22 ms·

Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

• cbarrick 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/Bas23 https://archive.ph/Bas23
• Roark66 2y ago
  >OpenAI plans to loose $5 billion this year Let that sink in for anyone that has incorporated Chatgpt in their work routines to the point their normal skills start to atrophy. Imagine in 2 years time OpenAI goes bust and MS gets all the IP. Now you can't really do your work without ChatGPT, but it cost has been brought up to how much it really costs to run. Maybe $2k per month per person? And you get about 1h of use per day for the money too... I've been saying for ages, being a luditite and abstaining from using AI is not the answer (no one is tiling the fields with oxen anymore either). But it is crucial to at the very least retain 50% of capability hosted models like Chatgpt offer locally.
  • switch007 2y ago
    $2k is way way cheaper than a junior developer which, if I had to guess their thinking, is who the Thought Leaders think it'll replace. Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired
    • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      Which thought leader is telling you to use AI or get fired?
      • switch007 2y ago
        My CTO (C level is automatically a Thought Leader)
    • CamperBob2 2y ago
      It's premature to think you can replace a junior developer with current technology, but it seems fairly obvious that it'll be possible within 5-10 years at most. We're well past the proof-of-concept stage IMO, based on extensive (and growing) personal experience with ML-authored code. Anyone who argues that the traditional junior-developer role isn't about to change drastically is whistling past the graveyard. Your C-suite execs are paid to skate where that particular puck is going. If they didn't, people would complain about their unhealthy fixation on the next quarter's revenue. Of course, if the junior-developer role is on the chopping block, then more experienced developers will be next. Finally, the so-called "thought leaders" will find themselves outcompeted by AI. The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage.
      • actsasbuffoon 2y ago
        Unless I’ve missed some major development then I have to strenuously disagree. AI is primarily good at writing isolated scripts that are no more than a few pages long. 99% of the work I do happens in a large codebase, far bigger than anything that you can feed into an AI. Tickets come in that say something like, “Users should be able to select multiple receipts to associate with their reports so long as they have the management role.” That ticket will involve digging through a whole bunch of files to figure out what needs to be done. The resolution will ultimately involve changes to multiple models, the database schema, a few controllers, a bunch of React components, and even a few changes in a micro service that’s not inside this repo. Then the AI is going to fail over and over again because it’s not familiar with the APIs for our internal libraries and tools, etc. AI is useful, but I don’t feel like we’re any closer to replacing software developers now than we were a few years ago. All of the same showstoppers remain.
        • luckydata 2y ago
          Google's LLM can ingest humongous contexts. Check it out.
        • CamperBob2 2y ago
    • srockets 2y ago
      I found those tools to resemble an intern: they can do some tasks pretty well, when explained just right, but others you'd spend more time guiding than it would have taken you to do it yourself. And rarely can you or the model/intern can tell ahead of time which tasks are in each of those categories. The difference is, interns grow and become useful in months: the current rate of improvements in those tools isn't even close to that of most interns.
      • luckydata 2y ago
        I have a slightly different view. IMHO LLMs are excellent rubber ducks or pair programmers. The rate at which I can try ideas and get them back is much higher than what I would be doing by myself. It gets me unstuck in places where I might have spent the best part of a day in the past.
        • srockets 2y ago
          My experience differs: if at all, they get me unstuck by trying to shove bad ideas, which allows me to realize "oh, that's bad, let's not do that". But it's also extremely frustrating, because a stream of bad ideas from a human has some hope they'll learn, but here I know I'll get the same BS, only with an annoying and inhumane apology boilerplate.
          • Kiro 2y ago
            Not my experience at all. What kind of code are you using it for?
            • guappa 2y ago
              Not everyone does CRUD applications.
    • kergonath 2y ago
      > Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired Ours told us not to use LLMs because they are worried about leaking IP and confidential data.
