Microsoft Swallows OpenAI's Core Team – GPU Capacity, Incentives, IP
semianalysis.com
semianalysis.com
I'm convinced an actual, true open approach (ideally open source) will win out, everyone thinks MS has executed a masterstroke, but more likely they've shot their load too early with LLMs only being a signpost on the way to higher-order AI (AGI is a ill-defined fantasy).
In my view Altman represents the 'lets get lots of money' side of things and not much else. The deals with MS, ME financiers, SoftBank, a Jony Ive colab makes that pretty clear.
Maybe it's not that simple, but I'd say it's broadly correct.
I'd be willing to bet that between Sam's approach and the theorized approach of the OpenAI board we're discussing, Sam's approach has a higher chance of success.
The biggest breakthroughs in science do not come from those with the most money. It's all ideas.
About 1000x the complexity of GPT-3 and much slower would be the best guess right now.
That said I agree "human like" is unlikely, although LLMs and diffusion models are much closer than I was expecting.
Despite people calling them stochastic parrots and autocomplete on steroids, ChatGPT is behaving like it is trying to answer rather than merely trying to continue the text the user enters. I find this surprising.
Isn't MIRI focussed on “trustworthy reasoning”, not AGI more generally, and doesn't it see untrustworthy AGI as an undesirable thing to develop, even as an instrumental step?
So, literally, isn't “solving AGI” an explicit anti-goal?
It always appears plausible at its face if you don't know much about the tech, and if you do know the tech, you still need to have inside sources to really know how far off it is. And even once you know the tech and have inside sources to confirm they make stuff up, people are very reluctant to believe it, so it continues its march unimpeded.
Was the majority of openAIs employees threatening to leave the beneficial and good outcome that you were expecting for the company?
It's perfectly rational for me, a stranger who doesn't work at OpenAI, to say that if I worked at OpenAI, I'd be doing it for the "Open" part and wouldn't exactly enjoy the shift to commercialization - which coincidentally, has been widely reported now, and previously, as being an issue for all employees, not just the board.
It's also perfectly reasonable for me, a stranger who doesn't work at OpenAI, to not be able to know that was outweighed by their appreciation of leadership.
I recommend taking things a bit easier, trying to make everyone else use your frame of reference of conversation as a scorable game with binary opinions is a losing battle. Been there. Better to as dang says, come with curiosity, and learn from what you don't expect to hear.
Indeed, and I was curious as to your answer. There were a number of people a couple days ago, who were talking about the mission, and how its a non profit, and that it was important to stay with that mission.
And I was curious to see what those people think now.
You can feel however you want about your previous opinion and your now new one.
But anyway I am glad that I got your answer to the question, which is that it seems like you no longer believe that this thing was beneficial to almost anyone involved, even those who believed in the mission.
84% of OpenAI employees have signed a statement that they will leave OpenAI if the board does not resign. The letter they signed states that Microsoft has made an open offer to any OpenAI employee. And Satya is almost certainly not going to spoil this moment with stingy packages. He is, after all, essentially acquiring a company that was valued at $90 billion, for nothing.
EDIT: And to continue my "thinking out loud", MS have no real need to cut ties with OpenAI (yet), who knows OpenAI might just turn out fine after all this, As S.R. Hadden once said: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
Why would they need a clean room at all? Part of their investment was almost completely unfettered access to OpenAI IP.
It’s been brought up several times in the past but people seem to respond more to the drama that they put forward, rather than factually correct information.
the fact that this happen and satya nadella can make move in the WEEKENDS is pretty big deal
> What’s more important to understand is if Microsoft has legal direct access to all the data and code used for pre-training and RL. It is obviously all stored on Azure, but if the new Sam-led internal team can freely access that, they can basically start exactly where they left off without much of a hiccup. If they cannot get it, then we estimate that it could possibly lead to only a 4-6 month delay vs prior.
Does anyone actually know if MSFT has access to OpenAI's training data ? Hard to imagine the human created/curated portion of it being redone in 4-6 months.
