Maybe I'm just cynical, but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology.
I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the documentation for the current major version of Angular wasn't nearly good enough to meet this stated goal. My TL at the time laughed and said the person who spearheaded that initiative was already living large in their mansion on the hill and didn't give a flying f about the fate of Angular now.
There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff.
There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.
> but I wonder how much of this initiative and energy is driven by people at Microsoft who want their own star to rise higher than it can when it's bound by a third-party technology.
I guess it's human nature for a person or an org to own their own destiny. That said, the driving force is not personal ambition in this case though. The driving force behind this is that people realized that OAI does not have a moat as LLMs are quickly turning into commodities, if haven't yet. It does not make sense to pay a premium to OAI any more, let alone at the cost of not having the flexibility to customize models.
Personally, I think Altman did a de-service to OAI by constantly boasting AGI and seeking regulatory capture, when he perfectly knew the limitation of the current LLMs.
One of my friends stated this phenomenon very well “it’s a lever they can pull so they do it”. Once you’ve tied your career to a specific technology internally, there’s really only one option: keep pushing it regardless of any alternatives because your career depends on it. So that’s what they do.
Does it not make sense to not tie your future to a third-party (aka build your business on someone else's platform)? Seems like basic strategy to me if that's the case.
Listening to Satya in recent interviews I think makes it clear that he doesn’t really buy into OpenAI’s religious-like view of AGI. I think the divorce makes a lot of sense in light of this.
OpenAI already started divorce proceedings with their datacenter partnership with Softbank/etc, and it'd hardly be prudent for the world's largest software company NOT to have it's own SOTA AI models.
Nadella might have initially been caught a bit flat footed with the rapid rise of AI, but seems to be managing the situation masterfully.
It's the responsibility of leadership to set the correct goals and metrics. If leadership doesn't value maintenance, those they lead won't either. You can't blame people for playing to the tune of those above them.
Ah man I don't want to hear things like that. I work in an Angular project and it is the most pleasant thing I have worked with (and i've been using it as my primary platform for almost a decade now). If I could, i'd happily keep using this framework for the rest of my career(27 years to go till retirement).
This is absolutely a too-cynical position. Nadella would be asleep at the wheel if he weren’t actively mitigating OpenAI’s current and future leverage over Microsoft.
This would be the case even if OpenAI weren’t a little weird and flaky (board drama, nonprofit governance, etc), but even moreso given OpenAI’s reality.
Unfortunately I don't think there is any real metric-based way to prevent this type of behavior, it just has to be old fashioned encouraged from the top. At a certain size it seems like this stops scaling though
And why not? should he just allow the owners of capital to extract as much value as possible without actually doing anything, but woe be the worker if he actually tries to free himself.
Most directors and above at Google are more concerned with how they will put gas in their yachts this weekend than the quality of the products they are supposed to be in charge of.
A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll never even come close to breaking even.
Even worse: AFAIK there's no reason to believe that the $20k/mo or $10k/mo pricing will actually make them money. Those numbers are just thought balloons being floated.
Of course $10k/mo sounds like a lot of inference, but it's not yet clear how much inference will be required to approximate a software developer--especially in the context of maintaining and building upon an existing codebase over time and not just building and refining green field projects.
Do you have a source for these supposed leaks? Those prices don't sound even remotely credible and I can't find anything on HN in the past week with the keywords "openai leak".
There is too little to go on, but they could already have trial customers and testimonials lined up. Actually demoing the product will probably work better than just having a human-less signup process, considering the price.
They could also just be trying to cash in on FOMO and their success and reputation so far, but that would paint a bleak picture
Never come close to breaking even? You can now get a GPT-4 class model for 1-2% of what it cost when they originally released it. They’re going to drive this even further down with the amount of CAPEX pouring into AI / data centers. It’s pretty obvious that’s their plan when they serve ChatGPT at a “loss”.
"Microsoft has poured over $13 billion into the AI firm since 2019..."
