OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gainstratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/
7498 sats \ 11 comments \ @elvismercury 20 Nov 2023 tech
For those of us addicted to the latest global tech soap opera, Ben Thompson delivers.
This is, quite obviously, a phenomenal outcome for Microsoft. The company already has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights; the question was whether it would have the talent to exploit that IP if OpenAI suffered the sort of talent drain that was threatened upon Altman and Brockman’s removal. Indeed they will, as a good portion of that talent seems likely to flow to Microsoft; you can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit.
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1799 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 20 Nov 2023
“This, in the end, was Nadella’s insight: the key to winning if you are big is not to invent like a startup, but to leverage your size to acquire or fast-follow them; all the better if you can do it for the low price of $0.” 👌
Staying in the game long enough to make a move is a far better consequence if your the pursued startup in this scenario.
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470 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 20 Nov 2023
I have a high prior on not having conspiracy theories, since 99.9% of the world can be explained by normal and obvious incentives + human stupidity.
If what MSFT wanted was to lock up Sama vs having him compete, precipitating this implosion seems a really dumb strategy. If Sama wanted to start his own company, he could have, and blowing up OpenAI exacerbated that risk. God knows there's no shortage of interest in the area, he's riding at epic highs based on the success of the last year, he's one of the most connected people in all of VC, and MSFT couldn't make him take a job with them.
And given the no-compete situation in CA, they could have just hired the people directly, without any of this drama, if that's what they wanted. Plus coordinating this kind of conspiracy is hard, and word of it would almost certainly get out, to cataclysmic legal and financial repercussion once it did.
So my take is that it is what it appears to be. That's weird enough already.
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240 sats \ 2 replies \ @davidw 20 Nov 2023
I still think there’s another twist in this saga. Microsoft may still drop the ball. There’s benefits to being small and nimble. LinkedIn for me is the perfect example.
That or Altman will become CEO at Microsoft in the next 18 months. If so, this was planned for weeks on end, not the weekend as the press would have you believe.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @owleyedapprentice 20 Nov 2023
this was almost certainly planned for many weeks beforehand ... i'd really love to see this twist happen; a rejection of the big players and going back to the roots. it's the allegory the world needs right now.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sudonaka 20 Nov 2023
How do you have any faith in the closed source shitcoiners at “open” ai?
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152 sats \ 0 replies \ @gmd 21 Nov 2023
Imagine thinking we can align an AGI when we cant align 5 board members...
wngmi
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fred 20 Nov 2023
The whole debacle seems like a Trojan Horse 🐴 next level way of hostile takeover
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fred 20 Nov 2023
The whole debacle seems like a Trojan Horse 🐴 next level way of hostile takeover
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sudonaka 20 Nov 2023
Planned
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Entrep 20 Nov 2023
Microsoft pulled a good move with this talent hunt as Altman is the known in some circle as the pioneer of A.I chatbox assistant
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @legxxi 20 Nov 2023
Going to paste what I wrote in another thread on the issue:
“So maybe Microsoft orchestrated the whole thing in order to have him just as an employee instead of risking him create his own company, while at the same time having OpenAI on a leash.”
That being said, the puppeteers and big capital boys have planned and decided in advance how this telenovela for men is going to play out.
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