Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

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1,738 pointsJimDabell1,311 comments

All: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: the one in our code—not the world) is a thing of the past.

I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads, but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of the page to read all the comments, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196&p=4

etc...

Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure, but Microsoft can now capture even a bigger slice of THE FUTURE than it was possible with OpenAI investment.

Remember when they did this?

"Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion" -https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/

To then write down their assets?

"How Skype lost its crown to Zoom" - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/skype-coronavirus-pandemic Or when they did this ?

Or how in 2014...

"Microsoft buying Nokia's phone business in a $7.2 billion bid for its mobile future" - https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/2/4688530/microsoft-buys-nok...

Then in 2016 sold it for 360 million?

"Nokia returns to the phone market as Microsoft sells brand" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-ret...

I really don't understand the argument here, why are Altman and Brockman the most formidable AI team? I would wager a substantial sum that Altman has not touch anything technical (let alone related to AI) in a very long time. He certainly showed he is a very good operator, networker and executer, but that doesbt give you the technical expertise to build state of the art AI.

If he manages to get a significant amount of the OpenAI engineers to jump ship maybe, but even for those who are largely motivated by money, how is MS going to offer the same opportunity as when they joined for equity with OpenAI? Are they going to pay then >$1M salaries?

And this kind of thinking seems to be the exact reason he was pushed away. “The future” as envisioned by a megacorp might not be that great.

Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI.

The argument would go something like this:

MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and its mission.

For Microsoft , 2% loss in stock value on this news on Friday was $60 billion, so writing off $10B and giving another $50B to form a team is still a great deal.

For Sam , he got more than what he was asking and a better prospect to become CEO of Microsoft when Satya leaves. Satya lead cloud division, which was the industry growth market at that time before becoming CEO and now sam is leading AI division , the next growth market.

Ilya still lost in all of this , he managed to get back the keys of a city from sam , who now got this keys to the whole country . Eventually sam will pull everyone out of the city in to rest of his country. Microsoft just needs a few openai employees to join them . They just need data and GPU , openai has reached its limits for getting more data and was begging for more private data while Microsoft holds worlds data, they will just give a few offers to business or free Microsoft products in return of using their data or use their own. I think it’s the end for openAI.

> Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company?

Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?

10 billion was potential investment. They transfer that in tranches, so lot of it is still in MS bank. They already have access to GPT3/4/turbo + Dalle 2/3. Plus with its hordes of lawyers, it will be an uphill battle for OpenAI to make MS lose.

Satya simply had to move quickly to restore shareholder confidence. I'm not convinced that its actually desirable for Microsoft to be fully in the driving seat. Hopefully the new division will have autonomy.

Microsoft will not have actually paid $10B as a single commitment, in fact the financials of OpenAI appear to be alarming from the recent web chatter. OpenAI are possibly close to collapse financially as well as organizationally.

Whatever Satya does will be aimed at isolating Microsoft and its roadmap from that, his job is actually also on the line for this debacle.

The OpenAI board have ruined their credibility and organization.

Agreed, Satya is a first rate executive, other than Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, I can't really think of anyone in the same league.

There was a lot of discussion on HN the past few days regarding the importance (or lack thereof) of a CEO to an organization. It may be the case that most executives are interchangeable and attributing success to them is not merited, but in the case of the aforementioned, I think it is merited.

This whole weekend will probably be a case study in both Corporate Governance (Microsoft may look bad here for not anticipating the problem) and Negotiation (a masterclass by Satya: gave Ilya what he wanted and got most of OpenAI's commercial potential anyway).

He doesn’t have to write down the investment that came in the form of azure credits. He just doesn’t have to deliver.

The core thing he is 100% focused on is not having a massive stock drop Monday morning. That’s it that’s his reason to exist all weekend long.

After that. He has time to figure it out.

Given it's Microsoft we're talking about, it's more likely they use it to find new and novel ways to shove Edge, OneDrive, Teams and Bing down your throat whenever you use any of their products.

TBH We are living in the outcome of the $10B investment. Google is in a weaker position in search, with egg on their face. Microsoft appears (with or without ChatGPT) uniquely positioned to monopolize on this new AI future we're heading into with or without OpenAI as a company.

Yes directly, the $10B investment in the company itself may be a write off. But it's not just about that.

Microsoft got Copilot. They were first to establish the brand. OpenAI technologies let them do it. I don't know how much Copilot brand cost, but right now when you're thinking about AI-assisted programming, Copilot is the first thing comes in mind. So probably they got something in return.

I would say this is a better outcome for what remains of OpenAI. a New startup would have created more exodus that Microsoft. Doubt many brilliant researchers would want to be Employee number 945728123 of Microsoft when the market is theirs at this moment.

Microsoft is now the for-profit arm of OpenAI.

> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

How so? I don't get the hype.

OpenAI trained truly ground breaking models that were miles ahead of anything the world had seen before. Everything else was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at best, average. They called their flagship product "ChatGPT", a term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a random string of letters to the average person. They had no mobile app for a long time. Their web app had some major bugs.

Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success by far and large hinges on their game-changing models. And by extension, the bulk of the credit goes to their AI research/tech teams.

Maybe the next move is an open offer to any OpenAI employees to join Sam’s team at their current compensation or better.. call it the ‘treacherous 500’ or something.

I dunno man. Doing innovation from inside Microsoft might be more difficult than if they had just formed a new startup. Microsoft as a brand has the stench of mediocracy upon it. Large companies are where ideas and teams go to die, or just rest and vest.

If there's one thing we should have learned over the last 45 years in this industry - it's never underestimate Microsoft.

Was GPT4 a success due to the brilliance of OpenAI's tech team vs first movers advantage and good GPU deals with MS? I might be missing something here, but to me nothing about this technology feels like rocket science (obviously, there is a lot of nuance, yada yada, but nothing that seems intractable). I have a strong suspicion that the reason Amazon, Google and so on are not particularly interested in building GPT-scale transformers is that they know they can do it anytime - they are just waiting for others to pave the path to actually good stuff.

> recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles

Or at least the most hyped AI team in the world. The level of cult of personality around OpenAI is reaching pretty nauseating levels.

> possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B

There was an article that came out over the weekend that stated that only a small part of that $10B investment was in cash, the vast majority is cloud GPU credits, and that it has a long time horizon with only a relatively small fraction having been consumed to date. So, if MSFT were to develop their own GPT4 model in house over the next year or so they could in theory back out of their investment with most of it intact.

> recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company

This massively increases the odds we’ll see AI regulated. That isn’t what Altman et al intended with their national press tour—the goal was to talk up the tech. But it should be good in the long run.

I also assume there will be litigation about what Sam et al can bring with them, and what they cannot.

MS also has its own ML teams and is probably capable of replicating a lot of OpenAI without OpenAI.

Like some googlers have mentioned - aside from GPU requirements, there isn't much else of a moat since a lot of ML ideas are presented and debated relatively freely at NEURIPS, ICML and other places.

