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Microsoft Touted OpenAI's Independence Nine Days Before Hiring Top Talent 43

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
theodp writes: In a panel on AI at the Paris Peace Forum just 10 days ago, Microsoft President Brad Smith gave Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun a lecture on the importance of OpenAI's nonprofit independence.

"Meta is owned by shareholders," Smith argued. "OpenAI is owned by a nonprofit . Which would you have more confidence in? Getting your technology from a nonprofit? Or a for-profit company that is entirely controlled by one human being?"

But on Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pretty much trashed Smith's argument with his announcement that Microsoft was hiring OpenAI's co-founders and some of its top talent to head up a "new advanced AI research team." Another case of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish?
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Microsoft Touted OpenAI's Independence Nine Days Before Hiring Top Talent More

Microsoft Touted OpenAI's Independence Nine Days Before Hiring Top Talent

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  • Its really dumb to blame MS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Monday November 20, 2023 @12:21PM (#64018629)
    Unless youre a serious conspiracy theorist, they didnt anticipate that OpenAIs board would put a gun to its own temple and blow the brains out of the company. What were they supposed to do at that point? They pick up the pieces, thats what.
    • Precisely. Although I'd still would like to understand the reasoning more... Just to make sure we aren't walking into fire here.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Apple did literally the same thing decades ago under the exact same circumstances. Microsoft has experience here.

      Some people never learn.

    • What a golden opportunity for Microsoft. They were first to the smartphone game more than 20 years ago, but failed to keep up with Apple and Google. Sam Altman wants to make a phone. At first blush, this sounds ridiculous unless you see the future is in agents that act as personal assistants using a voice Interface. Microsoft is arguably the only company who has successfully monetized GPT with its Azure systems running OpenAI's comp load. Don't blame Microsoft, applaud them. I for one think they are the be

    • Yeah, MS has been up to a lot of its old tricks lately, but I don't think this is an example of it. They want OpenAI to be independent, but they have too much invested in it to stand idly by as OpenAI implodes from internal self-inflicted turmoil.

    • Unless youre a serious conspiracy theorist, they didnt anticipate that OpenAIs board would put a gun to its own temple and blow the brains out of the company. What were they supposed to do at that point? They pick up the pieces, thats what.

      I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, but it is hypocrisy.

      MS was just saying how great it was that OpenAI was run by an non-profit rather than a company trying to maximize profit.

      Then the non-profit fired the CEO seemingly because they were concerned he wasn't taking the risks of the technology seriously enough (as was their mandate).

      And now Microsoft is very unhappy that the non-profit was interested in something other than profit maximization.

      For sure, the board screwed up with the surprise decision to fire th

  • so? (Score:2)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )

    I don't see how there was some contradiction here.

    • The board, including Ilya, handed the $90 billion OpenAI, a non-profit company, to Microsoft, a for-profit company (which had previously touted the advantage of OpenAI being non-profit).
  • This is like saying you are all for people earning their money and then refusing to pick up a $20 bill you found on the street 'cause you didn't earn it. MS is doing the rational thing by picking up proven skillset individuals after their company has discarded them. Nothing disingenious about this.

    • I agree. Love Microsoft or hate it, it sure looks like OpenAI is committing some sort of weird suicide. At that point, you can either be a spectator to the board burning the asset you have some significant investment to the ground, or you basically grab what you can from the house fire.

    • I agree that nothing disingenuous there at all. The problem is the bigger picture, where the needs of Microsoft might not be in alignment with the needs of humanity. Or more generally, the need to make money vs the need to service humanity. These are not necessarily opposing goals, and certainly are not mutually exclusive, but the potential to sacrifice the needs of humanity in order to make money is clearly there. You may disagree with that premise, and that is fine, but that seems to be the point of t

  • "Gotcha" bullshit journalism. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Monday November 20, 2023 @12:44PM (#64018729) Journal

    While criticising Microsoft for being rank hypocrites isn't exactly new, the manufactured outrage that TFA's author is going for suffers from a critical flaw: lauding non-profit sourced AI tech doesn't make you a hypocrite when the single source for non-profit AI tech cakes it's pants due to the boardroom being filled with finalists for "dumbest motherfuckers alive". My guess is that they didn't bother to do so much as a pulse survey to find out that nobody in the company is loyal to the board over the founders who built the place, and are recognized as global leaders in the field.