      • switch007 2y ago
        I think Enterprise plans mostly solve this. And Copilot is quite aggressive with blocking public code (haven't looked in to what that really means and what we've configured, I just get the error often)
        • guappa 2y ago
          Ah yes, because microsoft never had a leak right? I can absolutely not go on the internet and download the source code for windows, because microsoft's security is impeccable.
    • guappa 2y ago
      A junior developer gets better every day (hopefully), an AI is a blank slate every time more or less.
  • hggigg 2y ago
    I think this is the wrong way to think about it. It's more important to find a problem and see if this is a fit for the solution, not throw the technology at everything and see if it sticks. I have had no needs where it's an appropriate solution myself. In some areas it represents a net risk.
  • chrsw 2y ago
    What if your competition is willing to give up autonomy to companies like Microsoft/Open AI a bet to race head of you and it comes off?
    • achierius 2y ago
      It's a devil's bargain, and not just in terms of the _individual_ payoffs that OpenAI employees/executives might receive. There's a reason why Google/Microsoft/Amazon/... ultimately failed to take the lead in GenAI, despite every conceivable advantage (researchers, infrastructure, compute, established vendor relationships, ...). The "autonomy" of a startup is what allows it to be nimble; the more Microsoft is able to tell OpenAI what to do, the more I expect them to act like DeepMind, a research group set apart from their parent company but still beholden to it.
  • hmottestad 2y ago
    Cost tends to go down with time as compute becomes cheaper. And as long as there is competition in the AI space it's likely that other companies would step in and fill the void created by OpenAI going belly up.
    • infecto 2y ago
      I tend to think along the same lines. If they were the only player in town it would be different. I am also not convinced $5billion is that big of a deal for them, would be interesting to see their modeling but it would be a lot more suspect if they were raising money and increasing the price of the product. Also curious how much of that spend is R&D compared to running the system.
    • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      > Cost tends to go down with time as compute becomes cheaper. This is generally true but seems to be, if anything, inverted for AI. These models cost billions to train in compute, and OpenAI thus far has needed to put out a brand new one roughly annually in order to stay relevant. This would be akin to Apple putting out a new iPhone that costed billions to engineer year over year, but was giving the things away for free on the corner and only asking for money for the versions with more storage and what have you. The vast majority of AI adjacent companies too are just repackaging OpenAI's LLMs, the exceptions being ones like Meta, which certainly has a more solid basis what with being tied to an incredibly profitable product in Facebook, but also... it's Meta and I'm sure as shit not using their AI for anything, because it's Meta. I did some back of napkin math in a comment a ways back and landed on that in order to break even merely on training costs, not including the rest of the expenditure of the company, they would need to charge all of their current subscribers $150 per month, up from... I think the most expensive right now is about $20? So nearly an 8 fold price increase, with no attrition, to again break even. And I'm guessing all these investors they've had are not interested in a 0 sum.
      • Mistletoe 2y ago
        The closest analog seems to be bitcoin mining, which continually increases difficulty. And if you've ever researched how many bitcoin miners go under...
  • jdmoreira 2y ago
    Skills that will atrophy? People learnt those skills the hard way the first time around, do you really think they can't be sharpened again? This perspective makes zero sense. What makes sense is to extract as much value as possible as soon as possible and for as long as possible.
  • sebzim4500 2y ago
    The marginal cost of inference per token is lower than what OpenAI charges you (IIRC about 2x cheaper), they make a loss because of the enormous costs of R&D and training new models.
    • diggan 2y ago
      Did OpenAI publish concrete numbers regarding this, or where are you getting this data from?
      • lukeschlather 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833287 This says 506 tokens/second for Llama 405B on a machine with 8x H200s which you can rent for $4/GPU so probably $40/hour for a server with enough GPUs. And so it can do ~1.8M tokens per hour. OpenAI charges $10/1M output tokens for GPT4o. (input tokens and cached tokens are cheaper, but this is just ballpark estimates.) So if it were 405B it might cost $20/1M output tokens. Now, OpenAI is a little vague, but they have implied that GPT4o is actually only 60B-80B parameters. So they're probably selling it with a reasonable profit margin assuming it can do $5/1M output tokens at approximately 100B parameters. And even if they were selling it at cost, I wouldn't be worried because a couple years from now Nvidia will release H300s that are at least 30% more efficient and that will cause a profit margin to materialize without raising prices. So if I have a use case that works with today's models, I will be able to rent the same thing a year or two from now for roughly the same price.
