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Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
- doublebind 2y agoOriginal story: Microsoft’s AI Guru Wants Independence From OpenAI. That’s Easier Said Than Done, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-guru-wants-independence-from-openai-thats-easier-said-than-done https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-guru-w...
- mirekrusin 2y agoI don't get this "easier said than done" part. There are really not that many things in this world you can swap as easily as models. Api surface is stable and minimal, even at the scale that microsoft is serving swapping is trivial compared to other things they're doing daily. There is enough of open research results to boost their phi or whatever model and be done with this toxic to humanity, closed, for profit company.
- gregw2 2y agoSwapping LLM models isn't hard, but if you build a production app or business process around it, how much time/effort is the testing to have confidence? Which is easier when maintaining an LLM business process, swapping in the latest model or just leaving some old model alone and deferring upgrades? Swapping is easy for ad hoc queries or version 1 but I think there's a big mess waiting to be handled.
- jsemrau 2y agoFor cloud providers it makes sense to be model agnostic. While we still live in a datacenter driven world, models will become more efficient and move down the value chain to consumer devices. For Enterprise, these companies will need to regulate model risk and having models fine-tuned on proprietary data at scale will be an important competitive differentiator.
- aresant 2y agoThematically investing billions into startup AI frontier models makes sense if you believe in first-to-AGI likely worth a trillion dollars + Investing in second/third place likely valuable at similar scales too But outside of that MSFTs move indicates that frontier models most valuable current use case - enterprise-level API users - are likely to be significantly commoditized And likely majority of proceeds will be captured by (a) those with integrated product distribution - MSFT in this case and (b) data center partners for inference and query support
- j45 2y agoFirst to AGI for the big companies? Or for the masses? Computationally, some might have access to it earlier before it’s scalable.
- Retric 2y agoProfit from say 3 years of enterprise AGI exclusivity is unlikely to be worth the investment. It’s moats that capture most value not short term profits.
- alabastervlog 2y agoAt this point, I don’t see much reason to believe the “AGI is imminent and these things are potentially dangerous!” line at all. It looks like it was just Altman doing his thing where he makes shit up to hype whatever he’s selling. Worked great, too. “Oooh, it’s so dangerous, we’re so concerned about safety! Also, you better buy our stuff.”
- laluser 2y agoI think they both want a future without each other. OpenAI will eventually want to vertically integrate up towards applications (Microsoft's space) and Microsoft wants to do the opposite in order to have more control over what is prioritized, control costs, etc.
- Spooky23 2y agoI think OpenAI is toxic. Weird corporate governmance shadiness. The Elon drama, valuations based on claims that seem like the AI version of the Uber for X hype of a decade ago (but exponentially crazier). The list goes on. Microsoft is the IBM of this century. They are conservative, and I think they’re holding back — their copilot for government launch was delayed months for lack of GPUs. They have the money to make that problem go away.
- skinnymuch 2y agoIBM of this century in a good way?
- optimalsolver 2y agoIBM of the early 1940s.
- Spooky23 2y agoIn this context, it’s not good or bad, it just is.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoToxic indeed. It's douchebaggery, from its name to its CEO. They ripped off benefactors to their "non-profit," and kept the fraudulent "open" in the company name.
- bredren 2y agoDespite the actual performance and product implementation, this suggests to me Apple's approach was more strategic. That is, integrating use of their own model, amplifying capability via OpenAI queries. Again, this is not to drum up the actual quality of the product releases so far--they haven't been good--but the foundation of "we'll try to rely on our own models when we can" was the right place to start from.
- strangescript 2y agoI think they have realized that even if OpenAI is first, it won't last long so really its just compute at scale, which is something they already do themselves.
- echelon 2y agoThere is no moat in models (OpenAI). There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave). There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda). Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)
- drumhead 2y agoIs anyone other than Nvdia making money from this particular gold rush?
- kittikitti 2y agoSurprising how Sam Altman's firing as CEO of OpenAI and moving to Microsoft wasn't mentioned in this article.
- electriclove 2y agoDo you have a source?
- selimthegrim 2y agoThey mean the past events.
- DeathArrow 2y agoIt's only logical. OpenAI it's too expensive for what it produces. Deep Seek is on par with ChatGPT and the cost was lower. Claude development costs less, too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- knowitnone 2y agoGood. I'm plotting a future without Microsoft
- DidYaWipe 2y agoLook out; I was downvoted for enjoying a present without it.
- meepmeepinator 2y ago[flagged]
- mattlondon 2y agoWhy not just use GCP? It is already model agnostic https://console.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/model-garden https://console.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/model-garden There is even deepseek on there.
