OpenAI acquires Global Illumination
openai.com
openai.com
Odd acquisition choice unless OpenAI is going to do an unexpected pivot.
Couldn't it be the opposite ?
Let's imagine, that Microsoft, one of the main investor of OpenAI, wants to get rid of a solid open-source Minecraft clone before it gets popular ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPHEtewFm3M
Not saying it's true, but that's totally reasonable to spend xxM USD if you have to defend your multi-billion game license.
Was it them or someone else who trained their bots on Dota a few years back?
They've since abandoned all their reinforcement learning projects. (aside from RLHF for training ChatGPT)
That was the same time they depreciated OpenAI Gym: https://github.com/openai/gym
That's a shame, I was really impressed with their research in that space.
> OpenAI has acquired the team at Global Illumination, a company founded by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flynn. The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on our core products including ChatGPT. Global Illumination is a company that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences. The team previously designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook and have also made significant contributions at YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies. We’re very excited for the impact they’ll have here at OpenAI.
Seems like a very standard acquihire. There's no indication that any of Global Illumination's projects will continue, or that OpenAI will get into the gaming business.
Sorry, I don't see any of that written there, not "pretty clear" to me.
What's the point of the quote, then?
Someone posts this:
>Their statement is pretty clear about what they see as the value add
And add a quote to support that.
I argue that I do not see what the value added is from that quote, (and I still don't, btw).
You tell me to scroll down ... ??? What? I don't need to scroll down to read a 4-5 sentence quote.
You then start talking about the article, which is not what I'm not referring to, I'm talking about the quote.
I ask "what's the point of the quote then?", as in, if GP wanted to point its argument at something else in TFA why would it choose to quote this instead? And you also didn't grasp that.
Anyway, hope it's all clear now.
Deploying AI agents to 3D worlds seems like a huge potential market. Not just for gaming, but as a test bed for real world 3D SLAM.
Rendering scenes in 3D with AI seems like another huge potential market, at the intersection of movies and gaming.
This is both at once. I think it'd be a mistake to put them to work on ChatGPT.
They are going to put AI to voxel 3d spatial dev... "EnvironGPT" '3DGPT'
Each character had all their Bethesda-written dialog fed to the LLM as a starting prompt, so each one communicated with the player within the bounds of their authored identity, and knew what that character was written to know.
The human player used freeform in-game text-to-LLM as input to talk to the people in the town square. The latency was large, but not more than a few seconds.
He was able to walk up to someone and say things like "Where do you live? Who is your father?" .... latency pause ... "Oh me? I live in the Cloud District. It's where all of us Battleborn clan live, of course!"
The real kicker of this demo was that they passed the LLM-generated response dialog in to a deep-fake model trained on each character's original voice actors (since the corpus in Skyrim is vast, this ended up quite accurate).
All of this was a major generational shift for gaming as a whole. I had just witnessed the first time a video game player could actually TALK to an NPC, in a fully unstructured and unscripted fashion, while each character remained as in-character as the original game's authors intended.
So maybe this purchase by OpenAI is about something like that. Building NPCs for Biomes.gg that you can actually talk to.
The voice is added in post through editing. The voice generation wasn't performed in real time. Still, a very interesting project.
So obviously yes it's an odd decision to buy an open-source MMORPG, but there are tons of possibilities.
Plenty of times, you can see large companies buying non-sense, or companies at outrageous price (we just don't know the price in the case here).
Sometimes even to fire the people behind, and throw away the product.
It can be for many reasons:
- Either they really have a solid business use which justifies the acquisition
or
- Perhaps they have a common investor/VC, and that investor is influent enough in OpenAI to "convince" the board to buy the company.
or
- Some investors give a kickback on the acquisition (I don't think so)
or
- Microsoft wanted to early kill a competitor to Minecraft.
etc.
Probably it'll be difficult to know.
Their founder and CEO created The Algorithm at Instagram. Rest of the team is super strong too. Makes a lot of sense for OpenAI to acquire a team at the intersection of AI and consumer products.
Businesses don't tend to do well when they directly compete with their clients.
At the very least spin one off into a subsidiary whose affiliation isn't widely known.
True in general, but then we have Amazon.
don’t let those darn things trick you into thinking they are people. legally it gets murky, but they aren’t people. it is all just a ploy for emotional connection for the sake of taking advantage of you.
like cats.
That being said, considering Microsoft's investment, the most likely outcome is that OpenAI will move into the consumer business while being the research arm for Azure.
They started out obviously doing API stuff. chatGPT was some sort of proof-of-concept or whatever but once it went viral, the obvious pivot is to be a product maker. The margins on ChatGPT+ is way better than an API, as every ChatGPT clone will tell you. A viral product is really hard to make, never mind make and throw away to focus on lower margin corporate customers.
They seem to have a great vision now - make a good product (WIP, but rapidly iterating), and sell the underlying models to Microsoft to offer as an API for the residual value they can’t capture directly. This should make it clear that if you’re selling a Chatbot off of their APIs, they’re planning to compete with you.
Isn't this what MSFT and GOOG do?
If you can build a bot to beat an open world game as complex as Minecraft, you’re pretty close to automating an enormous amount of jobs and potentially doing some destructive stuff. This seems like an aquihire to kickstart that initiative.
Full disclosure this is a complete assumption, could just as well be on the whims of Sama. I’m skeptical of the other answers here - OpenAI is perfectly capable of hiring some of the best PM’s in the world without having to buy a company.
As someone not well versed in how startups work, why do they need to acquire the entire company to have the team work for them, as opposed to negotiating with the employees individually? Is it essentially a lump sum payment to stop what they were currently working on.
Because otherwise, the team would have the option of continuing their current employment.
Take away the alternative they are demonstrably already choosing over you, and you have a better chance of getting and keeping them.
1) have an idea, negotiate seed funding. Someone will give you a bunch of money to make an MVP. the "angel" or "seeder" will exchange money for a percentage of the company. They will have a say in how its run
2) grow the company according to the metrics that make you look valuable (market share is normally the common one)
3) growing costs money, so raise a "series a" same deal as before, either seeder/angels are bought out, or their share of the company is diluted in exchange for more monoey from the funders, typically a VC.
4) repeat until either bankrupt, IPO, Profitable, or boughtout.
Now. As an early employee, you are given shares in the company. Typically <1%. the more rounds you have, the more diluted that percentage gets.
when the company is bought out, your shares are exchanged for a price. however as you didn't put the money in, you are a way down the pecking order for getting the cash. Not only this, but a "buyout" price is rarely the headline price. For example CTRL-Labs[1] was "bought out" for $500 mill. However thats not the price they paid for the company. thats the price paid for the company and the "golden handcuffs" to keep employees.
of that 500mill some of is say <75m will go to physically buy the company, the rest will go towards golden handcuffs to keep the employees working. After all, if you give most of the company >$2m upfront, they'll say "work for facebook? fuck that, I'm retiring"
So to combat that, you'll get your 0.0001% of $75m, then offered a contract with the new company that will give you shares that will be released to you gradually after a certain cool off period, say one year (Fb and google give you 6.25% every 3 months.) That means that to get your $2m you need to work for the new company for four years.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquired-brain-comp...
Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
(There have actually been multiple Minecraft-like web codebases around for years. Nothing as complete as Biomes that I know of though. I built a basic one 11 years ago. https://vimeo.com/50111926/comments)
They obviously already have lots of machine learning expertise and wanted top-level application engineering. This is a way to acquire a whole integrated team.