    • ignoramous 2y ago
      > The marginal cost of inference per token is lower than what OpenAI charges you Unlike most Gen AI shops, OpenAI also incurs a heavy cost for traning base models gunning for SoTA, which involves drawing power from a literal nuclear reactor inside data centers.
      • fransje26 2y ago
        > from a literal nuclear reactor inside data centers. No.
  • b112 2y ago
    The cost of current compute for current versions pf chatgpt will have dropped through the floor in 2 years, due to processing improvements and on die improvements to silicon. Power requirements will drop too. As well, as people adopt, the output of training costs will be averaged over an ever increasing market of licensing sales. Looking at the cost today, and sales today in a massively, rapidly expanding market, is not how to assess costs tomorrow. I will say one thing, those that need gpt to code will be the first to go. Becoming a click-click, just passing on chatgpt output, will relegate those people to minimum wage. We already have some of this sort, those that cannot write a loop in their primary coding language without stackoverflow, or those that need an IDE to fill in correct function usage. Those who code in vi, while reading manpages need not worry.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      > We already have some of this sort, those that cannot write a loop in their primary coding language without stackoverflow, or those that need an IDE to fill in correct function usage. > Those who code in vi, while reading manpages need not worry I think that's the wrong dichotomy: LLMs are fine at turning man pages into working code. In huge codebases, LLMs do indeed lose track and make stuff up… but that's also where IDEs giving correct function usage is really useful for humans. The way I think we're going to change, is that "LGTM" will no longer be sufficient depth of code review: LLMs can attend to more than we can, but they can't attend as well as we can. And, of course, we will be getting a lot of LLM-generated code, and having to make sure that it really does what we want, without surprise side-effects.
    • nuancebydefault 2y ago
      > Those who code in vi, while reading manpages need not worry. That sounds silly at first read, but there are indeed people who are so stubborn to still use numbered zip files on a usb flash drive in stead of source control systems, or prefer to use their own scheduler over an RTOS. They will survive, they fill a niche, but I would not say they can do full stack development or be even easy to collaborate with.
    • whoisthemachine 2y ago
      You had me until vi.
  • singularity2001 2y ago
    people kept whining about Amazon losing money and called me stupid for buying their stock...
    • empath75 2y ago
      Depending on when you bought it, it was a pretty risky play until AWS came out and got traction. Their retail business _still_ doesn't make money.
    • bmitc 2y ago
      Why does everyone always like to compare every company to Amazon? Those companies are never like Amazon, which is one of the most entrenched companies ever.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        While I agree the comparison is not going to provide useful insights, in fairness to them Amazon wasn't entrenched at the time they were making huge losses each year.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      As I recall, while Amazon was doing this, there was no comparable competition from other vendors that properly understood the internet as a marketplace? Closest was eBay? There is real competition now that plenty of big box stores' websites also list things you won't see in the stores themselves*, but then also Amazon is also making a profit now. I think the current situation with LLMs is a dollar auction, where everyone is incentivised to pay increasing costs to outbid the others, even though this has gone from "maximise reward" to "minimise losses": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction * One of my local supermarkets in Germany sells 4-room "garden sheds" that are substantially larger than the apartment I own in the UK: https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/
    • bigstrat2003 2y ago
      And for every Amazon, there are a hundred other companies that went out of business because they never could figure out how to turn a profit. You made a bet which paid off and that's cool, but that doesn't mean the people telling you it was a bad bet were wrong.
  • bmitc 2y ago
    Fine with me. I've even considered turning off Copilot completely because I use it less and less.
