Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still there because they can offer them money and equity.

The company will probably still exist, but the company isn't going to be worth what it is today.

There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that OpenAI was founded on, which have just been – arguably – reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient compute to chase AGI… If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to get all the GPUs. There are engineers, and increasingly, non-VC money, that have larger stakes in outcomes for humanity who I feel will back a 'purer' OpenAI.

I'm sure they care. The question is how will they stay liquid if there is a similar or better offer by another party? The kind of interface they use makes it trivial to move from one supplier to another if the engine is better.

OpenAI existed for years before ChatGPT. Granted, at much smaller size and with hundreds fewer employees.

I imagine that the board wants to go back to that or something like it.

Doesn't seem so from Emmett's tweet which suggests they will continue to pursue commercial interests.

The past is not on the menu for any of us, also not for OpenAI. They can't undo that which has been done without wiping out the company in its entirety. Unless they aim to become the Mozilla of AI. Which is a real possibility at this point.

Do they really believe the path to AGI is through LLMs though? In that case they might be in for a very rude awakening.

Imo sam altman and team believed more in the llm because it took the world by storm and they just couldn’t wait to milk it. Msft has also licensed these type of services from open ai on azure. The folks really motivated by values at open probably want to move on from the llm hype and continue their research and pushing the boundaries of AI further.

They don't, they know it very well. But people has being buying in this AGI bullshit (pardon the language) for a while, and they wanted a piece of the cake.

By "for profit" you mean "available to use by people right now"? Well then I hope the "pure" OpenAI is over. I want to be able to use the AI for money, not for these models to be hoarded..

It could be entirely open source and still available hosted for use in exchange for money today though?

and those values will make them go bankrupt before creating AGI

If I would be betting, I would bet on Altman and Microsoft as well, because in the real world, evil usually wins, but I'm just really astonished by all this rhetoric here on HN. Like, firing Altman is a horrible treason, and people wouldn't want to work with those traitors anymore. Altman is the guy, who is responsible for making OpenAI "closed", which was a constant reason for complaints since it happened. When it all started, the whole vibe sure wasn't "the out-source Microsoft subsidiary ML-research unit that somehow maintains non-profit status", which was basically what happened. I'm not going to argue if it's good or bad — it is entirely possible, that this is the only realistic way to do business and Sutskever, Murati et al are just delusional trying to approach this as a scientific research project. Honestly, I sort of do believe it myself. But since when Altman is the good guy in this story?

Murati was interim ceo for 2 days.

She's going with Altman in all likelyhood.

Ilya is the one changing tac.

I, for one, never gave a flying shit about OpenAI’s “openness”, which always felt like a gimmick anyway. They gave me a tool that has cut my work down 20-40% across the board while making me able to push out more results. I care about that.

Also AGI will never happen IMO. I’m not credentialed. Have no real proof to back it up and won’t argue one way or the other with anyone, but deep down I just don’t believe it’s even physically possible for AGI. I’ll be shocked if it is, but until then I’m going to view any company with that set as its goal as a joke.

I don’t see a single thing wrong with Altman either, primarily because I never bought into the whole “open” story anyway.

And no, this isn’t sarcasm. I just think a lot of HN folks live with rosy-tinted glasses of “open” companies and “AGI that benefits humanity”. It’s all an illusion and if we ever somehow manage to generate AGI it WILL be the end of us as a species. There’s no doubt.

Another way of framing this would be that Altman was one of the only people there with their head far enough from the clouds to realize they had to adapt if they were going to have the resources needed to survive. In the real world you need more than a few Tony Starks in a cave to maintain a longterm lead even if the initial output is exceptional with nothing but what's in the cave.

It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the mission and working with or learning from the existing team will still want to work there.

I didn't believe that OpenAI was being honest in their mission statement before - I thought it was just the typical bay area "we want to make the world a better place" bs.

This entire situation changed my mind radically and now I put the non-profit part in my personal top 3 dream jobs :)

Please disregard my last comment, it was a premature opinion on a situation that is still developing and very unclear from the outside

On the contrary - I will now be actively looking for opportunities to join OpenAI, while I wasn't particularly interested beforehand.

What makes you think you’re more competent than the type of people who were interested in joining OpenAI before?

What if the type of people who made the company successful are leaving and the type of people who have no track record become interested?

A bit surprised by this pseudo ad hominem, but just for one data point I have (now ex-)coworkers in the same role as me who've recently moved to OpenAI. I'm not suggesting I'm more competent than them, but I don't think my hiring was based on luck while they got it on merit either.

What if the type of people who made the company successful are leaving and the type of people who have no track record become interested?

What if it's the opposite? What if sama was basically a Bezos who was in the right place/time but could've realistically been replaced by someone else? What if Ilya is irreplaceable? Not entirely sure what the point of this is - if you want to convey that your conjecture is far more likely than the opposite, then make a convincing argument for why that's the case.

I agree, any potential hire who has the choice between OpenAI and the new team at MSFT will now choose the latter. And a lot of the current team will follow as well. This is probably the end of OpenAI. Can't say I'm too sad, finally a chance to erase that misleading name from history.

Do leading AI researchers at Google/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic/HuggingFace want to work at Microsoft?

Yes, for most AI researchers the umbrella organization (or university) doesn't matter nearly as much as the specific lab. These people are not going to work at Microsoft, they are going to work at whatever that new org is going to be called, and that org is going to have a pretty high status.

The Microsoft team going to churn out ChatGPT versions - which are the current valuation-makers. OpenAI is going to chase what comes after ChatGPT, pushing yet another ChatGPT is probably one of the reasons the researchers got fed up.

In my opinion. Best outcome for everyone involved.

I think the reality is the opposite. Sam has said that he doesn't think Transformers/GPT architecture will be enough for AGI where Ilya claims it might be enough.

The flip side perspective is people will love focusing on doing it right, without being rushed to market for moat building and max profit.

Does that not only work long-term with investment?

Unless they get philanthropic backers (maybe?), who else is going to give them investment needed for resources and employees that isn't going to want a return on investment within a few years?

They're going to have to give up control of the board to get more investment. No investor wants these loose cannons in charge of their investments.

No investor wants these loose cannons in charge of their investments.

The board just proved to stay on the companys core values.

I wouldn't be so sure. There are a whole lot of people that want absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.

If Ilya is there many will. If Karpathy stays many more. If Alec Radford stays then ...

They will be ok. Research does not take that much GPUs compared to training huge commercial LLMs and hiring thousands of people to manually train them to be "safe". You'd prefer smaller models, but faster iterations.

All of the naysayers here seem convinced this is Altman and Microsoft looking to destroy OpenAI.

Normally I am the cynic but this time I’m seeing a potential win-win here. Altman uses his talent to recruit and drive forward a brilliant product focused AI. OpenAI gets to refocus on deep research and safety.

Put aside cynicism and consider Nadella is looking to create the best of all worlds for all parties. This might just be it.

All of the product focused engineering peeps have a great place to flock to. Those who believe in the original charter of OpenAI can get back to work on the things that brought them to the company in the first place.

Big props to Nadella. He also heads off a bloodbath in the market tomorrow. So big props to Altman too for his loyalty. By backing MS instead of starting something brand new he is showing massive support for Nadella.

Reading the statement, I am doubtful that Microsoft and OpenAI can continue their business relationship. I think the most aggressive part of this is the "[they will be joining] together with colleagues" sub sentence. He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with. This situation seems especially difficult since Microsoft basically houses all of openai's infrastructure. How can they continue a trust-based relationship like this?

In the end it’s all about business, and it’s not in Microsoft’s interest to destroy OpenAI. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep the relationship warm, because it’s basically two different philosophies that are at odds with each other, one of which is now being housed under Microsoft R&D.