> can capture a bigger slice of THE FUTURE History says that the future is actually written by the nerds and not the drumbeaters (ah read CXOs).

In all this drama, the deep work interruption of the nerds is the net loss (and effectively slight deceleration) for the future.

I'm wondering how Sam is going to work with Demis. Two master cooks in a kitchen/

What choice did Satya have? Nothing much else he could have done in the present situation.

I basically agree - and it’s a weird cognitive shift to think that going to Microsoft is the best place for tech innovation today.

Credit to Nadella for making a big cultural shift over the past several years.

> most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure

By all accounts, OpenAI is not a going concern without Azure. I could see Tesla acquiring the bankrupt shell for the publicity, but the worker bees seem to be more keen on their current leader (as of last week) than their prior leader. OpenAI ends with a single owner.

However it's a nice way to deal with the whole "open" AI issue: first you create a non-profit to create open AI systems; then when you hit a marketable success it turns into a "capped profit"; and finally, all the people from that capped profit leave en masse and transfer their acquired know how to a for-profit company.

It's more than that, OpenAI had many people aligned with the decel agenda, MSFT managed to take the accel leadership and likely their supporters. Does anyone know any large AI competitors that don't have a big decel contingent? Also interesting that META took the opportunity to close one of their decel departments on Saturday.

This might have been a reasonable and workable solution for all parties involved.

Context:

---------

1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level

1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition.

1.3/ Microsoft, after investing $10+ Billions do not want this fight enable slow progress of AI Commercialization and fall behind Google AI etc..

a workable solution:

--------------------

2.1/ @sama @gdb form a new AI company, let us call it e/acc Inc.

2.2/ e/acc Inc. raises $3 Billions as SAFE instrument from VCs who believed in Sam Altman's vision.

2.3/ Open AI and e/acc Inc. reach an agreement such that:

a) GPT-4 IP transferred to e/acc Inc., this IP transfer is valued as $8 Billion SAFE instrument investment from Open AI into e/acc Inc.

b) existing Microsoft's 49% share in Open AI is transferred to e/acc Inc., such that Microsoft owns 49% of e/acc Inc.

c) the resulted "Lean and pure non-profit Open AI" with Ilya Sukhar and Board can steer AI progress as they wish, their stake in e/acc Inc. will act as funding source to cover their future Research Costs.

d) employees can join from Open AI to e/acc Inc. as they wish with no antipoaching lawsuits from OpenAI

Really? These two did not do the technical work but hired, managed, and fund raised.

They won’t necessarily be able to attract similar technical talent because they no longer have the open non profit mission not the lottery ticket startup PPO shares.

Working on AI at Microsoft was always an option even before they were hired, not sure if they tip the scale?

If I had to make a list of companies that need shackles of that sort, Microsoft would definitely be top three or so.

> There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

Hiring Altman makes sure that MSFT is still relevant to the whole Altman/OpenAI deal, not just a part of it. Hiring Altman thus decreases such possibility to write-off its investment.

Side note, the 10B investment is less than a half a percent of MSFT's 2.75T market cap.

> Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI

Not sure why you didn’t research before saying that! It was $10B committed and not a cash handover of that amount. Also, majority of that’s Azure credits

My understanding was that a large tranche of that $10B consisted of Azure compute credits, not actual cash.

You do realize that Microsoft uses OpenAI IP for all of its AI products, of which there are at least two dozen that they released this year. In what universe do you make the connection that they would write it off and go to a different, less superior/reliable, model provider? It would never happen.

You are looking forward to a self-aware, self-replicating, unregulated Clippy?

>>There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles...

That's a slightly flamboyant reading.. but I agree with the gist.

A slim chance of total right off doctor off.. that was always the case. This decision does not affect it much. The place in the risk model, where most of the action happens... Is less dramatic effects on more likely bans of the probability curve.

Msft cannot be kicked off the team. They still have all of the rights to their openai investment no matter who the CEO is.

Meanwhile, is clearly competing, participating, and doing business with openai. The hierarchy of paradigms, is flexible... Competing appears to have won.

I agree that direct financial returns, are the lesser part of the investment case for msft.. and the other participants. That's pretty much standard in consortium-like ventures.

At the base level, openai's IP is still largely science, unpatentable know how and key people. Msft have some access to (I assume) of openAI' defendable IP via their participation in the consortium, or 49% ownership of the for-profit entity. Meanwhile, openai is not so far ahead that pacing them from a dead start is impossible.

I also agree, that this represents a decision to launch ahead aggressively in the generative AI space.

In the latter 2000s, Google have the competence, technology, resources and momentum to smash anyone else on anything worldwideWeb.

They won all the "races." Google have never been good at turning wins into businesses, but they did acquire the wins handily. Microsoft wants to be that for the 2020s.

Able to replicate everything, for the new paradigm OpenAI's achievments probably represents.

The AI spreadsheet. The LLM email client. GPT search. Autobot jira. Literally and proverbially.

At least in theory... Microsoft is or will be in a position to start executing on all of these.

Sama, if he's actually motivated to do this.. it's pretty much the ideal person on planet earth for that task.

I'm sure takes a lot to motivate him. Otoh, CEO of Microsoft is it realistic prize if he wins this game. The man is basically Microsoft the person. I mean that as a compliment.. sort of.

One way or another, I expect that implementing OpenAI-ish models in applications is about commence.

Companies have been pleading chatbot customer support for years. They may get it soon, but so will the customers. That makes for a whole new thing in the place where customer support used to exist. At least, that is the bull case.

That said, I have said a lot. All speculative. I'll probabilistic, even where my speculations are correct. These are not really predictions. I'm chewing the cud.

All of the naysayers here seem convinced this is Altman and Microsoft looking to destroy OpenAI.

Normally I am the cynic but this time I’m seeing a potential win-win here. Altman uses his talent to recruit and drive forward a brilliant product focused AI. OpenAI gets to refocus on deep research and safety.

Put aside cynicism and consider Nadella is looking to create the best of all worlds for all parties. This might just be it.

All of the product focused engineering peeps have a great place to flock to. Those who believe in the original charter of OpenAI can get back to work on the things that brought them to the company in the first place.

Big props to Nadella. He also heads off a bloodbath in the market tomorrow. So big props to Altman too for his loyalty. By backing MS instead of starting something brand new he is showing massive support for Nadella.

Reading the statement, I am doubtful that Microsoft and OpenAI can continue their business relationship. I think the most aggressive part of this is the "[they will be joining] together with colleagues" sub sentence. He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with. This situation seems especially difficult since Microsoft basically houses all of openai's infrastructure. How can they continue a trust-based relationship like this?

Agreed, I think this is an awesome outcome. We now have an extremely capable AI product organization in-house at each of Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and a couple strong research-oriented organizations in Anthropic and OpenAI. This sounds like a recipe for a thriving competitive industry to me.

I wonder how this will all workout in the end (and the excitement around all of this is a little reminiscent of AOL bying Time Warner).

For one, I'm not sure Sam Altman will tolerate MS bureaucracy for very long.

