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.
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/?utm_medium=social&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=wired
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