My understanding is that this isn't really true, as most of those "dollars" were actually Azure credits. I'm not saying those are free (for Microsoft), but they're a lot cheaper than the price tag suggests. Companies that give away coupons or free gift certificates do bear a cost, but not a cost equivalent to the number on them, especially if they have spare capacity.
I think they have realized that even if OpenAI is first, it won't last long so really its just compute at scale, which is something they already do themselves.
There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave).
There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda).
Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)
Sam Altman should have sold OpenAI to Musk for 90$ billion or whatever he was willing to pay (assuming he was serious like he bought twitter). While I find LLMs interesting and feel many places could use those, I also think this is like hitting everything with a hammer and see where the nail was. People used OpenAI as a hammer until it was popular and now everyone would like to go their way. For 90$ billion he could find the next hammer or not care. But when the value of this hammer drops (not if it's a when) he will be lucky if he can get double digits for it. Maybe someone will buy them just for the customer base but these models can become obsolete quickly and that leaves OpenAI with absolutely nothing else as a company. Even the talent would leave (a lot of it has). Musk and Altman share the same ego, but if I was Altman, I would cash out when the market is riding on a high.
I think they both want a future without each other. OpenAI will eventually want to vertically integrate up towards applications (Microsoft's space) and Microsoft wants to do the opposite in order to have more control over what is prioritized, control costs, etc.
I think OpenAI is toxic. Weird corporate governmance shadiness. The Elon drama, valuations based on claims that seem like the AI version of the Uber for X hype of a decade ago (but exponentially crazier). The list goes on.
Microsoft is the IBM of this century. They are conservative, and I think they’re holding back — their copilot for government launch was delayed months for lack of GPUs. They have the money to make that problem go away.
Thematically investing billions into startup AI frontier models makes sense if you believe in first-to-AGI likely worth a trillion dollars +
Investing in second/third place likely valuable at similar scales too
But outside of that MSFTs move indicates that frontier models most valuable current use case - enterprise-level API users - are likely to be significantly commoditized
And likely majority of proceeds will be captured by (a) those with integrated product distribution - MSFT in this case and (b) data center partners for inference and query support
At this point, I don’t see much reason to believe the “AGI is imminent and these things are potentially dangerous!” line at all. It looks like it was just Altman doing his thing where he makes shit up to hype whatever he’s selling. Worked great, too. “Oooh, it’s so dangerous, we’re so concerned about safety! Also, you better buy our stuff.”
Despite the actual performance and product implementation, this suggests to me Apple's approach was more strategic.
That is, integrating use of their own model, amplifying capability via OpenAI queries.
Again, this is not to drum up the actual quality of the product releases so far--they haven't been good--but the foundation of "we'll try to rely on our own models when we can" was the right place to start from.
It's clear that OpenAI has peaked. Possibly because the AI hype in general has peaked, but I think moreso because the opportunity has become flooded and commoditized, and only the fetishists are still True Believers (which is something we saw during the crypto hype days, but most at the time decried it).
Nothing against them, but the solutions have become commoditized, and OpenAI is going to lack the network effects that these other companies have.
Perhaps there will be new breakthroughs in the near future that produce even more value, but how long can a moat be sustained? All of them in AI are filled in faster than the are dug.
LLM's don't have to get better — with apps and such, it looks like we still have a good 4 or 5 years of horizontal growth. They're already good enough for a whole suite of apps that still aren't written yet — some I suspect we haven't considered.
Of course big players like OpenAI need constant growth because it's their business model. Perhaps it's the story we see play out time and time again: the pioneer slips up and watch as others steal their thunder.
People using AI, even the high school teachers that I know, constantly compare and battle models against each other. Even a 10% difference in the results is something that it's worth paying for, because it saves you a lot of time
Softbank’s Masa’s magic is convincing everyone, every time, that he hasn’t consistently top ticked every market he’s invested in for the last decade. Maybe Satya’s finally broken himself of the spell [1].