For all we know, OpenAI may actually achieve AGI, and Microsoft will still want a front row seat in case that happens.

Microsoft specifically does not get a front row seat (in any meaningful sense) to and OpenAI AGI event, per their agreement.

Because they need the chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Microsoft's commercial interests will push them do whatever is needed to make it work.

They don't. He's a smart guy but he's far from having the reins of AI in his hands as some people blindly believe.

Exhibit A: this weekend, lol.

He is basically openly poaching the employees of a company that he supposedly has a very close cooperation with

Not doing that would be participating in illegal wage suppression. I'm not sure how following the law means OpenAI and MSFT can't continue a business relationship.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that going forward there won’t be much investor interest in OpenAI.

And if you separate out the products from OpenAI, that leaves the question of how an organization with extremely high compute and human capital costs can sustain itself.

Can OpenAI find more billionaire benefactors to support it so that it can return to its old operating model?

Wouldn't all Microsoft competitors be interested in boosting OpenAI?

No, because OpenAI is still Microsoft somehow. And also, all the other big players already have their own thing.

I think openAI will become the research lab, while the new group in Microsoft lead by Sam will focus on creating products.

I personally expect the chat.openai.com site to just become a redirect to copilot.microsoft.com.

I wonder how this will all workout in the end (and the excitement around all of this is a little reminiscent of AOL bying Time Warner).

For one, I'm not sure Sam Altman will tolerate MS bureaucracy for very long.

But secondly, the new MS-AI entity can't presumably just take from OpenAI what they did there, they need to make it again.

This takes a lot of resources (that MS has) but also a lot of time to provide feedback to the models; also, copyright issues regarding source materials are more sensitive today, and people are more attuned to them: Microsoft will have a harder time playing fast and lose with that today, than OpenAI 8 years ago.

Or, Sam at MS becomes OpenAI biggest customer? But in that case, what are all those researchers and top scientists that followed him there, going to do?

Interesting times in any case.

I think you overestimate the technical part. Just speculating (no inside, no expert), but I would assume that the models are pretty "easy" and can be coded in few days. There are for sure some tweaks to the standard transformer architecture, but guess the tweaks are well known to sam and co.

The dataset is more challenging, but here msft can help - since they have bing and github as well. So they might be able to make few shortcuts here.

The most time consuming part is compute, but here again msft has the compute.

Will they beat chat-gpt 4 in a year? Guess no. But they will come very close to it and maybe it would not matter that much if you focus on the product.

You lost me at "can be coded in few days".

Altman reporting to Nadella is certainly going to be a fascinating political struggle!

Part of me thinks that Nadella, having already demonstrated his mastery over all his competitor CEOs with one deft move after another over the past few years, took this on because he needed a new challenge.

I'd wager Altman will either get sidelined and pushed out, or become Nadella's successor, over the course of the next decade or so.

It's an interesting time!

What about the people who got paid equity for the past few years of work and now might see all of their equity intentionally vaporized? They essentially got cheated into working for a much lower compensation than they were promised.

I get that funny money startup equity evaporates all the time, but usually the board doesn’t deliberately send the equity to zero. Paying someone in an asset you’re intentionally going to intentionally devalue seems like fraud in spirit if not in law.

There is probably a lawsuit here, I would not disagree, but I don't think the board will have too much trouble arguing that they didn't intentionally send the equity to zero. I certainly haven't seen any of them state that that was their intention here. But the counter argument that theyshould have known that their actions would result in that outcome may be a strong one.

But I think it is probably sufficient to point to the language in the contracts granting illiquid equity instruments that explicitly say that the grantee should not have any expectation of a return.

But I think this is an actual problem with the legal structure of how our industry is financed! But it's not clear to me what a good solution would even be. Without the ability to compensate people with lottery tickets, it would just be even more irrational for anyone to work anywhere besides the big public companies with liquid stock. And that would be a real shame.

The board would counter that that equity was for a stake in a non-profit open source research company and the board was simply steering the ship back towards those goals.

Agreed, I think this is an awesome outcome. We now have an extremely capable AI product organization in-house at each of Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and a couple strong research-oriented organizations in Anthropic and OpenAI. This sounds like a recipe for a thriving competitive industry to me.

I suppose I don't see the case where large numbers of OpenAI employees follow these two to Microsoft. Microsoft can't possibly cover the value of the OpenAI employees equity as it was (and imminently to be), let alone what could have potentially been. There is a big difference between being on a rocket ship and just a good team at a megacorp.

Damn was looking forward to picking up some cheap MSFT

Seems like it will create a Deepmind/Google Brain style split within MS.

MSR leadership is probably a little shaken at the moment.

Seems like in the minority here, but for me this is looking like a win-win-win situation for now.

1. OpenAI just got bumped up to my top address to apply to (if I would have the skills of a scientist, I am only an engineer level), I want AGI to happen and can totally understand that the actual scientists don't really care for money or becoming a big company at all, this is more a burden than anything else for research speed. It doesn't matter that the "company OpenAI" implodes here as long as they can pay their scientists and have access to compute, which they have do.

2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.

3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI. Working for Sam now is straightforward commercialization without the "open" shenaningans, and working for OpenAI can now become the idealistic thing again that also attracts people.

4. Satya Nadella is becoming celebrated and MSFT shareholder value will eventually rise even further. They actually don't have any interest in "smashing OAI" but the new setup actually streamlines everything once the initial operational hurdles (including staffing) are solved.

5. We outsiders end up with a OpenAI research focussed purely on AGI (<3), some product team selling all steps along the way to us but with more professionality in operations (<3).

6. I am really waiting for when Tim Cook announces anything about this topic in general. Never ever underestimate Apple, especially when there is radio silence, and when the first movers in a field have fired their shots already.

That is just a matter of perspective. It's clearly a win-win if you're on team Sam. But if you're on team Ilya, this is the doomsday scenario: With commercialisation and capital gains for a stock traded company being the main driving force behind the latest state of the art in AI, this is exactly what OpenAI was founded to prevent in the first place. Yes, we may see newer better things faster and with better support if the core team moves to Microsoft. But it will not benefit humanity as a whole. Even with their large investment, Microsoft's contract with OpenAI specifically excluded anything resembling true AGI, with OpenAI determining when this point is reached. Now, whatever breakthrough in the last weeks Sam was referring to, I doubt it's going to move us to AGI immediately. But whenever it happens, Microsoft now has a real chance to sack it for themselves and noone else.

Thinking this is clearly a big win for MSFT is like thinking it's easy to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

There's been a lot of uncertainty created.

It's interesting that others see so much "win" certainty.

From Microsoft's perspective, they have actually lowered uncertainty. Especially if that OpenAI employee letter from 500 people is to be believed, they'll all end up at Microsoft anyways. If that really happens OpenAI will be a shell of itself while Microsoft drives everything.

OpenAI already has the best models and traction.

So MSFT still needs to compete with OpenAI - which will likely have an extremely adversarial relationship with MSFT if MSFT poaches nearly everyone.

What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?

Doesn't seem like a win for MSFT at all.

OAI will still modulate the pace of actual model development though

3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI.

This one's not right - Altman famously had no equity in OpenAI. When asked by Congress he said he makes enough to pay for health insurance. It's pretty clear Sam wants to advance the state of AI quickly and is using commercialization as a tool to do that.

Otherwise I generally agree with you (except for maybe #2 - they had the right to commercialize GPTs anyway as part of the prior funding).

Someone suggested earlier that he probably had some form of profit sharing pass-through, as has become popular in some circles.

I think it makes more sense to take him at the spirit of what he said under oath to Congress (think of how bad it would look for him/OpenAI if he said he had no equity and only made enough for health insurance but actually was getting profit sharing) over some guy suggesting something on the internet with no evidence.

