This is literally hilarious, so what your saying is that everyone except the board is just gonna move over to MS, and OpenAI will buy back the remaining openai hardware for pennies on the dollar, and kick out the ~100 that stayed lol
Putting aside everything else, we’re witnessing the most significant labor action in tech in years.
ETA: Remember the good old days when Elon took over Twitter, in part because the workers had too much control?
How did workers having too much control result in Musk taking over Twitter?
Musk seems to be proving similarly inspirational to CEOs who believe their employees have grown too lazy, too coddled, too opinionatedabout their workplaces. On November 16th, the same day Musk asked Twitter’s remaining employees to sign an oath pledging to work long hours or resign, former PayPal CEO and Facebook crypto guy David Marcus tweeted:
I guess the times of complaining to the CEO of a large tech company at an all hands in front of thousands of people about the quality of toilet paper have come to an end. (True story. This really happened.)
Marcus has plenty of company in being annoyed at the entitlement of some tech employees; countless rank-and-file tech workers have told us stories about one outrageous request or another that one of of their peers made at an all-company meeting.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/29/23483812/elon-musk-tech-ceo-dei-inclusivity-twitter-ban-big-bang
Ironic if this was done to try to remove a monopolistic entity controlling AI and to slow things down.
Because now a monopolistic company has what it needs to control AI and accelerate in whatever direction it likes, regardless of any decel/EA feelings.
Yes, some of this know-how will fall over the industry and other labs, but few places in the world can offer the big fat checks Microsoft will offer these people. Possibly NVIDIA, Meta and Google and a few more, but many of them are former employees of those firms to begin with. Google in particular, has been expelling any really ambitious AI people for a while.
Ironic if this was done to try to remove a monopolistic entity controlling AI and to slow things down
Watching corpos wrestle for control of the largest AI company reminds us that we need to find a way to permanently open source AI.
We cannot allow the most important piece of technology for this century to rest in the hands of a cabal of clumsy sociopaths.
I hope in the next couple of years we see decentralized training for big models or some breakthroughs that allow smaller models to outperform larger ones. Or both. Without such advances, the outcome is going to be extremely cyberpunk.
I just hope I don’t need to use windows, or bing or edge later to access sota LLM. Msft is pretty scammy to consumers.
Done to make it a for profit venture.
I wonder how real this threat really is.
Sam Altman is not the only guy who knows how to monetize things. Also these employees are sitting on 10M+ bonuses that they will NEVER get from Microsoft. At most they will get 250K-500K TC.
Definitely not true. Every big tech company that is in AI right now (Google, Meta, etc) will be offering great sums of money to OpenAI engineers.
The company appears to be imploding, many engineers who are at the top of their game are going to either stay with OpenAI, or move somewhere else.
Considering an engineer at OpenAI is getting paid around 400k right now (levels fyi), microsoft would be foolish to offer them anything lower. Its likely the engineers are being offered closer to a million a year.
Think about it this way: microsoft could buy out open AI for 80 BILLION dollars, or poach 80% of their staff with a million dollars per year.
Even if they hired ALL of OpenAI staff at a million a year (they wont), they’d still have only spent 700 million dollars basically acquiring openAI, versus the 80 billion it would have cost to buy them a week ago.
And they’d lose out on every single thing they built in-house.
- Their MLOPs and data scraping infra? Gone
- Their results and experiments (like millions of iterations)? Gone
- They would take 1-2 yrs to catch back up and would lose the lead.
Don’t assume Google, Inflection, Anthropic etc. are more than 1 yr behind.
Sam Altman is not the only guy who knows how to monetize things. Also these employees are sitting on 10M+ bonuses that they will NEVER get from Microsoft. At most they will get 250K-500K TC.
Salesforce has issued an open offer to all OpenAI employees. They will match both salary and equity.
this is really really bad for the public
Where else to make 1 mil a year?
Can’t wait for the movie.
Here is hope for a Silicon valley like tv series, fist tv series created by AI and truly funny
Update: As of a minute ago, 700 out of the 770 employees have now signed the letter.
That remaining 70 either plan to work elsewhere or they’re delusional that they can keep this thing working with 90% of the staff gone 😆
What the hell? How am i supposed to believe that Ilya Sutskever signed the letter?
so all this circus was about to absorb openai unconditionally (agi comes to mind)
Satya already made the announcement that Sam is joining Microsoft, so it’s pretty much impossible for OpenAI board to reinstate Sam as ceo.
The board can resign but they won’t get Sam back, so I think at this point OpenAI is going to crumble and Microsoft will take in everyone
interim position at MSFT
Satya already made the announcement that Sam is joining Microsoft, so it’s pretty much impossible for OpenAI board to reinstate Sam as ceo.
Nadella said tonight that he’s OK with Altman being reinstated as CEO of OpenAI. Considering Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, it benefits Microsoft. So whether Altman is in Microsoft or it’s partner OpenAI is OK with him.
If they brought all 770 of them over, and it cost the company 500k/yr per employee, they’d have 30 years of headroom on that 13b investment in OpenAI.
But they get 100% of the IP for 50% of the price.
And since OpenAI basically has to pay back that 13b anyways, and it’s all in compute credits, they won’t use if the company is defunct, lol…
This would be a massive win for Microsoft, that same 13b they would have spent on OpenAI will go much, much farther and get them much much more now.
But they get 100% of the IP for 50% of the price.
Officially and cleanly, they wouldn’t get a lot of openAI’s data that way. Especially the parameters for the new models and a lot of the best training data has not been shared with MS yet, and unless an employee brings that through the back door, they won’t ever get it.
Yeah but it’s 50% off plus the cost of training GPT-4 which is not gonna be 13B.
Only if Sam sign a contract with MS, and it explicitly prevents that.
What is decel/EA?
Imagine the moment Microsoft takes OpenAI’s market share, and converts not just corporates but also individuals to paying customers
So openAI is dead
Nope. Some people signed a letter, not a resignation. I wonder if those employees are that interested in OpenAI’s ideas if everything it takes to quit is another position at … hold your ground … Microsoft.
Microsoft will absorb OpenAI and we will live in a cyberpunk world ran by megacorps 🥳