    • simonswords82 2y ago
      Copilot really is garbage and I just don’t understand why. Is Microsoft not using OpenAIs latest models?
  • InkCanon 2y ago
    I would just switch to Claude of Mistral like I already do. I really feel little difference between them
    • mprev 2y ago
      I like how your typo makes it sound like a medieval sage.
      • card_zero 2y ago
        Let me consult my tellingbone.
  • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    I used to be concerned with this back when GPT4 originally came out and was way more impressive than the current version and OpenAI was the only game in town. But Nowadays GPT has been quantized and cost-optimized to hell that it's no longer as useful as it was and with Claude or Gemini or whatever it's no longer noticeably better than any of them so it doesn't really matter what happens with their pricing.
    • edg5000 2y ago
      Are you saying they reduced the quality of the model in order to save compute? Would it make sense for them to offer a premium version of the model at at a very high price? At least offer it to those willing to pay? It would not make sense to reduce output quality only to save on compute at inference, why not offer a premium (and perhaps perhaps slower) tier? Unless the cost is at training time, maybe it would not be cost-effective for them to keep a model like that up to date. As you can tell I am a bit uninformed on the topic.
      • bt1a 2y ago
        Yeah, as someone who had access to gpt-4 early in 2023, the endpoint used to take over a minute to respond and the quality of the responses was mindblowing. Simply too expensive to serve at scale, not to mention the silicon constraints that are even more prohibitive when the organization needs to lock up a lot of their compute for training The Next Big Model. Thats a lot of compute that cant be on standby for serving inference
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    > being a luditite and abstaining from using AI is not the answer Hum... The judge is still out on that one, but the evidence is piling up into the "yes, not using it is what works best" here. Personally, my experience is strongly negative, and I've seen other people get very negative results from it too. Maybe it will improve so much that at some point people actually get positive value from it. My best guess is that we are not there yet.
    • bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Yeah, I agree. It's not "being a Luddite" to take a look and conclude that the tool doesn't actually deliver the value it claims to. When AI can actually reliably do the things its proponents say it can do, I'll use it. But as of today it can't, and I have no use for tools that only work some of the time.
    • Kiro 2y ago
      It's not either or. In my specific situation Cursor is such a productivity booster that I can't imagine going back. It's not a theoretical question.
      • epolanski 2y ago
        +1, people that are giving up on tools like Cursor are just less productive, that's not theoretical, that's a fact.
    • int_19h 2y ago
      Machine translation alone is a huge positive value. What GPT can do in this area is vastly better than anything before it.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • righthand 2y ago
    Being a luddite has it’s advantages as you won’t succumb to the ills of society trying to push you there. To believe that it’s inevitable LLMs will be required to work is silly in my opinion. As these corps eat more and more good will of the content on the internet for only their gain, people will and have already started defecting from it. Many of my coworkers have shut off CoPilot, though still occasionally use ChatGPT. But since the power really only is adding randomization to established working document templates, the gain is only of a short amount of working time. There is also the active and passive efforts to poison the well. As LLMs are used to output more content and displace people, the LLMs will be trained on the limited regurgitation available to the public (passive). Then there’s the people intentionally creating bad content to be ingested. It really is a lose for big service llm companies as the local models become more and more good enough (active).
  • zuminator 2y ago
    Where are you getting $2k/person/month? ChatGPT allegedly has on the order of 100 million users. Divide that by $5b and you get a $50 deficit per person per year. Meaning they could raise their prices by less than four and a half dollars per user to break even. Even if they were to only gouge the current ~11 million paying subscribers, that's around $40/person/month over current fees to break even. Not chump change, but nowhere close to $2k/person/month.
    • ants_everywhere 2y ago
      I think the question is more how much the market will bear in a world where MS owns the OpenAI IP and it's only available as an Azure service. That's a different question from what OpenAI needs to break even this year.