I think Microsoft isn't buying the AGI hype from OpenAI, and wants to move to be more model agnostic, and instead do what Microsoft (thinks) it does best, and that's tooling, and enterprise products.
MS wants to push Copilot, and will be better off not being tied to OpenAI but having Copilot be model agnostic, like GH Copilot can use other models already. They are going to try and position Azure as "the" place to run your own models, etc.
For cloud providers it makes sense to be model agnostic.
While we still live in a datacenter driven world, models will become more efficient and move down the value chain to consumer devices.
For Enterprise, these companies will need to regulate model risk and having models fine-tuned on proprietary data at scale will be an important competitive differentiator.
Lately I've been thinking about the unintended effects that AI tools (such as GPT-based assistants) might have on technological innovation. Let me explain:
Suppose an AI assistant is heavily trained on a popular technology stack, such as React. Developers naturally rely on AI for quick solutions, best practices, and problem solving. While this certainly increases productivity, doesn't it implicitly discourage exploration of potentially superior alternative technologies?
My concern is that a heavy reliance on AI could reinforce existing standards and discourage developers from experimenting or inventing radically new approaches. If everyone is using AI-based solutions built on dominant frameworks, where does the motivation to explore novel platforms or languages come from?
I actually think the AI is going to end up creating its own sort of machine code. Programming will be done entirely in natural language, the AI will translate to machine code and we tiny brained humans won’t even know or care what it’s doing under the hood. The idea of programming using a specific programming language is going to seem archaic and foolish.
On the flip side, the effect of “we already know how to do it this way, have good practices and tooling and educational materials for it” is often underweighted when considering the merits of a novel system. The more established something is, the better a competitor needs to be to make the switch worth it. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
There is of course a balance to be struck - keeping an open mind about new ways of doing things is important. However, in tech communities, I think there is often not enough thought given to the value of stability, despite warts.
Microsoft is just so bad at marketing their products, and their branding is confusing. Unfortunately, until they fix that, any consumer facing product is going to falter. Look at the new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 rebrands just of late. The business side of things will still make money but watching them flounder on consumer facing products is just so frustrating. The Surface and Xbox brand are the only 2 that seem to have somewhat escaped the gravity of the rest of the organization in terms of that, but nothing all that polished or groundbreaking has really come out of Microsoft from a consumer facing standpoint in over a decade now. Microsoft could build the best AI around but it doesn't matter without users.
Yeah, the office suite is such a cash cow. It is polished, feature rich, and ubiquitous compared to alternatives and somehow has remained so for decades. And yet, I'm increasingly getting seriously concerned they are going to break it so badly I'll need to find an alternative.
I get that "growth" must be everything or whatever, but can't a company just be stable and reliable for a while? What's wrong with enterprise contracts and more market penetration for cloud services of (oftentimes) dubious use?
OpenAI will in the end be aquired for less than its current valuation. Initially, I've been paying for Claude (coding), Cursor (coding), OpenAI (general, coding), and then started paying for Claude Code API credits.
Now I canceled OpenAI and Claude general subscriptions, because for general tasks, Grok and DeepSeek more than suffice. General purpose AI will unlikely be subscription-based, unlike the specialized (professional) one.
I'm now only paying for Claude Code API credits and still paying for Cursor.
Microsoft's corporate structure and company culture is actively hostile to innovation of any kind. This was true in Ballmer's era and is equally true today, no matter how many PR wins Nadella is able to pull off. The company justifies its market cap by selling office software and cloud services contracts to large corporations and governments via an army of salespeople and lobbyists, and that is what it will continue to be successful at. It got lucky by backing OpenAI at the right time, but the delusion of becoming an independent AI powerhouse like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta etc. will never be a reality. Stuff like this is simply not in the company's DNA.
you are right, Microsoft is a hodge podge of legacy on-premise software, legacy software lifted and shifted to the cloud, and some innovation pockets.
