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.
