Technology

well you have about 4-6 years to find another job then, like it or not, OpenAI is going to be owned by Microsoft

I can’t blame them. Working for a huge company can suck in a lot of ways.

But since OpenAI still makes people move to SF and shlep into an office every day, I don’t want to work there either.

At this stage, I’d say it’s 50/50 whether OpenAI is a net positive for the world. I’m not talking about the chatbot coming to life and enslaving humanity. Just making it easy to flood the internet with SPAM, fake images, etc. is going to be awful for the internet and, possibly, humanity for a bit.

I also wouldn’t be shocked if the technology does have tremendous benefits (like DeepMind with protein folding) that outweigh the downsides. But let’s see what the sewer rats of capitalism and Machiavellian political actors do with it before anyone pops the champagne about “changing the world.”

Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup "look down on what they consider legacy companies" and "see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world."

I despise Microsoft's advertising and some of its anti-competitive practices, but man, fuck these out of touch, clout chasing, dorks. Microsoft has been making products for 30 years that are stable enough for most of the world's companies to build successful businesses on top of.

There are flat out no SV companies that can claim the same longevity, and only one or two, like Google / Salesforce, that actually enable the rest of the economy in any meaningful way.

SV is a beautiful place and the money that flows into it makes it seem like paradise, but it also deludes everyone there into thinking that they're vastly smarter and more important than they actually are.

As a long time techie, and somebody that's run Linux as my main OS for over 20yrs, hard to hate MS more than me, but, MS is a very different company now than in years past. They've come pretty far from the days of Ballmer destroying it, directly involved with more Open source shit now, Azure is literally Linux, they have people working physically with Canonical on all the WSL shit, they're trying at least.

Still wouldn't run garbage Windows for shit, but credit where credit is due.

My favorite part about the Microsoft translation is that MS reportedly had to go out and buy a bunch of MacOS machines for the Open AI folks because they didn’t want to use the operating system that their future employer made.

I wonder if Apple’s two week return policy works for enterprise purchases of hundreds of machines.

people working at the San Francisco-based startup "look down on what they consider legacy companies"

I can't help the feeling Altman is the great leader of all them, who love to look down on us.

It’s the money . Always the money . They talk about where they like to work, but it’s about their stock.

We will try really, really hard to believe that. Or is letting the wolf in better?

I don't want to go to work. Period.

They already do, who do they think called the shots when Altman was tossed out? Santa Claus?

people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”

With the rumors that the ethics board was worried about OpenAI and Altman moving too fast to truly consider ethics... This checks out. Startups are truly a different beast to larger "legacy companies", who move slower because they have checks and balances and a reputation to maintain.

I do think Microsoft would have given them a lot of leeway though, given the gold mine they were about to be sitting on. Staying at the front of the copilot race is critically important right now, and as Microsoft continues to move all its Office 365 services to the web and cross-connect them, it's even more important for them to have a copilot for Enterprise clients that spans and can pull data from all those services.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

After Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI late last month, the startup's employees threatened to leave and accept a blanket offer from Microsoft to hire them all.

After the sudden ouster of their CEO, hundreds of OpenAI employees signed an open letter demanding Altman's reinstatement and the resignation of the board.

At the time, their main source of leverage was a plan to all quit and join Altman and President Greg Brockman at a new AI group within Microsoft.

The letter itself was drafted by a group of longtime staffers who have the most clout and money at stake with years of industry standing and equity built up, as well as higher pay.

While OpenAI staffers would have followed through with their threat and joined Microsoft, they probably would have left at the first opportunity for other AI startups such as Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Cohere, the employee added.

Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup "look down on what they consider legacy companies" and "see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world."

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