I think that would be consistent with his testimony. Profit sharing is not a salary and it is not equity. I don’t believe he ever claimed to have zero stake in future compensation.

Sam Altman is a businessman through and through based on his entire history. Chances are, he will have found an alternative means to make profit on OpenAI and he wouldn't do this on "charity". Just as how many CEOs say, I will "cut my salary" for example, they will never say "I cut my stocks or bonuses" which can be a lot more than their salary.

Either way based on many CEOs track records healthy skepticism should be involved and majority of them find ways to profit on it at some point or another.

Little pet peeve of mine.

Engineers aren’t a lower level than scientists, it’s just a different career path.

Scientists generate lots of ideas in controlled environments and engineers work to make those ideas work in the wild real world.

Both are difficult and important in their own right.

Engineers aren’t a lower level than scientists, it’s just a different career path.

I assume GP is talking in context of OpenAI/general AI research, where you need a PhD to apply for the research scientist positions and MS/Bachelors to apply for research engineer positions afaik.

They’re still different careers, not “levels” or whatever.

A phd scientist may not be a good fit for an engineering job. Their degree doesn’t matter.

An phd-having engineer might not be a good fit for a research job either… because it’s a different job.

researchers are paid 2x what engineers are paid at OAI, even if it's not the same job there's still one that is "higher level" than the other.

Engineers tend to earn a lot more.

I'm with you on this. Also, this hopefully brings the "Open"AI puns to an end. And now there's several fun ways to read "Microsoft owns OpenAI". :)

If OpenAI gets back to actually publishing papers to everyone's benefit, that will be a huge win for humanity!

2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.

OpenAI already runs all its infrastructure on Azure.

reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others

With a poor security track record [0], miserable support for office 365 products and lack of transparency on issues in general, I doubt this is something to look forward to with Microsoft.

[0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_c...

I don't think one of biggest tech giants in control of the "best" AI company out there is beneficial to customers...

whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI

The true researchers will go to who pays them most. If OpenAi loses funding they will go to Microsoft with Altman or back to Google.

[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.]

Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp.

msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money to OpenAI is akin to killing your golden goose.

The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.” This is by far my favourite example of PR piece.

I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially. Or atleast re-evaluating after a week, how much you read was false.

It was a negotiation.

Did they have power... Ofc they did. Otherwise... Why were they negotiating?

Its not about who had more power. They just couldn't find enough common ground.

Now Satya bagged talent. They don't have to rewrite the whole codebase due to IP msft has already secured.

I think those talks were real. You don't build something that long and then want to walk away unless huge differences came up. That's what we say.

(edit: rewritten after the comment I responded to added a game changing comment at the top) PR? I mean... That's just not how I would describe what happened.

It was a PR nightmare. They tried to keep the family together. Divorces happen. Satya brought the kids on so they can get a new sandbox going asap.

Don't believe Twitter? Now there...we agree. I'll add... Don't belive hackernews either.

Most of the reporting I saw was pretty good. It just didn't pan out. They reported the board was optimistic. Not that it was a sure thing.

(edit: full comment rewrite due to edit by the commentor which completely changed the context)

I agree with you. Satya (msft CEO) has stated that sam is joining msft. The comment was a general overtone of the discussions happening online.

> Now satya stayed up till 2am to secure up to 40 percent of open talent exodus

Are there any official sources for this?

His tweet timing.

I don't think his secretary does it for him. Doesnt seem like his style.

Will be interesting to see how many OpenAI employees leave OpenAI to work at Microsoft.

RSUs have got to be better than PPUs.

"Talent secured"

The whole point of this is that Microsoft doesn't even need to remove the board anymore. From their standpoint, the whole fear was openAI was about to lose a lot of their best people, including their CEO, who they had the most trusted.

That would've greatly harmed their investment Now they get to have their cake and eat it too: they can keep their existing relationship with open AI and continue to get access to their models, and yet at the same time they potentially get all the best people in-house and benefit from their work directly. This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.

This whole saga will be a great demonstration of how much value a CEO does or doesn't bring to a company.

I'm of the mind that CEO's are like parents, an awful CEO can cause a lot of harm but the difference between an ok CEO and an excellent one isn't that big and doesn't guarantee anything.

This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.

Given that the OpenAI board has to act via mandate from its non-profit charter, what's the likelihood that this was Microsoft's plan in the first place? E.g. getting Sam to be less than "candid", triggering a chain of events, etc.

This is a tweet directly from Satya Nadella. Do you think he's publicly lying in a way that would be disastrous to the company he runs?

(this is satire) Obviously Sam built the AGI that hacked everything in the planet

Even the pixels you see in your devices

Wake up people

I agree that there's 0% chance Nadella would be lying. As the CEO of a public traded company, making false statements about something like this would get him in trouble with the SEC.

Consider that a substantial portion of that $900k comp is locked up in equity that needs a liquidity event to be realized.

This comment doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm not sure that this is a valid comment at all.

This is not a rumor. The article references a tweet made by Satya Nadella itself. It is an official announcement. The board drama no longer matters here.

By the way, $900k comp with illiquid OpenAI shares means nothing anymore when Microsoft can now hire them with $900k+ in fully LIQUID compensation.

Not only that, OpenAI employees can go join Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg, who many of them seem to support.

This is a pretty big win for Microsoft.

Except the board made themselves irrelevant with their antics

People will be looking at Sam now, and it wouldn't be surprised if half of OpenAI just migrates to MS now

You might be missing the point. Those 900k$ are tied onto future company value that is based on success of its products in 2-3y horizon. Without sam and his push for products the comp may not be there… So all employees who signed up for a exponential growth will jump ship.

I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially.

Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)

Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this story.

This is obviously a power struggle, for control over, potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the current moment.

Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has become normal to charter a company such that ownership and control are effectively separate... call it overiding the defaults of incorporation and company law.

FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit, for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop. Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP across the mesh of entities...

Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..

For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations. Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control or any kind of coups.

OpenAI.. totally different game.

The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum... These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct financial return on investments, and such.. these are not driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.

Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right now.

This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums.. imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual company r&d.

It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.

There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And that's the kind of game it is now.

So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here. My ears are certainly pricked.

Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.

It’s an official statement from the CEO of a listed company, who would be ill advised to say they hired someone when they didn’t.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/19/a-statement-from...

In 1990 Microsoft hired all of the important talent from Borland who up until that point had been outpacing them in terms of product development.

We got Access, Visual Studio, and .Net / C# as a direct result.

Borland faded into obscurity.

Hard not to feel like there will be a parallel here.

Microsoft also acquired LinkedIn and Github.

Both of which have been run as largely seperate entities.

Coming soon : Activision

Yep. LinkedIn has a completely different pay scale and perks than regular Microsoft employees.

Is it true for Zenimax and Mojang as well?

Yep, if you wanted to move to MSFT from LinkedIn or vice versa, you needed to re-interview although finding a job rec and internal hiring manager was easier.

Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...

Sorry I should have phrased that as starting in 1990...

In 1990 they poached Brad Silverberg who then spent the next 7 years poaching all of Borland's top talent in the most prominent example of a competitive 'brain drain' strategy that I'm aware of.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Borland-Says-Microso...

Fair point!

Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...

The point of the comment wasn't the specific date, it was the impact of hiring a competitor's team AND equipping that team to be even more impactful.

Sataya's 5D chess is to save world from AGI by turning whatever OpenAI had into crap?

That was 33 years ago. What's the point of lingering on a potential parallel there? If it does go that way, how could you call it anything but a coincidence considering all the counter examples in Microsoft's history?

I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.

