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OpenAI Acquires Multi
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- colesantiago 2y agoWow, shutting down a startup with a deadline being in less than a month that it was acquired without warning, that is a whole new reason to not trust startups at all. Totally unprofessional. I'm rather surprised that Keybase is still running after the team joined Zoom. What an incredible journey.
- whalesalad 2y agomoney talks
- rfoo 2y agoNot without occasional problems. It shows how much original team cares about the product though. Feels like if running Keybase was already financially viable at that time they won't join Zoom.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoFor the right amount of money, anyone is willing to walk away from an enterprise, profitable or not. There are outliers, but they are rare. We all have a price that is enough.
- ethbr1 2y ago+1 See MailChimp "We'll never sell! Corporate culture, etc etc." to "We're excited to be joining the innovative Intuit family." Granted, it took them decades, but there is always a number someone won't say "No" to.
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- visarga 2y ago> It shows how much original team cares about the product though. I remember during the Sam firing saga 90% of OpenAI employees signed a letter declaring they are considering moving to Microsoft with their current compensation package. It shows how much the "open" part matters for the team. Risking AGI being concentrated in the hands of a large company? No problem. And they have the guts to lobby government to restrict open models.
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- samtheprogram 2y agoThere isn’t a lot of switching cost for something like Multi. In most cases a month seems extremely short and would grind my gears too, but it’s not like you’ll need to move anything off of Multi.
- oppegard 2y agoI wish Alexander and the rest of the Multi team all the best at OpenAI. I'm saddened by the loss of what I consider the best remote pair programming app around (if Mac-only is acceptable). Other than Tuple.app, are there any strong competitors? I tried Datadog's CoScreen early on, and the amount of chrome it added to windows made things a little janky (perhaps it's better now).
- orliesaurus 2y agoFunnily enough I tried Tuple.app literally last week for the first time and the experience was incredible. I love their "privacy veil" feature. Good job if anyone's looking for a replacement that seems like the best alternative to Multi app.
- alanpearce 2y agoIt might be somewhat different in that it's only for programming, but Zed is a "multiplayer code editor" with channels, notes, video chat, screen sharing etc. https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/
- _boffin_ 2y agoNo love for jetbrains pairing solution inside idea?
- beeboobaa3 2y agoI want to love it so badly, and it's fine if you're comparing it to e.g. google docs. But if you're comparing it to running the ide locally it's sadly still not quite there. A lot of actions are still not supported remotely, syntax doesn't get reinterpreted properly unless you do manual workarounds like switching between files, etc. It's getting better and better, though.
- mritchie712 2y agowhat's wrong with Tuple? Multi looks like the exact same product.
- btown 2y ago
- chabes 2y ago> Unfortunately, this means we’re sunsetting Multi. We’ve closed new team signups, and currently active teams will be able to use the app until July 24, 2024, after which we’ll delete all user data. Seems a little abrupt.
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- byteknight 2y agoSame with the rockset acquisition earlier this week. Buying spree for sure.
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- greekanalyst 2y agoRockset acquisition announced 2 days ago. Now Multi. OpenAI on an M&A spree. Interesting.
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- ivanjermakov 2y agoIncredible how fast successful startups shut the door in front of their customers.
- phoe-krk 2y agoThese aren't their customers. The likes of OpenAI are.
- ethbr1 2y agoThat's the nice thing about (hypothetical) robust anti-trust enforcement... it makes sure the best customers are actual users.
- tom_ 2y agoA lot of Startup World makes no sense until you think about things this way. The actual company is the founders and associates (early employees, investors, etc.). The product being sold is the company. Larger companies who might wish to buy it are the true customers. Later employees, "products" and "services", "customers", all that nonsense - marketing materials.
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- carimura 2y ago[flagged]
- dcchambers 2y agoOpenAI transformation from research lab to typical product company is almost complete.
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- tensor 2y ago> What if desktop computers were inherently multiplayer? What if the operating system placed people on equal footing to apps? Those were the questions we explored in building Multi, and before that, Remotion. I presume that Multi actually did something useful, perhaps some sort of virtualization. But this description doesn't tell me anything useful about the company, nor does it even make sense. Is a desktop computer a video game? Why would it "play" let alone be multiplayer? Why would the OS be on equal footing to the apps? It doesn't make sense let alone be useful.
