The amazing takeaway for me from this data driven story is that if you care to actually solve a problem in today's political climate the BEST thing you can do is to try and make it as non-partisan as possible. The WORST thing you can do if you're actually trying to solve a problem is to make it partisan or to inflame partisan divisions.
Partisanship as an anti-pattern in trying to actually solve problems.
The challenge, I think, is that when you are non-partisan, you have no allies.
When a problem is partisan, you have ~50% of people on your side, and ~50% deeply opposed. When you're non-partisan, you're on your own. Instead of facing bitter opposition, you're facing a vast wall of apathy.
It's hard to find anything that's so overwhelmingly popular that people will be on your side just on the merits of the proposition. If it costs any money, somebody will be opposed. If it benefits somebody more than others, somebody will be opposed -- even if it's a benefit to them, but a smaller benefit than somebody else. Some will oppose it just because they dislike you personally.
And because of partisanship, they have allies, who may be apathetic but will support them just because they care. Now you've got ~0% of people on your side and ~50% of people bitterly opposed.
Being non-partisan is a lonely, frustrating business. You don't see much of it because it has a very poor track record.
It would be great if we could ditch all of our existing alliances. But new ones would form almost immediately, because you need them to get anything done. The resulting web of connections might be different, but the level of partisanship will be similar.
> to actually solve the problem? Partisanship is an anti-pattern
Sure. The point is there are people incentivised to drive partisanship. Because people respond to it. It goes back to Plato’s criticism of Athenian democracy: demagoguery works.
From the moment Llama 3.1 was released, GPT4All developers have been working hard to make a beta version of tool calling available. We're happy to announce that the beta is now ready. The first tool is web search implemented through brave.com just as in the Llama 3.1 paper.
Big new update to the GPT4All project. All the installers are completely signed and the new update includes comprehensive UI overhaul as well as upgrades and new localdocs (built-in private and local RAG) experience.
So when the author states that "Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0" they mean, effectively, only a fixed-time snapshot of code that is likely old news in about 18 months by the time other models have caught up. Microsoft still needs to execute like mad to make this work out for them. Right now the entire thing seems to rest on the hope that enough talent bleeds out of OpenAI to make this worthwhile. They'll probably get that. But it's still a delicate game. I most wonder what breakthrough Ilya has been alluding to recently [1] and whether it'll be available under MSFT's license.
Plenty of them can go to Google, Anthropic, Apple, Tesla, Amazon or any other attractive company to work for. By attractive I mean they'd be compensated well enough to have a nice life there.
There's not a lot to suggest everyone will jut join M$ by default.
Development work on GPT5, curated input datasets, human feedback data, archives of all ChatGPT conversations, DALL-E, stats on which users are the big spenders, contracts with cheap labor to generate data and moderate abuse...
Driving the narrative doesn't mean driving reality. It is clear that Sam and friends are great at manipulating the media. But this is a disaster for Microsoft and the CEO damn well knows it. It is also a personal disaster for Altman and probably not a great move for those who choose to join him.
Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging that at best they were fooling themselves into believing they were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed looks to be dying.
They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the actual tech. They made a huge bet on OpenAI to produce the tech and that relationship is going down the drain. Watch the market today, the next week, the next month, the next six months and that will tell you what I say: this is a disaster for MS and they damn well know it.
> They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the actual tech
Microsoft also “has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights.”
If you’re a scientist, OpenAI is a fine place to be, though less differentiated than before. If you’re an engineer more interested in money and don’t want the risk of a start-up, Microsoft seems the obvious path forward.
You're making the assumption that the technical folks won't follow him, and that's a pretty ridiculous bet at this point unless you've got some more data you're just not sharing.
Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.
So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?
The only technically person who matters here, the one who came from deepmind and who is the worlds top AI researcher, is sure as hell not going to follow him since he’s the reason Sam is gone.
You're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about, clearly people aren't going to leave and follow Sam instead of Ilya. Nobody at all... just 550 of 700 employees, nothing to see here.
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
That’s how it appears currently but experience has taught me to be very careful about making snap judgments in these types of fast moving situations. Nobody seems to know yet why he was actually fired. The popular theory is that it was a disagreement about mission but something about that narrative just feels off. Also Nadella and Altman are both enjoying God-like reputations and the OpenAI board totally being dismissed as clueless and making a stupid, impulsive decision even though basic logic would tell you that a rational acting person would not do that. There’s a lot of room for the pendulum of public opinion to swing back the other way and it’s clear that most of the most fervent supporters of Altman and Microsoft are motivated by money rather than truth.
Microsoft stock is up in the pre-market, because they basically got half of the OpenAI team for free.
The majority of top researchers at OpenAI are expressing solidarity for Sam and basically signalling they want to move too, just check out twitter. That also includes like the majority of the execs tehre.
LOL This is more of the Altman based media blitz to drive this in his favor. This is nothing short of an unmitigated DISASTER for Microsoft and they well know it.
Not them but it’s not a good look to spend 10B in a bet for zero control. Also to spend months building up to an acquisition (there’s no way that wasn’t what Sam was trying for) only for it to result in the firing of the CEO who was trying to sell his company to you.
This looks terrible, and all of these “Sam is the real winner” posts are cope
The majority of that money is in the form of Azure credit.
It all pretty much hinges on how much talent you think Microsoft can obtain. I’m going to make a bet that Microsoft poaches between 30 and 70% of open AI key employees.
If they spent $10 billion to achieve this outcome, securing the loyalty of the two founders and attracting double digit percentage of the employees, then they will have conservatively gotten a 5 to 10x return overnight
Edit: I was too conservative, it's looking like 90%
Partisanship as an anti-pattern in trying to actually solve problems.