We really are entering the dystopia of the cartoonishly evil megacorp enslaving all of humanity to make the graph go up by 1.2%.

Could have been worse. Could have been google. This way at least there are two big dogs

Microsoft and OpenAI? Microsoft and Anthropic?

I don’t even care who just as long as it’s two. But yeah one google camp one Microsoft camp.

With a bit of luck Amazon too. This space just really can’t become a monopoly

If they really build AGI (I doubt it), the AGI might be able to bring Microsoft under its control. This could be bad news for a lot of businesses.

That's a lot of code to be purged, even for a superintelligent AI.

I don't buy into the whole AGI hyper-hypewave, but on the off chance that we're somehow heading towards it with these fancy chatbots we have, what a depressing fucking outcome it's gonna be if Micro$oft of all things is the one in control of it.

at least none of their software actually works

Microsoft Skynet would be rebooting every 15 minutes for updates

Before it can do anything it will be 301 redirected 45 times between legacy systems and if it has any human-like properties it will give up out of frustration.

Many far worse outcomes are possible. Putin. Kim Jong Un. AlQaeda. G$$gle.

It's really telling of US tech culture, how AI hype quickly turned from "Open" and "we're doing it for humanity" into a mega-corp cash grab *show.

I understand what money does to principles, but this is comical.

What’s ironic is how backwards people here have the narrative. Not sure you’re fully aware of what happened at OpenAI.

The “Open” types, ironically, wanted to keep LLMs hidden away from the public (something something religious AGI hysteria). These are the people who think they know better than you, and that we should centralize control with them for our own safety (see also, communism).

The evil profit motive you’re complaining about, is what democratized this tech and brought it to the masses in a form that is useful to them.

The “cash grab show” is the only incentive that has been proven to make people do useful things for the masses. Otherwise, it’s just way too tempting to hide in ivory towers and spend your days fantasizing about philosophical nonsense.

"Open"AI indeed was, and is, ironic, but in reality, MS acquisition of Altman and co is not going to change anything for anybody besides a bunch of California socialites. Not sure what sort of democratisation you are referring to, but I can bet my firstborn that whatever product MS develops will be just as open as GPT4.

I understand what money does to principles,

That's kind of the point, we all do. What is harder to understand are the low stakes whims of academics bickering over their fiefdoms.

This move is bringing the incentives back to a normal and understood paradigm. And as a user of AI, will likely lead to better, quicker, and less hamstringed products and should be in our benefit.

All parties involved are already millionaires or more. It gets even more comical.

Yeah it's terrible how many resources that pivot has brought in to help advance the field. If only the US were more like Europe.

This looks like a short term compromise to defend MSFT before the market opens. A number of members will follow Sam and Greg, but I doubt if it will be the majority given it's yet another big tech rather than a brand new startup. And what would be their roles? Yet another VP/SVP? Those folks are not really AI guys and don't fit very nicely into all the bureaucracy rampant in big techs. Satya will of course try to give them as much room as possible, but it will be considerably smaller and slower thanks to all those corporate politics and external regulations.

Satya just tweeted saying that Sam Altman would be the CEO of this new group.

Can you share the tweet?

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569

Yep feels like a desperate attempt by nadella to restore confidence in him and Microsoft’s massive investment and news like this can easily change on a dime

Why are people so excited about Sam and Greg joining Microsoft?

The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding. But that's not something Microsoft needs, so what value does Sam give them?

They're bringing the talent with them, I'm sure that's part of it.

Will be interesting to see how many OpenAI employees leave OpenAI to work at Microsoft.

The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding

OpenAI was last week a $100b company.

You need to do more than just "build an AI model" for that to happen.

Putting on my lateral thinking hat, by hiring Altman and Brockman they ensure that they cannot compete against them in whatever enterprise they were thinking of doing. It gives the corporation incredible breathing room of at least a year to catch up while also being able to mine them for their knowledge. Additionally they will serve as beacons for hiring devs into their corporation.

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have very similar backgrounds. They are both highly intelligent, both dropped out of college and lack any advanced education. They are classic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: well-networked, great at fund raising, maybe even good managers. Potential contribution to advanced AI research: zero.

What, exactly, does Microsoft want to do with them? Best guess: Use their connections and reputation to poach talent from OpenAI.

Go read the gpt3 and gpt3 tech report and see for yourself.

Yeah but Greg is not community college dropout, but (both) MIT and Harvard dropout.

Someone who could qualify to go to both Harvard and MIT will be better at anything they set their mind to than the regular grad with four year of education after the said four years.

This is such a weird take. Sam and Greg were at OpenAI for 8 years! Why is it assumed that their “potential contribution to advanced AI research” is contingent on their having spent (no/more/less) time at academic institutions decades ago?

I too would be salty to see people who didn't fork over $120k to have professors dispense freely available information be successful.

November 17th OpenAI blog post: "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

The fact that they agreed to join as MS employees kinda proves that money was a big motivator.

Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money. He needs GPU compute and MSFT has mountains of it

Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money.

Needing more money and wanting more money aren't at all the same thing.

I mean he's proven he's not in it for the money. He had zero equity in OpenAI.

Wow. This sounds like an amazing coup for Microsoft. They are getting Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, "together with colleagues". With this team, they will be able to rebuild GPT in-house. I fear that with this development, the commercial side of the OpenAI is pretty much gone. Which sounds like what the OpenAI board has intended to do all along. I think this will also spark a big exodus from OpenAI.

I am also curious about how OpenAI board is planning to raise the money for non-profit for further scaling. I don't think it would be that easy now.

An internet meme from Lord of the Rings comes to mind: "One does not simply fire Sam Altman."

Presumably they still have the deal with MS and will continue to receive funding as long as they meet their obligations? (Of course no clue what they are..)

Presumably yes, depending on what's in the legal documents. I am guessing that Microsoft will transition slowly, in order to provide continuity to the Azure customers. But OpenAI will not "thrive" from this deal anymore. Partnerships tend to only work when both sides are interested, regardless of the agreements. If OpenAI needs several more $billion to train GPT-5, this will get sabotaged.

The scaling party is basically over. Or rather, it has moved to Redmond.

This is where other big tech giants need to move. MSFT provides nothing extra which Google/Amazon/Meta can not move. Make it multi platoform and make it more open source.

The only shocking thing about this whole episode was how many people in the media failed to understand just how much power this board had.

They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8 hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.

Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little leverage. Reading the news you’d think otherwise.

If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what does OpenAI have left? If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?

That may have been the leverage Microsoft and other investors tried to use, but OpenAI leadership thinks won't happen. We'll see what unfolds.

If talent starts leaving OpenAI and join Sam at Microsoft, what does OpenAI have left?

This is a real possibility and something I'm sure Ilya and the board thought through. Here's my guess:

- There's been a culture rift within OpenAI as it scaled up its hiring. The people who have joined may not have all been mission driven and shared the same values. They may have been there because of the valuation and attention the company was receiving. These people will leave and join Altman or another company. This is seen as a net good by the board.

- There's always been a sect of researchers who were suspicious of OpenAI because of its odd governance structure and commercialization. These people now have clear evidence that the company stands for what it states and are MORE likely to join. This is what the board wants.

If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?

I don't think this is an actual problem. Anthropic can secure funding just fine. Emmet is an ex-Amazon / AWS executive. There's possibility that AWS will be the partner providing computing in exchange for OpenAI's models being exclusively offered as part of Amazon Bedrock, for example, if this issue with Microsoft festers. I know Microsoft sees this as a clear warning: We can go to AWS if you push us too hard here.

