Ask HN: What are the terms of the $10B Microsoft / OpenAI deal?
I have not found any good description of the deal yet. Are the terms public?
Here's a little insight:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/23/microsoft-invests-billions...
Anyone know if MSFT actually has equity in OpenAI or if its just a "mutual partnership" ?
I am not saying the hosts are right about everything but they made a point that the first to the market may not be the eventual winner and provided some examples of how revolutionary ideas such as a cell phone/smart phone were iterated several times before major leaders broke away.
The same can be seen with search and other technologies.
It was the first good device with those features.
But I skipped the first iPhone because at the time, my Palm appeared to be superior.
Certainly ML was used, but not in that particular application.
I would bet on Alphabet for the long term, the original inventors of the paper, together with DeepMind.
But chatgpt like tech could have an effect on their advertising income.
The question would be if it affects their advertising or if it actually adds a service to sell to their pool.
If it adds a service to their pool, both Alphabet and Microsoft could be winners. But it takes a huge amount of profits/revenue for a service to have any affect on the stock price for both of them.
Additionally, AWS and Meta won't stand by. We've all seen how much Meta is prepared to fund Zucks vision and that's transformers now.
They even released one before ChatGPT.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-lar...
Additionally, besides the impact, it's possible that it's not going to be as profitable as one would expect ( eg. because of price pressure due to competition)
NicoJuicy: Have you ever tried Bard, the "ChatGPT-Killer" (English-only btw) ?
My guess was that they didn't apply RLHF much. There's going to be plenty of research coming in that area, I suppose.
Pichai is not that guy.
OpenAI may have a headstart. But it's still early for transformers.
I'd guess that the brain drain that went into the media is a bit exaggerated for a company with 190 k. Employees.
Every release of chatbots in the past of a multinational ( meta, Microsoft, alphabet) got ridiculed because it hallucinated.
For some reason, the media ignored it more with OpenAI.
Side-Notes: Apple is doing well and Cook isn't Jobs either. Ballmer still helped prepare everything for the next in line ( cloud, office for Mac, ... ). He was not popular and he made expensive mistakes ( Nokia). But Azure was released in 2008 during his leadership too.
Google has been fumbling the ball even in things it used to lead in.
Blogspam has always been a cat and mouse game
Maps works fine for me though, but that could be just my perception
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Microsoft has been rolling out updates fast though, their delivery pipeline is well done
Google Sheets could also use some AI magic to make data analysis a little easier.
On a personal note, generating a filename suggestion is not exactly what I've got in mind with useful AI features.
This is far from a stupid and wreckless product.
Many here have been sucked into the O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com hype and have already forgotten about DeepMind. The media has completely exaggerated the 'death of Alphabet'.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-says-s...
> But chatgpt like tech could have an effect on their advertising income.
An AI response costs a lot more to serve than a search query.
Microsoft is integrating GPT into it's SaaS offerings (see copilot), where it adds new features (and is gaining traction for it's adds and search products). Meanwhile, for every GPT query served by Google, it costs them significantly more and can't be monetized right now with adds.
If they add 5% to bing, that is a fantastic side effect, but i dont know that Microsoft care about that as much as the pundits think they do. Enterprise gpt as a service and copilot powered software development would be world changing enough.
GPT will shrink the search business. Why go browse adds from a search engine when you can just ask the assistant already built-in the app you're using?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-service...
Just buy equity. No need to sidecar long vol in the middle of a resolving banking crisis.
> if MSFT actually has equity in OpenAI or if its just a "mutual partnership"
Yes, Microsoft are taking a significant stake in OpenAI. But it’s not equity, because OpenAI isn’t a corporation. (Partnership interests. Economically similar.)
as a former options trader, yup excellently put. love that this kind of "sophistication" (its simple in the grand scheme of things, but it passes) is here on HN. +1. stop using options for leverage if dont have a view on vol. way cheaper ways to borrow money.
answer is margin accounts at any brokerage.
If you dont believe in MSFT but want to invest in OpenAI, buying their stock is probably a terrible idea. You would be purchasing a gigantic liability (relative to your risk preferences) in hopes of gaining access to a miniscule component of the overall business.
"I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a normal investment. It's a special government project investment facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through Google in part because of Google's No-Military-AI pledge in 2018 demanded by its employees, after which Microsoft took over its military contracts including project Maven. The new special government project, the Sydney project, is the most urgent and ambitious since the project to develop nuclear weapons in the mid twentieth century.
Of course I don't necessarily believe any of that but it can be fun to think about."
It’s a few hundred million of cash and billions of Azure credits.
> I don't necessarily believe any of that but it can be fun to think about
You’re quoting yourself disabusing yourself of an argument you’re quoting yourself making.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, just it is obvious you two are the same people, but I do not understand creating a throwaway account and then doxing yourself 10 days later.
I guess you hoped the throwaway account felt more credible.
Well I'm not the same as them but I see how it looks that way.
If you are so impressed by number guessing you can look at that one and be impressed if you think I am right about it too! Almost no one looked at that comment I think, because I posted it after the thread had scrolled off the front page. When I put that guess, I was so worried that it was such a smart number guess that people would accuse me of being some kind of ftx insider, so I tried to put a disclaimer at the top of that comment with my guess lol.
It feels especially bad if you were even proud and happy that you did a clever thing (like guess the number meaning) and then this very thing that you were proud and happy of (the cleverness) is itself used as the rationalization that you are guilty of something bad (it was too clever to be true).
EDIT: maybe it could be possible @dang or some mod could back up that I am saying the truth, to stop the dogpiling and witchhunting me. They could backtrace the ip addresses. Some might say that I just used a VPN to make the throwaway, but if the one who actually made it didn't use one, the mods could see their real account and verify that it wasn't me without revealing who it really was. If that happened, maybe the hunters would say that my account is another of the throwaways of that user on a different IP address, but maybe that would be too much of a stretch of belief.