I can't read the article so maybe the content is more nuanced, but the framing irks me.
This all happened really fast and the offer was informal. I can only speak for myself but I do have a lot of respect for modern MS, and would have seriously considered the move if that's what kept the team together and comp was reasonable. I would be surprised if most people felt differently.
MS is trying to make me use Edge Browser by randomly refusing to let me use Bing chat in any other browser. This makes me think that MS is still evil and will force me to do things the moment they can. I gave up Bing Chat because of this and was using Perplexity.ai instead, until Bing got integrated into ChatGPT.
Another thing is the feel of the MS products is very different than OpenAI. For example, Bing chat again, would have a strange UX where it counts down my message allowance on the topic as I keep asking follow up questions as if it was designed for their convenience and not mine. OpenAI products on the other hand feel much more pleasant to use and don't stress me out even when things don't work as expected, which makes me think that the approach of product design is very different than MS.
Same tech running on the Azure servers, completely different product experiences. IMHO this points to completely different mindsets.
You think the employees at “Open” AI care about anything more than their large paychecks no matter what they say?
notice how the one OpenAI employee posted he'd "consider it" if the comp was right. Ie, it's about the money.
We're likely to see an 8-16x reduction in hardware costs over the next decade. That's about enough to shrink the current GPT-4 inference endpoints to a laptop/desktop sized hardware footprint.
Since it is MS providing the compute for equity, they would not have an incentive to discount.
All big corporations are "evil", as in, their decisionmaking is scaled and institutionalized enough to effectively implement the goal of "maximizing shareholder value" above what's good for you or society.
I'm not talking about "hey, we have this product that you might like", I'm talking about "if you want to use this product, you must also use this product". There's also no technical reason for it, sometimes they will let me use it.
Not O.K.
I'm not sure of any large one that doesn't. The incentives are aligned such that it's hard for them not to. It's easy to find examples of similar (sometimes almost identical) behavior from most large companies.
Google/Android/Chrome/YouTube
Meta/Messenger/Facebook/WhatsApp
...just to name a few.
All that said, I would expect Valve's total immediate-term 'worth' to be much less than it could be, which is the entire point of this topic. The reason companies treat their customers poorly is because it's profitable, but it also has consequences. You see large short to mid term growth in exchange for long term failure. That's why I think it's more typical to see public companies treat their customers poorly than it is for private companies. Generally the "employees" (including board and CEO) of a public company are evaluated on their short to mid-term performance.
By contrast private companies, especially ones that remain private long beyond the point of being able to 'cash out' with a public offering, tend to be more focused on the long term viability. So it's expected that their 'value', whatever it may be, would be less than it would be if they acted in a hostile fashion to their users.
The likely effect on day-to-day for OpenAI would have been a different promotion process, their stock being worth $0, and having to use a different videoconferencing solution. I worked at a startup that got bought by a huge company, and that's basically all that changed for us. Our team continues to work on our product, and I'm only vaguely aware of what the rest of the company even does. (I think they make servers? Like solder together chips and put them in the box.) Day-to-day doesn't change much; it's the same people, the same code, and the same goals. I didn't get bought by Microsoft, but I can't imagine that these strategic acquisitions are much different across the Fortune 500.
OS maybe but browser? They're going to great lengths to push Edge. Including harassing customers trying to download Chrome or Firefox.
Even though they are in fact considering the enterprise market as a key customer. I used to manage Apple devices (iPhone but also Mac which was much more work) for a long time and that was much harder.
For example, for a federated Apple ID you can still, after 5 years since release, not use federated Apple IDs if your Azure AD UPN and E-mail are not the same. In like 90% of enterprises this is not the case but they just won't fix this. Apple thinks we should just change our entire org for them. Well with Macs taking up 0,5% of our installed base that's just not going to happen (and this way it's not going to be much higher either).
Not to mention all the terrible Mac ports of windows software like VPN, Security etc that don't follow Mac concepts or installers. You have to pile workaround upon workaround.