- jjj123 2y agoMultiplayer is a SAAS term for collaborative. So in the same way google docs is collaborative, I guess the OS would be too?
- MajimasEyepatch 2y agoSpecifically real-time collaborative, like you see multiple cursors on the screen moving at once.
- rasengan 2y agoLooks like they will build in the automation as another player?
- tensor 2y agoOur industry does itself a huge disfavour with these gimmicky terms. When you can substitute your buzzword of the day with a traditional word that everyone will instantly understand, well, this is where buzzword bingo criticisms come from. :-(
- freedomben 2y agoHas OpenAI already reached that point in the lifecycle where they start gobbling up smaller companies? Damn this cycle is starting to feel faster and faster. I have criticisms of OpenAI, but on the whole I really hope this doesn't mean they are losing the war and turning to diversification and other classic "big tech" moves. GPT still is (IME) the best at not assuming/inferring things in the prompt that aren't there (especially then mangling the prompt *cough* Gemini *cough*). For those of us who try to be very precise with our prompts, that is a big deal.
- ethbr1 2y agoMaybe they finished training their M&A model. :)
- n2d4 2y agoI wonder whether this is diversification or just acquihiring. Given that they abruptly shut down the products instead of rebranding them and converting their users, it may be the latter. Both Multi and Rockset had strong infra teams.
- twoodfin 2y agoOpenAI is racing to become a product company (beyond ChatGPT) before the traditional tech companies commoditize AI infrastructure behind new product features.
- lunfard000 2y agoThis one kinda makes sense, buy a multiplayer desktop app and add ChatGPT as a default player. I dont think they care too much about the "human" collaboration. API's are much harder to sell than fancy apps.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seankurtz 2y ago[dead]
- achow 2y agoIs this acquisition or acqui-hire? Since they are shutting down their product sounds like it is former.
- mritchie712 2y agoSeems somewhere in the middle. I can see how chatgpt controlling your screen is an interesting path for OpenAI and Multi seems like a good place to start.
- neilv 2y ago> We’ve closed new team signups, and currently active teams will be able to use the app until July 24, 2024, after which we’ll delete all user data. What is it with OpenAI acquisitions reaming their user bases on short notice? Is OpenAI already locked in such a dominant position that they don't have to pretend to care what anyone in industry thinks about them? Everyone savvy knows that Microsoft and Oracle don't care, and are just waiting until they can stab you again. Even Google, who routinely pulls the rug out from under its customers, is gentler about it. Even the usual serial-founder brogrammer startups often have a semi-reasonable migration. Sustaining engineering for legacy customers doesn't have to be expensive, and you can think of it as an obligation to pay back for your success, and maybe a foot in the door for sales.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoI'd assume that OpenAI is simply doing Microsoft's bidding, and is a way for them to indirectly acquire companies with very little to no scrutiny. Continuation of the existing product isn't usually of concern in these cases, and appears to be very common practice even for companies that are otherwise well known for almost never deprecating their products (e.g. various AWS acquisitions.)
- mostlysimilar 2y agoThe era where tech companies had to pretend to care about the users is long gone. The name of the game is cut to the bone.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seankurtz 2y ago[dead]
- mritchie712 2y agoMulti will be low effort to switch off from. If you're using Slack already (which I'd imagine most of their customers are) you can get by with huddles and screen share. The Rockset one is fucked up. It's a central part of some companies infra[0]. 0 - https://x.com/SRhyne/status/1804266196193157256 https://x.com/SRhyne/status/1804266196193157256
- OutOfHere 2y agoOpenAI stands to introduce the functionality of Multi into their own product. OpenAI is going to want control of your computer. It will want access to the data on your computer, to your screens, to what you're doing from moment to moment, and it wants to control it all for you. That's what it means by multiplayer. If you grant it this control, you stand to lose any shred of privacy you have left, and become a complete slave to them. This is different from using assistants with granular access to data. It also is different from running your own private AI.