I've read there's some limitation in the OpenAI-MSFT agreement of it being limited to "AI" vs "AGI" technology, but no details of how that determination is made. Maybe time for OpenAI to play the AGI card.
There are three unavoidable things in life: Death, Taxes and Samsung =)
Rise of mass media and opaque conglomerates along with the poor economics of late 70's through 80's that saw many (mostly) manufacturing jobs get nuked by boardrooms.
Yes and no. At the time, Cyberpunk was a fringe movement by some rebel authors. Hence the "punk". Until then, mainstream science fiction was very much obsessed with nice utopias that used technology and communication for the benefit of society in far distant futures. Cyberpunk tore it all down and pointed at the possible nightmare of a not so distant future where all pervading technology leaves you cluelessly behind, crushed under the foot of megacorporate feudalism.
this gets really difficult when consdiering that the same unit of wealth also prices food, AND gambling
A side note: the fact that there are so many tech unicorns in the US is self-reinforcing, because the founders and early employees of IPO'd unicorns have usually invested their money into either their own venture or those of some random people they knew, and repeated the cycle. The rest of the world barely got anything from the insane valuation explosion in the tech sector of the last 15-20 years.
Yeah, a few of them are very high-profile in that [1], but they're a) an utter minority (there's ~3k of billionaires vs 236 that signed the Giving Pledge) and b) for most of them, even if they'd give away 90% of their wealth, their kids would still be effectively landed gentry. It's a sham to placate the masses.
Whereas this toady is so bent on having an overclass that he's doing that on behalf of others.
... and the pledge thing is the same, really. In order to have some hypocritical desire to signal adherence to some ideal, you first have to believe it's an ideal. Those people have no need to "placate the masses" in the sense of there being an imminent risk of torches and pitchforks. They're doing it at most for prestige... and prestige only counts if it's among people whose opinions you actually care about.
In your value system, is blowing it on yourself better?
EDIT: to be clear, the main point of generating wealth is to generate value for society. Society then pays you for that value with the wealth that you get... Now I am pointing out that on the personal level, helping your future generations is a totally admirable goal.
I don’t think you know what this means
Maybe? Like, certainly it's nice and good to pass along something to your children. But giving them the ability to just sit around and play video games every day for the rest of their life? What's good about that? (Yes, I know, many inheritors end up doing productive things with their money.)
I would advocate for dropping the inheritance tax exemption to something much much lower, and then taxing nearly all (or even all) of an inheritance above that amount.
As much as I am not a fan of Bill Gates, I 100% approve of his plan to earmark pretty much all of his wealth for philanthropy before he dies. I am still uncomfortable with the idea that we have to depend on the largess of a few billionaires in order to direct resources to make the world better. But I think that's massively better than passing on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to offspring who didn't do anything to earn it.
> to be clear, the main point of generating wealth is to generate value for society. Society then pays you for that value with the wealth that you get...
That sounds like an overly idealized view of how things work. Many people get super rich for reasons that have little to do with generating wealth for society. And even if they do generate wealth for society, their reward is usually comically greater than the wealth they generate.
If you cap my ability to do that, that removes the main driver of my motivation.
Why allow kids to benefit from their parents at all? EG, why do immigrant kids get to benefit from their hardworking parens' ability to come to this country and build a life?
Perhaps a better question is to ask if great responsibility comes with great power. Because extreme wealth is great power. And money is not some mandate for power.
Living off inherited wealth isn't rent seeking; your dynasty doesn't need to collect any rents if you've left a large enough sum of money to them in a trust. They're living entirely off the money you earned fair and square.
And who actually makes that money? Those who pay rent, either in actual rent if you invested into real estate, or in one or another kind of fees, that you(r kids) can set (almost) at will.
Getting to that point where you are a rent seeker is the core issue at heart of SV-style capitalism. Use and burn enormous amounts of VC to destroy entrenched industry by price dumping (and in some cases like taxis, actually providing a better service), then either acquire or destroy your competition, and finally you have complete control over the market in a way that it would require enormous amounts of money to even be anything close to a threat to you (and at that point, you acquire them). Additionally, use the income from your market stranglehold to pivot into new ventures, because you can do so with ease. The best examples for how that played out are Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Google and, to a bit, Apple. Utterly dominant in their respective fields, and all at the control of one or more money spigots. And this is why these companies were and are valued at the valuations they have... investors assess companies on their chance of getting to such a dominant position, to then reap the benefits of the money spigot.