But secondly, the new MS-AI entity can't presumably just take from OpenAI what they did there, they need to make it again.

This takes a lot of resources (that MS has) but also a lot of time to provide feedback to the models; also, copyright issues regarding source materials are more sensitive today, and people are more attuned to them: Microsoft will have a harder time playing fast and lose with that today, than OpenAI 8 years ago.

Or, Sam at MS becomes OpenAI biggest customer? But in that case, what are all those researchers and top scientists that followed him there, going to do?

Interesting times in any case.

Seems like it will create a Deepmind/Google Brain style split within MS.

MSR leadership is probably a little shaken at the moment.

What about the people who got paid equity for the past few years of work and now might see all of their equity intentionally vaporized? They essentially got cheated into working for a much lower compensation than they were promised.

I get that funny money startup equity evaporates all the time, but usually the board doesn’t deliberately send the equity to zero. Paying someone in an asset you’re intentionally going to intentionally devalue seems like fraud in spirit if not in law.

I suppose I don't see the case where large numbers of OpenAI employees follow these two to Microsoft. Microsoft can't possibly cover the value of the OpenAI employees equity as it was (and imminently to be), let alone what could have potentially been. There is a big difference between being on a rocket ship and just a good team at a megacorp.

Damn was looking forward to picking up some cheap MSFT

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that going forward there won’t be much investor interest in OpenAI.

And if you separate out the products from OpenAI, that leaves the question of how an organization with extremely high compute and human capital costs can sustain itself.

Can OpenAI find more billionaire benefactors to support it so that it can return to its old operating model?

This is sorta brilliant.

Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And now Altman and Brockman will have that access too.

Meanwhile, I imagine their tenure at MSFT will be short-lived, because hot-shot startup folks don’t really want to work there.

They can stabilize, use OpenAI’s data and models for free, use Microsoft’s GPUs at cost, and start a new company shortly, of which Microsoft will own some large share.

Altman doesn’t need Microsoft’s money - but Microsoft has direct access to OpenAI, which is currently priceless.

Satya will probably allow them to run a startup under the MS umbrella without interference and with full MS backing.

"brilliant"

I think "predictable" is more apt.

Lets assume the whole structure works, 1-2 years later, Sam becomes the apparent CEO candidate after Satya.

> Microsoft has access to almost everything OpenAI does. And now Altman and Brockman will have that access too.

Microsoft still has to deal with OpenAI as an entity to keep the existing set up intact. The new team has to kinda start from zero. Right?

That was my first thought too: Didn't occur to me as a solution, and it seems to square the circle brilliantly. It struck me that this is why people who are CEOs of mammoth companies have the jobs they have, and not me :)

if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would they even go there? If you're flat broke, you need a job; they're not flat broke, they don't need a job. The deal at MS is worth it, or it's not, it's not something they need to decide over the course of a weekend... unless it's what they were already not being candid about.

Seems like in the minority here, but for me this is looking like a win-win-win situation for now.

1. OpenAI just got bumped up to my top address to apply to (if I would have the skills of a scientist, I am only an engineer level), I want AGI to happen and can totally understand that the actual scientists don't really care for money or becoming a big company at all, this is more a burden than anything else for research speed. It doesn't matter that the "company OpenAI" implodes here as long as they can pay their scientists and have access to compute, which they have do.

2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.

3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI. Working for Sam now is straightforward commercialization without the "open" shenaningans, and working for OpenAI can now become the idealistic thing again that also attracts people.

4. Satya Nadella is becoming celebrated and MSFT shareholder value will eventually rise even further. They actually don't have any interest in "smashing OAI" but the new setup actually streamlines everything once the initial operational hurdles (including staffing) are solved.

5. We outsiders end up with a OpenAI research focussed purely on AGI (<3), some product team selling all steps along the way to us but with more professionality in operations (<3).

6. I am really waiting for when Tim Cook announces anything about this topic in general. Never ever underestimate Apple, especially when there is radio silence, and when the first movers in a field have fired their shots already.

That is just a matter of perspective. It's clearly a win-win if you're on team Sam. But if you're on team Ilya, this is the doomsday scenario: With commercialisation and capital gains for a stock traded company being the main driving force behind the latest state of the art in AI, this is exactly what OpenAI was founded to prevent in the first place. Yes, we may see newer better things faster and with better support if the core team moves to Microsoft. But it will not benefit humanity as a whole. Even with their large investment, Microsoft's contract with OpenAI specifically excluded anything resembling true AGI, with OpenAI determining when this point is reached. Now, whatever breakthrough in the last weeks Sam was referring to, I doubt it's going to move us to AGI immediately. But whenever it happens, Microsoft now has a real chance to sack it for themselves and noone else.

I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.

We really are entering the dystopia of the cartoonishly evil megacorp enslaving all of humanity to make the graph go up by 1.2%.

Anyone else find it strange that startup founders of the magnitude of Sam & Greg would join a gigantic corporation as employees?

It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.

I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still there because they can offer them money and equity.

The company will probably still exist, but the company isn't going to be worth what it is today.

It's really telling of US tech culture, how AI hype quickly turned from "Open" and "we're doing it for humanity" into a mega-corp cash grab *show.

I understand what money does to principles, but this is comical.

In 1990 Microsoft hired all of the important talent from Borland who up until that point had been outpacing them in terms of product development.

We got Access, Visual Studio, and .Net / C# as a direct result.

Borland faded into obscurity.

Hard not to feel like there will be a parallel here.

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have very similar backgrounds. They are both highly intelligent, both dropped out of college and lack any advanced education. They are classic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: well-networked, great at fund raising, maybe even good managers. Potential contribution to advanced AI research: zero.

What, exactly, does Microsoft want to do with them? Best guess: Use their connections and reputation to poach talent from OpenAI.

Wow. This sounds like an amazing coup for Microsoft. They are getting Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, "together with colleagues". With this team, they will be able to rebuild GPT in-house. I fear that with this development, the commercial side of the OpenAI is pretty much gone. Which sounds like what the OpenAI board has intended to do all along. I think this will also spark a big exodus from OpenAI.

I am also curious about how OpenAI board is planning to raise the money for non-profit for further scaling. I don't think it would be that easy now.

An internet meme from Lord of the Rings comes to mind: "One does not simply fire Sam Altman."

This looks like a short term compromise to defend MSFT before the market opens. A number of members will follow Sam and Greg, but I doubt if it will be the majority given it's yet another big tech rather than a brand new startup. And what would be their roles? Yet another VP/SVP? Those folks are not really AI guys and don't fit very nicely into all the bureaucracy rampant in big techs. Satya will of course try to give them as much room as possible, but it will be considerably smaller and slower thanks to all those corporate politics and external regulations.

I think people underestimate how much of a company’s value is in their key leadership, select talent, and technology. When a company is acquired those are typically the reasons to do so other than pure revenue acquisition. Microsoft already has their technology, now has the key leadership, and will soon have the select talent.

Satya wins, OpenAI is walking dead.