- ZtaBY 2y agoSounds like investors are asking "What is the product you have?" and military ties and mixed people/AI chat apps are the answer. Still waiting for the "PhD level" Q*.
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- orliesaurus 2y agoI have been working on a similar space for the last 8 months. Creating a way for the AI use your OS. There are many projects out there trying to achieve this: Open Interpreter, OpenAdapt, etc. The thing that is hard to achieve is not to get your LLM to operate your computer but to make it do the right thing. And by right thing I mean, the thing you expect it to do in the way you want. Example I always show to people when I give a demo of what I built: Say you want to buy a new Macbook. If you ask the computer to buy you one, it might: A) Go to Google and search for a Macbook B) Go to Apple and search for a Macbook C) Go to Amazon and search for a Macbook Now, depending on your implementation it might then ask you to give you more details about the Macbook you need (pro? air? how big?) The tough part is to wrap all this together in a way that doesn't frustrate the user. In a way it's like when you do a Google search: the first result is the best guess of what you want. But how likely is it that it's not? Pretty much 50% of the time you look at the top 2-3 results right? Well it's the same with having the AI control your computer, at this point in time, you want to have "multiple sessions" - sort of like a parallel universe where the AI has done 2-3 things and lets you pick from A, B ... or C and then go from there. Another approach would be to collate a library of most used "prompts" - i.e. if you are trying to buy a laptop and someone else managed to get the AI to go through a very thorough process where you're asked all the important details that lead to purchasing the Macbook, then you should be able to re-use that one workflow from the library, rather than have the AI start from scratch. Anyway, it's very very tough - more so from a UX experience rather than an AI perspective.
- miki123211 2y agoAnother part to this is memory, "get me the cheapest vegan pizza that can get here before I have to leave" should be a prompt that just works, and should automatically take allergies into account. This is pretty much an open research problem with current AI approaches.
- orliesaurus 2y agoCorrect! I built memories into my agent
- mlsu 2y ago"OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Is this like EA where they have to make a trillion dollars first before getting to the actual mission?
- x3haloed 2y agoI wonder what the play is here. Any ideas? The key must be somewhere in the statement "we’ve been increasingly asking ourselves how we should work with computers. Not on or using computers, but truly with computers." I wish I had some experience using Multi so I could picture this better. But is there a chance this is for a sandboxed execution environment that would allow models to interact with software alongside a human counterpart?
- ec109685 2y agoTheir blog shows their product: https://multi.app/blog/launching-multi-multiplayer-collaboration-for-macos https://multi.app/blog/launching-multi-multiplayer-collabora... It’s Remote Desktop, but allows more than one participant to connect at once.
- sethkim 2y agoIt became clear to me in the GPT-4o launch that OAI was interested in the "GitHub copilot for everything" route. With low-latency voice mode and the ability to take action on a user's behalf, this will basically feel like pair-programming for everything, or just having an employee who can do everything for you until they need your help or clarification. To power that experience, an app will need to feel "multiplayer" like someone else is working with you. They'll probably bundle this in the API and have "agent mode" that developers can embed in any app or website, or just let consumers give OAI access to control their desktop. It'll also likely work async, so you can assign tasks, walk away or go to sleep for a few hours, and see the results. This is speculation. But it feels like the interface that we'll look back on in ten years and say "that seemed obvious in hindsight."
- harry2quinn 2y agoAnyone else think 30 days is just not enough notice before shutting off access for a paid app? I totally understand free users getting a shorter notice period, but there's almost no instance where a paid user should get <60 days notice before being forced to migrate off a product they're using. This sort of thing leads to a lot of mistrust in trying / using a startup for anything remotely important.
- dcre 2y agoIt's on the short side, but this isn't a cloud database or whatever. Nobody is using it in production because it doesn't plug into your apps. There are any number of alternatives you can switch to and there's little productivity lost. https://tuple.app/ https://tuple.app/ is the most direct alternative (and excellent) but in the short term there's also VS Code live share, or screen sharing in whatever your main video chat app is.
- TechMax 2y ago[flagged]