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There is a mass exodus of the core OpenAI team leaving and joining Microsoft. This new organization within Microsoft will get hundreds of technical staff from OpenAI.
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The truth is outside a select few, MSFT grand scheme/plans hasn't happened yet.
This shit was just announced. Noone jumped yet as it doesn't exist yet .
I can see MSFT scooping as much talent now as possible, roll the dice, cut some heads a few quarters later
- Lost all their key people - Lost some or all of the handouts Microsoft was giving them, potentially more - Microsoft has full rights (commercial?) to all of their IP
It’s really interesting to see this said as if it’s something terrible. That’s the entire reason this company exists.
Or was it more of non-binding pledge?
Probably not a bad time to lock in some of those returns.
What he does with those two assets and their previous 13B investment will be what to watch for.
Though I believe sometimes some narrowly-defined non-competes are ok when it comes to executive-level roles, so unclear if Altman et al. could be affected by those.
But I also feel like someone with Altman's clout could have avoided signing something like that when he took the CEO job.
I assume this is meant to mean don't get too attached to intelligence as a uniquely human quality as it soon won't be (or maybe already isn't, based on his estimation).
Altman did indicate there'd been a recent breakthrough a couple of weeks ago (4th one in company history). Not sure why the secrecy in saying what is is (or what the prior 3 were) .. Maybe can't be told without giving away HOW to achieve it, e.g. "when you train on data type XXX, YYY happens" ?
Who is this article written for? Who doesn't know what $10 million is but knows what $1e7 is?
Some kind of a leak a real possibility IMO
It initially took the view that actual openness was the best route for that. It later took the view that openness was more dangerous than having the most advanced progress behind the walls of a benevolent gatekeeper.
The set of options it faces has changed, and its quite possible its view of the best option in the current context could change, again, because of that. (Also, who "OpenAI" is has changed over time, and changed rather radically recently, a process which almost certainly is not complete, which also can change decisions about the best way forward.)
Ironically, it's almost like what you'd hear from MS in the 90s/2000s
They (the moderate AI risk-of-slavery-or-extermination camp, that sees safety as a critical issue but the promise of AI benefit to humanity if well-aligned as significant enough that working for aligned AI is worthwhile instead of just adopting an AI-ban and bombing non-compliant datacenters) have always been of the opinion that open source is less safe than in the hands of a benevolent dictator with AI safety in mind, which is why their best case scenario was them being the benevolent dictatory gatekeeping AI.
OTOH, its quite possible that they would see having a single entity purely interest in private gain being likely to acquire a commanding lead as even a greater risk than having current SotA public (really, its hard for me to see any other possibility consistent with their public views other than seeing that threat as a reason to join the extremist Yudkowski camp in anti-AI crusade mode.)
That seems like a fool's errand, even before they accepted MS's money, with Google, Facebook, and even Amazon in play.
To be an independent alternative to big corporations, I can understand. But all that went out the window with Altman, his deal with MS, and the direction he chose to take OpenAI - effectively becoming the big corporation they were suppose to fight.
Agreed; my describing the history of public decision making by OpenAI is not the same as endorsing any of the decisions.
I've never thought closed gatekeeping was going to be an effective mitigation in this space, whether by intrusive government action or a private "benevolent gatekeeper".
This is the biggest Silicon Valley power play I can recall in the last 3 decades.
There were some of the big lawsuits too I suppose? But those were (relatively) slow burners.
Ok sure internet guy. They'll just "claw back" based on which clause in the agreement? Oh the "don't fire the CEO clause". Really, which section and paragraph is that?
My conjecture on what'll probably happen is compute will be split somewhat unevenly between NewOpenAI and OldOpenAI. Because let's not forget, OldOpenAI actually has revenue and a raft of paying customers.