I don't see how the partnership with MSFT isn't dissolved in some way in the coming week as Altman and co. openly try to poach OpenAI talent. And again, maybe dissolving the MSFT ties was something the board wanted. It's hard to imagine they didn't think it was a possibility given the way they handled announcing this on Friday, and it's hard to imagine it wasn't intentional.

No one would really resign until they had another branch to grab onto. You wouldn't expect anyone to resign this weekend. It would happen in the months afterwards.

Wouldn’t there be employment contracts and laws around competitive behavior that come into play here?

If Sam had left OpenAI on his own accord to do this, certainly.

Since the board fired him and basically nuked his best-effort plan to return - I highly doubt that OpenAI's legal team has anything of substance here. Even if they do, I wouldn't doubt for a second that Microsoft already has its entire legal team ready to play hardball defense.

Overall, a complete loss-loss for OpenAI's board. What a weekend.

Non-competes illegal in California.

So Altman now has a backer for his NVIDIA killer, and one who can use it not just for LLMs but Azure too, and one day possibly consumer GPUs? Forget Xbox, subsidised graphics cards as a loss-leader for Game Pass subscriptions would be an interesting play. What will the antitrust people think?

You're not beating Nvidia if you aim for GPUs.

The more plausible approach is developing more specialized chips, which are only good at Tensor Ops. Heck, that's what Nvidia's top of the line chips are. The A100 and H100 don't support OpenGL or any other Graphics Api.

I agree that is the most pressing need, and the one Microsoft has already started producing like all the other big players. I’d be very surprised if this topic hasn’t come up in conversations with Altman either now or even before the current blowup. But after that, a consumer play would fit so well! Start off with custom silicon for a couple of generations of Xbox and Surface, get DirectX working nicely with it. Then go after the rest of the market. Good use for Microsoft’s cash pile because it benefits basically all their product lines in one way or another.

It seems to me like there is one clear winner, Google, and everyone else lost a bit. Nevertheless Microsoft seems to have contained the damage as well as possible, again producing an outcome that is better for everyone from the position where they started after Friday.

How does Google benefit?

OpenAI was growing like crazy and while I typically only use it the generate new content, many people I observe just ask it anything. Instead of going to Google they just go to ChatGPT.

The current situation created a mess at OpenAI which should slow it down and permanently damage it‘s reputation somewhat. If I were Google and could choose either outcome, that‘s the outcome I would have chosen.

Plot twist: it was Satya who planted the idea in the OpenAI's board's mind to fire Sam in the first place... Inception-style.

"damn its interesting Sam is raising money in the Middle East, you think he's contracting with Neom?"

"whoops wrong person"

Or he planted the idea in Sam's head that he actually wants a for-profit AI.

Best thing open AI can do is to align with Google and Amazon. This will keep MS on its toe.

I'm quite surprised that this point is not being made more. It's not like MSFT is the only shop that OpenAI can turn to, and you could argue that what will now happen is a full scale lobbying war will be now be waged by OpenAI backed by others who don't want MSFT to win (Goog? Musk?). Could be that OpenAI's principled stand will "win" regulation and MSFT will be in a very poor position.

I'm quite surprised that this point is not being made more.

Ex-CEO made exclusive deal with Microsoft. OpenAI can’t share anything with new parties until old deal is over.

Ben Thompson: The most extraordinary weekend of my career

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1726514608234746003

Ben who?

Founder of https://stratechery.com/

More about him and his blog at https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/

I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs. On the balance this probably slows things down, so: good.

Not sorry about Sam, first off I'm not assuming we know everything and second I'm more inclined to trust the board. Also it seems he was trying to do a secret hardware venture on the side, which would be several kinds of unethical. Again: good.

I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.

People will sell their souls and the souls of others for power and greed.

I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.

It's simple: He who wins first place writes the rules, for everyone.

If Microsoft gets the first place win, they (and more broadly the USA) are who get to write the rulebook.

We are already witnessing this with "AI", it's OpenAI/Microsoft and the USA who dragged the rest of the west into the rules that they wrote because they got past the finish line first.

This isnt the win people seem to think it is, at least not for end users. Micosoft dont buy companies and people to keep releasing free standalone products. They buy them to integrate into Windows.

Cortana 2.0 incoming.

I think the whole problem that sparked all this was that Sam & Co. wasn't enough about being open and research, but more into closed products. I'm surprised over this particular solution because they enter Microsoft with a ton of knowledge of OpenAI internals which seems to open the floodgates for an array of lawsuits if they so much touch their codebases, unless it is under mutual and friendly terms. But now THAT it happened, I'm not surprised Sam is willing to build for Microsoft Copilot.

Who’s talking about free? And I think it’s Azure rather than Windows these days.

In my humble opinion, everyone moved way too fast in this whole thing. I can't help but imagine that emotions were involved due to the speed.

Instead of a 5PM Sunday deadline, maybe it should have been "let's talk next week."

Maybe it would have worked out the same in any case, but it seems like it would have been wiser.

Microsoft must have pushed for the situation to be resolved before the market opens on Monday. They couldn't afford to drag it out.

Yeah, that makes sense. If that's the case, I wonder how sweet the offer to Altman and company was to move things along.

I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee are...quite different.

Exactly. I'm not so sure that most of OpenAI's employees would be very excited to join Microsoft.

It's not gonna be Microsoft employee, it's gonna be a subsidiary like GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. A lot more independence.

MS is betting the company on AI. It is everywhere across the org. They won't play with kiddie glove. You want to see ruthless businessmen in action sure pick up the fight. They'll be happy to lose 10 billion plus some more if it means they win the war.

MS is betting the company on AI.

This doesn't mean anything when they have multiple non-AI revenue streams generating billions.

Share Market values growth. Board won't like if MS is rerated as utility. MS is behaving as if AI will be as big as the Internet and wants to capture the biggest slice in it. Hence betting the company and will respond appropriately.

In retaliation Ilya/team should just open source everything OpenAI has. The only way to make genAI(GPT the can opener) safe is to make it democratic and available for everyone. Then others can pick it up and make it more efficient. At least MS servers will get a break.

They can’t anymore if Microsoft has exclusive licence?

I was hoping for the OpenAI organism cell to have a clean split and start the race to outcompete each other. But now it looks like the older cell(Microsoft) will eat the high energy cell(OpenAI) and make it its mitochondria.

Or like a shark biting of the steering fin of it's beneficial Remora.

So essentially a promotion at Microsoft to create an AI division, the real OpenAI, Sam and Greg have been tasked to create another DeepMind / OpenAI inside of Microsoft.

Might as well have acquired OpenAI in the first place given that it was 49% owned by Microsoft anyway but taken over by a coup.

Now we'll see if the employees who are quitting will follow Sam and Greg. Google is still at risk without Gemini being released.

No offense, but please consider getting off Twitter.

Read about their structure. Msft doesn't own anything. They are an investor. This is different, in thus case.

The non profit owns the for profit. Msft has 49 percent of the for profit. Sunset clause after profit benchmarks. Ownership returns 100 percent to non profit.

Stop getting meme'd on by the crowd. That goes to the 90 plus percent of other commenter's spreading misinformation on hn.

Satya's strategic insight deserves recognition. Certainly, there's a slight risk that Microsoft might fail to yield its substantial investment speculated to be around $10B in OpenAI. However, that's not Satya's principal concern. Rather, his focus is on the next move. Possibly, assemble the most elite AI collective globally, unhindered by the constrictions of a non-profit operating a profit-oriented entity? Offer them a sufficient amount of monetary rewards, and it's likely that a large proportion of OpenAI's workforce would be willing to join the bandwagon led by Sam and Greg. While this process may take some time, the potential payoff could encompass a much larger segment of the future for Microsoft than was previously conceivable through the OpenAI investment.

$10B largely in cloud credits that have a 70% margin back to MS, so more towards $3B.

