
OpenAI and Microsoft - jk4930
https://openai.com/blog/openai-and-microsoft/
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argonaut
I get that AI is all the rage right now. But this is an information-thin
Microsoft press release, if not outright ad, with the OpenAI stamp on it.
These things really should not be on the front page.

~~~
MzHN
If it was some other company than OpenAI, I would agree. But just the fact
that Microsoft is partnering with OpenAI is noteworthy to many here.

OpenAI is a non-profit, and I don't know how lucrative the deal is for
Microsoft or how much business OpenAI has, but I don't mind Microsoft getting
some good press for the move either.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Microsoft probably offered them a really sweet deal (read: tons of Azure
credits), in exchange for the press/marketing.

Amazon is pretty stingy with those kinds of things, so they are very Jeff
Bezos when it comes to startup credits and the like.

The "open" name is telling, OpenAI's work should be agnostic of platform, and
they shouldn't be pitching others' proprietary systems in public like this.

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old-gregg
I am actually getting more and more impressed with Azure. The rate of maturity
of their offering is really impressive, and the number of world-wide regions
is insane.

Wile we're primarily still AWS users, but we're hosting free global tools
(check out [https://teleconsole.com](https://teleconsole.com)) on Azure for
low latency.

~~~
raphinou
My experience with azure is subpar : slow, deploys failing for no clear
reason, terrible ui. Do you have bettee experience with it?

~~~
setq
This. I get $150 credit with my MSDN account but it never gets used because
paying for AWS is a better deal than dealing with Azure.

Azure _feels_ like Microsoft wrote it. Clunky, slow and unreliable.

~~~
m1sta_
Throw another delivery centre at it. They'll fix it.

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hpvic03
Seems like Microsoft is trying to do to Google in AI what Google did to Apple
in Mobile, using OpenAI as a vehicle.

i.e. if you aren't the leading innovator, the next best thing to do is to make
the technology free and widespread.

~~~
kayoone
What exactly did Google do to Apple in Mobile ? You mean marketshare ? I
believe Apple is fine with that, they still make the majority of profits in
the mobile business.

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AlexCoventry
I just taught a class[1] where the idea was that everybody would learn to spin
up a GPU-backed AWS instance and learn to train their own tensorflow models.

Unfortunately, I was the only person who was able to launch an instance,
though almost everyone was able to log into AWS and go through the pre-launch
instance configuration. I think maybe having everyone request a g2 instance at
roughly the same time triggered some sort of fraud-prevention system.

Maybe there's some kind of priming people can do to prepare their accounts
before the class, but maybe next time we should try Azure.

(The class went mostly OK, though. I just showed people what I intended to
help them do themselves.)

[1] [https://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Artificial-Intelligence-
Mee...](https://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Artificial-Intelligence-
Meetup/events/235496478/)

~~~
niels_olson
Martin Wicke had a few hundred of us up and running in AWS-powered lab
environments, each with our own GPU, at the NVidia GTC in April. Now, they
also had a direct line of communication to somebody at AWS to make sure that
many GPUs were available. Maybe a call to let them know what you're up to? I'm
sure they want people using the gear.

~~~
AlexCoventry
I don't think the problem was resource availability. Some of my students
attempted to start t2's because we weren't going to be doing particularly
heavy calculations in this class, and were rejected.

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Analemma_
How much better is Azure at cloud GPU compute? I remember they were first to
roll out K80 instances, but Amazon followed suit shortly after, so it seems
like it would be a wash. Is the interconnect story on Azure way better or
something, or is this just fluff?

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daxfohl
I'd love to see some of their FPGA projects mentioned in the 2nd link on that
page.

