I can't read the article so maybe the content is more nuanced, but the framing irks me.
This all happened really fast and the offer was informal. I can
only speak for myself but I do have a lot of respect for modern MS, and would have seriously considered the move if that's what kept the team together and comp was reasonable. I would be surprised if most people felt differently.
Obviously MS does some great things but I wonder what do you think about their culture?
MS is trying to make me use Edge Browser by randomly refusing to let me use Bing chat in any other browser. This makes me think that MS is still evil and will force me to do things the moment they can. I gave up Bing Chat because of this and was using Perplexity.ai instead, until Bing got integrated into ChatGPT.
Another thing is the feel of the MS products is very different than OpenAI. For example, Bing chat again, would have a strange UX where it counts down my message allowance on the topic as I keep asking follow up questions as if it was designed for their convenience and not mine. OpenAI products on the other hand feel much more pleasant to use and don't stress me out even when things don't work as expected, which makes me think that the approach of product design is very different than MS.
Same tech running on the Azure servers, completely different product experiences. IMHO this points to completely different mindsets.
Open AI doesn’t have any meaningful “products” they have good technology and they charge $20 a month for a subscription to a technology demo that doesn’t come close to covering their costs.
You think the employees at “Open” AI care about anything more than their large paychecks no matter what they say?
I’d be curious if $20/mo is or is not enough to cover their costs. It’s opaque what their inference setup is, or what the final economics of LLMs will be. With 30-100 Billion param models becoming available which are in spitting distance of gpt-4, and dedicated ASIC implementations… openAI might be charging too much.
GPUs will be cheaper later. GPUs have still been tracking Moore's law, enterprise GPUs went from a niche product to being the hottest enterprise hardware overnight. Margins on H200's are massive from what I understand. I would bet that we'll see massive competition in the hardware space from AMD, NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, and GOOG + startups.
We're likely to see an 8-16x reduction in hardware costs over the next decade. That's about enough to shrink the current GPT-4 inference endpoints to a laptop/desktop sized hardware footprint.
It is implied in OP's reply too, right? No word about 'hey we're giving powerful tech to a hyper-monopolist', it's only about your friends and the money
All big corporations are "evil", as in, their decisionmaking is scaled and institutionalized enough to effectively implement the goal of "maximizing shareholder value" above what's good for you or society.
No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in.
I'm not talking about "hey, we have this product that you might like", I'm talking about "if you want to use this product, you must also use this product". There's also no technical reason for it, sometimes they will let me use it.
> No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in.
I'm not sure of any large one that doesn't. The incentives are aligned such that it's hard for them not to. It's easy to find examples of similar (sometimes almost identical) behavior from most large companies.
You don’t need to use any of Facebook’s other platforms to use WhatsApp. I’ve not had a Facebook account for nigh on a decade but use WhatsApp as my
main messaging app.
I don't know if Safari is that important to Apple. I have the enhanced data security feature of iCloud turned on, and I can still access my stuff in Chrome on the iCloud web interface (via the auth flow on my phone). It's actually exceedingly well-thought out and a nice bone to throw to Windows users that otherwise use Apple stuff! They could have been Safari-only or Mac-only, but aren't, even for super niche features.
Apple with iMessage onthe iPhone is about as similar as you can get, and was actually at the forefront of my mind when I wrong my comment. It's a chat platform that you have to use their product to be able to utilize.
Valve's a great example. They have overwhelming market share and could have long since tried to tighten the screws to make a buck, and haven't done anything of the sort. They've also launched numerous 1st party systems and hardware that they could have tried to shove on people (Steamdeck, Index, controllers, etc) but, again, have done nothing of the sort.
That figure is quite ridiculous. Even if one completely ignores Steam and all of their games/products, even CS:GO alone is worth billions by itself, with millions of concurrent players (and growing) more than a decade after its launch!
All that said, I would expect Valve's total immediate-term 'worth' to be much less than it could be, which is the entire point of this topic. The reason companies treat their customers poorly is because it's profitable, but it also has consequences. You see large short to mid term growth in exchange for long term failure. That's why I think it's more typical to see public companies treat their customers poorly than it is for private companies. Generally the "employees" (including board and CEO) of a public company are evaluated on their short to mid-term performance.
