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They fired the ceo and everyone went with him to microsoft. Microsoft's in control of all the compute resources to be delivered to openai, has access to all their tech and got the means to divert compute resources to this new "openai2.0" team that is now under full control of microsoft
Microsoft no longer needs the current "openai", it's gotta be 1 of the most stupid shit the board could've done
Embrace, extend, extinguish. OpenAI needed Microsoft a lot more than they needed OpenAI. The playbook hasn't changed. They're the same they've always been. What's new is that it was significantly accelerated time frame this time. This kind of thing usually takes years, but OpenAI made it possible for it to happen in weeks.
Seems board severely underestimate the amount of friends Sam has
You mean firing the founder who brought all the employees and funding to your company might be bad for morale? No way! Who could’ve possibly seen that coming? Clearly no one on the board.
The board was more insulated than usual from the actual company because of the weird corporate structure of OpenAI and some members were uniquely unqualified.
Microsoft no longer needs the current "openai" as a result
Yeah that's not true. Microsoft still needs their technology. At least until it can be replaced, but that will take time.
So far only a couple of key people have left. Hundreds of staff wrote in support of Sam and said they may leave. Considering the nature of startups a lot of knowledge is probably tribal and oral so whatever happens the openAI team and knowledge base will be fractured from this. It will probably take more than just a couple of months to get back on track, assuming there are no legal challenges either.
so whatever happens the openAI team and knowledge base will be fractured from this
If basically the whole company shifts over, that wouldn't be an issue.
If this was a play by MS, I'm impressed. Reddit thinks tech bro Altman is some kind of hero and forgot all of his sketchy past projects and unfounded scifi hype. Its mind boggling. I think neither Altman nor the EA weirdos on the board have gotten enough scrutiny in the media, and certainly not on reddit.
By EA, are you talking about the video game company?
You could definitely make a terminator film out of this.
Also the delay that development from MS will have for a bit will also mean that Google has some time to catchup to where ChatGPT was when this all happened. It was claimed they were a year behind OpenAI tech so that is also a major blow against them as well. I don't expect MS to stop or to really be damaged by this news but it will enable Google to catch up a bit more. There's also a benefit in that since it means more competition on this area for consumers/companies.
I can't think of the last time google was relevant in the innovation conversation.
It gives time for everyone to catch up.
Altman is just a CEO, they can be replaced. He disrespected the ethical concerns of the OpenAI board in a major way, firing him was the least they could do. People who want to push AI tech without safety nets need to educate themselves urgently, they're the same idiots who claim that climate change can be "solved" with tech. It can't and there are very physical and mathematical reasons for it.
Not all CEO's are easy to replace. If Nvidia didn't have Jensen they'd be screwed.
MS will gut them and eventually acquire them.
Microsoft isn't going anywhere faster than their legal departement can follow. And that departement is going to have it's hands full with this.
7 years of code development and 500+ new employees that you have to be sure isn't using that code from their former employee.
Good luck to everything
I'm late to the thread sorry if you've moved on but I'm confused about one of your points. It was my understanding Sam is/was the one beating the drum for safety restrictions, why is he now suddenly "no longer held back"?
The buried lede here is we could've had four major players in the GPU space, if it weren't for those meddling board members. This fourth one surely would've been built with compute in mind from the ground up, which might have finally put out a real competitor to CUDA.
Barriers to entry are a high bar. $Bs in VC capital has flown into that exact space over the last 5-8 years, and there are a bunch of dead startups in the wake. Altman’s resources are no different than any of those others.
The buried part of that is that some Middle East sovereign fund would also control them.
Which if we take the “anti-aging tech, water rights in Arizona adjacent to TSMC, ip3 nuclear tech,petrodollar, and hobby owning of republicans” historical context into account makes this an extremely bad decision for humanity.
The buried part of that is that some Middle East sovereign fund would also control them.
Unlikely. They're probably looking for investors all over. The Middle East just happens to be one such destination.
last thing we want is the ME to have tons of AIs and drones
Too late for that...
The buried lede here is we could've had four major players in the GPU space
There are a large number of startups working to rival Nvidia's AI prowess. TensTorrent, Cerebras, etc.
https://www.ai-startups.org/top/hardware/
Each of them are five or more years ahead of whatever Altman was raising funds for.
I see zero suggestion that anybody would be entering the GPU space, this would be focused for AI applications only.
In some senses you end up with convergent design, it's not a GPU, it's just a control system that commands a bunch of accelerator units with a high-bandwidth memory subsystem. But that could be ARM and an accelerator unit etc. Probably need fast networking.
But it's overall a crazy proposition to me. Like first off goog and amazon are gonna beat you to market on anything that looks good, and you have no real moat other than "I'm sam altman", and really there's no market penetration of the thing (or support in execution let alone actual research) etc. Training is a really hard problem to solve because right now it's absolutely firmly rooted in the CUDA ecosystem. Supposedly there may be a GPU Ocelot thing once again at some point but like, everyone just works with nvidia because they're the gpgpu ecosystem that matters.
Like, if you wanted to do this you did like Tesla and have Jim Keller design you a big fancy architecture for training fast at scale (Dojo). I guess they walked away from it or something and just didn't care anymore? Oops.
But, that's the problem, it's expensive to stay at the cutting edge. It's expensive to get the first chip, and you'll be going against competitors who have the scale to make their own in-house anyway. it's a crazy business decision to be throwing yourself on the silicon treadmill against intense competition just to give nvidia the finger. wack, hemad.
Should FTC have a look at Microsoft?
Right now, MS is a small player in AI, well behind the other big tech companies. If Altman goes to MS and builds a competitor to NVidia, this would be something the FTC is very happy about.
They definitely should. Otherwise Windows 12 is going to be shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0 and consumers won't be given a choice.
Is this bad sarcasm or are you actually braindead?
Now he's CEO of a Microsoft research group.
It's crazy how fast this whole OpenAI Sam Altman story has developed, and how many twists have occurred. OpenAI now has the ex-Twitch CEO as its interim CEO. 550/700 employees have signed documents stating they want the board members to step down. Ilya Sutskever, the linchpin in this whole fiasco has now publicly stated they regret siding with the board. Sam Altman has now joined Microsoft.
In less than a week the entire company has imploded.
I'm betting the board members were originally talking to someone and now regret it.
saying less than a week underplays it. it was a weekend. it all happened in rwo days.
Things happen fast (and weird) when hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake
Is this better for Microsoft? They no longer have to operate through a not-for-profit and all the engineers want to come to them!
Supposedly Microsoft is now offering direct compensation, including the odd stock options thing transferring to equivalent stock options in Microsoft, to any Open AI employees for switching to Microsoft.
Watch the entire company, worth $90 billion a week ago, vanish in the course of a week. Wild.
This is like the Titan Submersible of AI companies, an implosion so rapid that your brain doesn’t have time to respond
That was the analogy that I had in mind.
If the board doesn't resign and everyone goes to Microsoft, the whole company will disintegrate in a blink of an eye.
Does Altman have any experience in hardware design, fabrication, or anything related?
Of course, he also has questionable family history (look up his sister, she posts about it) and has ties to the JE group. Of course he cant stay working for a company that has a real mission to do decent by humans.
Stop taking middle eastern investment money ffs. Stop letting these people diversify their investments outside of oil!
Well. This puts things into perspective.
In Public: "We're here to make world better palce by developing AGI!"
In Private: "Hey mister bone-saw. I'd sure love some of your blood money"