This might turn out to be a lot more stable structure long term: the commercialization of AI under Microsoft's brand, with Microsoft's resources, and the deep research into advanced AI under OpenAI. This could shield the research division of OpenAI from undue pressure from the product side, in a way that it probably couldn't when everything was under one roof.

Satya just pulled best move of 2023. Gets the hot names, whoever will follow Sam and Greg, to work in a startup like cocoon. Throws money at them, which is peanuts to Microsoft, both stock to keep them and unlimited compute. Sam wants to do custom chips? Do it with Microsofts money, size and clout. All doors are open. The new Maia100 chip can soon be followed by Sam200. Brings innovation and makes the company more attractive to future hires. Who cares if Same leaves after 2 years? Maybe that was part of the discussions, Satya wont be around forever and doesn't really have a good allround replacement inhouse. MSFT stock meanwhile goes from sideways movement to another all time high and onto 400. Genius move, would have never thought Sam accepts such arrangement but it makes sense.

The only shocking thing about this whole episode was how many people in the media failed to understand just how much power this board had.

They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8 hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.

Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little leverage. Reading the news you’d think otherwise.

This actually seems like a decent compromise. Sam and Greg can retain velocity on the product side without having to spin up a whole new operation in direct competition with their old levers of power, and Ilya + co can remain in possession of the keys to the kingdom.

The GPT Golden Goose consists of 2 parts: 1. Smart people with the knowledge and motivation to build the Goose. 2. The compute required to create Eggs. MSFT now has both.

I don't see how any regulatory framework could have prevented this now or in the future.

I thought for sure the only two outcomes were that Altman raises money for a new startup or he comes back to OpenAI with a new governance structure (which is still a wild and crazy outcome, but crazier things have happened). Now that this happened though, I feel stupid for not considering this as a possible outcome at all.

The whole timeline of events over the last two events still leaves me scratching my head though.

What is Sam's actual value re: AI and not just as a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.

OpenAI is destined to learn the story of Xerox PARC the hard way. I commend them.

I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee are...quite different.

Incredible how much has changed in one weekend… or not?

Confused what this really means. So Microsoft still has access to OpenAI’s pre-AGI tech that Sam and Greg can leverage for their more product-focused visions.

More than that, it looks like Microsoft has become a major AI player (internal research) overnight up with the likes of Meta, Google, and OpenAI. Incredible.

Can someone help me understand what Sam's actual value is? He doesn't seem to be a particularly important practitioner/researcher re: AI and is "just" a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.

Microsoft's board made the right call when they promoted Satya to CEO. Their share price on the day he became CEO was $36.35 and is now $369.84 (and likely to increase again on this news).

Putting together a deal like this whilst maintaining the relationship with OpenAI is impressive enough, but to do it as a cricket tragic when India was losing to Australia is even better.

In retaliation Ilya/team should just open source everything OpenAI has. The only way to make genAI(GPT the can opener) safe is to make it democratic and available for everyone. Then others can pick it up and make it more efficient. At least MS servers will get a break.

I live in a completely different world.

When this all went down, I just felt really bad for all those involved, in any situation like this, I feel horrible for the person, imaging what it must of felt for Sam, as if his situation was really bad, yet of course he was always likely to land somewhere on his feet and always in a much better situation than me personally.

Then by the late hours of Sunday, he has already negotiated with OpenAI and then joined Microsoft. Crazy to me that such decisions are made at breakneck speed and everything unfolds so quickly, when I take much longer to make much simpler choices.

People overvalue Sam Altman role. He is not a technological mastermind, he is primarily a superb execution and business guy.

It's not like he and Greg are brilliant mathematicians and coders that will sit down in a cubicle at Redmond and churn out code for AGI in six months.

I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs. On the balance this probably slows things down, so: good.

Not sorry about Sam, first off I'm not assuming we know everything and second I'm more inclined to trust the board. Also it seems he was trying to do a secret hardware venture on the side, which would be several kinds of unethical. Again: good.

Hopefully this motivates a lot of people who don't want Microsoft to be the AI company. Slowing down research would mean Microsoft wins everything.

MS now has both the accelerationists and the deccelerationists. They can keep accelerating themselves when pushing for regulatory capture through their deccelerationist branch to slow down any competition.

Wonder how long this will last. This team doesn't seem like a good fit for big corp Microsoft.

Good get by MS though!

Additional info from a Linked-in follow-up comment by Satya: "I’m super excited to have Sam join as CEO of this new group, setting a new pace for innovation. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having Sam and team do the same."

Microsoft is swiftly moving on to the third "E" with OpenAI. First time I get to witness this process first-hand.

Nadella was heavily involved in the talks to get Altman et al. back in OpenAI. This must have been brought up, so I’m guessing the OpenAI board made their decision knowing this would be the outcome?

Purely business-wise, it sure does seem like it's a race down to the bottom. A disproportionate amount of the sharpest minds are working on this, burning ungodly amounts of money but no one has so far has really managed to capture that value in a profitable way either.

The public positions of these people are opaque, inconsistent, and intellectually dishonest too. They're apparently not here to make money but they need a lot of it until they create a superintelligence (but money will be obsolete by then, apparently). And AI may destroy humanity so we will try to build it faster than anyone else so it doesn't..? WTF.

It's okay to want to make money and cement your name in history, but what is up with these public delusions?

Presumably Sam and Greg now get to pick up where they left off and keep productizing GPT-4 since Microsoft has the IP and is hosting their own GPT-4 models on Azure, right?

The more interesting thing is whether or not they'll be able to build and release something equivalent to GPT-5, using Microsoft's immense resources, before OpenAI is able to.

This was expected. Who would possibly think Sam would join MS to be a "senior research" or "VP of engineering"? They get to form a company and run a startup within Microsoft with full Microsoft backing.

OpenAI is so over.

Satya is the best CEO in tech and it isnt even close

Reality is indeed stranger than fiction. I don't have an opinion on whether this is good or bad for whomsoever. But it's entertaining for sure. Best tech weekend I have ever had.

Others from OpenAI team, maybe can lead the AI research, but how does Sam can lead a research group?

IMO, to lead a research group you need some decent research skills, Sam is good at business

Sauron declares: Saruman to join Mordor.

Why are people so excited about Sam and Greg joining Microsoft?

The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding. But that's not something Microsoft needs, so what value does Sam give them?

So we have OpenAI, Microsoft, a whole bunch of capital, and a few "rock stars" moving. And it's these people holding the keys to the AI kingdom where they go to work to achieve AGI.

Finally they got rid of this pesky idea of "safety". We're back in "break things" mode.

Does nobody recognize the stakes here? AGI, which soon would accelerate into something far more capable, ends civilization. I'm not saying it would kill us, I'm saying it makes us cognitively obsolete and all meaning is lost.

AI Safety isn't a micro bias in the training set. It's existential at planetary scale. Yet we let a bunch of cowboys just go "let's see what happens" with zero meaningful regulation in sight. And we applaud them.

