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Comment by manyoso | Hacker News Reader

Driving the narrative doesn't mean driving reality. It is clear that Sam and friends are great at manipulating the media. But this is a disaster for Microsoft and the CEO damn well knows it. It is also a personal disaster for Altman and probably not a great move for those who choose to join him.

Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging that at best they were fooling themselves into believing they were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed looks to be dying.

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Why is this a disaster? They managed to acquihire the founders of a 90B company. Probably the most important company in the world until last Friday.

Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of profit in about a month.

They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the actual tech. They made a huge bet on OpenAI to produce the tech and that relationship is going down the drain. Watch the market today, the next week, the next month, the next six months and that will tell you what I say: this is a disaster for MS and they damn well know it.

Did you even research the basic facts?

Microsoft stock is up in the pre-market, because they basically got half of the OpenAI team for free.

The majority of top researchers at OpenAI are expressing solidarity for Sam and basically signalling they want to move too, just check out twitter. That also includes like the majority of the execs tehre.

Yes, low volume pre market moves on the back of a nonstop news flow always predict how they end up

You're making the assumption that the technical folks won't follow him, and that's a pretty ridiculous bet at this point unless you've got some more data you're just not sharing.

Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.

So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?

The only technically person who matters here, the one who came from deepmind and who is the worlds top AI researcher, is sure as hell not going to follow him since he’s the reason Sam is gone.

You're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about, clearly people aren't going to leave and follow Sam instead of Ilya. Nobody at all... just 550 of 700 employees, nothing to see here.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775

> 550 of 700 employees

Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.

It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.

> They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the actual tech

Microsoft also “has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights.”

If you’re a scientist, OpenAI is a fine place to be, though less differentiated than before. If you’re an engineer more interested in money and don’t want the risk of a start-up, Microsoft seems the obvious path forward.

You’ve nailed it. The excitement is going to be short lived imo

given that 500 employees are saying "either give us sama and gdb back or we are going to msft", i say nadella won hard.

That’s how it appears currently but experience has taught me to be very careful about making snap judgments in these types of fast moving situations. Nobody seems to know yet why he was actually fired. The popular theory is that it was a disagreement about mission but something about that narrative just feels off. Also Nadella and Altman are both enjoying God-like reputations and the OpenAI board totally being dismissed as clueless and making a stupid, impulsive decision even though basic logic would tell you that a rational acting person would not do that. There’s a lot of room for the pendulum of public opinion to swing back the other way and it’s clear that most of the most fervent supporters of Altman and Microsoft are motivated by money rather than truth.

Most human beings are motivated by money.

> a rational acting person would not do that.

Non-profit boards have no incentive to be rational.

Based on credits in Gpt3 and 4 papers, I think the team that follows Sam and Greg are the main drivers of the tech. Ilya is an advisor more or less.

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

Ilya just said he will do everything he can to reunite the company. If that’s the case the easiest way to do it is to resign and join MS

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