    • directevolve 2y ago
      [dead]
    • alpha_squared 2y ago
      What you're suggesting is the basic startup math for any typical SaaS business. The problem is OpenAI and the overall AI space is raising funding on the promise of being much more than a SaaS. If we ignore all the absurd promises ("it'll solve all of physics"), the promise to investors is distilled down to this being the dawn of a new era of computing and investors have responded by pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars into the space. At that level of investment, I sure hope the plan is to be more than a break-even SaaS.
    • layer8 2y ago
      > ChatGPT allegedly has on the order of 100 million users. That’s users, not subscribers. Apparently they have around 10 million ChatGPT Plus subscribers plus 1 million business-tier users: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-coo-says-chatgpt-passed-11-million-paying-subscribers https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-coo-says-chat... To break even, that means that ChatGPT Plus would have to cost around $50 per month, if not more because less people will be willing to pay that.
  • X6S1x6Okd1st 2y ago
    Chatgpt doesn't have much of a moat. Claude is comparable for coding tasks and llama isn't far behind. No biz collapse will remove llama from the world, so if you're worried about tools disappearing then just only use tools that can't disappear
    • mlnj 2y ago
      And Zuckerberg has vowed to pump billions more into developing and releasing more Llama. I believe "Altman declaring AGI is almost here" was peak OpenAI and now I will just have some popcorn ready.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • Spivak 2y ago
    Take the "millennial subsidy" while the money font still floweth. If it gets cut off eventually so be it.
  • AlwaysRock 2y ago
    Is anyone using it to the point where their skills start to atrophy? I use it fairly often but mostly for boilerplate code or simple tasks. The stuff that has specific syntax that I have to look up anyway. That feels like saying that using spell check or autocomplete will make one's spelling abilities atrophy.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• WithinReason 2y ago
  Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?
  • mhh__ 2y ago
    It's possible that it's only one strong personality and some money away but my guess is that OpenAI-rosoft have the best stack for doing inference "seriously" at big, big, scale e.g. moving away from hacky research python code and so on.
    • erickj 2y ago
      Its pretty hard to ignore Google in any discussion on big scale
      • mhh__ 2y ago
        Completely right. Was basically only thinking about OpenAI versus Anthropic. Oops
        • XenophileJKO 2y ago
          Google in their corporate structure, is to cautious to be a serious competitor.
          • tim333 2y ago
            I'm not so sure about that. They have kind of opposite incentives to OpenAI. OpenAI starting without much money had to hype the AGI next year stuff to get billions given to them. Google on the other hand is in such a dominant position with most of the search market, much of the ad market, ownership of Deepmind, huge amounts of data and money and so on probably don't want to be seen as a potential monopoly to be broken up. Also Sergey Brin is back in there working on AI.
      • luckydata 2y ago
        They seem to have managed to do so just fine :)
• mikeryan 2y ago
  While technical AI and LLMs are not something I’m well versed in. So as I sit on the sidelines and see the current proliferation of AI startups I’m starting to wonder where the moats are outside of access to raw computing power. Open AI seemed to have a massive lead in this space but that lead seems to be shrinking every day.
  • weberer 2y ago
    Obtaining high quality training data is the biggest moat right now.
    • segasaturn 2y ago
      Where are they going to get that data? Everything on the open web after 2023 is polluted with lowquality AI slop that poisons the data sets. My prediction: Aggressive dragnet surveillance of users. As in, Google recording your phone calls on Android, Windows sending screen recordings from Recall to OpenAI, Meta training off Whatsapp messages... It sounds dystopian, but the Line Must Go Up.
      • jazzyjackson 2y ago
        I'm really curious if Microsoft will ever give in to the urge to train on private business data - since transitioning office to o365, they hold the world's and even governments word documents and emails. I'm pretty sure they've promised never to touch it but they can certainly read it so... Information wants to be free.
        • jhickok 2y ago
          Microsoft "trains" on business data already, but typically for things like fine-tuning security automation and recognizing malicious signals. It sure would be a big step to reading chats and email and feeding them in to a model.
