skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sam and Greg were responsible for everything including building the company, deciding on strategy, raising funding, hiring most of the team, coordinating the research, building the partnership with Microsoft and acquiring the huge array of enterprise customers.

To act like they were just responsible for the "UI parts" is ridiculous.
Yes, however they’ll be shielded from lawsuits from OpenAI at Microsoft.
Apple does not use TPMs. They use their own proprietary security chips, which approximates TPMs. I'm not sure how their implementation works, but even for TPMs "emulated TPM" won't work because real TPMs have endorsement keys[1] with accompanying certificates signed by the manufacturer. If apple really wanted to, they could check against such key, which would theoretically block non-genuine devices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing#Endorsement_...
Very similar features, quite slow inference speed, and various rumors.
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.
People compare climate change hysteria to fear of nuclear war back during the cold war but the difference is that in the former, it is as if the bombs have already been sent and the explosion has been slowed down so much it will take decades for a single bomb to explode.
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.
Ugh. I’m not keen on AGI being an eventual Microsoft product, or after this circus, even the hangers on at Open AI. Hope it’s still decades off and this all is a silly side show footnote.
Wouldn’t there be employment contracts and laws around competitive behavior that come into play here?
I've found it's best to go to a bank or post office and use the ATM there, rather than those generic "Bankomat" machines.
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.
Hot new startup just dropped:MSFT
Capital tries to make a company forfeit it's constitution of non profit to make profit. Shocked I tell ya
> It’s been a literal lifesaver,.

Whose lives have been saved?

> also fun

Do people actually work in security companies for the LOLz? Nobody told me.
It depends on what they are allowed to do as employees, which is probably in the process of being figured out right now.
Ah yes, Greg Brockman, former CTO of Stripe (amongst other things)... sales person.
You can still buy kit homes today: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-...

Construction permits and significantly increased regulation have made them difficult though. You get economies of scale not just in construction, but more importantly in permitting, electrical and sewer connections etc. Then consider than desirable urban areas are already built up leading to land costing much more than the structure.
He doesn’t have to write down the investment that came in the form of azure credits. He just doesn’t have to deliver.

The core thing he is 100% focused on is not having a massive stock drop Monday morning. That’s it that’s his reason to exist all weekend long.

After that. He has time to figure it out.
> But you only need access to the /proc/pid directory to change another processes env.

/proc/$pid/environ is not writable

(and as a matter of fact, due to how the environment works, it cannot be writable.)
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.
Why would I use this instead of the AWS SES Simulator ? [1]

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/send-an-email-from...
Well, this definitely isn't the "internet is fad" Microsoft of Gates/Ballmer ...
> He was the kind of guy on the way to become worth $100 billion and more, with enough luck,

Was he though? If I understand correctly he didn’t have any equity in the for profit org. Of OpenAI.

IIRC he also publicly said that he doesn’t “need” more than a few hundred million (and who knows, not inconceivable that he might actually feel that).
Ben Thompson: The most extraordinary weekend of my career

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1726514608234746003
Seems like last minute news to avoid a MSFT stock dive tomorrow morning.
> It's almost like people inventing new 'standards' are deliberately trying to make them hard so they can be the de facto gatekeepers of the new tech — all while decrying the web's current gatekeepers.

This blog post feels like a subtweet, making accusations of malice about... something? ActivityPub? If it flat out said what it was talking about, we could have a more productive discussion.
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?
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?)
This is Microsoft starting a copy machine to replace OpenAI with in-house tech in medium to long term.

Apparently Microsoft already had plans to spend $50 billion on cloud hardware.

Now they are getting software talent and insider knowledge to replace OpenAI software with in-house tech built by Sam, Greg and others that will join.

Satya just pulled a kill move on OpenAI.
Kara Swisher is so unhinged, she thinks Emmett Shear, founder and CEO of Twitch, is "being generous here, less than impressive in comparison to" Mira Murati...
That doesn't contradict anything. Most people can't afford to start a new venture, so they have a 0% success rate.
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.
How will equity and compensation work

AI peeps are not cheap
Afraid not. I only found out about Tufte's book due to a mention in xkcd. Until Randall mentions another book about plots I'm not likely to find one :-)

It would be nice to find someone like Tufte that gathered some actual evidence. Like, trying different plots on groups of people to see which find information faster, maybe using eye tracking. Even just subjective surveys might be an improvement on one person's opinion.
It's typical HN/engineer brain to discount the CEO and other "non-technical" staff as leeches.
Do you think Microsoft gets access to it?
These same mindsets are shared by those who seek to put the internet under centralised control. Technocrats are digital autocrats. I don't like the idea of an unelected, unaccountable organisation having the ability to switch off people's money. It would be an extreme amount of power in today's economy, let alone a cashless society.