By contrast private companies, especially ones that remain private long beyond the point of being able to 'cash out' with a public offering, tend to be more focused on the long term viability. So it's expected that their 'value', whatever it may be, would be less than it would be if they acted in a hostile fashion to their users.
What organizations are interested are interested in “what is good for you or society”? Even if they start out that way, eventually corruption sets in. I’d rather have companies have a clear profit motive instead of a series of fake motives and increased regulatory capture.
I don't think any of that really affects the day-to-day at OpenAI if they got bought. There are plenty of counter-examples for forcing you to use Edge or ads in the Start menu. They made Typescript. They made VS Code. Those teams are just doing their thing, and it's very likely that OpenAI would be like that. Microsoft is past the world of "everyone must use our browser and OS", they really just want to sell any of their products if you'll buy them. Like, I use Outlook on my iPhone because my organization uses Office 365. That would have been unheard of a couple decades ago; Outlook and Windows was their moneymaker and if you wanted one you got both. But now, it's just teams doing their own thing.
The likely effect on day-to-day for OpenAI would have been a different promotion process, their stock being worth $0, and having to use a different videoconferencing solution. I worked at a startup that got bought by a huge company, and that's basically all that changed for us. Our team continues to work on our product, and I'm only vaguely aware of what the rest of the company even does. (I think they make servers? Like solder together chips and put them in the box.) Day-to-day doesn't change much; it's the same people, the same code, and the same goals. I didn't get bought by Microsoft, but I can't imagine that these strategic acquisitions are much different across the Fortune 500.
Yeah I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s a minor nightmare as well in an enterprise setting trying to lock down their attempts to change defaults, push copilot, lock down office smart services etc.
Even though they are in fact considering the enterprise market as a key customer. I used to manage Apple devices (iPhone but also Mac which was much more work) for a long time and that was much harder.
For example, for a federated Apple ID you can still, after 5 years since release, not use federated Apple IDs if your Azure AD UPN and E-mail are not the same. In like 90% of enterprises this is not the case but they just won't fix this. Apple thinks we should just change our entire org for them. Well with Macs taking up 0,5% of our installed base that's just not going to happen (and this way it's not going to be much higher either).
Not to mention all the terrible Mac ports of windows software like VPN, Security etc that don't follow Mac concepts or installers. You have to pile workaround upon workaround.
I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG.
Google created the meme that a company could be evil or not but we're past that age. Let's focus on the experiences, and while not forgetting the past (yes the 90s do not paint MS well), be forgiving. MS seems to continue to develop and even innovate on a lot of this tech, painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Yes as with any large company, there will be parts that are good and parts that are not.
Disclaimer: I have never worked at Microsoft and own no stock directly though so have ETFs. And through OSS I have some friends there that I strongly respect and think are awesome and always think of them any time I see hate talk towards MS, which is unfortunately common...
Most of OpenAIs tech stack is AI toolage, but basically everything you interact with is written in Python. Nobody uses C# for anything serious, because why would you?
It’s not a bad language, it’s just not a very good language either. Need efficiency? Rust/C++. Need an all round language? Node or Python, which are less efficient, but still powerful enough to power Instagram and well OpenAI as far as Python goes and LEGO as far as Typescript goes. Realistically you’re looking to choose between C#, Java and Go. Both Java and Go are miles ahead of C# in terms of concurrency, I mean, C# is still stuck with “await” after all, and while I guess you can have a lengthy debate on C# vs Java, 9 gazillion large companies use Java while 0 use C#.
It’s not that C# is bad, like I said. It’s never really been better than it is now, it’s more a question of why would you ever use it? Even the C# developers at Microsoft admit to prototyping using Python because it’s just so much faster to build things with it, and while they do move things to C#, you have to wonder if they would if they weren’t working for Microsoft.