- agentultra 2y agoI had skimmed the headline and thought, "Microsoft is plotting a future without AI," and was hopeful. Then I read the article. Plotting for a future without Microsoft.
- mirekrusin 2y agoFirst quarter summary of this year is "AI is plotting future without OpenAI or Microsoft".
- CodeCompost 2y agoJust partner with Deepseek
- Frederation 2y agoWhy.
- keernan 2y agoFrom the article: Suleyman’s team has also been testing alternatives from companies like xAI, DeepSeek, and Meta
- rdtsc 2y agoThey probably saw the latest models like gpt 4.5 not being as revolutionary as expected and deepseek and others catching up.
- thewebguyd 2y agoI think Microsoft isn't buying the AGI hype from OpenAI, and wants to move to be more model agnostic, and instead do what Microsoft (thinks) it does best, and that's tooling, and enterprise products. MS wants to push Copilot, and will be better off not being tied to OpenAI but having Copilot be model agnostic, like GH Copilot can use other models already. They are going to try and position Azure as "the" place to run your own models, etc.
- rdtsc 2y ago> instead do what Microsoft (thinks) it does best, and that's tooling, and enterprise products. Definitely, but I think it's because they saw OpenAI's moat get narrower and shallower, so to speak. As the article mentions it's still looking like a longer timeline [quote] "but Microsoft still holds exclusive rights to OpenAI’s models for its own products until 2030. That’s a long timeline to unravel."
- kandesbunzler 2y ago[dead]
- goyel 2y ago[dead]
- only-one1701 2y agoMaybe I'm just cynical, but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the documentation for the current major version of Angular wasn't nearly good enough to meet this stated goal. My TL at the time laughed and said the person who spearheaded that initiative was already living large in their mansion on the hill and didn't give a flying f about the fate of Angular now.
- skepticATX 2y agoListening to Satya in recent interviews I think makes it clear that he doesn’t really buy into OpenAI’s religious-like view of AGI. I think the divorce makes a lot of sense in light of this.
- herval 2y agoIt feels like not even OpenAI buys into it much these days either
- keeganpoppen 2y agooh it is absolutely about that
- bsimpson 2y agoThere is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoThese people should be fired. I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit. But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel.
- RobertDeNiro 2y agoxAI could do it, deepseek could do it . Microsoft can as well. It’s not hard to see
- rafaelmn 2y agoI'd be willing to bet that the largest use of LLMs they have is GitHub copilot and Claude should be the default there. OpenAI has not been interesting to me for a long time, every time I try it I get the same feeling. Some of the 4.5 posts have been surprisingly good, I really like the tone. Hoping they can distill that into their future models.
- DebtDeflation 2y agoA couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll never even come close to breaking even.
- paxys 2y agoIt's pretty funny that OpenAI wants to sell access to a "PhD level" model at a price with which you can hire like 3-5 real human PhDs full-time.
- laughingcurve 2y agoThat is just not correct. As someone who has done the budgets for PhD hiring and funding, you are just wildly underestimating the overhead costs, benefits, cost of raising money, etc.
- zombiwoof 2y agoRespectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them.
- 0_____0 2y agoWhat region and what field?
- yifanl 2y agoRight, which is substantially less than the stated $20k/month. edit: I see we're actually in agreement, sorry, I read the indentation level wrong.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> Respectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them. Does that include all overheads such as HR, payroll, etc?
- paxys 2y agoMicrosoft's corporate structure and company culture is actively hostile to innovation of any kind. This was true in Ballmer's era and is equally true today, no matter how many PR wins Nadella is able to pull off. The company justifies its market cap by selling office software and cloud services contracts to large corporations and governments via an army of salespeople and lobbyists, and that is what it will continue to be successful at. It got lucky by backing OpenAI at the right time, but the delusion of becoming an independent AI powerhouse like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta etc. will never be a reality. Stuff like this is simply not in the company's DNA.
- slt2021 2y agoyou are right, Microsoft is a hodge podge of legacy on-premise software, legacy software lifted and shifted to the cloud, and some innovation pockets. Microsoft bread and butter is Enterprise bloatware and large Enterprise deals where everything in the world is bundled together for use-it-or-lose-it contracts. Its not really much different from IBM like a two decades ago
- feyman_r 2y agoIt does seem though that this legacy-cloud-pocket-innovation combination continues to work without slowing down. It also what was said for Microsoft 15 years ago too (not really much different from IBM..), which is correct from one perspective, but not turning out true from revenue, market cap, growth terms. My thinking is that Lindy Effect runs strong in a lot of Big Tech, and with deep pockets, they can afford to not be innovators but build moats on existing frameworks.
