* Tigris is DOA - If because it would piss off the MSFT board but mostly because the SEC would arrest Sam assuming he’s an officer at MSFT. He could maybe be a passive investor, but that’s it

* People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board forced headcount reductions?

* Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3 trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than the OpenAI one

* there was a ton of fan fiction yesterday online about Satya forcing a move on the board. This was never really a thing. He made one of the worst investments in the history of SV in terms of keeping power to make sure your money is used correctly. $10B for 0 votes or any power to change votes

This was a brilliant power move by Satya. I don't see any hope for OpenAI after this brain drainage.

"The OpenAI for-profit subsidiary was about to conduct a secondary at a $80 billion+ valuation. These 'Profit Participation Units' were going to be worth $10 million+ for key employees. Suffice it to say this is not going to happen now," chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis said."

Insane self own by OpenAI

My unfounded Internet opinion: OpenAI just removed or reduced a large source of reward and have shown fundamental instability. OpenAIs success is very much tied to Employees and Compute.

It's insane to see all these takes when we don't even know what caused the loss of trust in the first place.

We are very complicated creatures and things get out of control, both internally and externally. My armchair opinion is that they started to believe that all of it is so advanced and important, that they lost a bit of a grip on reality. Sutskever imagining planet covered with data centers and solar panels shows me that [0]. Every single person is limited in his/her view - I get a strange feeling when listening to him in this video. Also, they are not the only people left on this planet. Fortunately, this task of creating AI/AGI is not a task for a pack of ten, trying to save us from harm. Still, it may and probably will get rough. /rant

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c

creating ASI for money seems particularly asinine as the machine overlords won't care terribly much about dollars

OpenAI, in contrast, will become more like an academic research unit at some university. Those who prefer life slow and steady, will select to stay there, making tech for effective altruists.

if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future "AGI".

Open source doesn’t necessarily imply good for humanity, for example distributing open source designs for nukes would probably be a net negative.

And even if it did, effective altruists wouldn’t need to prioritize the benefit provided by openness over all other possibilities.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=operator

Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their organizations up for unique success.

And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it. Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally distinct.

And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of smooth operator, apparently I was unfamiliar with the term in tech.

Do you realize how hard it is to make something like GPT4? I think all the non-AI people posting about this all over X/HN have this idea that if you move everyone over you just "remake the AI" as if this were a traditional API.

There is no way MS catches up to OAI in a short period of time. During that time the rest of the market will be pressing the accelerator as hard as possible.

I think MS is in a really, really shit spot right now.

- all the code that created GPT-4

- all the weights for GPT-4

- all the people who created both of those things

then, y'know, I like their odds.

They have access to the first two already, per their licensing agreement with OAI; by the end of the week, they may very well have the third.

Yes, this is probably the biggest self-own in corporate history.

MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to blow up Google. They will set the world on fire to do that.

To me this is exactly why I’m skeptical of Microsoft’s strategy here. They seem to be convinced that their success at unseating Google is assured. Meanwhile, google’s share price has barely flinched. Also, the way this has played out just feels desperate to keep the whole thing going. Wouldn’t Microsoft want at least some clarity about what actually happened by the board up and fired the CEO on the spot before doubling down to bring him into a position of power within the company?

But I doubt MSFT will win this round.

1/ We still don't know why Sam Altman was fired; does MS know? or think they know?

2/ It will take the new team at MS a long time to recreate what they had at OpenAI (what does "MS has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP" actually mean and entails, legally speaking?); during that time anything can happen.

You don’t have to do a ton of diligence to know you want to keep the people you bet the farm on. If it turns out that Sam is actually a massive liability, Nadella will deal with that after this crisis passes.

OpenAI employees have no equity? Well, then where exactly is that $86B of "existing employees' shares" coming from?

> ChatGPT creator OpenAI is in talks to sell existing employees' shares at an $86 billion valuation, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-talks-sell-shares-...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-86-bln-share-sale...

A random OpenAI eng job page clearly states: "Total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits."

https://openai.com/careers/software-engineer-leverage-engine...

