10 ms·
Microsoft CTO: Thoughts on OpenAI (2019)
- kd913 3y agoCurious how Bill Gates is still main cced? Does he still play a significant role in the control of Microsoft?
- scrlk 3y agoHe's still influential behind the scenes - there was a recent article published about it: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-still-pulling-strings-microsoft-ai-copilot-chatgpt-2024-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-still-pulling-str... (https://archive.ph/VmtON https://archive.ph/VmtON) > Current and former executives say Gates remains intimately involved in the company's operations — advising on strategy, reviewing products, recruiting high-level executives, and nurturing Microsoft's crucial relationship with Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI. > "What you read is not what's happening in reality," another Microsoft executive said. "Satya and the entire senior leadership team lean on Gates very significantly. His opinion is sought every time we make a major change."
- godzillabrennus 3y agoIf true it would explain why Microsoft keeps getting better while Google management seems to ignore the founders and keeps getting worse.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI don't think it's so much that Google ignores the founders, so much as the founders are ignoring Google. I was at G when L&S stepped away, and it really just felt that leading up to that, they'd become completely disinterested. S, especially, seemed completely out of touch. And L just tired.
- foobarian 3y agoBG is a shrewd, cutthroat businessman on top of having a tech background. I think he's far different from L&S in that respect. But yeah it helps he hasn't disengaged as well.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoGoogle would have probably been better off if Eric Schmidt had stayed engaged. I don't like the guy's opinions on many things, but he was pretty good at keeping the ship headed in generally the right direction.
- actionfromafar 3y agoOr any direction? I couldn't tell what the direction of Google was if I had to.
- esafak 3y agoWhat's the direction of Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple? They're too big to have one direction.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoGoogle does have one direction, the same direction it's had since IPO, really. Maximize ad revenue, to maximize share value. Just all the other window dressing is going away.
- VelesDude 3y agoNever liked Eric, but Google had such a clear direction and vision under his leadership. Pichai, feels like the accountants are running the business. It is ONLY about the next quarters results.
- anyfactor 3y agoI don't think Larry and Sergey is on the same level as Bill Gates. Solo founders who have raised to and led a big tech company is a different breed. I would pick Jeff Bezos, Zuck and Larry Ellison on the same level of Bill Gates. They don't manage day 2 day but big strategies don't go through without their blessing. Even though you can say Bill does not manage, the top level executives will always think "what would Bill do" or "what would Bill think about this".
- lionkor 3y agoWhich of their products is getting better?
- kranke155 3y agoThey’re executing better. Microsoft has never made great products with some exceptions.
- jiggawatts 3y agoMicrosoft makes “good enough” products that integrate smoothly. That’s what enterprises want and smaller vendors can’t provide by their very nature.
- dist-epoch 3y agoSome exceptions like Windows, Office and Xbox?
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoYou're listing widely used products, not great products. Fast food is not great just because it's popular.
- Sebb767 3y ago> Fast food is not great just because it's popular. It's not good for you, as a consumer. As a company, it's a trillion dollar market, nurturing some of the largest companies in the world.
- VelesDude 3y agoEven Bill Gates has admitted that a big part of their success was just sheer luck. There were many competitors that were pushing far better technology than they had but simply could not get a foot hold in the market. Just the other day on here I mentioned BeOS/Haiku OS, the tech vision on that thing is astounding but it simply did not pan out into any sort of market success. Same with parts of Commodore, IBM, NeXT. MS did capitalize and manipulate the market to assist themselves and keep competitors out, but just becaused they won doesn't mean they had the best technology.
- probably_jesus 3y ago[dead]
- paxys 3y agoThis was sent in 2019, when Gates was still chairman of the board at Microsoft and involved day to day as technical advisor to the CEO. Post 2021 he has no official role at the company.
- omega3 3y agoI found it curious he wasn't cc'd on the response from Satya.
- laurels-marts 3y agoI think Satya knows better than to waste Bill's time. His reply added no value to Bill and was done just to loop in Amy.
- a1o 3y agoPeople actually use Mail in Windows 10?
- Waterluvian 3y agoProbably millions of people. Us nerds need to habitually self-remind that we’re a sliver of the total user base and our experience and needs are not representative.”