Not sure I quite follow the point, Microsoft maintains PyLance and Pyright, tools that have had a large positive impact on Python development, including AI. Not sure about live share, but if there are feature gaps with paid IDEs I would say they're not so large - the functionality available for free in VSCode or its ecosystem (enabled by Microsoft with the help of many OSS developers) has helped democratize software engineering in a great way.
Yes they have some problems in hiding their attempts for lockin on the Windows side but ignoring all the good and just labeling them terrible for that is troubling.
there's no way you guys would get the same comp though? like not even close. MSFT irrespective of how much it wants you is not going to honor the 10X increase in valuation from the upcoming $90 billion valuation.
Even if they do, you will miss on the upside. MSFT stock is not going to 10X but OpenAI's might.
> Real MSFT stock beats a theoretical could-have-been with a 10x upside.
As someone who has done startups, I highly agree with this statement.
But for a lot of people doing start ups for the first time (including my younger self) they don't understand the headache of private market equity, and thus do not apply the correct discount.
As they say, a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.
> there's no way you guys would get the same comp though?
Nadella was directly involved and he's way smarter than that. Comping one the best ML teams in the world correctly is child's play compared to undoing Balmer's open source mess.
Uh, what? Are you claiming that if a company experiences a 10x (!) increase in valuation, that the dilution fully destroys that upside and the average developer experiences no increase in their comp? That is not even vaguely close to true in my experience.
> Are you claiming that if a company experiences a 10x (!) increase in valuation, that the dilution fully destroys that upside and the average developer experiences no increase in their comp?
Not the person you are replying to, but it depends on how diluted it gets. If they print 9x of currently outstanding shares as the value goes 10x, it would result in those original shares being worth exactly the same as before the 10x jump.
But I agree with you overall, in terms of the actual reality. I don’t think any company with half a brain would do that.
I have been the "regular people" at many companies that have increased in valuation. Dilution has never erased the gains of even much-more-modest increases in valuation. This sounds like paranoid fantasy to me.
How much do you really think that valuation would stand once OpenAI doesn’t get the massive subsidies from MS on compute? OpenAI couldn’t even be an ongoing concern.
the conversation in this thread makes me wonder about whether the right incentives for OpenAI should be to make tons of money.
Personally, I prefer to make tons of money, but as someone who will not have a say in whether to participate in an AI-driven world, I would prefer if there were non-profit counterweights. Perhaps governments will have the wherewithal to steer things but I am somewhat concerned.
I'm not the original poster, but yes I do. Sure there are plenty of examples of power hungry non-profits and once in a while a for-profit company acts altruistically, but on average I think that there's a difference. If we randomly picked some executives from either type of company I would bet that the people in the non-profit group would more often have motivations beyond pure power and money accumulation.
Let’s take the executives of the non profits that make the most revenue, how many do you think are not concerned with power…now add religious institutions to that mix.
I'm not a fan of "as an X" posts, unless there is evidence the user actually is X. With an anon account, not much history on HN and no apparent link to OpenAI, for all we know this might as well be someone from the Microsoft PR team.
If you're ok with sharing, did you sign it because you are more aligned with the productizing of GPT etc, or is it that you truly believe Sama is the CEO to follow? Or a combination of both?
I can't even imagine what it was like to experience this from the inside, with the entire world speculating on this drama, especially considering that the day before, everyone was celebrating what you and your team were creating.
I have to assume that the environment there was pretty exciting as well, and I hope the energy wasn't ruined by this. I like being surprised by technology and I love seeing people innovate because of what you and your team have pushed to the forefront. Godspeed.
For most employees, their OpenAI stock would have been worth even more than their salary at its current valuation, and it has the potential to potentially be worth quite a bit more in the future.
Replacing it with Microsoft stock would have made it a sure thing - but also with much less growth potential.
I'd be really curious to hear if Microsoft actually got so far as to figure out what to offer OpenAI employees in terms of an equity offer.
I can't read the article so maybe the content is more nuanced, but the framing irks me.
This all happened really fast and the offer was informal. I can only speak for myself but I do have a lot of respect for modern MS, and would have seriously considered the move if that's what kept the team together and comp was reasonable. I would be surprised if most people felt differently.