So any idea how that translates into the profit sharing? They have no profit right now. Curious how employees get to that number

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-investment-m...

Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced he wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell

It reads like an orchestrated coup against the other three members of the board. Convince the board to do something you imagine will get this kind of blowback. Board is forced to resign due to their fiduciary obligations to the non-profit. And now you control the entire board.

What fiduciary obligations does a non-profit have? Isn't the board pretty successful already at not making money?

Investors loved Satya's investment into OAI, not sure how we can qualify it as one of the worst investments in the history of SV?

How can we even compare the risk concerns of MSFT with OpenAI? The impression we have of OpenAI is the risk concerns are specifically about the profit drive. From a business standpoint, LLMs have huge potential at reducing costs and increasing profit in multiples.

This isn’t personally against you but they never had the $1M/year they flaunted when Sam the savior was their CEO

I don't know exactly how employee contracts are drawn up there but OpenAI has been pretty vocal that all the for-profit sides have caps which eventually lead back to 100% going into the non-profit after hitting the cap or the initial investment amount. So I am not quite clear what you are saying? Salary is cash, equity is stock. There has always been profit caps on the stock.

My only point was that you made an argument about employees giving up their equity for "mediocre" MSFT stock. It is just a misinformed statement that I was clearing up for you. 1) MSFT has been doing amazing as a stock 2) Employee equity has profit caps. 3) Employees who actually care about equity profit would most likely be more interested in joining MSFT.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.nytim...

If this was never true, that’s on the OpenAI team that misled their engineers

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-recruiters-luring-goo...

Their job postings even specifically mention “generous equity” - again if there is no equity in the contract - that’s OpenAI misleading its recruits

https://openai.com/careers/research-engineer-superalignment

This is where I see the win. Newcomer’s concerns about Altman are valid [1]. It is difficult to square the reputation he nurtured as OpenAI’s CEO with the reckless lawlessness of his crypto start-up.

Microsoft knows how to play ball with the big boys. It also knows how to constrain big personalities.

[1] https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the

This morning at OpenAI offices will be talent asking current leadership, "What have you done for me lately?"

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348010 | https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775 (505 of 700 Employees OpenAI tell the board to resign)

Their pay is majority equity, so its worthless now with a board that says it hates profits and money. OpenAI is probably worth 80% less than it did a weekend ago, so the equity pay is also worth 80% less.

Microsoft is perfectly willing to pay those typical AI salaries, because Nvidia and Google are literally doing a recruitment drive on twitter right now. Apple and Amazon are also probably looking to scoop up the leftovers. So Microsoft has to pay properly, and Sam will demand them to, to get the OpenAI team moved over intact. There aren't that many core engineers at OpenAI, maybe 200-300, so it is trivial for Microsoft to afford it.

SEC does not have the power to arrest anyone. Their investigations are civil.

https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/ia-5764.pdf

Llms do stuff that has value. I can use Rfdiffusion with motif scaffolding to create a fusion protein with units from enzymes that have no crystal or cryoem structures with as high as a 5-10% success rate!!!!!! That's absolutely insane! I only need to print 20 genes to have a chance of getting a variant that works. Literal orders of magnitude improvement. And if you don't have a good multisequence alignment for getting a good folks from alphafold? Pure llm based esmfold can fill in the gaps. Evodiff is out here generating functional proteins with disordered regions. Also, to bring it back to openai, if I ask chatgpt to write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. If I give it a bunch of PDFs and ask it to give me a summary, it gives me a summary. I don't buy the agi end of the world hype so a shift that means that we get more focus on d eveloping useful tools that make my life easier that I'm totally willing to pay 20 a month for? Yeah I'm down. Get this cool tech and product into a form that's easy to use and useful and keep improving it!

-I'm literally drinking a coffee I bought with bit coin right now.

-I was able to send large sums of money to my grandma in another country while paying a fraction of the fees going through banks

-It's a stable store of value for people in volatile countries with unstable currency

-It's an investment available to the small timers, normally only the wealthy have these opportunities

-It lets me pay artists for their art directly and bypass the corrupt middlemen

this is a forum coding so i have no idea what any of that biology mumbo jumbo means, but everything you mentiond about chatgtp is conveniently missing a lot of details.