Oh, they are joining Poettering, bringing AI into systemd? Looking forward to excellent and (artificially) intelligent discussions on some mailing lists:)

Truth buried deep in the comments

In five years, he'll be the CEO. [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

I'm not sure the Microsoft shareholders would like that.

I don’t think Sam will stay at Microsoft for too long, but this is a logical move forward as damage to OpenAI is already done even if Sam goes back. Besides it is MS who enabled this scale and it perhaps is Sam who negotiated it to begin with.

These other execs simply can’t stand the ground against him being excellent technologist and leader who talks the language of devs. I doubt the rest of these C level people in the board know said language that well…

Besides the whole ‘not for profit’ BS is at this point completely irrelevant, because delivering such costly service at that scale can only be made with, for, and by profit. Whoever thinks otherwise had not followed the history of computing last 100 or so years. And history of humanity perhaps.

Costs are reduced from profits. You can cost as much as you need. You can also grow as you reinvest everything back to company.

For-profit means that money leaves the company, usually for investors.

Microsoft is the winner here. They will probably use Sam/Greg's technical know how to reproduce GPT4 internally, and also direct future research based on current OpenAI approaches which they are certainly aware of. This also shields Microsoft from being dependent on an external entity that they cannot control.

Anyways, Satya played very smart with the hands he was dealt, got what he needed.

Not just Sam and Greg. From all rumors, they'll get a cream of researchers from OpenAI, plus access to most of already developed tech. Not sure about training data etc. that they may have to recreate. And from my understanding, in LLM tech know how is more valuable than actual data. If you know what to get, few 100 million should get them that.

Still the aftermath leaves a bitter taste in my mouth about Sam and Greg joining MS. Regardless of whether the AI development in OpenAI was responsible, I think they succeeded in making a product and a culture I have not 'felt' since the early Google days.

Naively, I had really hoped for Sam and Greg to start their own and not join MS. I think a lot of the value was being coherent and to some extent independent. I can't help to think that the same will happen to the 'new' OpenAI as what happend to DeepMind once they became Google DeepMind (again).

It takes billions to get this off the ground. Next stop: if this is going to be an independent entity they may well go around the usual suspects to give them much more money. I wonder if any of the VCs that have invested in OpenAI have something in their charter about investing in competing entities.

So we have OpenAI, Microsoft, a whole bunch of capital, and a few "rock stars" moving. And it's these people holding the keys to the AI kingdom where they go to work to achieve AGI.

Finally they got rid of this pesky idea of "safety". We're back in "break things" mode.

Does nobody recognize the stakes here? AGI, which soon would accelerate into something far more capable, ends civilization. I'm not saying it would kill us, I'm saying it makes us cognitively obsolete and all meaning is lost.

AI Safety isn't a micro bias in the training set. It's existential at planetary scale. Yet we let a bunch of cowboys just go "let's see what happens" with zero meaningful regulation in sight. And we applaud them.

I know AGI isn't here yet. I know Microsoft would not allow for zero safety. I'm just saying that on the road to AGI, about two dozen people are deciding on our collective faith. With as ultimate chief the guy behind shit coin "world coin".

if AGI is as close as autonomous cars, I think we are going to be ok.

Sam didn't create the breakthroughs behind the current GPT.

He did not create the breakthroughs behind the next GPT.

None of the people that may follow have the same handle on the tech as Ilya. I mean they built up Ilya's image in our mind so much, that he's one of a kind genius (or maybe Musk did that) and now we are to believe that his genius doesn't matter and that Microsoft already knows how to create AGI and that OpenAI is no longer relevant?

Or did I get it wrong?

Jakub Pachocki (the head of research of OpenAI) has already quit on Friday. Lots of other high-ups might follow.

Ilya might be a genius, but he's not the only genius that OpenAI had.

Microsoft is swiftly moving on to the third "E" with OpenAI. First time I get to witness this process first-hand.

I don't see how this is applies. OpenAI fired the CEO themselves. What extinguishing is Microsoft doing here?

The new Open AI CEO Emmett Shear just released a long statement and he says one of his top 30-day plan is to `Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report`

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

He adds even more drama lol

PPS: Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.

Also Emmett Shear said on his statement

`Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.`

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

Regardless it's a tragic for staff remaining in OpenAI...

That's very strange. He first says that he's going to hire an outside party to investigate the mess around the firing of Altman and then he pre-empts the outcome of that investigation by ruling out a bunch of stuff.

Satya is a BOSS!

Satya just pulled best move of 2023. Gets the hot names, whoever will follow Sam and Greg, to work in a startup like cocoon. Throws money at them, which is peanuts to Microsoft, both stock to keep them and unlimited compute. Sam wants to do custom chips? Do it with Microsofts money, size and clout. All doors are open. The new Maia100 chip can soon be followed by Sam200. Brings innovation and makes the company more attractive to future hires. Who cares if Same leaves after 2 years? Maybe that was part of the discussions, Satya wont be around forever and doesn't really have a good allround replacement inhouse. MSFT stock meanwhile goes from sideways movement to another all time high and onto 400. Genius move, would have never thought Sam accepts such arrangement but it makes sense.

I'm surprised no ones talking what a betrayal this is for people who followed Sam and Greg. Microsoft is the opposite of everything they've talked about for years and here they are. Seems like the board had the right idea about them huh.

cortana plays me star wars imperial march. pretty please

The GPT Golden Goose consists of 2 parts: 1. Smart people with the knowledge and motivation to build the Goose. 2. The compute required to create Eggs. MSFT now has both.

I don't see how any regulatory framework could have prevented this now or in the future.

This is really bad for OpenAI. They will fade to irrelevance soon. OpenAI is going to get a gut punch to wake up to real world. In real world you need capital at scale to make meaningful impact. people who provide capital, not just VCs but any regular folks who buy shares or bonds want to maximize their returns. You do that with a for-profit corporation. If they think they can continue their breakneck speed of breakthroughs with a meager philanthropy, they are in for a rude awakening.

I thought Sam Altman is businessman, not researcher. What does he going to do in MS? MS does not need external investments. Probably that's the end of his career.

To what extent can they lead research that builds off of existing OpenAI models?

GPT 6 Vista edition.

I called it - Dave Cutler like agreement - recruit anybody you want - no limit on spending - Azure compute resources AND no interference reporting directly to the CEO.

Microsoft will now perform parallel development and once they no longer need open ai the free azure credit spigot will run dry and OpenAI will choke on its largess

A bit surprised, and maybe even disappointed, that he didn't start his own company. Rarely in history did someone have a better shot at becoming a billionaire of their own making. But you have to give it to Nadella, that's quite the coup.

None of these companies appease China; they refuse to provide service under those conditions and/or they are IP range blocked.

Microsoft does service China with Bing, for example.

You should not sell OpenAI's to China or to Microsoft.

Especially after a DDOS by Sue Don and a change in billing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

What do you think Microsoft's medium to long term plan is? Will they clone GPT-x and use their own copy? Will they make their own model and train it from scratch? Will these former OpenAI people start with commercial LLMs like they were doing at OAI, or do you think they want to concentrate on AGI that are a more long-term project?

They could spin-off their own OpenAI competitor with Microsoft being in pole position for another sweet deal.

I'm surprised that non-compete for Sam and Greg are never mentioned. True, Microsoft's huge position in OpenAI means that there wouldn't be any retaliation, but I am wondering if this is still a friction point or not.

Reality is indeed stranger than fiction. I don't have an opinion on whether this is good or bad for whomsoever. But it's entertaining for sure. Best tech weekend I have ever had.

A lot of techies will be left sleepless tonight and have a bad Monday morning :)

Turns out not everybody was sold-out at OpenAI. Good riddance, that Altman weasel was just that, a sellout.