- a1o 3y agoI use Outlook, not super nerdy, idnk
- sincerely 3y agoIf you’re reading HN, you’re so much nerdier than the average software user that the existence of super nerds is irrelevant
- vorticalbox 3y agoI think this was more a generalisation about HN as a whole than directed at you.
- Philip-J-Fry 3y agoI did, it was a genuinely good little lightweight UWP email app. Now they've turned it into a bloated ad-ridden Outlook webview app.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jasode 3y agoTo add more context, about a month later after Kevin Scott's email... July 12, 2019 OpenAI announces Microsoft's $1 billion investment - https://openai.com/index/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-with-openai https://openai.com/index/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-w... - https://news.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/openai-forms-exclusive-computing-partnership-with-microsoft-to-build-new-azure-ai-supercomputing-technologies/ https://news.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/openai-forms-exclusive... It was interesting how K Scott was objective and candid about Microsoft's internal ai efforts falling behind but also phrasing the email diplomatically to not criticize anyone. It's interesting to see some of the behind-the-scenes thinking.
- hosh 3y agoI don’t think they want a repeat of missing out on web and then mobile again.
- seattleeng 3y agoWas gonna say, the email reads similarly to this famous thread about Java (with the old CTO of MS!): https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-im-literally-losing-sleep-over-java https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-im-literally-losing-... Really makes you think about the structure of mega corps and how powerful the “defender’s advantage” is. These giants knowingly sleep on disruption and wait to time their entry, and are generally rewarded. I dont know if its good or bad, it probably depends, but I think the capitalism game devs need some balance tweaks.
- vikramkr 3y agoAre they generally rewarded? Wondering is there are statistics on that because the narrative is usually that defenders end up unable to compete even with technologies they themselves invented and die out, with maybe apple and Microsoft recently breaking that trend.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
- tambourine_man 3y agoI don't understand why large companies use email for such important topics knowing that they can be required by law to disclosure them in the future. I know that large companies have email retention laws, but why not just keep sensitive topics on Signal or similar?
- neeh0 3y agobecasue it can be interpreted as acting against the company in first place
- Eridrus 3y agoThey are definitely doing more of that, but it's not always a get our of jail free card, and may actually put them at legal risk for destroying documents: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/26/24141801/ftc-amazon-antitrust-signal-ephemeral-messaging-evidence https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/26/24141801/ftc-amazon-antit... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/judge-mulls-sanctions-over-googles-shocking-destruction-of-internal-chats/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/judge-mulls-sanc...
- tambourine_man 3y agoNot being allowed secrets by law is such a weird concept
- riscy 3y agoIt's not weird for a publicly traded company.
- Eridrus 3y agoI find it weird that these get released as public records, but otherwise, laws against destroying evidence seem fine. And laws requiring disclosure of documents in a court to determine wrongdoing also seem fine. And laws requiring proper record keeping of decision making at large companies also seem fine. Particularly when the burden of record keeping (ensuring emails are not deleted) is not very large.
- hsdropout 3y agoPrevious submission from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40226114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40226114
- avi_vallarapu 3y agoIt is probably an observation and a forecast at the right time. I remember my days at one of the Top Home and Enterprise PC manufacturing companies over 15 years ago, when there was criticism around Smart phones. People laughed assuming that a smart phone is of no use and people prefer a PC or a laptop. Everything else is history. What is important at all times is the timing and Identifying something that can change the world at the right time. This is where the Top Leadership roles come into play. Identify the gaps and introduce the immediate action plan to make the best of the best.
- sahila 3y agoSure and not to discredit your observation, but what other observations have you made in the last 5 years that didn’t pan out? Regarding politics, sports, stock market, covid, or other tech trends? The evaluation can’t be looking back, and if you’re right about 1/10 things, would that warrant a $1b investment in each?
- skydhash 3y agoThe thing is that we had small notebooks/agenda/notepad, then we moved on to PDAs when things turn digital, it's not a big stretch to imagine how smart phones should work if the hardware is there (what I read is that manufacturers was cheaping out and locking things down). I still believe that what LLM does best is analyzing natural languages and producing coherent (not necessarily true) output. And there are maybe business needs for that, but still have not seen a truly individual tool, like personal computing is (you can go on a desert island with a laptop and compute). I agree that executives is to predict and plan strategical responses. But so far, it seems to be only useful for those that like quick answers, even if it maybe untrue.