I know AGI isn't here yet. I know Microsoft would not allow for zero safety. I'm just saying that on the road to AGI, about two dozen people are deciding on our collective faith. With as ultimate chief the guy behind shit coin "world coin".

November 17th OpenAI blog post: "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

The fact that they agreed to join as MS employees kinda proves that money was a big motivator.

This confirms that Sam and Greg don't belong as heads of a non-profit who's sole objective is to develop AGI for the benefit of all of humanity. Because if your Plan B is to join Microsoft, whose mission is to make profit for shareholders, then your heart wasn't really in it, as that won't achieve your original goal.

OMG, it is 12am in SF. I need to sleep.

But what a play, MSFT the winner here.

They now owns the actual OpenAI

Edit: PM->am

Sam and Greg obviously haven’t heard that Microsoft Research doesn’t get any GPU access (:

Amazing to see this on the front page multiple times and reposted every 20 minutes, each time as the highest performer on new. I've never seen such story velocity before.

There's a high likelihood that MS is going to start poaching top AI talent aggressively, with Altman's help. This will be to the significant detriment of OpenAI.

If this is how it plays out, OpenAI's board will be famous for decades to come for their boneheaded handling of this situation.

Altman's value is in business, how does bringing him to Microsoft to lead a research team help?

I suspected this. OpenAI was always going towards Microsoft and Sam was leading that charge. Who else but them to bankroll his next vision.

Great pickup by MSFT. The exodus is only beginning and MSFT will not have to buy OpenAI for the billions in valuation it was getting. East win.

Developing: OpenAI is nothing without its people https://twitter.com/search?q=OpenAI%20is%20nothing%20without...

Plot twist: it was Satya who planted the idea in the OpenAI's board's mind to fire Sam in the first place... Inception-style.

Still the aftermath leaves a bitter taste in my mouth about Sam and Greg joining MS. Regardless of whether the AI development in OpenAI was responsible, I think they succeeded in making a product and a culture I have not 'felt' since the early Google days.

Naively, I had really hoped for Sam and Greg to start their own and not join MS. I think a lot of the value was being coherent and to some extent independent. I can't help to think that the same will happen to the 'new' OpenAI as what happend to DeepMind once they became Google DeepMind (again).

Would Altman shine within Microsoft? Seems like raising capital is his main skill set, and theres no need for that now. But from Microsofts point of view this prevents a new competitor from popping up.

This isnt the win people seem to think it is, at least not for end users. Micosoft dont buy companies and people to keep releasing free standalone products. They buy them to integrate into Windows.

Cortana 2.0 incoming.

Microsoft is likely betting that they can build the next GPT with a bag of money and a few food people. They control a massive amount of GPUs, this could be a major factor for Altman and Brockman here.

It's a never ending story. Wonder how much talent they'll hire away from OpenAI and in spite of Nadella's soothing words whether OpenAI will survive all this (probably yes, but in what form?).

So it is safe to say that the negotiations didn't work out.

See: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/19/a-statement-from...

This is really bad for OpenAI. They will fade to irrelevance soon. OpenAI is going to get a gut punch to wake up to real world. In real world you need capital at scale to make meaningful impact. people who provide capital, not just VCs but any regular folks who buy shares or bonds want to maximize their returns. You do that with a for-profit corporation. If they think they can continue their breakneck speed of breakthroughs with a meager philanthropy, they are in for a rude awakening.

Seems like a logical choice. Microsoft’s next big play is generative AI, and they’ve put a lot of money into that. They need to show they’re taking steps to stabilize things now that their hype factory has come unraveled. I don’t think they particularly need these people , because they likely already have in house talent that is competitive. But having these people on board now will allow them to paint a much more stable picture to their shareholders.

My suspicion is that given Sam and Greg’s engineering and deal making chops, they will only ideate in how to use AI models invented elsewhere like right now.

Don’t think Sam or Greg have it in them to build a competing AI model suite, that too inside a bureaucracy like Microsoft.

I think this is exactly what OpenAI wanted - get the business types out and focus on building brilliant models which asymptotically approach AGI whose safety and ethicality they can guarantee.

Best thing open AI can do is to align with Google and Amazon. This will keep MS on its toe.

Oh, they are joining Poettering, bringing AI into systemd? Looking forward to excellent and (artificially) intelligent discussions on some mailing lists:)

The new Open AI CEO Emmett Shear just released a long statement and he says one of his top 30-day plan is to `Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report`

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

He adds even more drama lol

Satya wins by letting Ilya win. Wow.

You could both say that this gives Sam less power over OpenAI, and more.

We will see if OpenAI team can stand on its own legs. My bet is 70% they will start to humble and lose in long term. AI satety people may not those who know how to create a feasible business. At some point, Microsoft can make a purchase offer to get the remaining OpenAI.

We have seen similar stories with Nokia, Slack, others.

In my humble opinion, everyone moved way too fast in this whole thing. I can't help but imagine that emotions were involved due to the speed.

Instead of a 5PM Sunday deadline, maybe it should have been "let's talk next week."

Maybe it would have worked out the same in any case, but it seems like it would have been wiser.

Turns out not everybody was sold-out at OpenAI. Good riddance, that Altman weasel was just that, a sellout.

So Altman now has a backer for his NVIDIA killer, and one who can use it not just for LLMs but Azure too, and one day possibly consumer GPUs? Forget Xbox, subsidised graphics cards as a loss-leader for Game Pass subscriptions would be an interesting play. What will the antitrust people think?

It seems to me like there is one clear winner, Google, and everyone else lost a bit. Nevertheless Microsoft seems to have contained the damage as well as possible, again producing an outcome that is better for everyone from the position where they started after Friday.

I don’t think Sam will stay at Microsoft for too long, but this is a logical move forward as damage to OpenAI is already done even if Sam goes back. Besides it is MS who enabled this scale and it perhaps is Sam who negotiated it to begin with.

These other execs simply can’t stand the ground against him being excellent technologist and leader who talks the language of devs. I doubt the rest of these C level people in the board know said language that well…

Besides the whole ‘not for profit’ BS is at this point completely irrelevant, because delivering such costly service at that scale can only be made with, for, and by profit. Whoever thinks otherwise had not followed the history of computing last 100 or so years. And history of humanity perhaps.

Even though I find the step somewhat logical, it is unexpected as I dismissed it a few days ago.

Logical, because as far as I understand the conflict @openai, it is/was about conquering the market with cool products vs. advancing research for the greater good. So one option would have been to split the company into a product organization and a research organization. The only problem is that Microsoft is the product organization in this construct already (they bring the services to the masses via Bing).

Unexpected, because I didn't expect someone like Sam Altman to join the corporate world.

Looking forward I am very excited to see where this leads...

The most "When life give you lemons, make lemonade" move, if I've ever seen one.

Looks like Sam Altman never gave a shit about the Non profit aspect of Open AI. It wasn't about building a safer future. He just wants what every other SV bro wants, which is clout and success and money.

