Not really, that’s why OpenAI gets so much attention, they’re just by far leading the field. Amazon has a copilot alternative though that just does basic completions, I think.
Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don’t know if I would use the word “great”.
GPT-4… not really. Unless you’ve got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you’re not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the “average” person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the “basic” models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.
If you’re willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you’re basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.
So many people here are eager to determine who the money-grubbers are, but here I am just curious what the material disagreement actually is, and how MSFT fits into it.
Seems to me like the board of directors and leadership are mostly aligned on the underlying goals, but disagree on how to approach achieving them.
They’re all money grubbers. The board are part of a rationalist cult called Effective Altruism that claims to want to save humanity, but they believe they need lots of money to do this (Sam Bankman-fried is an EA guy.)
Sam Altman is also nominally part of this group, but also hangs out with people like musk and Rishi Sunak. He’s more like your typical alt-right tech bro.
I’m guessing Microsoft fits in basically having seen an opportunity and swept in. I doubt they have any “angle” in this other than “oh shit big name tech guy just lost his job and he’s skilled in stuff we want to be skilled in? grab him now”
I’ve been really surprised that the blanket promise to pay the legal bills of folks who may or may not be operating under fair use has not been a bigger part of this conversation. Particularly as this new line of user customized gpt products already includes PAYING the people who build these sometimes illegal products. The money incinerator continues.
I’m not convinced this wasn’t a planned strategy to get OpenAI back in the headlines for a week.
I didn’t think so at first but now that it looks like everything will go back to “normal” before the US Thanksgiving Weekend, I feel like maybe this was a “Chinese Firedrill” to get attention for something other than their training data and legal problems.
Who thinks some Ultra Intelligent General AI is already running things behind the scenes of openAI and threatens the humans of the company if they didn’t bring back the guy who serves the AI.
This is such a confusing and messy situation. There is definitely more going on that we dont know about. I already posted this in another thread but:
heres what I think could be going on:
tinfoil hat on
Some Microsoft bigwigs read the OpenAI foundation contract again and realise that they gave them a bunch of money but didnt get the nonprofit, and that they are now fully dependant on them, and that Altman is an experienced shark that knows this. They cant just buy the non-profit, the board would never agree. So they hatch a plan.
They get the lead researcher and a bunch of board members riled up against Altman, with a bunch of dirt they have on him. They tell them hes going to run off with the money and show some proof. The board decides to fire Altman. In the same breath but in another room microsoft hires altman, and promise all openAI employees employment at their new openAI bootleg. They then tell the board through the official channels, that they fucked up and need to resign.
Now, the situation was like this:
Either the board resigns, and microsoft gets to put some puppets in their place and complete buying openAI
The board doesnt resign, microsoft gets all their employees and the company in anything but name and openAI slowly fades in relevancy until Microsoft makes a generous offer of 150% above what they are worth(half of their price right now)
either way, microsoft wins.
so yeah, I think the next thing we are going to see is microsoft buying more openAI and getting actual control, or a complete buy.
Sadly, I think you’re absolutely right. This feels orchestrated in a way that allows a select few parties to look like visionaries, while eliminating others from getting in the way.
but thats exactly why they did it! They want to be majority shareholder to get the company under their control, and the board was likely against putting more shares on the market!
Here it says that just a month ago, there were rumors that they would do it, but then it didnt happen, so I believe altman wanted to but the board did not.
Wait, just so I get this right… The board fired him; Then members of the board wanted him back; Now he’s back and replaced the board too? - so did he pull an uno reverse on the board of directors or what? How the fuck does that shit work?
The entire company (literally almost all the employees) threatened to quit and take jobs at Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated and the board removed. And that’s exactly what has happened.
I don’t really have an opinion on this Sam guy or why his employees want to drink his bathwater, but it’s an interesting example of the employees of a company unifying behind somebody.
He’s a financial venture capitalist type who made open AI closed source, and tried to pressure the EU into not regulating AI.
He’s your typical shitbag tech CEO masquerading as a genius. Employees want him back because it’s better for their RSUs/stock options. Bunch of greedy assholes from top to bottom.
Have you heard of that creepy orb thing that was installed in a bunch of African developing countries that traded a shitcoin cryptocurrency that is worth nothing and constantly loses more and more value, in exchange for appropriating people’s biometric data, that additionally has never said why they want it or what they want to do with all of that information?
That’s this guy. He’s the creator and owner of that thing. Dude is a comic supervillain.
I’m still wondering why he was even fired in the first place. I’d thought that perhaps I just hadn’t paid proper enough attention and missed the reason, but nope, no reason was ever given.
They have been asked to provide that by the media, the first temporary CEO they named, and their investors, some of which even threatened to sue of they didn’t disclose it. So either it is something so discriminating to the board they’re willing to rather sink with it, or they actually don’t have anything solid at all and fired him without cause bue to something personal/unprofessional.
We fired the guy for a reason, it was a good reason honest, no we’re not going to tell you what it was. Anyway we’ve hired him back now so it’s fine, stop asking questions.
There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.
Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.
I’m not sure if I’d call this an investor win. More or less 90% of the company threatened to leave. It made sense on their part to do whatever it took to get him back. Anyways, looks like he stopped for a couple seconds to think about how smart it really was to join Microsoft.
The “Private investor” in this case is Microsoft, which “graciously” offered to bring all the staff into their own new AI project. This is 100% an investor (a.k.a microsoft) win.
Well, kind of. It’s a bad look for MS to be so heavily invested in such a dumpster fire of a corporation, so it’s okay for them it got resolved, but they would have won out more if Altman had joined them. It was the other investors, including a number of employees, who would have really lost out if the company had just collapsed in on itself like it immediately started doing. This got resolved sort of against MS’s best interests.
So, sure, investor win. But MS more or less lost this one.
I generally agree that it’s unlikely the non-profit structure is going to do its job here, I’ve seen something like it more or less work on a smaller scale with things that are less intensely of interest to the entire capitalist class, although I have no idea what kind of regulations we’d end up with considering how many oligopolists are involved.
It’s hard to tell from the outside - but at the beginning it mainly looked like pressure from the investors. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been a lot of activity from them behind the scenes, and the “90% leaving” part wasn’t really “standing up for Altman”, but more “follow the money”, with investors possibly pressuring employees in various ways.
The reason that makes the most sense in one of the articles I’ve read is that they fired him after he tried to push out one of the board members.
Replacing that board member with an ally would have cemented control over the board for a time. They might not have felt his was being honest in his motives for the ousting, so it was basically fire now, or lose the option to fire him in the future.
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