>write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. Is it trivial code? Is it code that shows up on the first page of any search engine with the same terms?

>it gives me a summary. Is it an accurate summary? Is it any better than just reading the first and last section of the report directly?

In terms of writing code, yeah it's pretty simple code. I'm paying 20 bucks a month not 200k a year. I've found it really useful to dive into open source code bases for papers (just upload the repo and associated paper) - academics write pretty garbage code and even worse documentation. It's able to easily and correcttly extend modules, explain weird uncommented and untyped code (what exactly is xyz data structure? Oh it's a tensor with shape blah where each dimension represents abc value. Great saved me 2 hours of work).

For the summaries - uhh yeah obviously the summaries are accurate and better than reading the first and last sections. Spend the 20 bucks and try it yourself or borrow someone else's account or something. Especially useful if you're dealing with nature papers and similar from journals that refuse to give proper respect for the methods section and shove all the information in a random way into supplementary info. Make a knowledgebase on both and ask it to connect the dots, saves plenty of time. I don't give a damn about the flowery abstract in the first part of the report and the tryhard conclusion in the last part of the report, I want the details.

It's comical that these useless hype bros can convince folks that a genuine computational breakthrough and a pretty solid 20 dollar a month consumer product with actual users must be bunk because the bros are shilling it, but luckily the baker lab doesn't seem to care. Can't wait to play around with all atom so I don't have to model a zinc atom with a guide potential and can just model the heteroatom directly in the functional motif instead! Not sure it'll work for the use case I have in mind until I try it out and print a gene or two of course but I'm glad folks are building these tools to make life easier and let me engineer proteins that were out of budget 3 years ago.

tell me... how much would it cost to develop a system that did this with pre-GPT OCR technologies? I know the answer. Do you?

What long term prospects do those employees have of raises, profit-sharing, equity, etc. at OAI if the board is willing to destroy value to maintain their non-profit goals?

I think the whole point of this piece is that OAI's entire organizational structure is built against generating a large startup valuation that would provide a large payout to employees and investors.

OAI has cash from ChatGPT revenue that it could use to offer competitive pay, but also this entire situations is based around the board being uncomfortable with the decisions that led to this revenue or attempts to expand it.

will researchers that were lured into OpenAI under this pretense jump ship to explictly work on extending microsoft's tendrils into more of people's lives?

(essentially the opposite of "benefit humanity")

no doubt some will

Not a bad moment for a rich patron to swoop in and capitalise the non-profit. If only there were a billionaire with a grudge against Altman and historic link to the organisation…

Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging that at best they were fooling themselves into believing they were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed looks to be dying.

Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of profit in about a month.

Microsoft also “has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights.”

If you’re a scientist, OpenAI is a fine place to be, though less differentiated than before. If you’re an engineer more interested in money and don’t want the risk of a start-up, Microsoft seems the obvious path forward.

Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.

So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775

Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.

It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.

Ilya just said he will do everything he can to reunite the company. If that’s the case the easiest way to do it is to resign and join MS

Non-profit boards have no incentive to be rational.

Microsoft stock is up in the pre-market, because they basically got half of the OpenAI team for free.

The majority of top researchers at OpenAI are expressing solidarity for Sam and basically signalling they want to move too, just check out twitter. That also includes like the majority of the execs tehre.

At least it's not sci-fi-risk averse ;)

What do you mean? MS employees are getting bonuses on a yearly basis, this year included.

That’s fine for corporate employees, but OAI employees were promised mountains of money to leave Google/Meta, they might not be as happy

OAI is a startup. All these OAI employees who were playing up their million dollar salaries should know that startups come with risk. How many times has it been said that equity is worth nothing until (and if) it is?

In the grand scheme of the current IT economy, top of the queue for sympathy to me is not "people making seven digit salaries at startup who may have to put up with only making $500K+ at MSFT".