Canada has shown us that governments are willing to put the financial clamps on people due to political disagreements.

93% of reserve banks are investigating CBDCs. Anyone remember the conspiracy theory about a one world currency, and the financial stranglehold that would entail?
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman Will Join Microsoft
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.
I really like Berkeley, JetBrains Mono, etc, but at this point I simply can't move away from Fira Code. It's, like, what code looks like to me at this point.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt Resigns
BigCos generally have a hard time keeping their autonomous groups actually isolated from bureaucracy. Lab126 has been thoroughly corporatized, and Area 120 got outright reabsorbed.
Microsoft is swiftly moving on to the third "E" with OpenAI. First time I get to witness this process first-hand.
Could Microsoft possibly sue the board for market manipulation? If someone on the board shorted MSFT stock, they could have made millions.
As in liquidate a billion in one raise? Is that kosher these days?
How many is that gonna be? 20% of the devs would be a generous estimate imo.
The National Archives have a search available, although not for free: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/...
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.
> if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would they even go there

MSFT may have offered them a lucrative offer to join (for the time being) in order to alleviate the potential stock dump.
I don't think I invented much with that code. I implemented a subset of Flavors based on the Flavors manual, as an add-on to Emacs Lisp. I guess it was cool in some ways, but it is long gone now. I've hacked on other compilers and interpreters but mostly about implementation, rather than inventing languages. IMHO we have plenty of languages and we don't need more ;).
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?
Is there a good article, or does anyone have the slightest inkling, about what the real conflict here is? There's a lot of articles about the symptoms, but what's the core issue here?

The board claims Altman lied. Is that it? About what? Did he consistently misinform the board about a ton of different things? Or about one really important issue? Or is this just an excuse disguising the actual issues?

I notice a lot of people in the comments talking about Altman being more about profit than about OpenAI's original mission of developing safe, beneficial AGI. Is Altman threatening that mission or disagreeing with it? It would be really interesting if this was the real issue, but if it was, I can't believe it came out of nowhere like that, and I would expect the board to have a new CEO lined up already and not be fumbling for a new CEO and go for one with no particular AI or ethics background.

Sutskever gets mentioned as the primary force behind firing Altman. Is this a blatant power grab? Or is Sutskever known to have strong opinions about that mission of beneficial AGI?

I feel a bit like I'm expected to divine the nature of an elephant by only feeling a trunk and an ear.
Ben who?
They had to.

Also, that doesn't mean Microsoft won't collect the outcome of this deal with its interest over time. Microsoft is the master of that craft.

Microsoft did not offer this because they're some altruistic company which wanted to provide free shelter to a unfairly battered, homeless ex-CEO.
Your details were wrong but your sentiment is turning horribly right
Sports betting, or gambling of any form, for that matter, wasn’t a fraction of the problem it is today.
And now he doesn’t even need to. He can get access to all their models legally as a Microsoft employee.
How welcoming you are.
> Question: Do you plan to implement valuable enhancements over the coming years or do you believe this is feature complete?

This is an excellent question. Not just for this particular case but for anyone planning on releasing subscription SaaS or app
Yes! Please do!
This is like a spacecraft research nonprofit working on faster than light travel promising Boeing 100% of the rights to any of their technology that's sub-light speed. I give even odds that they'll never achieve "AGI," or when it happens it'll be an incremental gain made by simply wiring existing technologies together that'll be obvious to any engineer competent in the field and thus easily duplicated.
Fair enough that perhaps you can allow M to be a function of N. It feels like this sort of model might run into other issues, though. If you treat a memory look up as an operation on an infinitely long bit string that therefore takes non-constant time, then why wouldn’t you select integer addition to act on unbounded numbers and have similar asymptotic behavior?

Obviously in practice M >> N, M is not a function of N, and/or M is constant, but we’re essentially discussing how to define the axioms underlying the complexity analysis.
Don't forget, MS has a board as well. One Satya reports to the same way Sam reported to the OpanAI one. Potantially loosong 10 billion is nothing the board will just shrug off.
There's different types of charisma; some people appear extremely charismatic in person but not through a camera (there's a bunch of politicians you could name here), and vice versa (a lot actors).
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.
Yeah... Not really how a mega-corp like MSFT does things. They LOVE to have control.
Microsoft have access to the gold mine and with a bit of time Altman can get enough gold to open a jewelry business
We switched from using SMTP to the AWS SDK for SES because when sending an e-mail the SDK returns the unique message ID of the e-mail. This allowed us to have a special process for handling bounces in our software by using an SNS HTTP endpoint. So the SDK makes sense for use cases where the SMTP protocol doesn't provide enough information.
Are you talking about OpenAI or about Sam Altman's hypothetical new company?