I'm not saying business is the wrong move, I'm not saying a non-profit is the right move either. I'm also not saying Sam Altman and Co are not skilled at building AI. I'm not even saying Sam Altman won't do good for the world.

What I'm saying is that this move here shows he's just dishonest. Which isn't bad. He's not some do-gooder out to build safer AI, (which is what he portrayed himself as) he's a normal person out to make a name for himself.

Ben Thompson: The most extraordinary weekend of my career

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1726514608234746003

Lawsuit incoming? What is the expectation that these guys aren't attempting IP transfer.

My bet is that OpenAI heard of this MSFT poach, Sam et al were not forthright and meanwhile were becoming very interested in the engineering details.

So let me get this straight, the OpenAI and Microsoft deal does work until AGI is achieved. But that would mean that some sort of source code is restricted for Microsoft at the moment even, otherwise Microsoft would have access to the code right until AGI is achieved (which would be weird).

Regarding Sam and Greg joining MSFT I see this announcement as damage control from Satya. It's still unclear on what exactly they will work on and if Sam and the rest of the team can just continue where they left off at MSFT.

It's Satyas way of showing the shareholders that they still back the face of OpenAI.

We will see how this whole thing develops.

Also Emmett Shear said on his statement

`Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.`

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

Regardless it's a tragic for staff remaining in OpenAI...

Having read through a lot of the comments around this situation, seems nobody on HN cares that much about AI safety, and is much more focused on corporate profits? Am I reading this wrong?

Not unexpected, MS is betting everything on AI. On the other hand, MS is a corporation in which lions are lead by donkeys. We had windows phones that was excellent and in the right place and then couple of product managers fucked it up. We have windows that is becoming even better underneath and then you have people that thought Cortana and Bing search in the bar were good ideas.

So Ilya can be safe that whatever potential nuclear capabilities they give sama, the Microsoft quagmire will not let them fully develop.

In five years, he'll be the CEO. [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

I would expect most people to be concerned about how AGI can be really useful to most of humanity without creating power concentration and more inequality, but these goals seem to be implicitly conflated for some reason with the value of MS stock and Sam Altman's and others' career paths. At least those seem to be the emphasis of most of the drama; admittedly they are much simpler and familiar topics to tackle than what path forward would better suit humanity as a whole.

How to kill your company in one week?

None of these companies appease China; they refuse to provide service under those conditions and/or they are IP range blocked.

Microsoft does service China with Bing, for example.

You should not sell OpenAI's to China or to Microsoft.

Especially after a DDOS by Sue Don and a change in billing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

Shengjia Zhao's deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/yrpXvt9.png

This was most unexpected. Hopefully it's a compromise reached mutually. Now OpenAI can fulfill what their mission is and these guys can work on AI products at MS.

Again. Very unexpected.

1. People concerned about them working for a profit-oriented business: there isn't a way to insist otherwise. Personally I'd rather it was Microsoft that Meta or Google or even Amazon.

2. I wonder what the AI teams at MSR think about this move? Looks like they'll be operating separately to the research division.

3. OAI could potentially make life difficult for Microsoft re the IP that those joining MS carry in their heads. I wonder if the future of OAI is just licencing their IP?

What I'm getting from all of this is the hype of AGI right around the corner got a bit exposed. I may be reading to much into it but if it were true then given an opportunity to be part of it you take it and put aside things that shouldn't matter at that point. I'm not even talking about Sam but the people who decided to leave with him. Of course this may be a completely false assumption given how little was disclosed, especially by Sutskever.

I realized thismorning that this somewhat banal story of these guys being cast out from the place of the creators has some chance to become a core origin myth for GPT-5, which is being trained at the moment, presumably also on this schism.

The rupture seems to literally be about GPT-5 itself, whether it will be good or evil. Whatever form its growth takes it must include introspection and this from Open AI about the thing itself is inevitably going to be relevant to it.

Never change a good running system. OpenAI ran quite good, even if things heated up, it sound kind of stupid to fire the CEO when the company is winning on every front.

I thought Sam Altman is businessman, not researcher. What does he going to do in MS? MS does not need external investments. Probably that's the end of his career.

Sam didn't create the breakthroughs behind the current GPT.

He did not create the breakthroughs behind the next GPT.

None of the people that may follow have the same handle on the tech as Ilya. I mean they built up Ilya's image in our mind so much, that he's one of a kind genius (or maybe Musk did that) and now we are to believe that his genius doesn't matter and that Microsoft already knows how to create AGI and that OpenAI is no longer relevant?

Or did I get it wrong?

Ok so the product people will leave Oai. As a developer I am now highly scared of building a product off their API. They angered investors etc.

Now it’s a full bet for them on AGI.

So Microsoft just won the lottery.

Microsoft will now perform parallel development and once they no longer need open ai the free azure credit spigot will run dry and OpenAI will choke on its largess

Statement by Emmett Shear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345162

Friday was a year ago.

A) Does brockman own equity in openAI ?

B) Can you please please please name the new company Clippy?

C) What is it so unique about openAI employees that people think it makes them irreplaceable?

While this is a coup for Microsoft, the problem is that this splits resources MS has to train models. They were already GPU constrained and I assume they have to honor their agreement w/ OpenAI so there is now N/2 GPUs to go around.

(an interesting fiction would be if all the AI companies agreed to combine their efforts to skip a level and advance the world to GPT-6, maybe through a mixture of experts model)

Good work for Microsoft, moving swiftly to take advantage!

So essentially a promotion at Microsoft to create an AI division, the real OpenAI, Sam and Greg have been tasked to create another DeepMind / OpenAI inside of Microsoft.

Might as well have acquired OpenAI in the first place given that it was 49% owned by Microsoft anyway but taken over by a coup.

Now we'll see if the employees who are quitting will follow Sam and Greg. Google is still at risk without Gemini being released.

Called it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310339

The only way to keep AGI safe is to put it on the Zune.

What motivates Sam to join Microsoft? Could it be the proximity of achieving AGI and his desire to remain competitive without starting from scratch?

Satya Nadella must have been eager to get this news out before markets open for the week. As of 3 AM EST, MSFT was up 2% in pre-market trading.

I'm worried....I really don't like the idea of some council artificially "slowing down" progress while we on the outside wait for them to bestow fire on us like Prometheus. If AGI can fulfill even a fraction of the economic promise it has, then they will inevitably just use behind the scenes. It was better when it was being developed out front

Satya pulls this together in 48 hours from a cold start and gets it signed and over the line before markets open, well played indeed.

This plays perfectly into the narrative that Sam wanted to take this godlike tech that Ilya created and commercialize it.

Sam chose greed over safety.

Due to Microsoft's very generous licensing agreements, this may be the best shot Altman, Brockman, and Nadella have to launder the technology that is currently owned by the OpenAI non-profit. If they manage to poach key staff, they may be able to resume their attempts at rapid commercial growth outside of the confines of the OpenAI mission.

This might be good for society. If there are multiple entities that develop such AI technology, there's some kind of competition and a distribution of power.