    The scenario changed between when the statement was made, and now. Microsoft, correctly, acted to protect their interests (and everyone else's besides that shitty board's interests) and in the process managed to jettison what appears to be the biggest thing holding OpenAI back - their monumentally awful board "leadership".

    And it's also an opportunity to release dead wood - you get the option of hiring all the people that are worth a damn, and leaving behind anyone who isn't getting the job done - they become that shitty board's problem.

    It's a perfect scenario for Microsoft, really. They get the crown jewels of OpenAI without having to actually purchase OpenAI and absorb (read: fire) all the folks they have no need for due to inherent redundancy (sales staff, legal, accounting, HR, for example). And they don't have to take on any financial or legal liabilities.

    • Agreed. I hate Microsoft as much as anyone else here but faulting them for this is silly.

    • I'm surprised at all the negative comments here, I expected a little less CEO worship from Slashdot. The board did one thing: they fired one guy who they said was not being honest with them.

      The fact that so many people are hyperventillating over this shows a few things: first, that OpenAI seems to have been entirely controlled by one human being. Contrary to Smith's quote in the summary. Second, that everyone seems to think this one human being was an untouchable god of a man, a single point of failure f

  • "Meta is owned by shareholders," Smith argued. "OpenAI is owned by a nonprofit . Which would you have more confidence in? Getting your technology from a nonprofit? Or a for-profit company that is entirely controlled by one human being?"

    Track record says Meta. It's pretty surprising, but Meta actually realeases their models (a lot more than just some LLMs too), publishes their research and generally seems to be behaving well. OpenAI, despite being founded as a counter to closed AI development, is secretive,

  • Breaking: 505 of 700 employees @OpenAI tell the board to resign. [twitter.com] "We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      It would have been better if it was 404. ("Employees not found")

  • Yep, humans still suck at predicting the future. Nothing to see here.

  • Microsoft. (Score:3)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday November 20, 2023 @02:15PM (#64019005)

    Altman now works for Microsoft.

    Apparently this is how one goes about "breaking captialism [futurism.com]"...

  • I'd like to know the actual specific reason for firing Altman. The board has not provided any details, but it may be entirely legitimate. Repeatedly lying to them in spite of warnings seems like a fire-able offense for example.

  • Microsoft Touted OpenAI's Independence Nine Days Before Hiring Top Talent

    If OpenAI is "independent," why would that independence be impeded by Microsoft hiring some of its former employees? These aren't people that were still working for OpenAI, they were fired (or quit) then were recruited by Microsoft. Assuming they weren't actually up to no good, the move makes a lot of sense to me, and doesn't in any way damage whatever independence OpenAI has (supposing that's an important thing to preserve).

  • Once they became available for hire MS would've been foolish to pass them up.

  • Lecun used to work at Bell Labs, the greatest innovator of the 20th century. Was it a non-profit?

    The only non-profits that innovate are universities, and universities generally do not develop products.

    The history of the 20th century, continuing into the 21st is that major innovations come from for-profit companies, and usually from monopolies, because monopolies are willing to fund basic research. Consider, for example, Google. Who gave you free maps and navigation. IBM. Fairchild Semiconductor. Space

  • This whole thing (Sam Altman, Worldcoin, the rapid rise and downfall of OpenAI, Microsoft), smells fishy and will not end well, mark my words *wears a tinfoil hat*
  • It's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before, cough, Nokia, cough.
    Or maybe they really really want Clippy back and Altman can be bought to dig it up and transplant another AI into it.

    LoB

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