OpenAI already had the best technology fully developed and in production when Microsoft invested in them.

I believe "cargo cult" means something quite different to how you're using it.

It's not "cargo cult" to consider someone's CV when you hire them for a new job. Sam Altman ran a successful AI company before and he most likely can do it again if provided enough support and resources.
RSS lacks some sort of push messaging. Sure, that's not RSS's fault, but constantly polling a feed is not a solution.
Classic example of someone taking away an overly simplified rule from a problem they don't fully understand. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Imagine thinking that top AI researchers are going to start choosing to work for MSFT after years of them being second class citizens there.

Like if they don’t like OpenAI they can go to 10 other places that pay more and treat researchers better than MSFT
I wonder if the OpenAI board will shut down the for-profit to avoid handing the tech to Microsoft now...
> Yup. It's a bad, broken, and unfixable API.

Is it, though?

The only argument I see is that an API can be misused. There are ergonomics debates we can have about it, but a user intentionally abusing an API wanting to do something that's completely wrong is hardly indication the API is broken.
He has technical skill, you don't need to oversell him. He's not Ilya.
The only meaningful thing here that makes sense to me is that the “secret sauce” that openAI has is exclusively licensed to Microsoft.

Which means, starting a competing startup means they can’t use it.

Which makes their (potential) competing startup indistinguishable from the (many) other startups in this space competing with OpenAI.

Does Sam really want to be a no-name research head of some obscure Microsoft research division?

I don’t think so.

Can’t really see any other reason for this that makes sense.
So having Altman's loyalists leave is probably exactly what Sutskever wants?

Still, what do they actually want? It seems a bit overly dramatic for such an organisation.
Does Microsoft (under the OpenAI agreement) have access to the model code etc or just the output? If not, they would have to rebuild it.

Not sure if its obvious that people would leave OpenAI in troves to join Microsoft just to be with Sam.
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."
Quite a lot of push technology is ultimately some kind of pull.
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?
> So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI

They already do, though, has everyone forgot they got a Microsoft Research division?
It's confusing because no one beyond the direct negotiating parties knows exactly why any of this is happening in the first place. The media scoops about commercialization disputes don't seem that important to warrant such a dramatic showdown
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.
You seem to put very heavy emphasis on the precise recorded time of a recurring meeting in everyone's calendar. In my experience, this is mostly irrelevant: the time of a recurring meeting is often renegotiated when circumstances change for a big enough swathe of participants, such as schedule changes in the more northern/souther latitudes as winter&summer approach.
It’s not 1998 anymore, you’d be surprised
Founder of https://stratechery.com/

More about him and his blog at https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
I guess OpenAI is done now.
multiple ways to make that work. LTIPs, share options, direct equity in subsidiary etc
You have been able to do that for years, even with low latency. Apart from the usual desktop sharing tools mentionned in another comment I was using parsec to game on a remote VM a few winters ago.

The only real limiter is people lazyness to setup a vm in the first place.
Yep, it's now time for MS to throw in the laywers.
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
>please don't tank our stock

ding ding ding
I really like the Atom protocol, especially with the "archived pages" extension. I've used it several times to distribute common data feeds in a really scalable way. Since everything is static, the processing on the server is minimal (either return the current string buffer, or return a string from a map), and all the archived content is infinitely cacheable. it's a really simple and clever idea
“Microsoft always lands on top”
Kyle Vogt has resigned as CEO of Cruise
Satya is the best CEO in tech and it isnt even close
Sam Altman is the CEO of a new AI group under Microsoft
Say it with me, folks - Embrace, extend, extinguish.
One word: GPUs
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.
> Liberalization will be painful but then things will get better.

Has this ever worked anywhere to take an empoverished country out of their miserable situation?

Also, this completely ignores the context of the region. South American history is littered with examples of politicians that promised easy solutions to deep, complex issues.
imo Satya is a different ball game compared to Ballmer. I wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on msft's track record pre-Satya personally.
That's a little interesting, if only because a lot of watches don't come with stands/cases - I remember when I was a kid I got a couple of watches that had little plastic holders, that they were packaged with.

These days I've got watches ranging from the low-end Casio Terrorist Watch to mid-range Rolexes, and a lot in between, and they typically come in boxes or cases without a stand of any kind.
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.
It is Satya we are talking about, I won't bet against him.
MSFT was trading around 29 in April 2007 when this was published. They’re now around 366.

Maybe this is a story of the value to a company with a huge, established customer base with actual reliance on their products. That probably doesn’t explain a 12.6x over that time period alone though.

Or maybe they’re not dead.