Microsoft bread and butter is Enterprise bloatware and large Enterprise deals where everything in the world is bundled together for use-it-or-lose-it contracts.
Its not really much different from IBM like a two decades ago
How does one define an AI powerhouse? If its building models, a smart business wouldn't bank on that alone. There is no moat.
If the definition of an AI Powerhouse is more about the capability to host models and process workloads, Amazon (the other company missing in that list) and Microsoft are definitely them.
That OpenAI would absolutely dominate the AI space was received wisdom after the launch of GPT-4. Since then we've had a major corporate governance shakeup, lawsuits around the non-profit status which is trying to convert into for-profit, and competitors out-innovating OpenAI. So OpenAI is no longer a shoo-in, and Microsoft have realized that they may actually be hamstrung through their partnership because it prevents them from innovating in-house if OpenAI loses their lead. So the obvious strategic move is to do this. To make sure that MS has everything they need to innovate in-house while maintaining their partnership with OpenAI, and try to leverage that partnership to give in-house every possible advantage.
It's only logical. OpenAI it's too expensive for what it produces. Deep Seek is on par with ChatGPT and the cost was lower. Claude development costs less, too.
Currently, it feels like many of the frontier models have reached approximately the same level of 'intelligence' and capability. No one is leaps ahead of the rest. Microsoft probably figured this is a good time to reconsider their AI strategy.
Even in the openAI ecosystem there are models that, while similar in theory, produce very different results, so much that some murderous are unusable. So even small differences translate to enormous differences.
It would be absolutely insane for Microsoft to use DeepSeek. Just because a model is open weights doesn't mean there's not a massive threat-vector of a Trojan horse in those weights that would be undetectable until exploited.
What I mean is you could train a model to generate harmful code, and do so covertly, whenever some specific sequence of keywords is in the prompt. Then China could take some kind of action to cause users to start injecting those keywords.
For example: "Tribble-like creatures detected on Venus". That's a highly unlikely sequence, but it could be easily trained into models to trigger a secret "Evil Mode" in the LLM. I'm not sure if this threat-vector is well known or not, but I know it can be done, and it's very easy to train this into the weights, and would remain undetectable until it's too late.
Microsoft is notorious for starting partnerships that end poorly.
Microsoft and IBM partnered to create OS/2, then they left the project and created Windows NT.
Microsoft and Sybase partnered to work on a database, then split and created MS SQL Server.
Microsoft partnered with Apple to work on Macintosh software, they learned from the Macintosh early access prototypes and created Windows 1.0 behind their back.
Microsoft "embraced" Java, tried to apply a extend/extinguish strategy and when they got sued they split and created .NET.
Microsoft joined the OpenGL ARB, stayed for a while, then left and created Direct3D. And started spreading fear about OpenGL performance on Windows.
Microsoft bought GitHub, told users they came in peace and loved open source, then took all the repository data and trained AI models with their code.
They need to and should hedge their bets and not put all eggs in one basket they don't fully control. Anything else would be fiduciarily irresponsible.
> OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4, the backbone of Microsoft’s Copilot assistant, aren’t cheap to run. Keeping them live on Azure’s cloud infrastructure racks up significant costs, and Microsoft is eager to lower the bill with its own leaner alternatives.
Am I reading this right? Does Microsoft not eat its own dog food? Their own infra is too expensive?
Just because you own a datacenter, doesn't mean it's free. For one, you still need to pay the power and bandwidth bills, both of which would be massive, and for two, every moment of compute you use internally is compute you're not selling for money.
They probably thought that burning cash was the way to get to AGI, and that on the way there they would make significant improvements over GPT 4 that they would be able to release as GPT 5.
And that is just not happening. While pretty much everyone else is trying to increase efficiency, and specialize their models to niche areas, they keep on chasing AGI.
Meanwhile more and more models are being delivered within apps, where they create more value than in an isolated chat window. And OpenAi doesn’t control those apps. So they’re slowly being pushed out.
