9 ms·

Maybe 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

Maybe 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 ago
Listening 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 ago
  It feels like not even OpenAI buys into it much these days either
keeganpoppen 2y ago
oh it is absolutely about that
bsimpson 2y ago
There 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 ago
  These 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.
  - escapecharacter 2y ago
    Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure. Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it. The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
    - saturn8601 2y ago
      This motivated part of Musk's moves at Twitter(and now DOGE). You can't reliably evaluate which people are checked out and when you are against the clock, you have to take a hatchet and accept that you will break things that are in motion.
      - chronid 2y ago
        You can somewhat reliably evaluate what works and what does not, what brings you forward and what is slack you can cut. It takes time (6-12 months at least) of very engaged work of a very engaged team - which you can bring with you. You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
mlazos 2y ago
One of my friends stated this phenomenon very well “it’s a lever they can pull so they do it”. Once you’ve tied your career to a specific technology internally, there’s really only one option: keep pushing it regardless of any alternatives because your career depends on it. So that’s what they do.
roland35 2y ago
Unfortunately I don't think there is any real metric-based way to prevent this type of behavior, it just has to be old fashioned encouraged from the top. At a certain size it seems like this stops scaling though
ambicapter 2y ago
Does it not make sense to not tie your future to a third-party (aka build your business on someone else's platform)? Seems like basic strategy to me if that's the case.
- pphysch 2y ago
  It's a good strategy. It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that OpenAI doesn't have AGI secret sauce. LLMs are a commodity and it's the platform integration that matters. This is the strategy that Google, Apple embraced and now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same. If OpenAI cares about the long-term welfare of its employees, they would beg Microsoft to acquire them outright, before the markets fully realize what OpenAI is not.
  - Izikiel43 2y ago
    > now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same. I mean, they have been doing platform integration for a while now, with all the copilot flavors and teams integrations, etc. This would change the backend model to something inhouse.
pradn 2y ago
It's the responsibility of leadership to set the correct goals and metrics. If leadership doesn't value maintenance, those they lead won't either. You can't blame people for playing to the tune of those above them.
- ewhanley 2y ago
  This is exactly right. If resume driven development results in more money, people are (rightly) going to do it. The incentive structure isn't set by the ICs.
m463 2y ago
I wonder if incentives for most companies favor doing things in-house?
- esafak 2y ago
  Yes, you can say you built it from scratch, showing leadership and impact, which is what big tech promotions are gauged by.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
OpenAI already started divorce proceedings with their datacenter partnership with Softbank/etc, and it'd hardly be prudent for the world's largest software company NOT to have it's own SOTA AI models. Nadella might have initially been caught a bit flat footed with the rapid rise of AI, but seems to be managing the situation masterfully.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  In what world is what they are doing masterful? Their product marketing is a huge mess, they keep changing the names of everything every few months. Nobody knows which Copilot does what anymore. It really feels like they're scrambling to be first to market. It all feels so incredibly rushed. Whatever is there doesn't work half the time. They're hugely dependent on one partner that could jump ship at any moment (granted they are now working to get away from that). We use Copilot at work but I find it very lukewarm. If we weren't a "Microsoft shop" I don't think would have chosen it.
  - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
    > scrambling to be first Third?
  - trentnix 2y ago
    > Their product marketing is a huge mess, they keep changing the names of everything every few months. Nobody knows which Copilot does what anymore. It really feels like they're scrambling to be first to market. It all feels so incredibly rushed. Product confusion, inconsistent marketing, unnecessary product renames, and rushing half-baked solutions has been the Microsoft way for dozens of products across multiple divisions for years.
    - eitally 2y ago
      Rule #1 for Microsoft product strategy: if you can't yourselves figure out the SKUs and how they bundle together, the odds are good that your customers will overpay. It's worked for almost 50 years and there's no evidence that it will stop working. Azure is killing it and will continue to eat the enterprise even as AWS starts/continues to struggle.
saturn8601 2y ago
Ah man I don't want to hear things like that. I work in an Angular project and it is the most pleasant thing I have worked with (and i've been using it as my primary platform for almost a decade now). If I could, i'd happily keep using this framework for the rest of my career(27 years to go till retirement).
- aryonoco 2y ago
  A hugely underrated platform. Thankfully at least for now Google is leaving the Angular team alone and the platform has really matured in wonderful and beautiful ways. If you like TypeScript, and you want to build applications for the real world with real users, there is no better front end platform in my book.
hintymad 2y ago
> 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 guess it's human nature for a person or an org to own their own destiny. That said, the driving force is not personal ambition in this case though. The driving force behind this is that people realized that OAI does not have a moat as LLMs are quickly turning into commodities, if haven't yet. It does not make sense to pay a premium to OAI any more, let alone at the cost of not having the flexibility to customize models. Personally, I think Altman did a de-service to OAI by constantly boasting AGI and seeking regulatory capture, when he perfectly knew the limitation of the current LLMs.
orbifold 2y ago
Mustafa Suleyman is building a team at Microsoft just for that purpose.
snarfy 2y ago
I like to refer to this as resume driven development.
surfingdino 2y ago
I can see a number of forces at play: 1) Cost -- beancounters got involved 2) Who Do You Think You Are? -- someone at Microsoft had enough of OpenAI stealing the limelight 3) Tactical Withdrawal -- MSFT is preparing to demote/drop AI over the next 5-10 years
pbh101 2y ago
This is absolutely a too-cynical position. Nadella would be asleep at the wheel if he weren’t actively mitigating OpenAI’s current and future leverage over Microsoft. This would be the case even if OpenAI weren’t a little weird and flaky (board drama, nonprofit governance, etc), but even moreso given OpenAI’s reality.
erikerikson 2y ago
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Guthur 2y ago
And why not? should he just allow the owners of capital to extract as much value as possible without actually doing anything, but woe be the worker if he actually tries to free himself.
ndesaulniers 2y ago
Most directors and above at Google are more concerned with how they will put gas in their yachts this weekend than the quality of the products they are supposed to be in charge of.
croes 2y ago
> by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. Isn’t that the basis for competition?