I don't think Microsoft is necessarily in a better position than it was on Thursday. If we're tallying up points:

    + More control over the full AI stack
    + Effectively they will own what was once OpenAI, but is now really OpenAI 2.0
    - OpenAI 2.0 is probably a worse business than OpenAI 1.0, which was, prior to the coup, a well-oiled machine
    + Control over OpenAI 2.0 operations, which can lead to better execution in the long term
    - Higher wage costs
    - Business disruption at OpenAI, delaying projects
    - Potential OpenAI departures to competitors like Google, Meta, Anthropic, Amazon, Apple (?)
    - Risk that OpenAI 1.0 (what's left of it) either sells to any of those competitors
    - Risk that OpenAI 1.0 actually goes open source and releases GPT-4 weights

Who else is positioned that they could possibly do anything with it commercially? Even Microsoft is supposedly renting GPUs from Oracle (deals with the devil!) to keep up with demand.

Amazon is the only other company with the potential computational power + business acumen to strike, but they already have their own ventures. Google could, but not sure they would willingly take the reputation hit to use a non-Google model.

`The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to organize a company.`

I don't see how anything that happened this weekend leads to this conclusion. Yes, it seems likely that the board's actions will result in an OpenAI with much smaller revenue and consumer traction. But the whole reason for setting up OpenAI as a non-profit was precisely ensuring that those were not the overriding goals of the company.

The only conclusion that seems warranted is that "the myth that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to organize a for-profit company.", but that is pretty obvious.

No investors will touch these non-profits with a 10 foot pole now. An unaccountable board that can lead the majority of the company and investors to revolt is radioactive for investors.

It proves that the shares=votes, standard corporate structure is the only way to organize mega scale organizations.

OpenAI will keep its goals, but it'll simply accomplish nothing. It'll probably devolve into some niche lab with no resources or GPUs to do anything significant.

OAI is burning billions in compute/salary to create their thing, and will spend billions more before truly massive value to society could ever be wrought.

I can't think of a nonprofit structure that has ever effectively allocated that much capital aside from, like, a government.

Because they had a difference in opinion about a devday presentation...?

Just confusing to me why so many people are thinking the board is so altruistic here. That kind of unchecked power is insane to me.

They seem to need additional investments, but their goals are not aligned with most of their would-be investors.

If their goal really is the 'safe' development of AI, they are now in an objectively weaker position to pursue that goal, even if the actions of this weekend were otherwise justified.

The real issue with LLMs is open-source vs. proprietary.

As someone who works at a non-profit that partners with various for-profits, I'm skeptical that the IRS would allow such sort of large-scale tax fraud to happen.

https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/07/for-hrc-profit-v...

As far as the IRS, this may be entirely legal due to tax loopholes pushed through by lobbyists and bought politicians, or it may take so many IRS resources to unravel that it tends to go ignored.

Called it, EEE is complete. This is old Microsoft magic. I hope younger people starting their careers are taking note. All that money gates is giving away to buy his way into heaven came from the same tactics.

AFAICT, New Microsoft is a platform of platforms with profit flowing down to lower-level platforms (Windows, Azure) but being made in all levels (Office, Xbox, LinkedIn) and shared with others (employees / partners) at some levels.

Satya has basically taken the Bezos insight --use your scale to build platforms that you also sell to outsiders-- and inverted it: use as many platforms as possible to build and sustain scale. This is not new, this is exactly what a conglomerate would have done 100+ years ago. But he's doing it methodically and while breaking fewer rules than Amazon or Google. Mad respect.

Or do you think MS fabricated evidence to falsely convince the board Sam Altman was lying to them?

Everything is good in moderation, and with AI we are taking our efficiency past that good point. AI not only takes jobs away from creatives such as illustrators and can be used for identity theft, it also is removing the reliance that people have on each other.

Society is held together because people need each other. People meet each other through needing each other, and this is what makes local communities strong. AI takes that away so that the only entities we need are big tech like Microsoft, Google, and other soulless organizations.

It is a descent into feudalism, where everyone will pay big tech for basic living necessities (first option, later a necessity, like the smartphone).