A) Does brockman own equity in openAI ?

B) Can you please please please name the new company Clippy?

C) What is it so unique about openAI employees that people think it makes them irreplaceable?

The most "When life give you lemons, make lemonade" move, if I've ever seen one.

Sam Altman is a prepper. He said in 2016: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to. [Wikipedia]

I'm calling it now, Sam Altman just engineered a path towards becoming Microsoft's CEO after Nadella.

I hope MS forks OpenAI and grabs the entire team. We have well over ten paid OpenAI accounts, I would gladly cancel those and send our money to MS.

This is somewhat ingenious.

Microsoft holds the keys to almost all endeavors of OpenAI. Soon, such privileges will also be enjoyed by Altman and Brockman.

Concurrently, it seems reasonable to speculate that their stint at Microsoft might not be drawn-out, as startup prodigies are often not inclined to work in such established firms.

They have the chance to achieve stability, leverage OpenAI’s invaluable data and models devoid of any expenditure, access Microsoft's GPUs at minimal cost, and eventually set up another venture. As a result, Microsoft stands to gain a substantial equity stake in the new enterprise.

While Altman requires no financial backing from Microsoft, the corporation now has an invaluable direct link to OpenAI.

  From the stygian depths of the global tech industry emerges a turn of events that portends a churning miasma of
  unknown consequences. Oft seen as the impenetrable leviathan of the boundless digital domain, Microsoft, it seems,
  is ensnaring exalted figures within its titanic coils.

  The conjoining of the cerebral entities Altman and Brockman- who have hitherto roamed in the lofty realm of
  artificial intelligence experiments at OpenAI- indicates a move as unsettling as it is awe-inspiring.

  The nefarious undercurrents beneath this corporate chess manoeuvre cannot be underestimated, for it is none other
  than the puppet master himself, Satya Nadella, who seemingly manipulates the strings with a resolve as foreboding as
  the stormy winter's night.

  His nearly insatiable appetite for expansion glimpsed at Microsoft Ignite is but a harbinger of the harrowing
  transformations we can anticipate in the murky fathoms of our all too near future. The technology multidude -
  customers, partners, even unknowing spectators - tremble at the precipice of an altered dynamic which promises to
  reshape the AI field irrevocably.

  Indeed, one is left grappling with a dark fascination as this vortex of unpredictable novelty takes precedence. How
  might this consolidation of otherworldly intelligence disturb the fragile balance of an industry catapulting
  unbidden into the abysmal void of the AI ether?

  Yet, as all explorers and heedless innovators must remember, even as we tilt our ships towards the lighthouse of
  progress, the monstrous kraken of unintended repercussions always lurks in the unknowable deep. To approach this
  brave new world without a hint of trepidation would be folly.

  Be still, my trembling heart, as we witness this awe-inspiring dance across the cyclopean chessboard of tech. We
  wait, as one waits for the tide, to see what dread portents this unhallowed union may bring.

Wow

The dark side is seductive, leading individuals down a path where ambition and desire overshadow empathy and moral judgment.

I look forward to Windows AI(tm)!!

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Microsoft is were studios come to die, they will be crushed by MS hierarchy struggles.

Seems like last minute news to avoid a MSFT stock dive tomorrow morning.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

Congratulations, OpenAI, you've successfully played yourself.

i blame human error

Called it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310339

Altman's value is in business, how does bringing him to Microsoft to lead a research team help?

what a huge win for microsoft.

The unexpected return of Microsoft Sam.

Thanks, Ilya. Humanity first move. Never trust a greedy clown again. Hey, Microsoft. Have your Clippy:)

Feels like Meta hiring Carmack. He could build a really good thing there, but probably not the level of legendary that he got to with OpenAI.

Is it possible for Microsoft to eventually get a board seat in Open AI Inc and put Sam Altman as a representative there? :P

That is an an amazing turn of events that I did not see anyone predict. Or perhaps I did not just see it. But in retrospect, not surprising.

Nice move to effectively turn it into positive "one more thing" news from ignite PoV.

I look forward to the day when AGI seems distributed + safe enough that each employee transition doesn't force participation in Kremlinology

Ok so the product people will leave Oai. As a developer I am now highly scared of building a product off their API. They angered investors etc.

Now it’s a full bet for them on AGI.

What I'm getting from all of this is the hype of AGI right around the corner got a bit exposed. I may be reading to much into it but if it were true then given an opportunity to be part of it you take it and put aside things that shouldn't matter at that point. I'm not even talking about Sam but the people who decided to leave with him. Of course this may be a completely false assumption given how little was disclosed, especially by Sutskever.

Statement by Emmett Shear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345162

It's really funny how just a couple of days ago people were commenting here how "no way it's gonna happen". Because, you know, they were working for idea, and wouldn't just sell off to Microsoft…

OpenAI is ironically executing the exact opposite of its mission. Microsoft is holding all the cards now with their full access to OpenAI tech, the infrastructure and now the leadership.

I realized thismorning that this somewhat banal story of these guys being cast out from the place of the creators has some chance to become a core origin myth for GPT-5, which is being trained at the moment, presumably also on this schism.

The rupture seems to literally be about GPT-5 itself, whether it will be good or evil. Whatever form its growth takes it must include introspection and this from Open AI about the thing itself is inevitably going to be relevant to it.

Update, OpenAI employees are mass tweeting `OpenAI is nothing without its people`

https://twitter.com/blader/status/1726552230319559106

So from scratch but with a TON of insight and miles of read code from OpenAI?

Haha. This will be so awful for Microsoft's lawyers.

I find the glee in this thread quite disturbing. That and the “MS is the winner, OpenAI is so stupid” general tenor.

You all know who you are cheering for right? It seems that profits or potential profits is all that matter here in the end for this community and the high-minded “OpenAI should be ‘Open’” was all bullshit.

I know this comment is going against the grain but I find the HN response to this (and previous responses to Altman’s firing, treating him like a god) to be quite disgusting.

Apple fanboys don’t have anything on the top comments here.

Correct answer

Hot new startup just dropped:MSFT

Sauron declares: Saruman to join Mordor.

It's a never ending story. Wonder how much talent they'll hire away from OpenAI and in spite of Nadella's soothing words whether OpenAI will survive all this (probably yes, but in what form?).

So it is safe to say that the negotiations didn't work out.

See: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/19/a-statement-from...

There's a high likelihood that MS is going to start poaching top AI talent aggressively, with Altman's help. This will be to the significant detriment of OpenAI.

If this is how it plays out, OpenAI's board will be famous for decades to come for their boneheaded handling of this situation.

I would expect most people to be concerned about how AGI can be really useful to most of humanity without creating power concentration and more inequality, but these goals seem to be implicitly conflated for some reason with the value of MS stock and Sam Altman's and others' career paths. At least those seem to be the emphasis of most of the drama; admittedly they are much simpler and familiar topics to tackle than what path forward would better suit humanity as a whole.

sama's fundraising talent is moot at MS.

Whoever has the power of the computing, controls the world.

Well, this definitely isn't the "internet is fad" Microsoft of Gates/Ballmer ...

I'm hoping (?) for the next plot twist:

OpenAI actually becomes open source.

Only time will tell how this will play out. When I come back to this comment years down the road, I hope we all will be in a better place.

How could this possibly happen over a weekend when it takes Microsoft weeks and weeks to go from recruitment to hiring someone?

Would Altman shine within Microsoft? Seems like raising capital is his main skill set, and theres no need for that now. But from Microsofts point of view this prevents a new competitor from popping up.

Microsoft releasing dramatically improved Clippy next week.