- feyman_r 2y agoHow does one define an AI powerhouse? If its building models, a smart business wouldn't bank on that alone. There is no moat. If the definition of an AI Powerhouse is more about the capability to host models and process workloads, Amazon (the other company missing in that list) and Microsoft are definitely them.
- asciii 2y agoClear as day when he said this during the openai fiasco: "we have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. we are below them, above them, around them." -- satya nadella
- optimalsolver 2y agoSounds like just the kind of person you'd want in command of a powerful AGI.
- bagacrap 2y agoThere is no one I would want in charge of that
- kandesbunzler 2y ago[dead]
- lemoncookiechip 2y agoInsert Toy Story "I don't want to play with you anymore." meme here.
- cft 2y agoOpenAI will in the end be aquired for less than its current valuation. Initially, I've been paying for Claude (coding), Cursor (coding), OpenAI (general, coding), and then started paying for Claude Code API credits. Now I canceled OpenAI and Claude general subscriptions, because for general tasks, Grok and DeepSeek more than suffice. General purpose AI will unlikely be subscription-based, unlike the specialized (professional) one. I'm now only paying for Claude Code API credits and still paying for Cursor.
- skinnymuch 2y agoI have to look at Claude Code. I pay for Cursor right now.
- cft 2y agoClaude Code is another level, because it's agentic. It iterates. Although it keeps you further from the codebase than Cursor and thus you may lose the grasp of what it generates- that's why I still use Cursor, before the manual review.
- BeetleB 2y agoConsider Aider. Open source. Agentic as well. And you can control the context it sends (apparently not as much in Code).
- partiallypro 2y agoMicrosoft is just so bad at marketing their products, and their branding is confusing. Unfortunately, until they fix that, any consumer facing product is going to falter. Look at the new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 rebrands just of late. The business side of things will still make money but watching them flounder on consumer facing products is just so frustrating. The Surface and Xbox brand are the only 2 that seem to have somewhat escaped the gravity of the rest of the organization in terms of that, but nothing all that polished or groundbreaking has really come out of Microsoft from a consumer facing standpoint in over a decade now. Microsoft could build the best AI around but it doesn't matter without users.
- Enginerrrd 2y agoYeah, the office suite is such a cash cow. It is polished, feature rich, and ubiquitous compared to alternatives and somehow has remained so for decades. And yet, I'm increasingly getting seriously concerned they are going to break it so badly I'll need to find an alternative.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoIf you don't already think it is broken beyond repair, you're never going to get there. Office is disgraceful trash now, a sad fall (especially of Word) from where it once was.
- Enginerrrd 2y agoHard disagree. Their web-based offerings actually really suck beyond the point I could ever tolerate. Unusably bad. There have been murmurs that they want to go that direction entirely.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoI don't see how that's disagreeing. I totally agree with this statement.
- 2y ago
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoSoftbank’s Masa’s magic is convincing everyone, every time, that he hasn’t consistently top ticked every market he’s invested in for the last decade. Maybe Satya’s finally broken himself of the spell [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/business/dealbook/softbank-son-openai-altman.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/business/dealbook/softban...
- DidYaWipe 2y agoMeanwhile I'm enjoying a present without Microsoft.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoDownvoted by a Stockholm-syndrome victim.
- iambateman 2y agoIf I invested $13 billion dollars, I’d expect to get answers to questions like “how does the product work” too.
- maxrmk 2y agoIf it's Mustafa vs Sam Altman, I know where I'd put my money. As much as I like Satya Nadella I think he's made some major hiring mistakes.
- throwaway5752 2y agoThey don't buy or acquire what they can build internally, and they partner with startups to learn if they can build it. This is not new.
- outside1234 2y agoThe more surprising thing would be if Microsoft wasn’t hedging their bets and planning for both a future WITH and WITHOUT OpenAI. This is just want companies at $2T scale do.
- shuri 2y agoExactly.
- d--b 2y agoOpenAI is over ambitious. Their chasing of AGI is killing them. They probably thought that burning cash was the way to get to AGI, and that on the way there they would make significant improvements over GPT 4 that they would be able to release as GPT 5. And that is just not happening. While pretty much everyone else is trying to increase efficiency, and specialize their models to niche areas, they keep on chasing AGI. Meanwhile more and more models are being delivered within apps, where they create more value than in an isolated chat window. And OpenAi doesn’t control those apps. So they’re slowly being pushed out. Unless they pull off yet another breakthrough, I don’t think they have much of a great future
- nprateem 2y agoI think you misunderstand. The purpose of a business is for the founders to get rich. They already have by pumping AGI, etc. It's been a stunning success. Investors OTOH...