        • ENGNR 2y ago
          Slack tried it but the backlash got them, this time anyway.
• twoodfin 2y ago
  Stay for the end and the hilarious idea that OpenAI’s board could declare one day that they’ve created AGI simply to weasel out of their contract with Microsoft.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    Microsoft themselves were the ones who wrote the "Sparks of AGI" paper. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712
  • candiddevmike 2y ago
    Ask a typical "everyday joe" and they'll probably tell you they already did due to how ChatGPT has been reported and hyped. I've spoken with/helped quite a few older folks who are terrified that ChatGPT in its current form is going to kill them.
    • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      It's crazy to me that anybody thinks that these models will end up with AGI. AGI is such a different concept from what is happening right now which is pure probabilistic sampling of words that anybody with a half a brain who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid can easily identify. I remember all the hype open ai had done before the release of chat GPT-2 or something where they were so afraid, ooh so afraid to release this stuff and now it's a non-issue. it's all just marketing gimmicks.
      • guappa 2y ago
        I think they were afraid to release because of all the racist stuff it'd say…
      • usaar333 2y ago
        Something that actually could predict the next token 100% correctly would be omniscient. So I hardly see why this is inherently crazy. At most I think it might not be scalable.
• farrelle25 2y ago
  This reporting style seems unusual. Haven't noticed it before...(listing the number of people): - according to four people familiar with the talks ... - according to interviews with 19 people familiar with the relationship ... - according to five people with knowledge of his comments. - according to two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans. - according to five people familiar with the relationship ... - according to two people familiar with the call. - according to seven people familiar with the discussions. - six people with knowledge of the change said... - according to two people familiar with the company’s plan. - according to two people familiar with the meeting... - according to three people familiar with the relationship.
  • mikeryan 2y ago
    It’s a relatively common way to provide journalistic bonafides when you can’t reveal the sources names.
    • ABS 2y ago
      yes but usually not every other paragraph, I count 16 instances!! It really made it hard for me to read the article without being continuously distracted by those
      • mikeryan 2y ago
        I had to go back and scan it but usually there are at least a few named sources and I didn’t see any in this (there’s third party observer quotes - and I may have missed one?) so I’d not be surprised if this is a case where they double down on this.
        • jprete 2y ago
          It's generally bad writing to use the same phrase structure over and over and over again. It either bores or distracts the reader for no real advantage. Unless they really could not find an adjective clause other than "familiar with" for sixteen separate instances of the concept.
• jampekka 2y ago
  So the plan is to make AI not-evil by doing it with Microsoft and Oracle?
  • deleted 2y ago
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• neilv 2y ago
  Who initiated this story, and what is their goal? Both MS and Altman are famous for manipulation. (Is it background to negotiations with each other? Or one party signaling in response to issues that analysts already raised? Distancing for antitrust? Distancing for other partnerships? Some competitor of both?)
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • startupsfail 2y ago
    To me it looks like this is simply New York Times that is into unraveling OpenAI’s and Microsoft dirty laundry for fun and profit. It’s funny they’ve quoted “best bromance”, considering the context.
• strangattractor 2y ago
  M$ is just having a "Oh I just bought Twitter for how much?" moment.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • chucke1992 2y ago
    Except MSFT got OpenAI extremely cheap. They invested in them early on and basically are paying them with Azure credits.
• solarkraft 2y ago
  How come I rarely see news about Anthropic? Aren’t they the closest competitor to ChatGPT with Claude? Or is LLama just so good that all the other inference providers without own products (Groq, Cerebras) are equally interesting right now?
  • jowday 2y ago
    Usually the people that give information to outlets in cases like this are directly involved in the stories in question and are hoping to gain some advantage by releasing the information. So maybe this is just a tactic that’s not as favored by Anthropic leaderships/their counterparties when negotiating.
  • dangsux 2y ago
    [dead]
  • rblatz 2y ago
    I think they’re just focused on the work. Amazon is set to release a version of Alexa powered by Claude soon, when that is released I expect to hear a lot more about them.