Google created the meme that a company could be evil or not but we're past that age. Let's focus on the experiences, and while not forgetting the past (yes the 90s do not paint MS well), be forgiving. MS seems to continue to develop and even innovate on a lot of this tech, painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Yes as with any large company, there will be parts that are good and parts that are not.
Disclaimer: I have never worked at Microsoft and own no stock directly though so have ETFs. And through OSS I have some friends there that I strongly respect and think are awesome and always think of them any time I see hate talk towards MS, which is unfortunately common...
It’s not a bad language, it’s just not a very good language either. Need efficiency? Rust/C++. Need an all round language? Node or Python, which are less efficient, but still powerful enough to power Instagram and well OpenAI as far as Python goes and LEGO as far as Typescript goes. Realistically you’re looking to choose between C#, Java and Go. Both Java and Go are miles ahead of C# in terms of concurrency, I mean, C# is still stuck with “await” after all, and while I guess you can have a lengthy debate on C# vs Java, 9 gazillion large companies use Java while 0 use C#.
It’s not that C# is bad, like I said. It’s never really been better than it is now, it’s more a question of why would you ever use it? Even the C# developers at Microsoft admit to prototyping using Python because it’s just so much faster to build things with it, and while they do move things to C#, you have to wonder if they would if they weren’t working for Microsoft.
Hard to understand this point of view with:
- vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension
- Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc
Yes they have some problems in hiding their attempts for lockin on the Windows side but ignoring all the good and just labeling them terrible for that is troubling.
I think GP's point is that PyLance and Pyright, while free, are still proprietary and not open-source.
there's no way you guys would get the same comp though? like not even close. MSFT irrespective of how much it wants you is not going to honor the 10X increase in valuation from the upcoming $90 billion valuation.
Even if they do, you will miss on the upside. MSFT stock is not going to 10X but OpenAI's might.
Real MSFT stock beats a theoretical could-have-been with a 10x upside.
As someone who has done startups, I highly agree with this statement.
But for a lot of people doing start ups for the first time (including my younger self) they don't understand the headache of private market equity, and thus do not apply the correct discount.
As they say, a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.
Nadella was directly involved and he's way smarter than that. Comping one the best ML teams in the world correctly is child's play compared to undoing Balmer's open source mess.
So most likely, if most of the employees moved over to Microsoft, they wouldn't get the same comp, at most 44% of the company would.
Yes, the "you guys" average HN demographic per the gp comment.
They would have to create some kind of crazy structure to avoid wrecking their levels. But of course it could be done.
If the valuation goes up x10 after next round average developer probably will have the same money locked in rsu/options.
Not the person you are replying to, but it depends on how diluted it gets. If they print 9x of currently outstanding shares as the value goes 10x, it would result in those original shares being worth exactly the same as before the 10x jump.
But I agree with you overall, in terms of the actual reality. I don’t think any company with half a brain would do that.
I'm not talking about key people, about first 50 employees, etc. Regular people.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that due to the existence of leverage. You can make MSFT have the potential to 10x (or ÷10) if you want.
Personally, I prefer to make tons of money, but as someone who will not have a say in whether to participate in an AI-driven world, I would prefer if there were non-profit counterweights. Perhaps governments will have the wherewithal to steer things but I am somewhat concerned.
Then add college administrators to that mix.
Large non-profits optimize for revenue, small ones for impact.
The big fish eat the little ones or turn them into impact sharecroppers.
It is human nature for people to want power, whether it is power over others or the power to have autonomy, or anything in-between.
I have to assume that the environment there was pretty exciting as well, and I hope the energy wasn't ruined by this. I like being surprised by technology and I love seeing people innovate because of what you and your team have pushed to the forefront. Godspeed.
A lot of complex issues and perspectives packed into those few words...
For most employees, their OpenAI stock would have been worth even more than their salary at its current valuation, and it has the potential to potentially be worth quite a bit more in the future.
Replacing it with Microsoft stock would have made it a sure thing - but also with much less growth potential.
I'd be really curious to hear if Microsoft actually got so far as to figure out what to offer OpenAI employees in terms of an equity offer.
They have PPUs, which is similar to profit sharing