OpenAI employees really, really did not want to go work for Microsoft
OpenAI employees really, really did not want to go work for Microsoft
During the chaos after Sam Altman's ouster, Microsoft offered to hire the CEO and his entire workforce. Insiders now say it was a bluff that worked.
well you have about 4-6 years to find another job then, like it or not, OpenAI is going to be owned by Microsoft
130Totally agree. Microsoft has invested way too much in openAI to have a repeat of the Sam Altman debacle. They will formalize their control of te company. And Altman has already shown that in conflict between the board and MS, he’s on Microsoft’s side.
Also, any openAI developer who thinks that openAI currently is an independent company is kidding themselves. Microsoft is effectively already calling the shots, al be it in a roundabout way.
83Altman has already shown that in conflict between the board and MS, he’s on
Microsoft’sSam Altman’s side.26
I dunno, I think they like the plausible deniability and monopoly regulation shielding that comes from investing in but not owning OpenAI. I think they'll absolutely find ways to exert more and more control, and once there are reasonable competitors they might snap it up, but for the time being they probably find the distance beneficial.
5There is no benefit to microsoft to have distance, they want to own it. Owning it creates shareholder value which is all Microsoft care about. If they wanted to make products using it, they could pay for it like everyone else.
But they chose to make moves and exert control. They know they can't own it today because of the complex arrangement of openai. they know they can own it outright tomorrow with enough small changes (like getting on the board for one)
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I can’t blame them. Working for a huge company can suck in a lot of ways.
But since OpenAI still makes people move to SF and shlep into an office every day, I don’t want to work there either.
86They have likely all, at least most of them, worked in a big corporate environment before and seen all the things it brings. For better or worse.
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At this stage, I’d say it’s 50/50 whether OpenAI is a net positive for the world. I’m not talking about the chatbot coming to life and enslaving humanity. Just making it easy to flood the internet with SPAM, fake images, etc. is going to be awful for the internet and, possibly, humanity for a bit.
I also wouldn’t be shocked if the technology does have tremendous benefits (like DeepMind with protein folding) that outweigh the downsides. But let’s see what the sewer rats of capitalism and Machiavellian political actors do with it before anyone pops the champagne about “changing the world.”
54Yep. I am absolutely fascinated by it. Totally agree with you, you couldn't be more right. I'm a heavy AI user and I love seeing those 2 minute papers about what clever people are doing with it, like creating a swarm of AIs to create a game using giving AIs roles and responsibilities and reporting hierarchy, code review, and more. On the other side I literally made copyright infringing material by accident.
While public ones might get some safe guards to help prevent people from doing bad things easily and intentionally, there's plenty of unrestricted ones coming in, scraping the internet, training and offering a moral free AI. The arms wars have begun on all kinds of fronts. I can't predict where we will be in 5 years from now.
Id be betting pessimistically though
14Just making it easy to flood the internet with SPAM, fake images, etc. is going to be awful for the internet and, possibly, humanity for a bit.
I don't see how the center will hold, when we won't be able to even really talk to each other any more, because we will think that everything we read is fake and produced by bots from corporate/political entities trying to manipulate us, instead of having intellectually honest conversations by individuals to resolve issues.
5Imagine if they'd kept it a secret, and none of us knew there was this thing out there that could do these things.
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Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup "look down on what they consider legacy companies" and "see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world."
I despise Microsoft's advertising and some of its anti-competitive practices, but man, fuck these out of touch, clout chasing, dorks. Microsoft has been making products for 30 years that are stable enough for most of the world's companies to build successful businesses on top of.
There are flat out no SV companies that can claim the same longevity, and only one or two, like Google / Salesforce, that actually enable the rest of the economy in any meaningful way.
SV is a beautiful place and the money that flows into it makes it seem like paradise, but it also deludes everyone there into thinking that they're vastly smarter and more important than they actually are.
52The only reason any of those businesses use Microsoft products is because of active directory and exchange. Both of which are legacy products that are being, if not already, phased out. The real truth is this, the enterprise runs on Microsoft, but the world runs on Linux. Windows is so bad for containers that Microsoft has to make their own distro of Linux specifically for containers with azure Linux and that's just one example of the technical debt Windows creates. The quicker NT can finally die is when the world can finally move towards real innovation instead of being handicapped by Microsoft and their unfair business practices. Some of us haven't forgotten "embrace, extend, and extinguish" which is exactly what they're doing in the gaming markets by buying up the competition.
16The only reason any of those businesses use Microsoft products is because of active directory and exchange. Both of which are legacy products that are being, if not already, phased out.
From an IT perspective it's active directory and exchange (and lol no they're not being faced out, there's nothing better to replace them), but from a business process standpoint it's because of Outlook and Excel.
Your hatred for Microsoft is blinding you from reality.
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I give it 5 years until their CEO goes off the rails like Elon or Zuck did.
2Wow. Microsoft exists because they've built an effective monopoly. Plain and simple. Their products don't suck but they absolutely would not survive if they completed in a free market environment. They are staffed with legions of engineers who see it as a safe haven metaphorically or literally (visa workers)
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40WSL is EEE in a nutshell. I don't know why that is held out as an example of how Microsoft has changed.
22It's just fancy virtualization. It's not really wildly different from KVM/QEMU going the other way.