- SunlitCat 3y agoIt's an interesting read. Especially if you consider that all it needs today is llama.cpp and a model of your choosing from huggingface. (Okay Okay, granted it takes a bit more and someone had to train those models, but point it, the fear from way back seems to be....dunno.)
- riscy 3y agoIf you can't train the model, you don't really have control over a product based on it.
- jbverschoor 3y agoYou can easily kill ambition or by requiring everything to go into slow processes, no freedom, and corporate politics. If there's any ambition left, it won't be for that company.
- phkahler 3y agoKnowing how something is done can be quite different from knowing all that it really takes to make it happen.
- fortenforge 3y agoThese emails were released as part of the antitrust lawsuit against Google currently being pursued by the FTC. It seems to me that contrary to the FTC's claims about how Google's monopoly power leads it to stop innovating, exactly the opposite is true. If Google had stopped innovating it's clear that Bing eventually would have caught up in terms of quality. As these emails make clear though, Google kept its lead by continuing to invest in cutting-edge AI research. Indeed, if anything it's Microsoft who should be scrutinized.
- sida 3y agowhy were these emails released as part of the FTC's lawsuit against google. How did the FTC get microsoft's email over an antitrust lawsuit against google
- advael 3y agoBoth are acting with monopolistic power in numerous areas and both should be scrutinized. Just because one argument against monopoly power is that incumbents can sometimes rest on their laurels and fail to innovate doesn't make this the sole reason to pursue antitrust action. Not on you though, this kind of reasoning failure is so common I think it deserves a fancy "cognitive bias" name. Off the cuff maybe something like "Single Rebuttal Fallacy"?
- gofreddygo 3y ago> These emails were released as part of the antitrust lawsuit I never understood this: Why would hot shot, high powered people risk putting such things on email? Things that could backfire when released into public domain like from a lawsuit or a leak. They know this well, and still keep doing it. Why not setup an in person meeting, or just pickup the phone and talk ? Why email? I almost feel they actually want it to happen but could never point my finger to how this could cover their asses, or an exit strategy?
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoUltimately, if the people at the company have to do a job, they have to communicate somewhat, and putting it on an email or another recorded medium is the best way to prevent endless meetings and have the perspective documented in a single place. Everything has a legal liability, it doesn't mean that it's worth it to move everything to an undocumented medium.
- ein0p 3y agoGoogle was a powerful place to work at 10 years ago. At Microsoft you had to convince people to give you quota for a few cores and wait for days or even weeks, if they even agree at all. At Google you could spin up a distributed batch job processing terabytes of data during your orientation codelab, literally on the first day. The contrast was very stark. Google was a very low friction environment where things just happened, and the environment was set up such that you couldn’t help but ship something. Note the past tense.
- bushbaba 3y agoInternal research had low friction external product not so much. They even had a tool, ariane, to help you navigate the product launch friction.
- ein0p 3y agoIMO Ariane was pretty straightforward and reasonable, all things considered. In fact it’s preferable to navigating the usual wobbly maze of humans each of which takes days to respond.
- alecco 3y agoThat's in contrast to what OpenAI's David Luan "Why Google couldn’t make GPT-3" (https://www.latent.space/p/adept https://www.latent.space/p/adept): And it turned out the whole time that they just couldn't get critical mass. So during my year where I led the Google LM effort and I was one of the brain leads, you know, it became really clear why. At the time, there was a thing called the Brain Credit Marketplace. Everyone's assigned a credit. So if you have a credit, you get to buy end chips according to supply and demand. So if you want to go do a giant job, you had to convince like 19 or 20 of your colleagues not to do work. And if that's how it works, it's really hard to get that bottom up critical mass to go scale these things. And the team at Google were fighting valiantly, but we were able to beat them simply because we took big swings and we focused.” The whole episode is very interesting.
- ein0p 3y ago
- hi41 2y agoHow do such emails get leaked. Since the email is from top management with just few recipients, wouldn’t it be easy to find the leaker. Testing done of these private emails scares me a bit. If such top secret emails can be leaked, how about private citizens like me.