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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

By joining Microsoft, they retain access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI. They don't have to start from scratch and ramp up. They can start up right where they left off.

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Care to elaborate? Microsoft funding OpenAI doesn’t grant them right to just grab intellectual properties.

Microsoft's deal with OpenAI grants Microsoft access to OpenAI's technology --- at least until AGI arrives

This is like a spacecraft research nonprofit working on faster than light travel promising Boeing 100% of the rights to any of their technology that's sub-light speed. I give even odds that they'll never achieve "AGI," or when it happens it'll be an incremental gain made by simply wiring existing technologies together that'll be obvious to any engineer competent in the field and thus easily duplicated.

How is it decided that "AGI" has arrived?

The OpenAI nonprofit board does, AIUI. That means OpenAI can, in theory, cut off everything from this day forward (by declaring GPT-5 or whatever as "AGI"), but they can't cut off access to GPT-4.

Microsoft also doesn’t give many GPUs to internal researchers so this has a long way to run yet.

Wouldn’t surprise me if Sam and Greg are back on the startup path by week end.

This just seems like PR to give MS a way to paper things over after such an abrupt firing.

What makes you think it wouldn't change after Sam and Greg join the team? AFAIK the reason Microsoft scaled down their research division (including GPUs) was because they were no where close to OpenAI despite years of investment.

Not true MSFT has never given good GPUs hence why they never published any SOTA challenging models

Sam is coming on as the CEO of a whole new group. This is like Cruise. Very exciting.

Weights are not intellectual property.

It does except for the AGI. That was part of the multi-billion deal with Microsoft.

I don't know the full details, but their licence is clearly quite broad, as well as being exclusive and irrevocable.

Your comment got me thinking, it's not just all the current access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI, it's also everything that will come out of OpenAI in the future.

Remember, Microsoft has an exclusive license to all models that come out of OpenAI until they reach the pre-agreed income threshold, which given the current trajectory of OpenAI, will not happen anytime soon.

I wonder if the OpenAI board will shut down the for-profit to avoid handing the tech to Microsoft now...

I wouldn't put it past them. There's never in history been as large and as wilful destruction of value as what we saw this weekend. The lawsuits will be fascinating.

Does the Microsoft deal let Microsoft continue training from e.g. the GPT-4 weights?

I guess at least it gives them access to the OpenAI models to use internally, which they kinda need as their ways of working (Greg especially) will be highly dependent on having them now.

Not sure about the IP, but the team can get whatever they have access in the past. It certainly speed up the restart process

Not only that, Microsoft in practice is OpenAI's customer. So somehow OpenAI will be working for them.

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