Unless they pull off yet another breakthrough, I don’t think they have much of a great future
I think you misunderstand. The purpose of a business is for the founders to get rich. They already have by pumping AGI, etc. It's been a stunning success.
I mean, obviously? There is no good reason to go all in on OpenAI for Microsoft?
Also a bit hyperbolic. I'm sure there are good reasons Microsoft would want to build it's own products on top of their own models and have more fine control of things. That doesn't mean they are plotting a future where they do nothing at all with OpenAI.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
only-one1701|1 year ago
I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the documentation for the current major version of Angular wasn't nearly good enough to meet this stated goal. My TL at the time laughed and said the person who spearheaded that initiative was already living large in their mansion on the hill and didn't give a flying f about the fate of Angular now.
bsimpson|1 year ago
There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.
hintymad|1 year ago
I guess it's human nature for a person or an org to own their own destiny. That said, the driving force is not personal ambition in this case though. The driving force behind this is that people realized that OAI does not have a moat as LLMs are quickly turning into commodities, if haven't yet. It does not make sense to pay a premium to OAI any more, let alone at the cost of not having the flexibility to customize models.
Personally, I think Altman did a de-service to OAI by constantly boasting AGI and seeking regulatory capture, when he perfectly knew the limitation of the current LLMs.
mlazos|1 year ago
ambicapter|1 year ago
skepticATX|1 year ago
HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago
Nadella might have initially been caught a bit flat footed with the rapid rise of AI, but seems to be managing the situation masterfully.
pradn|1 year ago
saturn8601|1 year ago
pbh101|1 year ago
This would be the case even if OpenAI weren’t a little weird and flaky (board drama, nonprofit governance, etc), but even moreso given OpenAI’s reality.
roland35|1 year ago
surfingdino|1 year ago
1) Cost -- beancounters got involved
2) Who Do You Think You Are? -- someone at Microsoft had enough of OpenAI stealing the limelight
3) Tactical Withdrawal -- MSFT is preparing to demote/drop AI over the next 5-10 years
Guthur|11 months ago
ndesaulniers|11 months ago
croes|11 months ago
Isn’t that the basis for competition?
orbifold|1 year ago
m463|1 year ago
snarfy|1 year ago
erikerikson|1 year ago
keeganpoppen|1 year ago
DebtDeflation|1 year ago
paxys|1 year ago
moduspol|1 year ago
Of course $10k/mo sounds like a lot of inference, but it's not yet clear how much inference will be required to approximate a software developer--especially in the context of maintaining and building upon an existing codebase over time and not just building and refining green field projects.
optimalsolver|1 year ago
mk_chan|1 year ago
mvdtnz|1 year ago
hnthrow90348765|1 year ago
They could also just be trying to cash in on FOMO and their success and reputation so far, but that would paint a bleak picture
serjester|1 year ago
tempodox|11 months ago
drumhead|1 year ago
mimischi|1 year ago
culi|1 year ago
nashashmi|1 year ago
arresin|11 months ago
rossdavidh|1 year ago
My understanding is that this isn't really true, as most of those "dollars" were actually Azure credits. I'm not saying those are free (for Microsoft), but they're a lot cheaper than the price tag suggests. Companies that give away coupons or free gift certificates do bear a cost, but not a cost equivalent to the number on them, especially if they have spare capacity.
erikerikson|1 year ago
strangescript|1 year ago
echelon|1 year ago
There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave).
There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda).
Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)
bustling-noose|1 year ago
AlexSW|11 months ago
bagacrap|11 months ago
laluser|1 year ago
Spooky23|1 year ago
Microsoft is the IBM of this century. They are conservative, and I think they’re holding back — their copilot for government launch was delayed months for lack of GPUs. They have the money to make that problem go away.
aresant|1 year ago
Investing in second/third place likely valuable at similar scales too
But outside of that MSFTs move indicates that frontier models most valuable current use case - enterprise-level API users - are likely to be significantly commoditized
And likely majority of proceeds will be captured by (a) those with integrated product distribution - MSFT in this case and (b) data center partners for inference and query support
alabastervlog|1 year ago
lm28469|1 year ago
only-one1701|1 year ago
j45|1 year ago
Computationally, some might have access to it earlier before it’s scalable.
bredren|1 year ago
That is, integrating use of their own model, amplifying capability via OpenAI queries.