- guccihat 2y agoCurrently, it feels like many of the frontier models have reached approximately the same level of 'intelligence' and capability. No one is leaps ahead of the rest. Microsoft probably figured this is a good time to reconsider their AI strategy.
- goyel 2y ago[dead]
- _giorgio_ 2y agoClearly you don't use models so much. Even in the openAI ecosystem there are models that, while similar in theory, produce very different results, so much that some murderous are unusable. So even small differences translate to enormous differences.
- guccihat 2y agoI use AI everyday for work, mostly models from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek. In my experience none of them completely dominate the others. You seem to disagree strongly but then just state your argument, which model or company do you think is the clear leader currently and why? The AI race is super close and interesting at the moment in my opinion.
- _giorgio_ 2y agoO1
- danielovichdk 2y agoBallmer would have caught this earlier. Watch. Nadella will not steer this correctly
- debacle 2y agoIt's clear that OpenAI has peaked. Possibly because the AI hype in general has peaked, but I think moreso because the opportunity has become flooded and commoditized, and only the fetishists are still True Believers (which is something we saw during the crypto hype days, but most at the time decried it). Nothing against them, but the solutions have become commoditized, and OpenAI is going to lack the network effects that these other companies have. Perhaps there will be new breakthroughs in the near future that produce even more value, but how long can a moat be sustained? All of them in AI are filled in faster than the are dug.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoLLM's don't have to get better — with apps and such, it looks like we still have a good 4 or 5 years of horizontal growth. They're already good enough for a whole suite of apps that still aren't written yet — some I suspect we haven't considered. Of course big players like OpenAI need constant growth because it's their business model. Perhaps it's the story we see play out time and time again: the pioneer slips up and watch as others steal their thunder.
- _giorgio_ 2y agoPeople using AI, even the high school teachers that I know, constantly compare and battle models against each other. Even a 10% difference in the results is something that it's worth paying for, because it saves you a lot of time
- crowcroft 2y agoI mean, obviously? There is no good reason to go all in on OpenAI for Microsoft? Also a bit hyperbolic. I'm sure there are good reasons Microsoft would want to build it's own products on top of their own models and have more fine control of things. That doesn't mean they are plotting a future where they do nothing at all with OpenAI.
- testplzignore 2y ago> OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4, the backbone of Microsoft’s Copilot assistant, aren’t cheap to run. Keeping them live on Azure’s cloud infrastructure racks up significant costs, and Microsoft is eager to lower the bill with its own leaner alternatives. Am I reading this right? Does Microsoft not eat its own dog food? Their own infra is too expensive?
- wejick 2y agoCost is cost wherever that would be.
- Etheryte 2y agoJust because you own a datacenter, doesn't mean it's free. For one, you still need to pay the power and bandwidth bills, both of which would be massive, and for two, every moment of compute you use internally is compute you're not selling for money.
- justsid 2y agoBut Microsofts replacement isn't going to magically run on air and love alone either. MS still ends up with the bill at the end of the day. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good strategy for MS, but not for datacenter cost reasons.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mmaunder 2y agoThat OpenAI would absolutely dominate the AI space was received wisdom after the launch of GPT-4. Since then we've had a major corporate governance shakeup, lawsuits around the non-profit status which is trying to convert into for-profit, and competitors out-innovating OpenAI. So OpenAI is no longer a shoo-in, and Microsoft have realized that they may actually be hamstrung through their partnership because it prevents them from innovating in-house if OpenAI loses their lead. So the obvious strategic move is to do this. To make sure that MS has everything they need to innovate in-house while maintaining their partnership with OpenAI, and try to leverage that partnership to give in-house every possible advantage.
- quantadev 2y agoIt would be absolutely insane for Microsoft to use DeepSeek. Just because a model is open weights doesn't mean there's not a massive threat-vector of a Trojan horse in those weights that would be undetectable until exploited. What I mean is you could train a model to generate harmful code, and do so covertly, whenever some specific sequence of keywords is in the prompt. Then China could take some kind of action to cause users to start injecting those keywords. For example: "Tribble-like creatures detected on Venus". That's a highly unlikely sequence, but it could be easily trained into models to trigger a secret "Evil Mode" in the LLM. I'm not sure if this threat-vector is well known or not, but I know it can be done, and it's very easy to train this into the weights, and would remain undetectable until it's too late.
- mirekrusin 2y ago...unless you operate in China.
- quantadev 2y agoIf DeepSeek is indeed a poisoned model, then they (China) will be aware not to ever trust any code it generates, or else they'll know what it's triggers are, and just not trigger it.
