this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openai's actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.

there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which I'll quote in full because they are so amusing to me

Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The first paragraph surprised me. I didn't know there were still some true believers left.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think I see a possible future here. Just as the promptfondlers are now trying to talk down human accomplishments to make the LLMs sound more impressive ('it learns just like a child!' (no, it doesn't)). As when you are trying to reach a deal on a car, you either need the buyer to raise the price, or the seller to lower theirs. This will lead to a lawsuit where they are going to drop down the theoretical capabilities of an AGI just to trigger this clause.

And as the judge thinks that emoji's are a form of novelty pasta, any potential jury can't spell stattistical, there is a 50% chance that they will be convinced it is AGI because humans like the AGI also make mistakes.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Still unclear how OpenAI declaring they've created an AGI (and getting this adjudicated as "true") and thus being released from their MSFT partnership helps OpenAI. They're just lost all their compute, and will have a worse negotiating position from which to get more compute. What's the upside?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago
[–] rook@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago

They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.