  • gman83 2y ago
    Because there's less drama? I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet every day for helping me with coding. It seems to just work. It's been much better than GPT-4 for me, haven't tried o1, but don't really feel the need, very happy with Claude.
    • ponty_rick 2y ago
      Sonnet 3.5 is phenomenal for coding, so much better than GPT or Llama 405 or anything else out there.
      • douglasisshiny 2y ago
        I've heard this and haven't really experienced it with Go, typescript, elixir yet. I don't doubt the claim, but I wonder if I'm not prompting it correctly or something.
• uptownfunk 2y ago
  Sam is a scary good guy. But I’ve also learned to never underestimate Microsoft. They’ve been playing the game a long long time.
  • Implicated 2y ago
    > Sam is a scary good guy. No snark/sarcasm - can you elaborate on this? This doesn't seem in line with most opinions of him that I encounter.
    • jeffbee 2y ago
      No other genius could have given us Loopt.
      • whamlastxmas 2y ago
        If we’re judging everyone by their failures then Warren Buffet is an idiot because he lost half a billion on a shoe company in the 90s
        • jeffbee 2y ago
          Possibly, I am just trying to separate the man's abilities from his good luck. Grade him on the basis of how much success he achieves versus anyone else who has tens of millions of dollars dropped in his lap.
    • themacguffinman 2y ago
      "Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful." "You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." - Paul Graham
      • uptownfunk 2y ago
        Yes this is what I am referring. I’m not saying he is like the boy coder genius, he is good at becoming and staying king. And if you look at all the departures of some of today’s brilliant technology innovators, perhaps it tells you why. Don’t fly too close to the sun.
• aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • readyplayernull 2y ago
    Confirmed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824
  • deleted 2y ago
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• cynicalpeace 2y ago
  I'm betting against OpenAI. Sam Altman has proven himself and his company untrustworthy. In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out. If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation.
  • caeril 2y ago
    > Sam Altman has proven himself and his company untrustworthy Did I miss a memo? This is one of the largest [citation needed] I've seen on this site in some time. Did he kick a puppy?
    • latexr 2y ago
      Heard of Worldcoin, for starters? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-... https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
  • cynicalpeace 2y ago
    A telling quote about Sam, besides the "island of cannibals" one. Is actually one Sam published himself: "Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions" This definition of success is founded on power and control. It's one of the worst definitions you could choose. There are nobler definitions, like "Successful people have many friends and family" or "Successful people are useful to their compatriots" Sam's published definition (to be clear, he was quoting someone else and then published it) tells you everything you need to know about his priorities.
    • mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Those are boring definitions of success. If you can’t create a stable family, your not successful at one facet, but you could be at another (eg musk.).
• stephencoyner 2y ago
  For folks who are skeptical about OpenAI's potential, I think Brad Gerstner does a really good job representing the bull case for them (his firm Altimeter was a major investor in their recent round). - They reached their current revenue of ~$5B about 2.5 years faster than Google and about 4.5 years faster than Facebook - Their valuation to forward revenue (based on current growth) is inline with where Google and Facebook IPO'd He explains it all much better than I could type - https://youtu.be/ePfNAKopT20?si=kX4I-uE0xDeAaWXN&t=80 https://youtu.be/ePfNAKopT20?si=kX4I-uE0xDeAaWXN&t=80
  • youoy 2y ago
    Does OpenAI's revenue per user increase with each new user? I don't think so, but it was definitely the case with Google and Facebook . That's a big difference that you can not overlook
    • x_may 2y ago
      I think right now they lose more money with each user. But maybe their value lies in training data
  • cynicalpeace 2y ago
    OpenAI is not profitable. That was OK in the case of Google and Facebook because switching off of either platform was too costly for a consumer. Clear path to profitability. But OpenAI is super easy to switch off of. You can plug and play models very easily.