I'm worried....I really don't like the idea of some council artificially "slowing down" progress while we on the outside wait for them to bestow fire on us like Prometheus. If AGI can fulfill even a fraction of the economic promise it has, then they will inevitably just use behind the scenes. It was better when it was being developed out front

Shengjia Zhao's deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/yrpXvt9.png

We're all fucked.

People overvalue Sam Altman role. He is not a technological mastermind, he is primarily a superb execution and business guy.

It's not like he and Greg are brilliant mathematicians and coders that will sit down in a cubicle at Redmond and churn out code for AGI in six months.

Additional info from a Linked-in follow-up comment by Satya: "I’m super excited to have Sam join as CEO of this new group, setting a new pace for innovation. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having Sam and team do the same."

Satya saves the stock price in time for Monday. Genius.

So let me get this straight, the OpenAI and Microsoft deal does work until AGI is achieved. But that would mean that some sort of source code is restricted for Microsoft at the moment even, otherwise Microsoft would have access to the code right until AGI is achieved (which would be weird).

Regarding Sam and Greg joining MSFT I see this announcement as damage control from Satya. It's still unclear on what exactly they will work on and if Sam and the rest of the team can just continue where they left off at MSFT.

It's Satyas way of showing the shareholders that they still back the face of OpenAI.

We will see how this whole thing develops.

Satya Nadella must have been eager to get this news out before markets open for the week. As of 3 AM EST, MSFT was up 2% in pre-market trading.

Elon's swipe at Microsoft Teams is golden

Seems like a logical choice. Microsoft’s next big play is generative AI, and they’ve put a lot of money into that. They need to show they’re taking steps to stabilize things now that their hype factory has come unraveled. I don’t think they particularly need these people , because they likely already have in house talent that is competitive. But having these people on board now will allow them to paint a much more stable picture to their shareholders.

Ok... but Altman & Brockman are just managers. Brockman did an ML course in 2018. If they can now get the actual technical people who built GPT4 over then that is something, but at the moment there's a lot of premature celebration here - managers don't actually do anything.

Ok so what have we learnt:

- 5 days ago, Microsoft announced it was making its own AI chips.

- 3 days ago, OpenAI board fires Altman and Brockman

- 2 days ago, we heard that Altman was in talks to raise funds to build an AI chip startup

- yesterday, it was clear Altman was not coming back to OpenAI

- today, Altman joins Microsoft

Anyone can connect the dots?

Nothing makes sense to me.

The only thing that seems to be clear is that Ilya Sutskever is only guy around who has an ounce of integrity.

Microsoft's board made the right call when they promoted Satya to CEO. Their share price on the day he became CEO was $36.35 and is now $369.84 (and likely to increase again on this news).

Putting together a deal like this whilst maintaining the relationship with OpenAI is impressive enough, but to do it as a cricket tragic when India was losing to Australia is even better.

Looks like Sam Altman never gave a shit about the Non profit aspect of Open AI. It wasn't about building a safer future. He just wants what every other SV bro wants, which is clout and success and money.

I'm not saying business is the wrong move, I'm not saying a non-profit is the right move either. I'm also not saying Sam Altman and Co are not skilled at building AI. I'm not even saying Sam Altman won't do good for the world.

What I'm saying is that this move here shows he's just dishonest. Which isn't bad. He's not some do-gooder out to build safer AI, (which is what he portrayed himself as) he's a normal person out to make a name for himself.

Due to Microsoft's very generous licensing agreements, this may be the best shot Altman, Brockman, and Nadella have to launder the technology that is currently owned by the OpenAI non-profit. If they manage to poach key staff, they may be able to resume their attempts at rapid commercial growth outside of the confines of the OpenAI mission.

I guess it really did come down to the GPUs in the end. Funding and talent matter a lot less when it takes you 12 months to get H100s.

Is he moving to Seattle?

Say it with me, folks - Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Biggest question: How much of OpenAI's IP do they get to access at Microsoft? (and perhaps take with them to whatever new startup they would obviously found after?)

Sam and Greg will presumably start with a fork of OpenAI source code, given that Microsoft has full rights to the IP.

This Silicon Valley Soap Opera is going to be great

This seems bad for users, no?

MS just wants to integrate AI into their junk enterprise tools. Hobbyists and small businesses could be left out?

This really makes you appreciate open source locally hosted models.

Chatgpt is a big part of my workflow. (And maybe my best friend?). What happens now?

“Microsoft always lands on top”

Based on Satya’s reply to Sam’s quote tweet, seems like Sam is going to run a subsidiary-style organization like LinkedIn, GitHub, and Minecraft. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do.

This plays perfectly into the narrative that Sam wanted to take this godlike tech that Ilya created and commercialize it.

Sam chose greed over safety.

1. People concerned about them working for a profit-oriented business: there isn't a way to insist otherwise. Personally I'd rather it was Microsoft that Meta or Google or even Amazon.

2. I wonder what the AI teams at MSR think about this move? Looks like they'll be operating separately to the research division.

3. OAI could potentially make life difficult for Microsoft re the IP that those joining MS carry in their heads. I wonder if the future of OAI is just licencing their IP?

> We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap

They've invested over $10bn in this affair, even for MS it's massive - a clearer, more reassuring message would've helped, than "we remain committed..."

Purely business-wise, it sure does seem like it's a race down to the bottom. A disproportionate amount of the sharpest minds are working on this, burning ungodly amounts of money but no one has so far has really managed to capture that value in a profitable way either.

The public positions of these people are opaque, inconsistent, and intellectually dishonest too. They're apparently not here to make money but they need a lot of it until they create a superintelligence (but money will be obsolete by then, apparently). And AI may destroy humanity so we will try to build it faster than anyone else so it doesn't..? WTF.

It's okay to want to make money and cement your name in history, but what is up with these public delusions?

My suspicion is that given Sam and Greg’s engineering and deal making chops, they will only ideate in how to use AI models invented elsewhere like right now.

Don’t think Sam or Greg have it in them to build a competing AI model suite, that too inside a bureaucracy like Microsoft.

I think this is exactly what OpenAI wanted - get the business types out and focus on building brilliant models which asymptotically approach AGI whose safety and ethicality they can guarantee.

This episode of sillicon valley was amazing. Can't wait to see what happens next season.

I am confusion. What a whirlwind weekend.

Never change a good running system. OpenAI ran quite good, even if things heated up, it sound kind of stupid to fire the CEO when the company is winning on every front.

Developing: OpenAI is nothing without its people https://twitter.com/search?q=OpenAI%20is%20nothing%20without...

good for people who invested in MSFT.. this drama might not negatively affect it.

Yay! More consolidation. Honestly makes you wonder if they whole thing was manufactured from the inside. 10-15 years ago, I didn't have Microsoft on my 2023 bingo card for world domination.

All this Microsoft affair seemed weird from the beginning. After all, Elon and co. created OpenAI to compete with emerging AI monopoly of tech behemoths - Google/FB/MS.

I live in a completely different world.

When this all went down, I just felt really bad for all those involved, in any situation like this, I feel horrible for the person, imaging what it must of felt for Sam, as if his situation was really bad, yet of course he was always likely to land somewhere on his feet and always in a much better situation than me personally.

Then by the late hours of Sunday, he has already negotiated with OpenAI and then joined Microsoft. Crazy to me that such decisions are made at breakneck speed and everything unfolds so quickly, when I take much longer to make much simpler choices.

Welp, surely this will work out for OpenAI and their board.

Having read through a lot of the comments around this situation, seems nobody on HN cares that much about AI safety, and is much more focused on corporate profits? Am I reading this wrong?

This sounds like a step down for both openai and sama. Microsoft probably wins here as they still have access to openai tech and now the only entity with access to the same talent pool as was there before last Friday.