Of course I'd prefer if everyone could just train such a model on their smartphone with a public dataset and an open source software. At least in terms of compute, companies will always be ahead.

What do you think Microsoft's medium to long term plan is? Will they clone GPT-x and use their own copy? Will they make their own model and train it from scratch? Will these former OpenAI people start with commercial LLMs like they were doing at OAI, or do you think they want to concentrate on AGI that are a more long-term project?

Sam and Greg will presumably start with a fork of OpenAI source code, given that Microsoft has full rights to the IP.

It’s really safe to say the big loser is OpenAI. Microsoft is effectively getting the team under their own overnight

This could be Satya engaging in succession planning: Sam Altman in line to become the next CEO of Microsoft.

Ok... but Altman & Brockman are just managers. Brockman did an ML course in 2018. If they can now get the actual technical people who built GPT4 over then that is something, but at the moment there's a lot of premature celebration here - managers don't actually do anything.

Thanks, Ilya. Humanity first move. Never trust a greedy clown again. Hey, Microsoft. Have your Clippy:)

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires...

Wouldn’t there be employment contracts and laws around competitive behavior that come into play here?

I think OpenAI should just focus on doing basic AI research for the time being, at least until their Microsoft deal lapses.

Hopefully, they find a more diverse group of partners in the future that respect their mission as a non-profit (which so happens to own a for-profit subsidiary).

Update, OpenAI employees are mass tweeting `OpenAI is nothing without its people`

https://twitter.com/blader/status/1726552230319559106

>> We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap

They've invested over $10bn in this affair, even for MS it's massive - a clearer, more reassuring message would've helped, than "we remain committed..."

MS is betting the company on AI. It is everywhere across the org. They won't play with kiddie glove. You want to see ruthless businessmen in action sure pick up the fight. They'll be happy to lose 10 billion plus some more if it means they win the war.

84% of the OpenAI team resigning? Is this true?

https://x.com/lilianweng/status/1726634736943280270?s=46

I'm surprised that non-compete for Sam and Greg are never mentioned. True, Microsoft's huge position in OpenAI means that there wouldn't be any retaliation, but I am wondering if this is still a friction point or not.

Microsoft is were studios come to die, they will be crushed by MS hierarchy struggles.

I was hoping for the OpenAI organism cell to have a clean split and start the race to outcompete each other. But now it looks like the older cell(Microsoft) will eat the high energy cell(OpenAI) and make it its mitochondria.

Sam Altman is a prepper. He said in 2016: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to. [Wikipedia]

This sounds like a step down for both openai and sama. Microsoft probably wins here as they still have access to openai tech and now the only entity with access to the same talent pool as was there before last Friday.

A lot of techies will be left sleepless tonight and have a bad Monday morning :)

To what extent can they lead research that builds off of existing OpenAI models?

So Microsoft gets co-founders and employees too. This is a great win for them!!

Yay! More consolidation. Honestly makes you wonder if they whole thing was manufactured from the inside. 10-15 years ago, I didn't have Microsoft on my 2023 bingo card for world domination.

I guess OpenAI is done now.

Seems like last minute news to avoid a MSFT stock dive tomorrow morning.

i love how they used the word advanced. not another regular AI team.

I would have preferred Sam launched a new venture with fresh capital.

OpenAI is ironically executing the exact opposite of its mission. Microsoft is holding all the cards now with their full access to OpenAI tech, the infrastructure and now the leadership.

I guess Microsoft has that much money where they sink 10 billion into OpenAI and then hire all the staff so that it will so that they will need another 10 billion to destroy OpenAI

Based on Satya’s reply to Sam’s quote tweet, seems like Sam is going to run a subsidiary-style organization like LinkedIn, GitHub, and Minecraft. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do.

It seems that Microsoft is the big winner in this story, well played.

All this Microsoft affair seemed weird from the beginning. After all, Elon and co. created OpenAI to compete with emerging AI monopoly of tech behemoths - Google/FB/MS.

Biggest question: How much of OpenAI's IP do they get to access at Microsoft? (and perhaps take with them to whatever new startup they would obviously found after?)

I called it - Dave Cutler like agreement - recruit anybody you want - no limit on spending - Azure compute resources AND no interference reporting directly to the CEO.

cortana plays me star wars imperial march. pretty please

I hope MS forks OpenAI and grabs the entire team. We have well over ten paid OpenAI accounts, I would gladly cancel those and send our money to MS.

Satya saves the stock price in time for Monday. Genius.

I look forward to the day when AGI seems distributed + safe enough that each employee transition doesn't force participation in Kremlinology

GPT 6 Vista edition.

Feels like Meta hiring Carmack. He could build a really good thing there, but probably not the level of legendary that he got to with OpenAI.

Not sure what the big deal is here. The tech and engineering team is surely the most valuable asset, not the CEO.

Edit: comment retracted. People going with him!

That is an an amazing turn of events that I did not see anyone predict. Or perhaps I did not just see it. But in retrospect, not surprising.

Only time will tell how this will play out. When I come back to this comment years down the road, I hope we all will be in a better place.

This really makes you appreciate open source locally hosted models.

Chatgpt is a big part of my workflow. (And maybe my best friend?). What happens now?

I guess it really did come down to the GPUs in the end. Funding and talent matter a lot less when it takes you 12 months to get H100s.

The next QBR with MS is going to be interesting.

How could this possibly happen over a weekend when it takes Microsoft weeks and weeks to go from recruitment to hiring someone?

This seems bad for users, no?

MS just wants to integrate AI into their junk enterprise tools. Hobbyists and small businesses could be left out?

The dark side is seductive, leading individuals down a path where ambition and desire overshadow empathy and moral judgment.

Is it possible for Microsoft to eventually get a board seat in Open AI Inc and put Sam Altman as a representative there? :P

So from scratch but with a TON of insight and miles of read code from OpenAI?

Haha. This will be so awful for Microsoft's lawyers.

I'm calling it now, Sam Altman just engineered a path towards becoming Microsoft's CEO after Nadella.

From the start I assumed that Sam was the (street) smarter guy here, and that only confirms it

Meanwhile Google remains oblivious

I am confusion. What a whirlwind weekend.

They could spin-off their own OpenAI competitor with Microsoft being in pole position for another sweet deal.

Seems like a very big step down to them.

The unexpected return of Microsoft Sam.

Over time, the new team at Microsoft will slowly drain the OpenAI talent as MS will provider fewer and fewer resources to OAI and prioritize their own team they have full ownership owner. OAI will die a slow death due to the talent and resource drain. In a year or two, Sam and Greg will end up with the same people at MS that are now still at OAI. Okay, perhaps minus Sutskever.

Altman's value is in business, how does bringing him to Microsoft to lead a research team help?

Well, this definitely isn't the "internet is fad" Microsoft of Gates/Ballmer ...

Ok so what have we learnt:

- 5 days ago, Microsoft announced it was making its own AI chips.

