We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.
News article covering the situation: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
Altman’s Microsoft hiring comes just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named as interim CEO.
Altman had been negotiating to return as OpenAI CEO, but OpenAI’s four-person board refused to step down and let him return.
Can’t be a good thing for OpenAI. Even if Sam Altman doesn’t start by taking half the company with him for this research team, I don’t see why Microsoft should continue placing OpenAI on a pedestal when they can continue the work in house.
The Verge article mentioned Altman had been trying to raise funds for a new venture to build specialised AI chips. It also mentions Microsoft have previously shown interest in that area. So if that the route he’s going down is possibly fairly irrelevant to OpenAI. Though he’s clearly taken key people with him so that can only be bad news forOpenAI
This was gonna be the end state of openai even with Sam Altman there, their deals with MS effectively look like MS owns them
these events are largely a result of processes initiated by the previous CEO of openai, so
We have no insight how much of a driving force for OpenAI’s success Sam Altman has been, or would have continued to be.
it’s not just sam, he’s bringing talent with him. people like jakub pachocki.
Jakub Pachocki has indeed done great work on the self-learning Dota video game player.
and the pre-training of GPT-4
Over 90% of openai have threatened to quit
720+ of the 778 staff I think
Yeah, they’ll keep OpenAI on life support for a few months until the exfiltrated staff have built MSGPT5, at which point Microsoft will just cut them off.
I am skeptical that a lot of OpenAI staff are enthusiastic about going to work for Microsoft. They are going to scatter to the wind. Google, Anthropic, Cohere, everywhere.
Anrhropic is the one to watch
I think it’s entirely possible that OpenAI merges with Anthropic
Microsoft is matching key OpenAI employees equity with Microsoft stocks, which can be 10+ millions. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/microsoft-swallows-openais-core-team?r=13ehoo
I think 95% of employees so far expressed support for Sam…
Nobody’s gonna use knockoff microsoft bing bong gpt “5” (or “bard” for that matter) - windows products have always been terribly unmarketable and Microsoft fails heavily in that regard
I mean
Do you use Bing’s AI thing
OpenAI has the stage here, because they’ve got the product everybody’s habituated to using
“ChatGPT” without performant models is just a brand name and a UX workflow. If Microsoft buys the brand name (or absorbs OpenAI’s IP) then you’ll use ChatGPT and not care that
bing bong gpt 5 bardis under the hood… or it will suck and you’ll find a new brand that’s better.I think it’s probably a bit of a stretch to say Microsoft products have always been unmarketable given they’re one of the largest software companies in history
Okay then
name one great Microsoft product
VSCode with Copilot
enterprise already prefers to use gpt via azure. when ms replaces that with something else, as long as there’s feature parity nobody will care.
It is way too early to say nobody will switch off Chat GPT.
And all of the points you made are managerial points, which they just brought the management team from OAI in.
Especially with all this being in the news, many people believe that the company face is the driving force between product quality, and now that face is in Microsoft
Microsoft has an exclusive license to all OpenAI models. They also own the compute hardware. OpenAI cannot afford to train and operate without Microsoft, and there will be no other suitor because OpenAI is already tied to Microsoft with model licensing.
Customers are already migrating to Azure GPT API vs OpenAI.
Interesting! Why is Ilya’s name on the list? Didn’t he orchestrate this whole thing?
EDIT: 505 of OpenAIs 700 employees will be leaving for Sam’s Microsoft team if the board does not resign. https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775
unless … the board … appoints … Will Hurd
This guy ?!? - https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/09/texas-will-hurd-2024-presidential-race/
Will Hurd, announced Monday he was suspending his longshot 2024 presidential campaign and endorsing Nikki Haley. … former CIA officer a
He’s a former OpenAI board member
ChatGPT only exists because MS permit it. It’s not financially viable otherwise.
um what in the holy hell duck sauce are you talking about
https://www.maginative.com/article/openais-revenue-skyrockets-to-1-3-billion-annual-rate/
do you want some sprinkles with that
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Nothing ever changes
I may be naive, but I honestly don’t think this was the original intention here. I think MS were quite happy having OpenAI at arms length as a maverick research group, while availing of the unlimited access to their results.
But it’s seemingly turned into more a case of Explode, Evacuate, Extinguish.
No more open source A.I
Hopefully this marks the start of the end of this derpy story
wow he’ll be able to visit that AI company Microsoft invested in. Maybe they can learn something from them.
I really wonder why the other companies can’t catch up with ChatGPT. It has to be more than compute and data right?
OpenAI must have found some algorithm that makes attention much better.
