of big daddy restriction. On the other hand, if they ended up chooses a different route, go patented everything and starts suing, then maybe it's better off for them to remove "Open" in their title just to make things more clear.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
They take the mathematicians meaning. Open does not mean not closed.
moomoo11 4y ago
I hope their api pricing goes down over time.
- nirui 4y ago
  It depends on how many competitors will enter the market. At current stage, I would say the chance of them to increase the price is high. The current price is so cheap, it might as well work for a saturated market, which is not what the actual market is currently at. I guess their current pricing is designed to attract new users to bring use cases/ideas to them, which would be a field where their the imagination is lacking.

rgbrenner 4y ago

I don't know if I buy the whole Microsoft got lucky part. I can remember years ago seeing Azure ads pushing machine learning. Github Copilot is now almost 2 years old (since the first "tech preview" announcement). Copilot is built on OpenAI/GPT-3 just like ChatGPT... and then a few months after Copilot, they made it available on Azure's OpenAI service. This is all in 2021. So they've been working on this and collecting data for a while through Azure and Github. Edit: Azure ML launched in 2015.

m463 4y ago
They also did a course correction for "the internet" years ago... I have to give them credit, but the other side of the equation is that though they react quickly, they tend to duct-tape feature and products together. I'm thinking of how office went online yet has always lacked cohesion. Or how teams competes with zoom/slack/etc, yet is frustrating to work with.
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  Microsoft treats working software as secondary to marketing. They only build software to the point where it makes their marketing plausible to people who will never use the software and don't understand what it does, or what characteristics matter for it.

bambax 4y ago

Non-profit to for-profit is one thing, but it shouldn't prevent them to actually open their technology. There are scores and scores of for-profit companies that do exactly that. Continuing to call themselves "OpenAI" is disingenuous and frankly ridiculous at this point.