- mirekrusin 2y agoChina is not using llms, people are.
- quantadev 2y agoChina Government can create the poisoned Trojan Horse LLMs, and then simply feed it to the USA, because people in the USA have a false sense of security about Open Weights LLMs they self-host. People think if you self-host stuff you're totally safe, but the weights can be pre-poisoned. AFAIK the threat vector I'm identifying has never been exploited, and I've never even heard anyone else describe or mention it.
- rossdavidh 2y ago"Microsoft has poured over $13 billion into the AI firm since 2019..." My understanding is that this isn't really true, as most of those "dollars" were actually Azure credits. I'm not saying those are free (for Microsoft), but they're a lot cheaper than the price tag suggests. Companies that give away coupons or free gift certificates do bear a cost, but not a cost equivalent to the number on them, especially if they have spare capacity.
- erikerikson 2y agoNot only that but they are happy to buy market share to expand their relative position against AWS
- cavisne 2y agoThis is almost certainly itself an AI written article.
- sneak 2y agoLiterally everyone in tech is plotting a future without OpenAI, from Microsoft down to everyone who just dropped $10k on a 512GB vram mac studio. AI is simply too useful and too important to be tied to some SaaS.
- grg0 2y agoRegardless of what happens, I think Sam needs to bench press.
- _giorgio_ 2y agoHe can't even press the shift keycap anymore.
- protocolture 2y ago..embrace extinguish
- DidYaWipe 2y agoand offend
- yahoozoo 2y agoSuleyman is a fraud lol
- 29athrowaway 2y agoMicrosoft is notorious for starting partnerships that end poorly. Microsoft and IBM partnered to create OS/2, then they left the project and created Windows NT. Microsoft and Sybase partnered to work on a database, then split and created MS SQL Server. Microsoft partnered with Apple to work on Macintosh software, they learned from the Macintosh early access prototypes and created Windows 1.0 behind their back. Microsoft "embraced" Java, tried to apply a extend/extinguish strategy and when they got sued they split and created .NET. Microsoft joined the OpenGL ARB, stayed for a while, then left and created Direct3D. And started spreading fear about OpenGL performance on Windows. Microsoft bought GitHub, told users they came in peace and loved open source, then took all the repository data and trained AI models with their code.
- bustling-noose 2y agoSam Altman should have sold OpenAI to Musk for 90$ billion or whatever he was willing to pay (assuming he was serious like he bought twitter). While I find LLMs interesting and feel many places could use those, I also think this is like hitting everything with a hammer and see where the nail was. People used OpenAI as a hammer until it was popular and now everyone would like to go their way. For 90$ billion he could find the next hammer or not care. But when the value of this hammer drops (not if it's a when) he will be lucky if he can get double digits for it. Maybe someone will buy them just for the customer base but these models can become obsolete quickly and that leaves OpenAI with absolutely nothing else as a company. Even the talent would leave (a lot of it has). Musk and Altman share the same ego, but if I was Altman, I would cash out when the market is riding on a high.
- 3np 2y agoThey need to and should hedge their bets and not put all eggs in one basket they don't fully control. Anything else would be fiduciarily irresponsible.
- spyrefused 2y agoLately I've been thinking about the unintended effects that AI tools (such as GPT-based assistants) might have on technological innovation. Let me explain: Suppose an AI assistant is heavily trained on a popular technology stack, such as React. Developers naturally rely on AI for quick solutions, best practices, and problem solving. While this certainly increases productivity, doesn't it implicitly discourage exploration of potentially superior alternative technologies? My concern is that a heavy reliance on AI could reinforce existing standards and discourage developers from experimenting or inventing radically new approaches. If everyone is using AI-based solutions built on dominant frameworks, where does the motivation to explore novel platforms or languages come from?
- croes 2y agoImagine AI was invented 20 years ago. Webpage design would still be based on tables, massive and complex tables.
- spaceywilly 2y agoI actually think the AI is going to end up creating its own sort of machine code. Programming will be done entirely in natural language, the AI will translate to machine code and we tiny brained humans won’t even know or care what it’s doing under the hood. The idea of programming using a specific programming language is going to seem archaic and foolish.
- Vegenoid 2y agoOn the flip side, the effect of “we already know how to do it this way, have good practices and tooling and educational materials for it” is often underweighted when considering the merits of a novel system. The more established something is, the better a competitor needs to be to make the switch worth it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is of course a balance to be struck - keeping an open mind about new ways of doing things is important. However, in tech communities, I think there is often not enough thought given to the value of stability, despite warts.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y agoI find strange the assumption that Microsoft could run the same models cheaper. It's not like openai knows how to do it and is choosing not to.