If a man or woman wants to live independently of big tech, it will be harder and harder now, and we are losing are sense of what it means to be human through the immoral actions of these companies.

I don't care if I have to pay megacorps for a right to my modern conveniences, if that means they extend to more and more people. Monsanto can take all my money if no one ever dies of starvation again. Microsoft can take all my data if we never have to do rote tasks again.

I also disagree that scarcity creates conflict and pain. Scarcity limits growth, which means it limits our expansion, which is good because other creatures have to live here too.

Every war in human history (and there have been a lot of them) was fought over control of scarce resources. Sure looks like scarcity creates conflict and pain to me.

It seems the last mile in replacing blue collar jobs may be more expensive and more challenging (if not impossible) than replacing information workers with AI...

It seems likely that AI will either replace or augment people in the most creative fields, creating a homogeneous MUSH out of once interesting things, making us consumerist and mindless drones that simply react like amoebas to advertising, buying junk we don't need so that the top 0.1% rule the world, pushed their by their intense narcissism and lack of empathy (like Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella who are by definition narcissists for doing what they do.)

This is self-limiting. It's a sort of built-in plateau. You can't serve the whole market with anything: the closest you'll get is something like a Heinz Ketchup, a miraculously well-balanced creation with something for everyone. It's also a relatively small market segment for all its accessibility.

We cannot be made 'consumerist and mindless drones that simply react like amoebas to advertising' more than we already are, which is a LOT: whole populations are poisoned by carefully designed unhealthy food, conned by carefully designed propaganda in various contradictory directions. We're already at saturation point for that, I think. It's enough to be a really toxic situation: doesn't have to threaten to be far worse.

The backlash always happens, in the form of more indigestible things that aren't homogenous mush, whether that's the Beatles or the Sex Pistols or, say, Flamin' Hot Cheetos. The more homogenous everything is, the more market power is behind whatever backlash happens.

This is actually one argument for modern democracies and their howling levels of cultural tension… it's far more difficult to impose homogenity on them, where other systems can be more easily forced into sameness, only to snap.

Is that image of a child being assaulted by terrorists real or fake? To the victims, its real, to political powers it fake, to mega corporations, its money.

The world we are headed into, accelerated by huge leaps in technology like AI, will be a sorry, pathetic, unforgiving world, that amplifies suffering and nullifies humanity.

Is that what has happened so far in your life? Technology has messed it up for you ?

Don't bully people into not expressing critical thought by emphasizing that they have their basic physical needs met. We should be critical of society, even if on the surface it seems pretty good.

We also have more advanced psychological needs such as the need to depend on others, and that is what is at stake here.

Wouldn't the poverty rebuild these communities ? I mean the hardships make people rely on each other right?

I don't entirely doubt what you're saying either, but I'm not so sure I see what you see.

Seriously, we're a long way off technological utopia. Even if we had some type of AGI/ASI that was self-aware like in movies ,there's little if any evidence to suggest it will just work for us and make sure you're ok.

Going back to the 90s probably would.

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty...

Why don't you go ask the 189 million people that since 1990 have avoided hunger if they agree?

A lot of people in southeastern Asia and China are working in industry and live tens time better than subsiste farmers just one generation before them exactly because the niche trinkets they make can now be sold on instagram.

AI tooling seems to be allowing for more time on creativity and less on rote work.

If that continues to play out creativity inevitably drives more collaboration as creativity cannot thrive only in a silo.

Except in the shovelware games industry and the instagram ad scam industry where is AI actually, currently, threatening to take away jobs?

2. Photographers (Check out Photo.AI). I know a local photographer who takes nice portraits for businesses. Now people can use this service for their headshots. (You may argue that it's good for people but at which point does it remain good if NOBODY can use their creative talents to make a living.)

3. Writing. Many websites are now using writers to write their articles. That means they hire less writers. Again, you can say that it makes society more efficient and I guess it does for consumers, but those people such as copy editors will have to find new jobs.

