> The fact that we did not lose a single customer will drive us to work even harder for you, and we are all excited to get back to work.
I'm not a big customer, but I am starting the process of moving away from OpenAI in response to these events
I'm not a big customer, but I am starting the process of moving away from OpenAI in response to these events
I guess my subscription didn’t count as a customer.
The other possibility is that they are lying to cover their ass, but they would never do that… right?
It was kind of eye-opening - they took phone calls form late-night tv infomercials and there was a script.
They would take down your name, take your order, and then... upsell, cross-sell, special offer sell, etc.
If the person said anything like "I'm not interested in this, blah blah", they had responses for everything. "But other people have quite upset when they didn't receive these very special offers and called back to complain"
It was carefully calculated. It was refined. It was polished and tested.
The only way OUT of the script was to say "I will cancel my order unless you stop"
If the call center operator didn't follow the script, they would be fired.
(You know this happens now with websites at scale. A/B test until the cancellation message is scary enough. A/B test until you give up on the privacy policy.)
Hanging up the phone is always an option. If you feel civilised you first say you are not interested and thank the sales person for their time, and then hang up no matter what they try to say. That is a way out of the script of course.
Ten years ago I would have found it really difficult to hang up on some random phone caller that I didn't want to speak to. Now I don't give it a second thought.
Inch by inch we'rkke all getting ruder and ruder to deal with these motherfuckers, and I can't help but feel that it is spilling out into regular interactions. I would hate to be in mmmmk
I think a lot of people will just leave your site and go elsewhere vs bother to provide feedback.
I think the true customers of OpenAI are likely not the people paying for a ChatGPT subscription, but paying to use their APIs which is significantly harder to just step away from.
You users aren't the customer you think you are.
Microsoft and big contracts are the customers.
It wouldn't shock me to learn all of the events that took place were to get worldwide attention, and strengthen their financial footprint. I'd imagine not being able to be fired, and having the entire company ready to quit to follow you, sends a pretty clear signal to all VC that hitching your cart to any other AI wagon is suicide, because the bulletproof ceo has literally the people at the cutting edge of the entire market ready to go wherever he does. How could anyone give funding to a company besides his at this point? Might as well catch it on fire if you're going to give it to someone else's company.
EDIT: The fact that me, average joe, knows all about open ai and its CEO, and even some of its engineers, yet didn't know Kagi was doing anything with AI until your comment, tells me that Kagi is not any sort of competition, not as far as VCs are concerned, anyway.
But that's the not the main problem. Even if people did share your opinion it wouldn't matter. ChatGPT is a tool. It is a hammer.
People are concerned about the effectiveness of a tool. They are not concerned about whether the hammer has any ethical "misalignments."
agree and why did they go from internal politics -> external politics (large scale external politics)
Well, that’s better for Sam, sure, but that just invites more speculation. That speculation is fed by a series of statements and leaks and bizarre happenings. All of that is newsworthy.
The most consistently asked question I got from various family over thanksgiving beyond the basic pleasantries was “so what’s up with OpenAI?” - it went way outside of the tech bubble.
My guess is it has something to do with the hundreds of employees whose net worth is mostly tied up in OpenAI equity. It's hard to leverage hundreds of people in a bid for power without everyone and their mother finding out about it, especially in such a high-profile organization. This was a potentially life-changing event for a surprisingly large group of people.
They didn't, though. They threatened to continue tomorrow!
It's called "walking across the street" and there's an expression for it because it's a thing that happens if governance fails but Makers gonna Make.
Microsoft was already running the environment, with rights to deliver it to customers, and added a paycheck for the people pouring themselves into it. The staff "threatened" to maintain continuity (and released the voice feature during the middle of the turmoil!).
Maybe relying on a business where the employees are almost unanimously determined to continue the mission is a safer bet than most.
Are you saying ~80% of OpenAI employees did not threaten to stop being employees of OpenAI during this kerfuffle?
At the end of the day, when you're using a good or service, are you getting into bed with the good/service? Or the company who makes it? If you've been buying pies from Anne's Bakery down the street, and you really like those pies, and find out that the person who made the pies started baking them at Joe's Diner instead, and Joe's Diner is just as far from your house and the pies cost about the same, you're probably going to go to Joe's Diner to get yourself some apple pie. You're probably not going to just start eating inferior pies, you picked these ones for a reason.
Blaming the board the hindered OpenAI mission by firing Altman but at the same time threaten to work for MS which would kill that mission completely.
No OpenAI no GPT.
It's far more common that if I'm building on you, if you blow up, I automatically own the stuff.
But they don't own it. If OpenAI goes down they have the rights of nothing.
This is almost certainly false.
As a CTO at largest banks and hedge funds and serial founder of multiple Internet companies, I assure you contracts for novel and "existential" technologies the buyer builds on top of are drafted with rights to the buyer that protect them in event of seller blowing up.