skepticATX 2y ago

Listening 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 ago
It feels like not even OpenAI buys into it much these days either

keeganpoppen 2y ago

oh it is absolutely about that

bsimpson 2y ago

There 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 ago
These 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.
- escapecharacter 2y ago
  Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure. Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it. The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
  - saturn8601 2y ago
    This motivated part of Musk's moves at Twitter(and now DOGE). You can't reliably evaluate which people are checked out and when you are against the clock, you have to take a hatchet and accept that you will break things that are in motion.
    - chronid 2y ago
      You can somewhat reliably evaluate what works and what does not, what brings you forward and what is slack you can cut. It takes time (6-12 months at least) of very engaged work of a very engaged team - which you can bring with you. You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.
      - disgruntledphd2 2y ago

mlazos 2y ago

One of my friends stated this phenomenon very well “it’s a lever they can pull so they do it”. Once you’ve tied your career to a specific technology internally, there’s really only one option: keep pushing it regardless of any alternatives because your career depends on it. So that’s what they do.

roland35 2y ago

Unfortunately I don't think there is any real metric-based way to prevent this type of behavior, it just has to be old fashioned encouraged from the top. At a certain size it seems like this stops scaling though

ambicapter 2y ago

Does it not make sense to not tie your future to a third-party (aka build your business on someone else's platform)? Seems like basic strategy to me if that's the case.

pphysch 2y ago
It's a good strategy. It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that OpenAI doesn't have AGI secret sauce. LLMs are a commodity and it's the platform integration that matters. This is the strategy that Google, Apple embraced and now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same. If OpenAI cares about the long-term welfare of its employees, they would beg Microsoft to acquire them outright, before the markets fully realize what OpenAI is not.
- Izikiel43 2y ago
  > now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same. I mean, they have been doing platform integration for a while now, with all the copilot flavors and teams integrations, etc. This would change the backend model to something inhouse.

pradn 2y ago

It's the responsibility of leadership to set the correct goals and metrics. If leadership doesn't value maintenance, those they lead won't either. You can't blame people for playing to the tune of those above them.

