Microsoft joins OpenAI’s board with Sam Altman officially back as CEO

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 183 points –
Microsoft joins OpenAI’s board with Sam Altman officially back as CEO
theverge.com
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I don't know how it will eventually happen, but Microsoft is going to own everything open ai someday. They are playing the long game

Yeah this feels like some kind of coup

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Lol no.

They aren't going to extinguish OpenAI, they are going to use their tech for everything

Extinguish isn't about snuffing the tech out, it's about pushing everyone else out of the market after you have extended it in a proprietary fashion and used your market dominance to create a defacto monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,\_extend,\_and\_extinguish

That'd only work with proprietary tech.

AI is pure math and that math is freely available. There are already many competitors with similar functionality and there isn't much Microsoft can do to change that.

EEE has been used against open source tools in the past (it's where the extend part comes in), and crushing competition with the full weight of the MS machine is kinda the point. I think you're being too quick to handwave it away, but I'd love to be wrong. In any case, not interested in changing your mind enough to argue with you about it. Have a nice day!

No, they are going to sell the tech to others, microsoft doesnt know what to do with it. Extinguish doesn't mean the thing no longer exists, it means that the entity openai, and it's mission and what it was created for gets extinguished. And microsofts version of that geared towards shareholder value

They're going to extinguish the ability of others to use it to displace them

That would mean having a monopoly on computation, which is never gonna happen.

My speculation is that they paid Sutskever a lot of money to go away and keep his mouth shut

They already do. Their licensing agreement with OpenAI is crazily favourable to them. They have basically unlimited rights to use OpenAI's tech forever, and have a claim on most of OpenAI's future profits.

right now they have a very favourable deal, but don't control the for-profit entity or the non-profit entity (officially) - which means all they can actually leverage is the tech that openai makes for their own uses.

and microsoft making things often just flops hard, look at what they are doing with it, your start menu talks to you now.

the goal is not to have a favourable deal, it's to grow shareholder value by owning openai in 6-7 years

Exactly what I was thinking.

That’s a hell of a “non-profit” to “mother of for-profit monopolists” transition. Obviously it had started years ago and this past few weeks was just the calamitous release of pent-up tension. But still, Microsoft of all companies.

The firing and subsequent rehire/board change was clearly orchestrated in a way to benefit Altman and Microsoft. I don't have the hate boner for Microsoft that most Lemmy users have, but it's not a particularly great sign of a healthy tech company your "owner" feels the need to pull a stunt like this.

Yea I wasn’t trying to channel any particular Microsoft hate. You could probably sub any of the big tech companies in. Either way it’s a massive for-profit to the point of pushing the lines of monopolism.

Yeah, at this point, it feels like beating a dead horse, but somehow they're still doing Embrace-Extend-Extinguish...