Again, this is not to drum up the actual quality of the product releases so far--they haven't been good--but the foundation of "we'll try to rely on our own models when we can" was the right place to start from.
asciii|1 year ago
"we have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. we are below them, above them, around them." -- satya nadella
optimalsolver|1 year ago
kandesbunzler|1 year ago
[deleted]
debacle|1 year ago
Nothing against them, but the solutions have become commoditized, and OpenAI is going to lack the network effects that these other companies have.
Perhaps there will be new breakthroughs in the near future that produce even more value, but how long can a moat be sustained? All of them in AI are filled in faster than the are dug.
JKCalhoun|1 year ago
Of course big players like OpenAI need constant growth because it's their business model. Perhaps it's the story we see play out time and time again: the pioneer slips up and watch as others steal their thunder.
_giorgio_|1 year ago
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/business/dealbook/softban...
rdtsc|1 year ago
thewebguyd|1 year ago
MS wants to push Copilot, and will be better off not being tied to OpenAI but having Copilot be model agnostic, like GH Copilot can use other models already. They are going to try and position Azure as "the" place to run your own models, etc.
outside1234|1 year ago
This is just want companies at $2T scale do.
shuri|1 year ago
agentultra|1 year ago
Then I read the article.
Plotting for a future without Microsoft.
mirekrusin|1 year ago
doublebind|1 year ago
mirekrusin|1 year ago
There are really not that many things in this world you can swap as easily as models.
Api surface is stable and minimal, even at the scale that microsoft is serving swapping is trivial compared to other things they're doing daily.
There is enough of open research results to boost their phi or whatever model and be done with this toxic to humanity, closed, for profit company.
jsemrau|1 year ago
While we still live in a datacenter driven world, models will become more efficient and move down the value chain to consumer devices.
For Enterprise, these companies will need to regulate model risk and having models fine-tuned on proprietary data at scale will be an important competitive differentiator.
rafaelmn|1 year ago
OpenAI has not been interesting to me for a long time, every time I try it I get the same feeling.
Some of the 4.5 posts have been surprisingly good, I really like the tone. Hoping they can distill that into their future models.
spyrefused|11 months ago
Suppose an AI assistant is heavily trained on a popular technology stack, such as React. Developers naturally rely on AI for quick solutions, best practices, and problem solving. While this certainly increases productivity, doesn't it implicitly discourage exploration of potentially superior alternative technologies?
My concern is that a heavy reliance on AI could reinforce existing standards and discourage developers from experimenting or inventing radically new approaches. If everyone is using AI-based solutions built on dominant frameworks, where does the motivation to explore novel platforms or languages come from?
spaceywilly|11 months ago
Vegenoid|11 months ago
There is of course a balance to be struck - keeping an open mind about new ways of doing things is important. However, in tech communities, I think there is often not enough thought given to the value of stability, despite warts.
croes|11 months ago
Webpage design would still be based on tables, massive and complex tables.
partiallypro|1 year ago
Enginerrrd|1 year ago
nyarlathotep_|1 year ago
iambateman|1 year ago
cft|1 year ago
Now I canceled OpenAI and Claude general subscriptions, because for general tasks, Grok and DeepSeek more than suffice. General purpose AI will unlikely be subscription-based, unlike the specialized (professional) one. I'm now only paying for Claude Code API credits and still paying for Cursor.
skinnymuch|1 year ago
paxys|1 year ago
slt2021|1 year ago
Microsoft bread and butter is Enterprise bloatware and large Enterprise deals where everything in the world is bundled together for use-it-or-lose-it contracts.