ewhanley 2y ago
This is exactly right. If resume driven development results in more money, people are (rightly) going to do it. The incentive structure isn't set by the ICs.

m463 2y ago

I wonder if incentives for most companies favor doing things in-house?

esafak 2y ago
Yes, you can say you built it from scratch, showing leadership and impact, which is what big tech promotions are gauged by.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

OpenAI already started divorce proceedings with their datacenter partnership with Softbank/etc, and it'd hardly be prudent for the world's largest software company NOT to have it's own SOTA AI models. Nadella might have initially been caught a bit flat footed with the rapid rise of AI, but seems to be managing the situation masterfully.

wkat4242 2y ago
In what world is what they are doing masterful? Their product marketing is a huge mess, they keep changing the names of everything every few months. Nobody knows which Copilot does what anymore. It really feels like they're scrambling to be first to market. It all feels so incredibly rushed. Whatever is there doesn't work half the time. They're hugely dependent on one partner that could jump ship at any moment (granted they are now working to get away from that). We use Copilot at work but I find it very lukewarm. If we weren't a "Microsoft shop" I don't think would have chosen it.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  > scrambling to be first Third?
- trentnix 2y ago
  > Their product marketing is a huge mess, they keep changing the names of everything every few months. Nobody knows which Copilot does what anymore. It really feels like they're scrambling to be first to market. It all feels so incredibly rushed. Product confusion, inconsistent marketing, unnecessary product renames, and rushing half-baked solutions has been the Microsoft way for dozens of products across multiple divisions for years.
  - eitally 2y ago
    Rule #1 for Microsoft product strategy: if you can't yourselves figure out the SKUs and how they bundle together, the odds are good that your customers will overpay. It's worked for almost 50 years and there's no evidence that it will stop working. Azure is killing it and will continue to eat the enterprise even as AWS starts/continues to struggle.

saturn8601 2y ago

Ah man I don't want to hear things like that. I work in an Angular project and it is the most pleasant thing I have worked with (and i've been using it as my primary platform for almost a decade now). If I could, i'd happily keep using this framework for the rest of my career(27 years to go till retirement).

aryonoco 2y ago
A hugely underrated platform. Thankfully at least for now Google is leaving the Angular team alone and the platform has really matured in wonderful and beautiful ways. If you like TypeScript, and you want to build applications for the real world with real users, there is no better front end platform in my book.

hintymad 2y ago

> 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 guess it's human nature for a person or an org to own their own destiny. That said, the driving force is not personal ambition in this case though. The driving force behind this is that people realized that OAI does not have a moat as LLMs are quickly turning into commodities, if haven't yet. It does not make sense to pay a premium to OAI any more, let alone at the cost of not having the flexibility to customize models. Personally, I think Altman did a de-service to OAI by constantly boasting AGI and seeking regulatory capture, when he perfectly knew the limitation of the current LLMs.

orbifold 2y ago

Mustafa Suleyman is building a team at Microsoft just for that purpose.

snarfy 2y ago

I like to refer to this as resume driven development.

surfingdino 2y ago

I can see a number of forces at play: 1) Cost -- beancounters got involved 2) Who Do You Think You Are? -- someone at Microsoft had enough of OpenAI stealing the limelight 3) Tactical Withdrawal -- MSFT is preparing to demote/drop AI over the next 5-10 years

pbh101 2y ago

This is absolutely a too-cynical position. Nadella would be asleep at the wheel if he weren’t actively mitigating OpenAI’s current and future leverage over Microsoft. This would be the case even if OpenAI weren’t a little weird and flaky (board drama, nonprofit governance, etc), but even moreso given OpenAI’s reality.

erikerikson 2y ago

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

Guthur 2y ago

And why not? should he just allow the owners of capital to extract as much value as possible without actually doing anything, but woe be the worker if he actually tries to free himself.

ndesaulniers 2y ago

Most directors and above at Google are more concerned with how they will put gas in their yachts this weekend than the quality of the products they are supposed to be in charge of.

croes 2y ago

> by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology. Isn’t that the basis for competition?