from Hacker News

Microsoft was not a winner of the events of the last few days around OpenAI

by shrumm on 11/21/23, 2:52 AM with 14 comments

  • by newscracker on 11/21/23, 3:48 AM

    I think, where feasible (to fit in HN’s length limit), tweet submissions should include the name of the person and/or title. This tweet is by Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare.

    While being terribly annoyed with the events since Friday (not because they affect me directly but because of the sheer amount of useless noise created by them), I was thinking that these folks joining Microsoft are short sighted and won’t last or stay very long there. I’m glad to see an echo of that here.

    > and execution risk (see DeepMind within Google for how all the smartest people in AI can still get stymied by the bureaucracy of a giant company).

    > I think the chances of the senior OpenAI folks still being at Microsoft in 3 years is asymptotically approaching zero. Where the independence and clear mission of OpenAI was exactly what could have kept that group of incredible talent motivated and aligned over the long term, making Office365 spreadsheets a bit more clever isn’t something that rallies a team like their’s. Sure they’ll try and have some level of independence, but the machinery of a trillion dollar+ business software behemoth is hard to not get caught up in and ground out by.

    I’d give them one year, maximum, before they all split up and either go back to OpenAI or form new companies in alliance with other money-minded devils with deep pockets.

    Now might be a good opportunity for others in this space to take advantage of the chaos, and in making things worse for OpenAI and Microsoft. And I can’t wait for this to get out of the news cycle.

  • by smoldesu on 11/21/23, 3:10 AM

    > There was real risk they lose all their ~$11B investment

    Semaphor said that only a fraction of it was actually spent so far: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...

    And even still, 11B dollars is bad but certainly not world-ending for Microsoft.

  • by htrp on 11/21/23, 3:10 AM

    This is an interesting nuanced take that digs into the heart of the matter beyond the headlines.

    I do wonder what the stock market reaction will be if @sama goes back to OpenAI.

    Does Microsoft still win (any moreso than it was winning previously)?

  • by anirudhgarg on 11/21/23, 6:18 AM

    Key is that Microsoft will let them run as a seperate company like Github and LinkedIn

  • by matthewfelgate on 11/21/23, 10:43 AM

    I disagree, Microsoft have a habit of coming out of these things on top. They will end up either with more control of OpenAI and/or employing some of it's people directly.

  • by peakskill on 11/21/23, 4:00 AM

    Microsoft before: no claim over AGI Microsoft now: will invent AGI

    Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.

  • by arbuge on 11/21/23, 3:05 AM

    FWIW, the stock market disagrees.

  • by gumballindie on 11/21/23, 3:11 AM

    Microsoft should not be allowed anywhere near ai. They need to be split.

  • by chipgap98 on 11/21/23, 3:21 AM

    This take misses a few big points

    1. Microsoft is offering GPT APIs in Azure. They’re already taking accountability for the technology.

    2. Much of their investment in OpenAI has been in the form of Azure credits and not all of it has been paid yet.

    3. Microsoft wouldn’t bring the OpenAI team into the core company. They’d let them build a new company that Microsoft owns. That’s a big difference.