• qwertox 2y ago
  OpenAI would deserve to get dumped by MS. Just like "the boss" dumped everyone, including his own principles. Maybe that's why Sam Altman is so eager to get billions and build his own datacenters.
  • mossTechnician 2y ago
    If Microsoft and OpenAI split up, can't Microsoft keep the house, the car, and the kids? > One particular thing to note is that Brockman stated that Microsoft would get access to sell OpenAI's pre-AGI products based off of [OpenAI's research] to Microsoft's customers, and in the accompanying blog post added that Microsoft and OpenAI were "jointly developing new Azure AI supercomputing technologies." > Pre-AGI in this case refers to anything OpenAI has ever developed, as it has yet to develop AGI and has yet to get past the initial "chatbot" stage of its own 5-level system of evaluating artificial intelligence. Sources to text from https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/
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• bansheeps 2y ago
  I'm calling it right now: there's a Microsoft/OpenAI breakup imminent (over ownership, rights, GTM etc) that's going to be extremely contested and cause OpenAI to go into a Stability AI type tailspin.
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• dekhn 2y ago
  Microsoft's goal here is to slowly extract every bit of unique ML capability out of OpenAI (note the multiple mentions about IP and security wrt MSFT employees working with OpenAI) so that they can compete with Google to put ML features in their products. When they know they have all the crown jewels, they will reduce then eliminate their support of OpenAI. This was, is, and will be a strategic action by Satya. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish". We're in the second stage now.
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• ein0p 2y ago
  This is NYT, so there’s about 95% chance they made it all up for clicks. And you’re giving them clicks.
• justahuman74 2y ago
  It's 100% unsurprising that two companies that aren't completely controlled by the same investors are having friendship issues
• tylerchilds 2y ago
  i remember satya saying “we have all the rights and capabilities” once microsoft believed they owned sam. not a healthy dynamic.
• mark_l_watson 2y ago
  Fun watching this all unfold. I am starting to suspect that LLMs, short term for a few years, will end up mostly having value as assistants to experts in their fields who know how to prompt and evaluate output. I see an ocean of startups doing things like ‘AI accounting systems’ that scare me a little. I just don’t feel good having LLM based systems making unsupervised important decisions. I do love designing and writing software with LLMs, but that is supervised activity that save me a ton of time. I also enjoy doing fun things with advanced voice mode for ChatGPT, like practicing speaking in French - again, a supervised activity. re: ownership of IP: I find the idea hilarious that by OpenAI declaring ‘AGI achieved!’ that Microsoft might get cut out of IP rights it has supposedly paid for.
  • sotix 2y ago
    > I see an ocean of startups doing things like ‘AI accounting systems’ that scare me a little. I’m a CPA and software engineer currently interviewing around for dev positions, and most of the people I’ve encountered running these companies are neither CPAs nor accountants and have little domain knowledge. It’s a scary combination with an LLM that demands professional skepticism for every word it says. I wouldn’t trust those companies in their current state.
    • lolinder 2y ago
      This brings up an interesting point, which is that it's likely that software developers overestimate the capabilities of LLMs in other domains because our own domain is so thoroughly documented on the internet. From what I've been able to gather interacting with other sectors, it seems like software is pretty unique in having a culture of sharing everything—tools, documentation, best practices, tutorials, blogs—online for free. Most professions can't be picked up by someone learning on their own from nothing but the internet in the way that software can. I strongly suspect that the result will be that LLMs (being trained on the internet) do substantially better on software related tasks than they do in other domains, but software developers may be largely blind to that difference since they're not experts in the other domain.
  • cynicalpeace 2y ago
• dzonga 2y ago
  why would teh relationship fray ? when microsoft has openAI by the balls. They just don't own it "legally" due to monopoly concerns from DOJ. But they own it. Remember microsoft is entitled to 49% of OpenAI's profits till they recoup their investment. That's like the protection fee you pay to the mafia boss.
• TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
  New York Times is suing Open AI... Take all this conjecture with a grain of salt... There's alllloooottt of hearsay in this article.