It’s just data
models are born with random init,
everything comes from the training data
This has damaged AGI safety research massively.
If OpenAI goes to slow, others will over take it.
Other companies will look at any safety oriented researchers as potential “traitors”.
If GPT is shuttered, people will turn to more ruthless competitors.
And last, they may even turn to open source directly, massively accelerating research there.
AGI safety research is the root cause of this mess.
Ignorant people wanting to steer the train of progression for their own interests.
And then people like you who believe them.
What?
On top of that, many OAI people will leave spreading their inside knowledge to other companies. All the secrets will be out.
But the irony is that AI doom fears triggered this avalanche, hurting AI safety while doing it for safety. And if it wasn’t fear, then it was greed, but that is not any better for our risk level.
For anybody who thinks this is a bombshell… well
Look at Twitter
It’s still the same exact hell hole
Reality check - nothing changes
And what’s come about with Dorsey’s “thing”? People underestimate how quickly high-pressure CEOs just decompress in these kinds of situations. The guy’s worth zillions and probably looking for an excuse to go out and spend it already. He had a lot of curiosity about the product, but not a whole lot of bond to it.
OpenAi is far more complex, but I agree with your POV. Actually, we are in the best case scenario (but the emotions obfuscated the analysis). Ilya and Wojciech are truest e/acc (not the trashy “laundry boy” style of larping). Everything is more than OK. Openai, Microsoft, the revived pleiad of new and old AI startups…
So the issue is that nothing is going to come out of this.
Microsoft is essentially absorbing the impact.
OpenAI 100% still has the stage here.
Nobody’s gonna stop using ChatGPT
Especially if Altman, with literally zero dev experience, manages to somehow replicate half of GPT’s algorithms somehow, with his… what… 3 devs now?
Who the hell is going to go “Yay, now let’s use this FOR PROFIT ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US KNOCKOFF SOFTWARE BING BONG”
with literally zero dev experience,
This is a lie. He has been coding since he was a kid. Went to Stanford for computer science. Now if you said… “He isn’t the driving dev force behind chatgpt” sure, but you said “literally zero dev experience,”
he has zero dev experience
you can see that from his resume
here, hold this balloon
Brockman has real dev (not research) experience and has a lot of street cred in that direction. Don’t forget that ChatGPT is as much an app as it is a LLM.
Especially if Altman, with literally zero dev experience, manages to somehow replicate half of GPT’s algorithms somehow, with his… what… 3 devs now?
much of AI research is back-of-a-napkin ideas tested on room-sized computers. I wouldn’t discount those few engineers joining MSFT: they’ll have at least a general knowledge of the best techniques, and now even more even more compute to test them on. Also, Sama is a talent magnet and I have no doubts they’ll build a team on par with OpenAIs.
Lol I always wanted to join OpenAI to work under Sutskevar. When Altman joined in 2019, my first thought was why is the YC guy running arguably the most important AI lab in the world.
He’s probably a talent magnet, but he’s not a talent magnet for ML researchers. Probably for tech people yes but more of the startup engineer types who are proud of not going to school. Not the academic researcher types who spent 10 years at university doing PhDs and PostDocs in ML.
Let’s not forget that Altman was reddit’s CEO for 8 days…
That gives him perpetual license to train AI models on the reddit corpus.
Maybe he gets 3 people, maybe half the company. But one thing is sure - a lot of people will leave OpenAI taking their OpenAI experience to other places. That will be good in the long term, less concentration of power.
The model is already done. The challenge right now is to scale up operations and make it viable/profitable. ML engineers can’t do that (their job is to build models not build infrastructure)
You mean to say ML scientists cannot do that?
Lol, yes, thank you. Corrected
500+/700 OpenAI employees have signed a letter to threatening to resign and join Microsoft. That’s pretty much the whole company https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/
I’d say to them: Good luck.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638823/microsoft-ethics-society-team-responsible-ai-layoffs
yea sams sister is surely happy about that
Very surprising, an unexpected turn of events.
I’d wager they’ll last less than a year under the Microsoft fold.
But maybe that’s more than necessary. Sam & Greg will have made a proper plan, and Microsoft would’ve calmed down their clients and product pipeline.
This would be an Extinction Level Event. If it wasn’t - you know - Microsoft.
Ask Chat GPT what it thinks?
And the average moral scruples of both companies increases.
Is Microsoft gonna just dump OpenAI now, lol?
Can’t wait to see what Advanced AI team will bring itto humanity 💪😁👍
Maybe openai will be open again.
The new board would rather delete all the models then let them be open source.