5 ms·

The article makes some statements that feel like conjectures rather than facts. For example “likely many to move to msft” and more significantly “PPUs will be r

The article makes some statements that feel like conjectures rather than facts. For example “likely many to move to msft” and more significantly “PPUs will be refreshed with MSFT stock and 10mil salaries”.

refulgentis 3y ago
+1, careful with this site, like most of the coverage, its maximalist horse race stuff very far from the tech and facts on the ground. It often wildly exaggerates its knowledge, for instance, it is the premier source of the mind-virus that GPT-4 is a MoE model with trillion parameters. It always appears plausible at its face if you don't know much about the tech, and if you do know the tech, you still need to have inside sources to really know how far off it is. And even once you know the tech and have inside sources to confirm they make stuff up, people are very reluctant to believe it, so it continues its march unimpeded.
- stale2002 3y ago
  So, btw, was that "gravy train" nipped in the bud? Was the majority of openAIs employees threatening to leave the beneficial and good outcome that you were expecting for the company?
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Would gently point out this is abnormal behavior for HN, been here 13 years and don't think I can recall at time a non-dead account was following people around to get followup on threads from days ago - It's perfectly rational for me, a stranger who doesn't work at OpenAI, to say that if I worked at OpenAI, I'd be doing it for the "Open" part and wouldn't exactly enjoy the shift to commercialization - which coincidentally, has been widely reported now, and previously, as being an issue for all employees, not just the board. It's also perfectly reasonable for me, a stranger who doesn't work at OpenAI, to not be able to know that was outweighed by their appreciation of leadership. I recommend taking things a bit easier, trying to make everyone else use your frame of reference of conversation as a scorable game with binary opinions is a losing battle. Been there. Better to as dang says, come with curiosity, and learn from what you don't expect to hear.
    - stale2002 3y ago
      > come with curiosity Indeed, and I was curious as to your answer. There were a number of people a couple days ago, who were talking about the mission, and how its a non profit, and that it was important to stay with that mission. And I was curious to see what those people think now.
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        Nah, that's not the case, we can see your comment above and it's mean-spirited
        stale2002 3y ago
        You are the one talking about mean spiritedness, scorable games and battles, not me. You can feel however you want about your previous opinion and your now new one. But anyway I am glad that I got your answer to the question, which is that it seems like you no longer believe that this thing was beneficial to almost anyone involved, even those who believed in the mission.
mediaman 3y ago
These are extremely safe conjectures. 84% of OpenAI employees have signed a statement that they will leave OpenAI if the board does not resign. The letter they signed states that Microsoft has made an open offer to any OpenAI employee. And Satya is almost certainly not going to spoil this moment with stingy packages. He is, after all, essentially acquiring a company that was valued at $90 billion, for nothing.
- Crosseye_Jack 3y ago
  Yeah, even if MS have to pay out the remainder of the $1B they promised OpenAI (in cash and Azure credits), I will say its still a pretty sweet "acquihire" (Though, not sure how much of a clean room they will have to put everyone in). EDIT: And to continue my "thinking out loud", MS have no real need to cut ties with OpenAI (yet), who knows OpenAI might just turn out fine after all this, As S.R. Hadden once said: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
  - tw04 3y ago
    >Though, not sure how much of a clean room they will have to put everyone in Why would they need a clean room at all? Part of their investment was almost completely unfettered access to OpenAI IP.
    - Animats 3y ago
      From the article: "Microsoft has full legal rights and access to the weights of the base GPT-4 model as well as the various fine-tuned versions and DALL-E 3." If that's correct, Microsoft pretty much owned them already.
      - peteradio 3y ago
        Not really, weights are just the magic that tells the machine what to do. If they don't have access to the training mechanism and/or the machine then they don't own OpenAI. I guess they are attempting to pirate the rest through employees, I hope they fail.
dagmx 3y ago
A lot of the SemiAnalysis posts are just conjecture (and the authors opinions) stated as fact. You can see this play out in their many Qualcomm vs ARM posts. It’s been brought up several times in the past but people seem to respond more to the drama that they put forward, rather than factually correct information.
shmatt 3y ago
People are haluscinating that this could go through easily in a $3T mega corp. Level 68 at MS makes about $700k TC, and is equivalent in level to a Google L8. You think they're just going to bring in hundreds of people all at L10 or something, thats not how any of this works. Any ex OpenAI engineers will soon learn
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  They'll get a raise or other financial incentive for sure, but since they're all so willing to jump ship, it's more that they want to get away from the existing one and make a horizontal movement. That said, each and every one that has OpenAI on their employment history is set for their wages for the forseeable, regardless of what they end up doing.
- tonyhart7 3y ago
  I doubt that, satya nadella literally meet sam altman next day(or night) after firing the fact that this happen and satya nadella can make move in the WEEKENDS is pretty big deal
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
This part seems conjecture: > What’s more important to understand is if Microsoft has legal direct access to all the data and code used for pre-training and RL. It is obviously all stored on Azure, but if the new Sam-led internal team can freely access that, they can basically start exactly where they left off without much of a hiccup. If they cannot get it, then we estimate that it could possibly lead to only a 4-6 month delay vs prior. Does anyone actually know if MSFT has access to OpenAI's training data ? Hard to imagine the human created/curated portion of it being redone in 4-6 months. I've read there's some limitation in the OpenAI-MSFT agreement of it being limited to "AI" vs "AGI" technology, but no details of how that determination is made. Maybe time for OpenAI to play the AGI card.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Also I really doubt taking all that data and doing whatever with it would be legal. I'd be really surprised if MS's license with OpenAI allows for unfettered access and unlimited use.

