Why? If the product is useful (it is to me), then why do you care so much as to the internal politics? If it ceases to be useful or something better comes along, sure. But this strikes me as being serially online and involved in drama
Nothing beats OpenAI at the moment. Nothing is even close.
The motivations of individuals, the trade-offs of organizations, the culture of development teams - none of those are "politics".
And neither is the fundamental hierarchical and governance structure of big companies. They influence the stability of architectures, the design of APIs, the operational priorities. It is absolutely reasonable to have one's confidence in depending on the technology of a company based on the shenanigans OpenAI went through.
Same reason I’m hesitant to wire up my home with IoT devices (just a personal example). Nothing to do with politics, I’m just afraid companies will drop support and all the things I invested in will stop working.
Our time is finite.
Sounds like they would like to have the devices but have a hard time pulling the trigger for a fear of sinking money into to something temporary.
They didn't, though. They threatened to continue tomorrow!
It's called "walking across the street" and there's an expression for it because it's a thing that happens if governance fails but Makers gonna Make.
Microsoft was already running the environment, with rights to deliver it to customers, and added a paycheck for the people pouring themselves into it. The staff "threatened" to maintain continuity (and released the voice feature during the middle of the turmoil!).
Maybe relying on a business where the employees are almost unanimously determined to continue the mission is a safer bet than most.
Are you saying ~80% of OpenAI employees did not threaten to stop being employees of OpenAI during this kerfuffle?
At the end of the day, when you're using a good or service, are you getting into bed with the good/service? Or the company who makes it? If you've been buying pies from Anne's Bakery down the street, and you really like those pies, and find out that the person who made the pies started baking them at Joe's Diner instead, and Joe's Diner is just as far from your house and the pies cost about the same, you're probably going to go to Joe's Diner to get yourself some apple pie. You're probably not going to just start eating inferior pies, you picked these ones for a reason.
Blaming the board the hindered OpenAI mission by firing Altman but at the same time threaten to work for MS which would kill that mission completely.
No OpenAI no GPT.
It's far more common that if I'm building on you, if you blow up, I automatically own the stuff.
But they don't own it. If OpenAI goes down they have the rights of nothing.
This is almost certainly false.
As a CTO at largest banks and hedge funds and serial founder of multiple Internet companies, I assure you contracts for novel and "existential" technologies the buyer builds on top of are drafted with rights to the buyer that protect them in event of seller blowing up.
Two of the most common provisions are (a) code escrow w/ perpetual license (you blow up, I keep the source code and rights to continue it) and (b) key person (you fire whoever I did the deal with, that triggers the contract, we get the stuff). Those aren't ownership before blowup, they turn into ownership in the event of anything that costs stability.
I'd argue Satya's public statement on the Friday the news broke ("We have everything we need..."), without breaching confidentiality around actual terms of the agreement, signaled Microsoft has that nature of contract.
agree and why did they go from internal politics -> external politics (large scale external politics)
Well, that’s better for Sam, sure, but that just invites more speculation. That speculation is fed by a series of statements and leaks and bizarre happenings. All of that is newsworthy.
The most consistently asked question I got from various family over thanksgiving beyond the basic pleasantries was “so what’s up with OpenAI?” - it went way outside of the tech bubble.
My guess is it has something to do with the hundreds of employees whose net worth is mostly tied up in OpenAI equity. It's hard to leverage hundreds of people in a bid for power without everyone and their mother finding out about it, especially in such a high-profile organization. This was a potentially life-changing event for a surprisingly large group of people.
They are clearly not responsible enough to deal with their own internal problems maturely. They have proven themselves irresponsible. They are not trustworthy. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they cannot be trusted to deal with anybody or any issue responsibly.