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.
We have no insight how much of a driving force for OpenAI’s success Sam Altman has been, or would have continued to be.
Over 90% of openai have threatened to quit
720+ of the 778 staff I think
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think 95% of employees so far expressed support for Sam…
Anrhropic is the one to watch
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 it’s entirely possible that OpenAI merges with Anthropic
No more open source A.I
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.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?
This guy ?!? - https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/09/texas-will-hurd-2024-presidential-race/
He’s a former OpenAI board member
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.
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
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
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
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