- 3 days ago, OpenAI board fires Altman and Brockman

- 2 days ago, we heard that Altman was in talks to raise funds to build an AI chip startup

- yesterday, it was clear Altman was not coming back to OpenAI

- today, Altman joins Microsoft

Anyone can connect the dots?

Nothing makes sense to me.

The only thing that seems to be clear is that Ilya Sutskever is only guy around who has an ounce of integrity.

Nice move to effectively turn it into positive "one more thing" news from ignite PoV.

This episode of sillicon valley was amazing. Can't wait to see what happens next season.

Enough material here for Horowitz to write "The next hard thing about hard things".

“Microsoft always lands on top”

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Congratulations, OpenAI, you've successfully played yourself.

I'm hoping (?) for the next plot twist:

OpenAI actually becomes open source.

Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI without actually needing to cross the 49% regulatory hurdle? Depending on who follows them to MSFT, that might actually be the outcome here. And OpenAI is suddenly Xerox Parc.

Microsoft releasing dramatically improved Clippy next week.

Whoever has the power of the computing, controls the world.

Welp, surely this will work out for OpenAI and their board.

Altman pulling an Elop

Looking forward to reading Sam and Greg's connects.

Why jockey for a board seat when you can harbor the org

Say it with me, folks - Embrace, extend, extinguish.

This Silicon Valley Soap Opera is going to be great

Elon's swipe at Microsoft Teams is golden

Weird. Why did not he start a new company?

Satya Nadela confirms that sama and team, presumably anyone who walked from OpenAI will be funded as part of a new advanced research team at Microsoft

GPT please summarize this thread.

A bit surprised, and maybe even disappointed, that he didn't start his own company. Rarely in history did someone have a better shot at becoming a billionaire of their own making. But you have to give it to Nadella, that's quite the coup.

I look forward to Windows AI(tm)!!

Hot new startup just dropped:MSFT

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

good for people who invested in MSFT.. this drama might not negatively affect it.

This is Microsoft desperately trying to preserve the value of their misguided investment in OAI.

Is he moving to Seattle?

I didn't know one can be "CEO" of some group within a company.

Welcome to the TikTok generation. The current video was just about to end and now we are at the climax of the next video.

sama's fundraising talent is moot at MS.

Satya is a BOSS!

I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever lies ahead without any concern whatsoever, and learn it the hard way.

It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.

I'm surprised no ones talking what a betrayal this is for people who followed Sam and Greg. Microsoft is the opposite of everything they've talked about for years and here they are. Seems like the board had the right idea about them huh.

Correct answer

It's really funny how just a couple of days ago people were commenting here how "no way it's gonna happen". Because, you know, they were working for idea, and wouldn't just sell off to Microsoft…

I find the glee in this thread quite disturbing. That and the “MS is the winner, OpenAI is so stupid” general tenor.

You all know who you are cheering for right? It seems that profits or potential profits is all that matter here in the end for this community and the high-minded “OpenAI should be ‘Open’” was all bullshit.

I know this comment is going against the grain but I find the HN response to this (and previous responses to Altman’s firing, treating him like a god) to be quite disgusting.

Apple fanboys don’t have anything on the top comments here.

what a huge win for microsoft.

I guess Satya Nadella really like this guy

Wow

i blame human error

Quelle Surprise.

What???? I thought sama was going to be installed as CEO of OAI?

We're all fucked.

Haha Satya won the game of chess lol

[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.]

Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp.

msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money to OpenAI is akin to killing your golden goose.

The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.” This is by far my favourite example of PR piece.

I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially. Or atleast re-evaluating after a week, how much you read was false.

Listen.

I was confused when the whole thing was going down.

I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down.

I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO.

...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative.

I remain, confused.

I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company".

Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it. Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.

Satya's strategic insight deserves recognition. Certainly, there's a slight risk that Microsoft might fail to yield its substantial investment speculated to be around $10B in OpenAI. However, that's not Satya's principal concern. Rather, his focus is on the next move. Possibly, assemble the most elite AI collective globally, unhindered by the constrictions of a non-profit operating a profit-oriented entity? Offer them a sufficient amount of monetary rewards, and it's likely that a large proportion of OpenAI's workforce would be willing to join the bandwagon led by Sam and Greg. While this process may take some time, the potential payoff could encompass a much larger segment of the future for Microsoft than was previously conceivable through the OpenAI investment.

This is somewhat ingenious.

Microsoft holds the keys to almost all endeavors of OpenAI. Soon, such privileges will also be enjoyed by Altman and Brockman.

Concurrently, it seems reasonable to speculate that their stint at Microsoft might not be drawn-out, as startup prodigies are often not inclined to work in such established firms.

They have the chance to achieve stability, leverage OpenAI’s invaluable data and models devoid of any expenditure, access Microsoft's GPUs at minimal cost, and eventually set up another venture. As a result, Microsoft stands to gain a substantial equity stake in the new enterprise.

While Altman requires no financial backing from Microsoft, the corporation now has an invaluable direct link to OpenAI.

  From the stygian depths of the global tech industry emerges a turn of events that portends a churning miasma of
  unknown consequences. Oft seen as the impenetrable leviathan of the boundless digital domain, Microsoft, it seems,
  is ensnaring exalted figures within its titanic coils.

  The conjoining of the cerebral entities Altman and Brockman- who have hitherto roamed in the lofty realm of
  artificial intelligence experiments at OpenAI- indicates a move as unsettling as it is awe-inspiring.

  The nefarious undercurrents beneath this corporate chess manoeuvre cannot be underestimated, for it is none other
  than the puppet master himself, Satya Nadella, who seemingly manipulates the strings with a resolve as foreboding as
  the stormy winter's night.

  His nearly insatiable appetite for expansion glimpsed at Microsoft Ignite is but a harbinger of the harrowing
  transformations we can anticipate in the murky fathoms of our all too near future. The technology multidude -
  customers, partners, even unknowing spectators - tremble at the precipice of an altered dynamic which promises to
  reshape the AI field irrevocably.

  Indeed, one is left grappling with a dark fascination as this vortex of unpredictable novelty takes precedence. How
  might this consolidation of otherworldly intelligence disturb the fragile balance of an industry catapulting
  unbidden into the abysmal void of the AI ether?

  Yet, as all explorers and heedless innovators must remember, even as we tilt our ships towards the lighthouse of
  progress, the monstrous kraken of unintended repercussions always lurks in the unknowable deep. To approach this
  brave new world without a hint of trepidation would be folly.

  Be still, my trembling heart, as we witness this awe-inspiring dance across the cyclopean chessboard of tech. We
  wait, as one waits for the tide, to see what dread portents this unhallowed union may bring.

I hope to see them failing miserably. People cheering for M$ to save the world is the end of the times.

Micro$oft acts as evil as possible as often as possible, be wary.

Microsoft is the winner here. They will probably use Sam/Greg's technical know how to reproduce GPT4 internally, and also direct future research based on current OpenAI approaches which they are certainly aware of. This also shields Microsoft from being dependent on an external entity that they cannot control.

Anyways, Satya played very smart with the hands he was dealt, got what he needed.

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