I’d say this is an amazing result for MS. Not only is their investment mostly Azure credits, so OpenAI is dependent on MS, now they also got Altman and his followers for themselves for more research.
Good for MS, bad for humanity. I believe one of the worst possible timelines for the average human is one where for-profit capitalist entities control access to AGI and horde all the benefits accrued from it. OpenAI was founded specifically to avoid this - with a complicated governance structure designed to ensure true AGI would end up owned by humanity with the benefits shared by all.
The OpenAI board and top researchers made a desperate bid to prioritize safety over profits, and even with that elaborate governance structure behind them capitalism still seems to have found a way to fuck us.
Today we saw Satya Nadella and Sam Altman steer humanity further from a possible utopia and closer to.... Cyberpunk 2077.
Do we know that for sure? What if the triggering event was secret dealings between Altman and Nadella?
I have no idea how likely that is, but the original messaging around Altman's firing seemed to leave open the possibility that this was about conflicts of interest. The messaging since seems to have contradicted that, though, so who knows.
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Microsoft is hiring former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman.
Altman was fired from OpenAI on Friday, after the board said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” After a weekend of negotiations to potentially bring Altman back to OpenAI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team.
“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team,” says Nadella.
“We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”