This exactly. When someone offers you $20B, it's hard to turn it down. In Adobe's case, $20B is a bargain price to stifle a competitor.
Even if Figma founders didn't want to sell, all the VCs and other investors would force the hand.
1,013 karma · joined June 15, 2020
Even if Figma founders didn't want to sell, all the VCs and other investors would force the hand.
Sure it could be a useful show of solidarity but I'm skeptical on the hypothetical conversion rate of these petition signers to actually quitting to follow Sam to Microsoft (or wherever else). Maybe 20% (140) of staff would do it?
The true winners are likely OpenAI's competitors Google and Meta. Whatever the outcome with Sam's OpenAI future, surely this circus slows their momentum and raises doubts for 3rd party developers.
Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.
Maybe Sam had been trying to broker a sale of the company without consulting the board first? All speculation until more details are revealed but he must've done something of similar magnitude.
Because different than the ARM chip also announced in the same Ignite event, Microsoft doesn't exactly "need" nor can fully utilize an AI chip. Google trains its foundational models (e.g. Gemini) on its own TPU hardware but Microsoft's is heavily reliant on OpenAI for its generative AI serving needs.
Unless Microsoft is planning to acquire OpenAI fully and switch over from Nvidia hardware...
An obvious rule of thumb is for "Pro"-branded laptops to only use "Pro"-branded chips. It's what they follow for the iPhone lineup, but I suppose iPad Pros also use non-Pro chips. Just seems like a very confusing SKU to create, and definitely something Steve wouldn't approve of.
Interesting that there's no hint of its relative single-thread performance. Wonder how the custom Oryon core stacks up against the ARM vanilla X4.
A near-perfect example is Qualcomm's switch of its Snapdragon SOCs to 64-bit to catch up to Apple with its SD 808 and 810 lineup. But those were notorious for overheating and it wasn't until the later SD 820 and 835 - but by then Apple's A-series performance lead was significantly greater.
Also others noted, hardware performance is only 1/2 of the equation - the software OS, drivers, and apps all also need to be optimized. Microsoft seems to be perennially struggling in its Windows-to-ARM transition so certainly doesn't help matters.
The dark horse is the ongoing ARM-Qualcomm lawsuit to unwind its Nuvia acquisition and prevent the IP from being used in future products. If that comes to fruition, then guaranteed there'll be huge delays.
Notably "By contrast, the Un-contract is all give, no take. You can keep your existing Simple Choice plan and we won’t raise your rates. As part of this commitment, customers on existing Simple Choice promotional plans − like the Un-carrier’s ultra-popular 4 lines for $100 with up to 10 GB of 4G LTE data − can keep them for as long as they’re T-Mobile customers."
Seems like a shut-and-close case for a class action lawsuit. Whoever made the decision to push ahead with this seems to have missed some internal due diligence - or there's some tiny legal footnotes I'm missing.
Either Microsoft is completely incompetent in its supply chain management since a comparable Asus, HP, Dell laptop is at most 1/2 price for similar specs. Or grossly overpricing the design. Heck even the reviewer mentioned a $300 Gateway laptop surpassing this easily.
No wonder Panos Panay jumped ship. Uncertain whether he signed off on one this willingly or forced to.
Makes sense since Microsoft seems to be increasingly weaning off hardware, aside from Xbox. Their hardware refreshes for the Surface lineup have been very slow and counterintuitive (e.g. what happened to the AMD-powered lineup). Uncertain how much influence Panay had but as the hardware chief for Surface, I expected more.
I wonder if government will end up enacting any legislation or this scrutiny will blow over until something egregious happens (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). They've shown zero willingness to legislate any consumer data privacy laws so far.
Dex actually works starting with the S20 series I believe, with the same feature parity as the latest devices. So you could pickup a cheap used S20 device to try it out.