It's hard to get too excited about it. It's not going to replace real Linux builds, which dominate the server space in a way which is never going to be meaningfully challenged by "Linux in a VM under Windows".
Windows implementing WSL is their concession that they've lost the server market and they aren't getting it back, and if they don't want to lose the workstation market as well they need to make sure that Linux development can happen easily on Windows boxes. Their business case for it is clear, and it's really not got anything to do with classic EEE tactics.
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What are you basing this on, exactly?
Windows has only gotten shittier, Azure is a fucking joke, Office 365 leaks like a sieve. Just about everything MS has touched in the last two decades has been abject garbage. WSL is a tragedy. Teams???
What has MS done that's been praise worthy? I don't get it.
11IMO they're still awkward and cludgy as ever, but less imperialistic. Maybe its just harder to corner all the markets these days.
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I keep seeing stuff like this but I don't get it. Azure is Linux because if it was Windows only, nobody would use it. It's a shit service filled with tricks to lock customers in.
It's obvious that WSL is EEE. It only exists because of their focus on the cloud, and they realized that Windows was a poor dev environment for Linux software. Microsoft is directly incentivized to kill Linux so people get even more locked in to their ecosystem.
Is the reason you have a good impression of them because you use VS Code? That's not even open source. The proprietary parts are all more spyware and walled garden shit designed to lock you in.
Or maybe you're not a dev, and it's because you like Xbox gamepass? That's an anticompetitive attempt to monopolize the game industry. It's unsustainable and designed to price out the competition and lock in customers, which is classic monopoly shit. It's the best deal in the game industry today, but prices will shoot up when they get the market share they want.
The golden rule still applies today, as it did 20+ years ago: never trust Microsoft
7They say gamepass is profitable!
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My favorite part about the Microsoft translation is that MS reportedly had to go out and buy a bunch of MacOS machines for the Open AI folks because they didn’t want to use the operating system that their future employer made.
I wonder if Apple’s two week return policy works for enterprise purchases of hundreds of machines.
35I can assure you that Microsoft already purchases a ton of Macs. They develop software for Mac and iOS, after all.
71Hardly any startups in Silicon Valley use Windows.
18That's wild. I can't dev for shit on a MacBook. I usually have to install Parallels or something if that's the case.
Or use Linux (when possible).
15It makes sense. You can develop for Windows and Linux on Mac, but you can't develop for Mac or iOS anywhere else but on Mac; at least not easily. In my job, I develop full stack web but also device code for Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS. It's way more convenient for me to use a Mac with VMware running Windows and ChromeOS than trying to cobble together a device lab.
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people working at the San Francisco-based startup "look down on what they consider legacy companies"
I can't help the feeling Altman is the great leader of all them, who love to look down on us.
23All these startups are owned by venture capital firms, who will eventually sell to one of the handful of companies that own everything, OpenAI is no different and Altman is like every other tech CEO that sells out
12OpenAI is no different
That's not exactly true. OpenAI is structured like Mozilla, where there's a nonprofit parent part which owns a for-profit subsidiary.
Idk all the details, but I suspect that the typical exit strategy isn't in the cards for them without some legal shenanigans.
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It’s the money . Always the money . They talk about where they like to work, but it’s about their stock.
14It's often about the money, yes. But highly sought after engineers who can choose where they want to work probably have other criteria too, like not getting stuck in MS corporate ladder long term. That being said, money compensates for a lot of things, that's just the world we live in.
12“highly sought after engineers” Tend not to get stuck
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We will try really, really hard to believe that. Or is letting the wolf in better?
11They already do, who do they think called the shots when Altman was tossed out? Santa Claus?
8SantaSatya Claus1
Huh that's crazy because most of them signed a letter threatening to do exactly that if they didn't get their way.
Maybe have the courage of your convictions, cowards.
7They can dislike one option to the point where they'd rather choose a different option they also dislike. The lesser of evils.
6Did you even read the article?
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I don't want to go to work. Period.
7This is the best summary I could come up with:
After Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI late last month, the startup's employees threatened to leave and accept a blanket offer from Microsoft to hire them all.
After the sudden ouster of their CEO, hundreds of OpenAI employees signed an open letter demanding Altman's reinstatement and the resignation of the board.
At the time, their main source of leverage was a plan to all quit and join Altman and President Greg Brockman at a new AI group within Microsoft.
The letter itself was drafted by a group of longtime staffers who have the most clout and money at stake with years of industry standing and equity built up, as well as higher pay.
While OpenAI staffers would have followed through with their threat and joined Microsoft, they probably would have left at the first opportunity for other AI startups such as Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Cohere, the employee added.
Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup "look down on what they consider legacy companies" and "see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world."
The original article contains 964 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
3people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”
With the rumors that the ethics board was worried about OpenAI and Altman moving too fast to truly consider ethics... This checks out. Startups are truly a different beast to larger "legacy companies", who move slower because they have checks and balances and a reputation to maintain.
I do think Microsoft would have given them a lot of leeway though, given the gold mine they were about to be sitting on. Staying at the front of the copilot race is critically important right now, and as Microsoft continues to move all its Office 365 services to the web and cross-connect them, it's even more important for them to have a copilot for Enterprise clients that spans and can pull data from all those services.
3But they are though so???
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