refulgentis 3y ago

+1, careful with this site, like most of the coverage, its maximalist horse race stuff very far from the tech and facts on the ground. It often wildly exaggerates its knowledge, for instance, it is the premier source of the mind-virus that GPT-4 is a MoE model with trillion parameters. It always appears plausible at its face if you don't know much about the tech, and if you do know the tech, you still need to have inside sources to really know how far off it is. And even once you know the tech and have inside sources to confirm they make stuff up, people are very reluctant to believe it, so it continues its march unimpeded.

stale2002 3y ago
So, btw, was that "gravy train" nipped in the bud? Was the majority of openAIs employees threatening to leave the beneficial and good outcome that you were expecting for the company?
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Would gently point out this is abnormal behavior for HN, been here 13 years and don't think I can recall at time a non-dead account was following people around to get followup on threads from days ago - It's perfectly rational for me, a stranger who doesn't work at OpenAI, to say that if I worked at OpenAI, I'd be doing it for the "Open" part and wouldn't exactly enjoy the shift to commercialization - which coincidentally, has been widely reported now, and previously, as being an issue for all employees, not just the board. It's also perfectly reasonable for me, a stranger who doesn't work at OpenAI, to not be able to know that was outweighed by their appreciation of leadership. I recommend taking things a bit easier, trying to make everyone else use your frame of reference of conversation as a scorable game with binary opinions is a losing battle. Been there. Better to as dang says, come with curiosity, and learn from what you don't expect to hear.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > come with curiosity Indeed, and I was curious as to your answer. There were a number of people a couple days ago, who were talking about the mission, and how its a non profit, and that it was important to stay with that mission. And I was curious to see what those people think now.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      Nah, that's not the case, we can see your comment above and it's mean-spirited
      - stale2002 3y ago
        You are the one talking about mean spiritedness, scorable games and battles, not me. You can feel however you want about your previous opinion and your now new one. But anyway I am glad that I got your answer to the question, which is that it seems like you no longer believe that this thing was beneficial to almost anyone involved, even those who believed in the mission.

mediaman 3y ago

These are extremely safe conjectures. 84% of OpenAI employees have signed a statement that they will leave OpenAI if the board does not resign. The letter they signed states that Microsoft has made an open offer to any OpenAI employee. And Satya is almost certainly not going to spoil this moment with stingy packages. He is, after all, essentially acquiring a company that was valued at $90 billion, for nothing.

Crosseye_Jack 3y ago
Yeah, even if MS have to pay out the remainder of the $1B they promised OpenAI (in cash and Azure credits), I will say its still a pretty sweet "acquihire" (Though, not sure how much of a clean room they will have to put everyone in). EDIT: And to continue my "thinking out loud", MS have no real need to cut ties with OpenAI (yet), who knows OpenAI might just turn out fine after all this, As S.R. Hadden once said: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
- tw04 3y ago
  >Though, not sure how much of a clean room they will have to put everyone in Why would they need a clean room at all? Part of their investment was almost completely unfettered access to OpenAI IP.
  - Animats 3y ago
    From the article: "Microsoft has full legal rights and access to the weights of the base GPT-4 model as well as the various fine-tuned versions and DALL-E 3." If that's correct, Microsoft pretty much owned them already.
    - peteradio 3y ago
      Not really, weights are just the magic that tells the machine what to do. If they don't have access to the training mechanism and/or the machine then they don't own OpenAI. I guess they are attempting to pirate the rest through employees, I hope they fail.

dagmx 3y ago

A lot of the SemiAnalysis posts are just conjecture (and the authors opinions) stated as fact. You can see this play out in their many Qualcomm vs ARM posts. It’s been brought up several times in the past but people seem to respond more to the drama that they put forward, rather than factually correct information.

shmatt 3y ago

People are haluscinating that this could go through easily in a $3T mega corp. Level 68 at MS makes about $700k TC, and is equivalent in level to a Google L8. You think they're just going to bring in hundreds of people all at L10 or something, thats not how any of this works. Any ex OpenAI engineers will soon learn

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
They'll get a raise or other financial incentive for sure, but since they're all so willing to jump ship, it's more that they want to get away from the existing one and make a horizontal movement. That said, each and every one that has OpenAI on their employment history is set for their wages for the forseeable, regardless of what they end up doing.
tonyhart7 3y ago
I doubt that, satya nadella literally meet sam altman next day(or night) after firing the fact that this happen and satya nadella can make move in the WEEKENDS is pretty big deal

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

This part seems conjecture: > What’s more important to understand is if Microsoft has legal direct access to all the data and code used for pre-training and RL. It is obviously all stored on Azure, but if the new Sam-led internal team can freely access that, they can basically start exactly where they left off without much of a hiccup. If they cannot get it, then we estimate that it could possibly lead to only a 4-6 month delay vs prior. Does anyone actually know if MSFT has access to OpenAI's training data ? Hard to imagine the human created/curated portion of it being redone in 4-6 months. I've read there's some limitation in the OpenAI-MSFT agreement of it being limited to "AI" vs "AGI" technology, but no details of how that determination is made. Maybe time for OpenAI to play the AGI card.

kelnos 3y ago
Also I really doubt taking all that data and doing whatever with it would be legal. I'd be really surprised if MS's license with OpenAI allows for unfettered access and unlimited use.