One reason for this slow transition is likely due to the legacy software support requirements. Microsoft seems to have vastly overestimated the complexity involved in porting Windows OS to ARM through its many attempts: first with Windows RT, followed by Windows 10S, and most recently tighter developer hardware tie-in with Project Volterra. Apple probably isn't too keen to follow this playbook - opting instead to just keep iOS and macOS separate and gradually drop x86 support entirely from macOS.
As an occasional Samsung Dex user, the benefit of having "one device to rule them all" is obvious and overall experience has been good. But to play devil's advocate, Samsung's revenues is heavily hardware-based so they'd much prefer to sell you multiple devices.
But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?
It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.
Sure there are competitors like Google but so far OpenAI is the leader and doesn't seem to be slowing down. The market could evolve into a natural duopoly, especially given the huge capital expenditures and technical know-how required to stand up and maintain a cutting edge LLM like GPT-4.
Once GPT-4/chatGPT reaches a certain tipping point for disruption, and public sentiment turns from curiosity to fear, the resulting backlash and scrutiny could be on the level of Microsoft's antitrust case in the 1990s. If I were Sam, I'd be pouring resources and money into DC to try to get ahead of this coming storm.
This seems like a no-brainer next step for OpenAI, to derive an AI instructor from GPT-4 without a partner like Khan Academy. I suppose that may require a "truer" multimodality of ChatGPT being able to generate images or visual patterns. Imagine being able to onboard new employees via such an agent or learning about complex subjects.
Haven't we heard this narrative before with other disruptive technologies such as self-driving technology? No one doubts the potential changes wrought by GPT-4 but it's a long, rocky road ahead. Protectionism policies created by governments are already coming to the forefront, like ChatGPT being banned in NYC schools.
Overall it seems GPT-4 is an incremental upgrade to GPT-3.5 and not a major jump between GPT-2 vs. GPT-3. We might have to wait until GPT-6 to see these forecasted workforce displacement changes to affect en-masse.
But in recent years Nvidia has added harder gating in between their products, the biggest being SLI or NVLink support reduced starting with Pascal and now entirely dropped in the latest Ada Lovelace generation. Effectively forcing you to buy the professional chips.
A different angle - how long before Google, Microsoft, and Amazon design and deploy their own "GPUs" instead of buying from Nvidia? They've all started with their own ARM SOCs so surely it's inevitable.
This would allow them to innovate quickly on the new tech without worrying about the baggage and backend migrations required for the first approach. Otherwise it could slow things to a crawl and risk of being leapfrogged by Microsoft. We saw a similar scenario play out for YouTube Shorts - it took 2-3 years of beta testing to avoid disrupting the core YouTube content but that allowed TikTok to firmly entrench itself.
There was a HN thread on this a while ago where consensus was serving cost ~$0.03-0.05 PER query, which is absolutely huge. Adds more credence to OpenAI's new subscription model of $20/month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390123
I'm most curious about how Microsoft is planning to pay for the infrastructure cost of serving the traffic.
1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and Fujifilm focusing on the high end.
2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand".
Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.
On a more serious note, there is real value-add for small restaurants as it allows them to offload the delivery part of their business - and focus on the food preparation. But that could be localized and/or turned into a SaaS product.
Interesting description as that's similar to the perception of Facebook when it was first widely launched. It was even popularized in films like The Social Network with the insinuation it was designed by nerds make their lives less isolated.
Look at where we are 10 years later...
Success is more dictated by 4 main constraints or factors: - Game selection and support - Price point - System performance (including storage) - Innovative-ness or accessibility
Successful consoles typically met at least 3 of the above. For example the Nintendo Switch had very mediocre system performance, but it had great (1st party) game support, priced lower than competing XBox and PS4, and seemed very approachable for all demographics.
Why didn't it launch as a true "Netflix for Games" solution? Similar to what Microsoft is doing now with its Gamepass. Sure the gaming partnerships needed to be built but could've easily leveraged huge library of Android games.
Ultimately will be curious to see how many heads will roll for this. It must've been a huge investment for both hardware (AMD Vega GPUs, controllers), marketing, etc.