Two of the most common provisions are (a) code escrow w/ perpetual license (you blow up, I keep the source code and rights to continue it) and (b) key person (you fire whoever I did the deal with, that triggers the contract, we get the stuff). Those aren't ownership before blowup, they turn into ownership in the event of anything that costs stability.
I'd argue Satya's public statement on the Friday the news broke ("We have everything we need..."), without breaching confidentiality around actual terms of the agreement, signaled Microsoft has that nature of contract.
Nothing beats OpenAI at the moment. Nothing is even close.
Same reason I’m hesitant to wire up my home with IoT devices (just a personal example). Nothing to do with politics, I’m just afraid companies will drop support and all the things I invested in will stop working.
Our time is finite.
Sounds like they would like to have the devices but have a hard time pulling the trigger for a fear of sinking money into to something temporary.
They are clearly not responsible enough to deal with their own internal problems maturely. They have proven themselves irresponsible. They are not trustworthy. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they cannot be trusted to deal with anybody or any issue responsibly.
The motivations of individuals, the trade-offs of organizations, the culture of development teams - none of those are "politics".
And neither is the fundamental hierarchical and governance structure of big companies. They influence the stability of architectures, the design of APIs, the operational priorities. It is absolutely reasonable to have one's confidence in depending on the technology of a company based on the shenanigans OpenAI went through.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
Hopefully recent events were enough of a wake up call for regulators and the unaware.
But there are so many unanswered questions still and the lack of transparency is an issue, as is the cult like behavior that can be observed recently.
https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410
Like in a cult.
>"Not this again!"<
I am unenlightened by your short missive. Perhaps there you could point to something clarifying your intent - something like, say:
"This has been previously discussed ad nauseum in the Fortune magazine article at URL..."
or
"Here's a similar post and the details of OpenAI URL."
Thank you.
I have not gathered the statistics that you undoubtedly have compiled. Please feel free to post them here in support of your grammar specificity for the usage of "HN trope".
There was however a post titled "Why big tech companies need so many people" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34734655
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quickthrower2 says >" Usually because you can build something that looks like it in a weekend"<
Yes, but that is a fair comparison, n'est-ce pas?
Q. How many programmers and engineers does it take to build an LLM and fire it up?
Some here implicitly speak as if they are familiar with LLMs, and so I assumed that the answer could be 1, 2 or possibly a handful of people to do the deed. But it seems I am very wrong.
Nonetheless by the time one has 700+ employees, surely someone in charge would have noticed that the room was crowded.
And why not the same at 500, or 200 or even 50 or fewer?
Perhaps the lack of oxygen has something to do with it? Might I suggest opening a window or two?
Scaling up - static website is enuf.
Site Reliability - ditto.
Front End Web - ditto.
Necessary items:
Ops - Gotta have someone who understands computers! Yes.
Research - Here's the work. Yes.
Training - No. Hire people carefully, fire quickly.
Legal - minimal - hire a small law firm.
So ~700 people mostly in Research and some cash for Legal? The scope of work must far exceed the scope of the task. Time to trim.
Comparisons to Google makes no sense.
"Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk...
In discussing OpenAI the article reveals why OpenAI is the size it is:
OpenAI was created before LLMs were so popular, so OpenAI has a diverse employee pool of AI people. Many, if not most, were hired NOT for LLM or even NN knowledge but for knowledge of the more general field of AI.
Were you an OpenAI exec who fervently believed LLMs would take you to true AI then there would be every reason to dump the non-LLM employees (likely a majority and a financial burden) and hire new staff who are more LLM-knowledgeable. At the same time, current OpenAI staff not familiar with LLMs are undoubtedly cramming!8-))
So that satisfies my question as to why OpenAI has so many people: only a fraction of the company produced the current hot products.
https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410#m
"The early employees have the most $$$$ to lose and snort the company koolaid [...] They were calling people in the middle of the night"
"The before ChatGPT [employees] are cultists and Sam Altman bootlickers"
From anonymous posts on Blind, current/former OpenAI employee
Co-pilot is already much more refined in terms of business value than the various OpenAI products. If you’ve never worked in a massive organisation you probably wouldn’t believe the amount of efficiency it’s added to meetings by being able to make readable PowerPoints or useful summaries by recoding a meeting, but it’s going to save us trillion of euro just for that.
Then there is there data protection issues with OpenAI. You wouldn’t put anything important into their products, but you would with Microsoft. So co-pilot can actually help with things like contract management, data-refinement and so on.
Of course it’s sort of silly to say that you aren’t buying OpenAI products when you’re buying them through Microsoft, but the difference is there. But if you included Microsoft in your statement, then I agree, there is no competition. I like Microsoft as a IT-business partner for Enterprise, I like them a lot, but it also scares me a little how much of a monopoly on “office” products they have now. There was already little to no competition to Office365 and now there is just none whatsoever.
> you probably wouldn’t believe the amount of efficiency it’s added to meetings by being able to make readable PowerPoints or useful summaries by recoding a meeting
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/w...
Edit: I misunderstood the ask, my apologies.