The perfect poached egg aside, the following consideration relates to the MSN carried Story by jbort@insider.com (Julie Bort) - undated - titled, The biggest potential loser of the OpenAI fiasco was Satya Nadella. Now he's outsmarted them all.
Guessing from that report as a basis:
Microsoft has business committed to use of and need for OpenAI's existing intellectual property, while reporting has been that the GPT 3.5 is the basis for MS reliance with Bing enhancements etc., (while GPT 4 is being shaken out). There are billions of net graph nodes to the OpenAI LLM (large language model), consisting of many terabytes of memory developed on a server configuration reportedly using 30,000 Nvidia server chips; i.e., hardware costing a fortune and web scraped and formatted data underlying the final model which OpenAI owns and upon which Microsoft relies via commitments re its own existing IP, and in planning.
Presumably, with key people having taken employment with Microsoft and likely more to come, the OpenAI nonprofit shifts to an owning and maintaining shell, i.e., it holds onto the hardware and data and tools already developed and will do continued maintenance, possibly development coordinated with the new MS unit, scraping web content on some ongoing basis to keep current, and will from some form of fee structure to be able to pay facility and power bills and continue operation at the maintenance level, rather than doing great amounts of new development. With key personnel moved, a skeleton maintenance crew can keep the ship afloat.
What Microsoft does, as to its IP and profit stream from now on will be interesting, so far as the public will know anything. As a publicly traded company MS will have to file stuff with the SEC speculating upon the impact of the firing/hiring scenario, but regulatory filings usually are turgid and full of hedging language, particularly as to future trends and intentions.
MS needs OpenAI to continue in some fashion, but the brains moved. That seems the bottom line. OpenAI owns something, and as a private venture, (non-profit and for profit arms), it is under a lower public disclosure norm than public companies.
Think of Cargill, filing public disclosure docs because of its borrowing and issuance of debt financing bonds, while ownership has been privately held over the entire firm's lifetime.
___________FURTHER UPDATE___________
Sam, I love the name OpenAI for your LLM walled garden. You'll do well at Microsoft.
It is interesting that OpenAI has selected Emmett Shear. Twitch founder, past CEO. Not being a gamer I had no idea what Twitch was, but Amazon bought it for a billion, so it must be worth more.
Per web searching, there is - of all things while writing of Microsoft and OpenAI, selling a prime service, get on monthly payments, a subscription service. This link, below image + quote:
Twitch Prime
is a monthly subscription service that exists as an offshoot of Amazon
Prime. Twitch Prime allows you to access premium content on Twitch that
isn't accessible to most Twitch users.
If you're a big fan of Twitch, or even gaming in general, you might want to look into getting Twitch Prime. It'll earn you a wide range of benefits.
Here's what you should know.
Twitch Prime, explained
As
stated, Twitch Prime is a monthly subscription service. To join, you'll
need to have either an Amazon Prime or Prime Video account — these cost
$12.99 per month and $8.99 per month, respectively.
Once you join, you gain a number of immediate benefits.
It
usually costs $4.99 to subscribe to a Twitch channel for a month, but
Twitch Prime lets you subscribe to one channel for free every month.
Subscribing to a channel lets you unlock exclusive emotes,
subscriber-only chats, and more. If you're lucky, the streamer might
even give you a shoutout.
Whenever you send a chat message, no
matter what channel it's on, your messages will be accompanied by a
small icon that looks like a crown. This is a badge that's exclusive to
Twitch Prime members.
All the shit I really, really need to live a full and complete life, Twitch Prime has it, right? And now the innovator of that service - yours for your going on payments - is the new CEO of OpenAI. All I can say is:
A Twitch Prime Amazon offering. Can't do without it! Link.
OpenAI shocked the tech industry Friday when its board announced that Altman was out as CEO of the company he helped start in 2015. The decision blindsided even Microsoft, a key OpenAI partner that has invested billions into the company.
Reports
over the weekend indicated that Altman and Greg Brockman, co-founder
and former chairman who quit Friday, could make a return. OpenAI
investors, including Microsoft, were reportedly pressuring the board to
bring Altman back, according to The New York Times. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was directly involved in the negotiations, The Information reported.
But the board went a different direction, tapping Shear, who helped
launch Twitch in 2006 and sold it to Amazon for nearly $1 billion in
2014.
Shear resigned from Twitch earlier this year, writing that “I feel ready for this change to tackle new challenges.” Update: In a statement
on X early Monday morning, Shear said he “took this job because I
believe that OpenAI is one of the most important companies currently in
existence,” and that “it’s clear that the process and communications
around Sam’s removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously
damaged our trust.”
The surprise removal of Altman raised questions about the company’s
role in the AI revolution, the ambitions of Altman and his team, the
impact of his exit on the rest of the tech industry, OpenAI’s complex
corporate structure, and its unusual partnership with Microsoft.
In a statement on Friday, OpenAI said Altman “was not consistently
candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to
exercise its responsibilities.”
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said.
OpenAI originally formed as a non-profit organization, OpenAI Inc.,
dedicated to building artificial general intelligence for the
advancement of humanity. In 2019, the non-profit created an affiliated
“capped-profit” entity, OpenAI Global LLC, aimed at giving it the
resources to pursue goals without the profit incentives of a traditional
company.
Reports indicate that a conflict between Altman’s ambitions for
OpenAI and the mission of the nonprofit were at the core of the board’s
decision to oust him as CEO and remove Brockman as chairman. Brockman
was initially designated to report to Mira Murati, the OpenAI CTO who
was named interim CEO by the board, but he then resigned from his executive role later Friday afternoon.