You may say that new jobs will be created but we have not seen such a versatile tool that can take away so many jobs at such a quick pace before. Moreover, will the world really be a nice place to live in if most of the creative jobs or at least jobs involved IN producing something nice will be left to machines?

What about Hollywood and their desire to replace writers and actors? You may say that Hollywood is dead anyway, but I'm sure it's about to get a lot worse...

5. Programmers

7. Composers, hired musicians, eventually singers, producers

Also there's areas where it's quickly becoming a required skill set, so it's not that it's replacing people but that the people there are getting their skills obsoleted. All the molecular biologists I know that used to joke about how they picked biology since they suck with computers and hate excel are at a high risk of getting left behind right now, especially with how steep the improvement's been with protein design models like RFDiffusion. Though by latest rumors it looks like the vast vast majority of biologists involved in protein work have already started using tools like alphafold and esmfold so it does look like people are adapting.

> The job cuts come as businesses waste no time adopting advanced AI technology to automate a range of tasks — including creative work, such as writing, as well as administrative and clerical work.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-job-losses-artificial-intell...

That is why we should be cautious about technology instead of inviting it with open arms. It is a question we should continue to ask ourselves with more wisdom, instead of relying on our mass global capitalistic system to deliver easy answers for us from the depths of the profit motive.

Why do these people deserve protection from automation any more than all the millions of people who worked other jobs tat were eliminated by automation up to this point?

What we're getting instead is the automation of those creative endeavours, while leaving a "gap" of repetitive, mind numbing work (like labelling data or doing basic physical tasks like "picking" goods in an Amazon warehouse) that still has to be done by humans.

Hand weaving is a creative endeavor, but almost no one makes a living from hand weaving today. People still do it for fun, though.

The upside there is that most people are able to afford more than two sets of clothing (one for daily wear, one for church, weddings, funerals, etc.).

You got it!!! All those other people DO deserve protection from automation! But our society made a mistake and pushed them out. Many communities were destroyed by efficient automation and guess what, efficient automation via cars and vehicles is what caused our most immense disaster now, the climate crisis.

We made a mistake by creating so much automation. We should strive to recreate smaller communities in which more creative AND manual tasks are appreciated.

So you're volunteering to become a stoop-labor agricultural serf, then?

Those exist?

When we're getting rid of assembly line jobs, or checkout counter staff, or data entry clerks, or any other job that we know is demeaning and boring, we can convince ourselves that the thousands/millions put out of work are an unfortunate side effect of progress. Oh sure, the loss of jobs sucks, but no one should have to do those jobs anyway, right? The next generation will be better off, surely. We're just closing the door behind us. And maybe if our economic system didn't suck so much, we would take care of these people.

But when creatives start getting replaced, well, that's different. Many people dream of moving into the creative industry, not out of it. Now it feels like the door is closing ahead of us, not behind us.

/s

My "Plan B" is becoming an electrician.

On the other hand access to information has given me more independence, and this hasn't been a bad thing. I do rely less on others, like my parents, but I still love them and spend more time having fun with them rather than relying on them.

I do understand what you mean, it just doesn't like up as all negative to me.

I also think open source AI will destroy any feudalistic society. These companies like MS are going to have a problem when their own technology starts to destroy their value add.

Look ad Adobe and some of the open source video and graphis editing AI software, there goes one fiefdom.

I don't think it's possible that the cultures of OpenAI and MS can be made compatible. MS is dreary. Highly effective at productizing, yes. But the culture that propels deep innovation -- that is not going to last.

Things have changed quite a bit, as I understand it.

I think what remains to be seen is who is on the right side of history. The real loser here is probably ethical AI. I know this won’t be a popular opinion around here, but it’s clear to me that with computing and AI, we may be in an echo of the Industrial Revolution where the profit motive of the 19th century led to deep human injustices like child labor and unsafe and inhumane working conditions.

Except of course that AI could have even more impact - both positive and negative, in the same way socmed has.

I would quibble with this slightly. They do have a right to fire, but they're doing a poor job of working in the not-for-profit's interests if they do so in a way that collapses the value of their biggest asset (the for-profit), especially when other options are potentially available. e.g. a negotiated exit, providing proper warning to their investors etc etc.