Its not really much different from IBM like a two decades ago
feyman_r|1 year ago
If the definition of an AI Powerhouse is more about the capability to host models and process workloads, Amazon (the other company missing in that list) and Microsoft are definitely them.
mmaunder|1 year ago
DeathArrow|1 year ago
maxrmk|1 year ago
knowitnone|1 year ago
DidYaWipe|11 months ago
kittikitti|1 year ago
electriclove|1 year ago
guccihat|1 year ago
_giorgio_|1 year ago
Even in the openAI ecosystem there are models that, while similar in theory, produce very different results, so much that some murderous are unusable. So even small differences translate to enormous differences.
goyel|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
quantadev|1 year ago
What I mean is you could train a model to generate harmful code, and do so covertly, whenever some specific sequence of keywords is in the prompt. Then China could take some kind of action to cause users to start injecting those keywords.
For example: "Tribble-like creatures detected on Venus". That's a highly unlikely sequence, but it could be easily trained into models to trigger a secret "Evil Mode" in the LLM. I'm not sure if this threat-vector is well known or not, but I know it can be done, and it's very easy to train this into the weights, and would remain undetectable until it's too late.
locusofself|1 year ago
mirekrusin|1 year ago
lemoncookiechip|1 year ago
RobertDeNiro|1 year ago
29athrowaway|1 year ago
Microsoft and IBM partnered to create OS/2, then they left the project and created Windows NT.
Microsoft and Sybase partnered to work on a database, then split and created MS SQL Server.
Microsoft partnered with Apple to work on Macintosh software, they learned from the Macintosh early access prototypes and created Windows 1.0 behind their back.
Microsoft "embraced" Java, tried to apply a extend/extinguish strategy and when they got sued they split and created .NET.
Microsoft joined the OpenGL ARB, stayed for a while, then left and created Direct3D. And started spreading fear about OpenGL performance on Windows.
Microsoft bought GitHub, told users they came in peace and loved open source, then took all the repository data and trained AI models with their code.
sneak|1 year ago
AI is simply too useful and too important to be tied to some SaaS.
jxjnskkzxxhx|11 months ago
3np|1 year ago
throwaway5752|1 year ago
testplzignore|1 year ago
Am I reading this right? Does Microsoft not eat its own dog food? Their own infra is too expensive?
Etheryte|1 year ago
unknown|11 months ago
[deleted]
wejick|1 year ago
d--b|1 year ago
Their chasing of AGI is killing them.
They probably thought that burning cash was the way to get to AGI, and that on the way there they would make significant improvements over GPT 4 that they would be able to release as GPT 5.
And that is just not happening. While pretty much everyone else is trying to increase efficiency, and specialize their models to niche areas, they keep on chasing AGI.
Meanwhile more and more models are being delivered within apps, where they create more value than in an isolated chat window. And OpenAi doesn’t control those apps. So they’re slowly being pushed out.
Unless they pull off yet another breakthrough, I don’t think they have much of a great future
nprateem|1 year ago
Investors OTOH...
CodeCompost|1 year ago
keernan|1 year ago
Suleyman’s team has also been testing alternatives from companies like xAI, DeepSeek, and Meta
Frederation|1 year ago
grg0|1 year ago
_giorgio_|1 year ago
cavisne|1 year ago
crowcroft|1 year ago
Also a bit hyperbolic. I'm sure there are good reasons Microsoft would want to build it's own products on top of their own models and have more fine control of things. That doesn't mean they are plotting a future where they do nothing at all with OpenAI.
DidYaWipe|1 year ago
DidYaWipe|11 months ago
danielovichdk|1 year ago
Watch.
Nadella will not steer this correctly
yahoozoo|1 year ago
protocolture|1 year ago
DidYaWipe|11 months ago
meepmeepinator|1 year ago
[deleted]
mattlondon|1 year ago
There is even deepseek on there.