And of course, the inspired idea. Turn this industry saga into an ongoing, monthly subscription, game. Monetize it. Flow cash. Be thought important if you implement that. Each player in the saga, a Palidin. It sings of success, so go do it, Stanford grad.
___________FURTHER UPDATE__________
The situation remains in flux, and there will be more updating, either to this post or via a new item. Of interest, a friend with years in tech marketing in an email stated, earlier while chips were still falling into place:
The one thing I am sure of
is that Microsoft is determined to be a major, if not the major, player
in AI. I’m sure the Microsoft Board is pissed about the $13 Billion
their CEO has spent on Open AI right now.
A very credible speculation. But disproved by THE BOTTOM LINE. As only a BOTTOM LINE can affect sentiment and judgment:
Microsoft stock hits all-time high after hiring former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Story by By Krystal Hur, CNN
That says it all, but detail is nice to see anyway.
Microsoft stock reached a record high on Monday after the company said that Sam Altman, former chief executive of OpenAI, will join the company to head its artificial intelligence innovation leg.
Shares of the tech behemoth rose 2.1% to an all-time high close of $377.44 on Monday, beating the previous record of $376.17.
That comes after shares of Microsoft fell 1.7% on Friday, when Sam Altman was ousted from his position
at OpenAI in a boardroom coup. Microsoft is the artificial intelligence
firm’s biggest stakeholder, with a $13 billion investment in the
company.
Greg Brockman, who co-founded OpenAI and quit after Altman’s firing, is also joining Microsoft.
[...] Microsoft shares are
up about 56% for the year. The stock is one of the “Magnificent Seven”
that have powered the lion’s share of the market’s returns this year,
boosted by Wall Street’s bet that artificial intelligence is the next
big thing in tech.
Dan
Ives, tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, reiterated his $425 price
target for Microsoft’s stock following Altman’s and Brockman’s hires.
“We
view Microsoft now even in a stronger position from an AI perspective
with Altman and Brockman” at the company, Ives wrote in a note on
Monday.
Other
members of the “Magnificent Seven” saw a boost on Monday. Nvidia shares
gained 2.3% to end the trading session at $504.20 ahead of its earnings
due on Tuesday, notching a record-high close for the chipmaker.
The last paragraph is interesting given that Microsoft is now in the server chip business, and is lasar focused upon leading what has been called the AI revolution. Yet Nvidia gained too. The belief at Crabgrass is that the Microsoft chip initiative will grow longer legs than the new hirings; but the two fit hand in glove.
SO ---- Stock's up, happy board is the guess here. A temp drop, likely a Board notice, but the record level is a shout out, all's well that ends well.
___________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
Another extended quote. Ilya Sutskever will be a name to notice. The Verge, from March of this year:
“I
think we can call it shut on ‘Open’ AI: the 98 page paper introducing
GPT-4 proudly declares that they’re disclosing *nothing* about the
contents of their training set,” tweeted Ben Schmidt, VP of information design at Nomic AI, in a thread on the topic.
Here, Schmidt is referring to a section in the GPT-4 technical report that reads as follows:
Given
both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of
large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details
about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training
compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.
Speaking to The Verge
in an interview, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and
co-founder, expanded on this point. Sutskever said OpenAI’s reasons for
not sharing more information about GPT-4 — fear of competition and fears
over safety — were “self evident”:
“On
the competitive landscape front — it’s competitive out there,” said
Sutskever. “GPT-4 is not easy to develop. It took pretty much all of
OpenAI working together for a very long time to produce this thing. And
there are many many companies who want to do the same thing, so from a
competitive side, you can see this as a maturation of the field.”
“On
the safety side, I would say that the safety side is not yet as salient
a reason as the competitive side. But it’s going to change, and it’s
basically as follows. These models are very potent and they’re becoming
more and more potent. At some point it will be quite easy, if one
wanted, to cause a great deal of harm with those models. And as the
capabilities get higher it makes sense that you don’t want want to
disclose them.”
“I fully expect that in a few years it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise.”
The closed approach is a marked change for OpenAI, which was founded in 2015
by a small group including current CEO Sam Altman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk
(who resigned from its board in 2018), and Sutskever. In an introductory blog post,
Sutskever and others said the organization’s aim was to “build value
for everyone rather than shareholders” and that it would “freely
collaborate” with others in the field to do so. OpenAI was founded as a
nonprofit but later became a “capped profit” in order to secure billions
in investment, primarily from Microsoft, with whom it now has exclusive
business licenses.
When
asked why OpenAI changed its approach to sharing its research,
Sutskever replied simply, “We were wrong. Flat out, we were wrong. If
you believe, as we do, that at some point, AI — AGI — is going
to be extremely, unbelievably potent, then it just does not make sense
to open-source. It is a bad idea... I fully expect that in a few years
it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is
just not wise.”
Put all that in the context of Altman having gone to western Asia to solicit funding for some form of AI chip innovation, apparently apart from Microsoft's recent disclosure of its chip development, and the open question of can AI run amok via a malicious superintelligence, or in the hands of James Bond type villains, (and a Board - Management dance conflict), puts in question where OpenAI lands after the upheaval. That is as unknown as the origin of life or the nature of consciousness. However, we'll find out about OpenAI in months to come, unlike the other considerations.
Business Insider has an item seemingly helpful in understanding events and movements, this link. All for now.
