I would venture to say that it is a near certainty that those researchers who left Google originally to work for OpenAI are going to be wanting to head right back there.
I don’t get why people aren’t seeing this. OpenAI said they’d achieve AGI by December. It’s mid November. When they claim to have achieved AGI, Microsoft’s deal with them ends immediately. Sam Altman is a practical man who thinks a lot about server costs, and Ilya is a terrified man who thinks a lot about potential catastrophe. Sam recently bragged about “pushing back the veil of ignorance”, and Ilya is working full-time on alignment techniques.
Why the dominant narrative isn’t “they’re probably disagreeing over the AGI status of a GPT5 ensemble because it affects their relationship w/ Microsoft” I have NO idea, and I’m trying to keep my head down and not let it all drive me crazy with anxiety…
Much love to the fellow hackers out there. If I’m anywhere close to right-ish, then I’m looking forward to exploring the post-SV/VC world with you.
I'd love to know how necessary the donations to the non-profit still are now that the commercial venture has picked up. But MSFT might want to re-think their OpenAI integration efforts at this point.
And now I expect that we see this "board" dissolved.
Frankly, as it should. If you are going to take $10B from another organization and you nuke the CEO during market hours and then later it turns out that it was just an ordinary disagreement, then you should answer for that action.
On a Friday, no less. This is actually the kind of thing that can sink MSFT's apparent "first mover" advantage in the eyes of big money. OpenAI is now fractured, and whatever work they were going to be doing on tech is now going to be devoted to figuring out WTF to do with this mess the board just created all by themselves for no apparent reason.
> And now I expect that we see this "board" dissolved.
The board has the power to dissolve itself, I am sure there(edit typo) are legal mechanisms for illegal acts, I think the IRS can revoke 501(c)(3) status but not dissolve, not sure if there are other mechanisms.
That's not how this works. OpenAI took investments for a reason. They benefit from the MSFT relationship. Harming that relationship will be bad for them (maybe not catastrophically bad, but significantly bad). I would be surprised if the relationship is not strained after this event since they have almost certainly created a major headache for MSFT (Satya is almost certainly fielding questions from his own board about this).
I’m pretty sure it’s catastrophically bad. OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft happened when ChatGPT took off at insane rates and OpenAI experienced scaling troubles. There was literally no one except a handful of cloud operators—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. who could provide enough GPUs to keep things running. Microsoft basically stepped in and said “we’ll provide the GPUs and pay the hosting bill for half the profits.” OpenAI now runs everything, from ChatGPT inference to GitHub copilot to GPT-5 training on Azure GPU instances.
If Satya is as pissed as it sounds like he is, and if Ilya et al double down on their madness, Microsoft could back out and shut that all off tomorrow. OpenAI would be dead in the water, with no running product and no path to recovery.
Professional boards of directors are supposed to be attentive to the risks to the organization as a whole, regardless of whatever weird ass governance structure exists.
Blowing out your CEO on a Friday afternoon and then accusing him of lying is not the way to do this, and they are likely to find out why come Monday morning at about 9:30AM Eastern.
This was my reaction as well. If a competent doctor had prescribed her medication and she took herself off of it without medical supervision, I think it is pretty reasonable to condition money on going back on medication (or at least going back to medical supervision). Many people who have family members struggling with mental health concerns take this approach.
Without question this extends to the other iBuyers in the market.
Zillow exiting because they could not make it work should be a massive alarm bell. Not only are they no longer buying new properties, they are liquidating their existing assets. You would not do that if you thought the market would come back to you.
I have a project related to an M&A of two mid-sized web hosting companies. I need a bunch of resources. Specific roles and tasks are listed below!
- C# .NET developer (some classic ASP) (x2)
The acquired company has some user-facing hosting management tools, as well as some internal tools that are used to manage the business. They need to maintain and extend these tools.
The acquiring company has a large client who needs a custom cloud server provisioning application completed.
- Microsoft Dynamics expert (x1, maybe more depending on complexity)
The two companies have separate Dynamics deployments that need to be merged and extended.
- Zimbra expert (x1, maybe more depending on complexity)
The acquired company has 55,000 email accounts currently hosted on an old version of Zimbra. They need to upgrade Zimbra to the latest version and limit breakage.
- Ceph expert (x1, maybe more depending on complexity)
The acquiring company needs someone to manage their Ceph environment. I don't have too much detail on this one, other than Ceph is a thing they need to deal with.
- Flexiant expert (x1)
As a hosting company trying to go after AWS, they need someone to handle scripting their virtual machines, or so I gather. Like the Ceph expert above, there is not a lot that I know about this particular task right now.
This is likely going to be a 3-6 month full-time contract for all of the above resources. If you are local to the Phoenix area, a full-time position as a C# dev is quite possible as well.
I need to fill these positions immediately, so if you or someone you know is interested, please email me at my HN uname (AT) Google's famous email service.
Pay is negotiable depending on experience! Make me an offer!