They can't just magically recreate what OpenAI has done. The data sets, the tooling, the models, the everything around it. It will take so long for MS to catch up even if they had 100% of their people working on it tomorrow.

The rest of the market is going to benefit more than MS.

Hmmmh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_Stiftung

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Sons

If anything it seems like the more likely lesson is that Altman manoeuvred OpenAI into a situation which was incompatible with its non-profit objectives.

>Although the charity is funded by owning the vast majority of shares, it has no voting rights and is involved in health and social causes unrelated to Bosch's business

There's also the example of Ikea's ownership structure, but that's just a giant tax dodge.

Yes, I think you're right there.

This reads like a disingenuous strategy to get rid of the other three members (one half) of the board. A real coup, not a fake one. I know nothing about any of these people, but it seems possible Sutskever convinced the board to make a decision that he knew would have an outcome that would end in them being fiduciarily obliged to resign so that he, Altman, and Brockman could come back as the entirety of the board. And if the hiring by MS is involved, then MS would then control the board of the non-profit.

I can't get past this snippet:

> they ultimately had no leverage because they weren’t a for-profit company with the capital to be truly independent.

Maybe I don't understand non-profits, but.. they're allowed to amass a war chest for expansion and to pay for dependencies, right? They're not compelled by charter to have no capital like some sort of a corporate equivalent of a monk -- it's just OpenAI that did not have enough capital to grant them better negotiating terms. How is that different from any other startup that gives up ownership of its IP in exchange for investment?

Best case scenario for MSFT probably would have been to negotiate Altman et al back to OpenAI with some governance changes to boost stability. Keep the OpenAI GPT-N momentum going that they have harnessed for themselves.

MSFT have managed to neutralize (for now) the threat of Altman et al creating a competitor, but this has come at the cost of souring their relationship with OpenAI who they will continue to be dependent on for AI for next couple of years.

Big question here is what happens to OpenAI - can they keep the momentum going, and how do they deal with their sugar-daddy & compute-provider MSFT now also being a competitor? How much of the team will leave, and can they recover from that ?

What would cease to exist would simply be speculation and arbitrage. Since all prices are perfect, you simply wouldn't be able to make more (or even less, for that matter) money than the return on capital everyone gets by buying and selling shares quickly.

Alternatively, we could have these companies turned into research organizations run by the government and funded by taxes they way most research (e.g. pharmaceuticals) should be. There's more than one way to get good research done, and having it public removes many strange incentives and conflicts of interest.

Sandia and Los Alamos both receive about $4.5 billion per fiscal year. OpenAI is likely spending an order of magnitude more than that.

[1] https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?si=YaawmLi8zKrFxwue&t=2303

There's not a lot to suggest everyone will jut join M$ by default.

- intellectual property as of today

- the servers that run it

- the people that wrote it

- the executive leadership that executed the play so far and know the roadmap ahead

What else do you need?

This is a big picture idea that we should examine more closely. Right now, in the heat of the chaotic collapse, it's easy to conclude that for-proft corp structure is the only way to go. But I think we should take a "proof is in the pudding" approach and remember all the amazing things that OpenAI accomplished under it's non-conventional org structure. Maybe that non-conventional org structure was a key ingredient in OpenAI's success? Sure, we now know that "long-term stability" does not seem to be a quality of this org structure, but nonetheless it seemed to have lots of other desirable qualities.

Be no evil, for example. Billions and billions were made when that phrase was erased.

a language model in alignment is control.

the model does not need to be aligned with the desires of people. just person. it could be people, but getting alignment with people is…

Ouch. Is that really the ideal vision of founding a SV startup?

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=stratechery.com

"None of these companies appease China; they refuse to provide service under those conditions and/or they are IP range blocked. Microsoft does service China with Bing, for example.

You should not sell OpenAI's to China or to Microsoft, [or to China or Russia through Microsoft]

Especially after a DDOS by Sue Don and a change in billing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...