Why Microsoft needs Sam Altman and his loyal OpenAI band
Why Microsoft needs Sam Altman and his loyal OpenAI band
A quick summary of the past three days of chaos. And Redmond has questions to answer
This is the most ridiculous situation I can remember in recent corporate times. 🍿
TL;DR Microsoft needs your data to make more money from you after you pay for their products.
I do think they genuinely aim for some technical delivery at the moment. It will definitely all be turned to shit in the upcoming decade. This article does have a title that doesn't match it, though. It's more about the ridiculousness of
- Altman sacked
- Board tries to hire him back
- Altman joins MS
- Board tries to hire him back
- MS is OpenAI board
- Chief scientist leads the coup
I mean I probably should have bolded the "DR" part. But I feel like I'm probably right, MS are scum, they're worse than Facebook and Google. At least the others can maintain the pretence that user data theft is some kind of exchange for free access.
You can't build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. We make the nuts and bolts (data), there's a trillion dollar industry trading our nuts and bolts, and we don't get paid anything. People say it's worth pennies per year, but trillions of dollars on 8 billion people mean that peoples' data is worth somewhere around $1,000 per year.
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Hours after Altman was chopped, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman - who had also been removed from his board chairman role on Friday - announced his resignation, and a handful of senior engineers followed suit.
As OpenAI's largest investor, with a 49 percent stake, Microsoft had hoped to repair the situation – after all, it has plowed more than $10 billion into the compute-hungry lab, and injected the upstart's family of content-generating, conversation-driven neural networks into all corners of the MSFT empire, from Azure and Bing to Windows and GitHub, under the Copilot brand.
We can't imagine Redmond being left totally high and dry if OpenAI imploded, though it's obvious the tech giant needs the lab's whiz-kids to continue their research and development work one way or another, and that Microsoft would like some stability brought to this cluster-fsck.
The mega-corp had to do something – and it managed to revive its stock, and even pushed it higher, by having CEO Satya Nadella boast on Monday that Altman and Brockman will join the enterprise IT giant to lead an AI research arm (and presumably keep that GPT tech flowing into Microsoft 365 etc.)
The OpenAI board made CTO Mira Murati interim CEO, and after she reportedly indicated her support for Altman to return, the directors on Sunday instead installed former Twitch boss Emmett Shear as chief exec.
Because who will Microsoft favor: an external business that may hold back on releasing state-of-the-art technology over safety concerns, or an internal team that promises to be bolder and faster in its execution to unleash more powerful models?
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