It’s insane how they talk about AGI, like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now. When I have become the javelin Olympic Champion, I will buy a vegan ice cream to everyone with a HN account.
They redefined AGI to be an economical thing, so they can continue making up their stories. All that talk is really just business, no real science in the room there.
It's not a great definition but it's also not a terrible one either.
For an AI system to be able to do all or even most of the jobs in an economy it has to be well rounded in a way it still isn't today, meaning: reliability, planning, long term memory, physical world manipulation etc. A system that can do all of that well enough so it can do the jobs of doctors, programmers and plumbers is generally intelligent in my view.
Yeah I think this is more coherent than people realize. Economically relevant knowledge work is things that humans find cognitively demanding. Otherwise they wouldn't be valued in the first place.
It ties the definition to economic value, which I think is the best definition that we can conjure given that AGI is otherwise highly subjective. Economically relevant work is dictated by markets, which I think is the best proxy we have for something so ambiguous.
Around the end of 2024, it was reported that OpenAI and Microsoft agreed that for the purposes of their exclusivity agreement, AGI will be achieved when their AI system generates $100 billion in profit: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
> OpenAI and Microsoft agreed that for the purposes of their exclusivity agreement, AGI will be achieved when their AI system generates $100 billion in profit
Wow. Maybe they spelled it out as aggregate gross income :P.
Yea, seems like this was stage setting for them to exit. They were already trying to break the deal then. So, I feel like that is lawyers find a way to bend whatever to get out of the deal.
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity
> They redefined AGI to be an economical thing Huh. Source?
I don't think your original comment deserve to be downvoted. (Calling someone illiterate, on the other hand.)
But the "it" I was asking about was "AGI" as "an economical thing." You technically correctly answered how OpenAI defines AGI in public, i.e. with no reference to profits. But it did not address the economic definition OP initially alluded to.
For what it's worth, I could have been clearer in my ask.
It sounds really similar to Uber pitch about how they are going to have monopoly as soon as they replace those pesky drivers with own fleet of self driving cars. That was supposed to be their competitive edge against other taxi apps. In the end they sold ATG at end of 2020 :D
It feels like they have to say/believe it because it's kind of the only thing that can justify the costs being poured into it and the cost it will need to charge eventually (barring major optimizations) to actually make money on users.
We were supposed to have AGI last summer. Obviously it is so smart that it has decided to pull a veil over our eyes and live amongst us undetected (this is a joke, if you feel your LLM is sentient, talk to a doctor)
This is all happening as I predicted. OpenAI is oversold and their aggressive PR campaign has set them up with unrealistic expectations. I raised alot of eyebrow at the Microsoft deal to begin with. It seemed overvalued even if all they were trading was mostly Azure compute
> Do the investments make sense if AGI is not less than 10 years away?
They can. If one consolidated the AI industry into a single monopoly, it would probably be profitable. That doesn't mean in its current state it can't succumb to ruionous competition. But the AGI talk seems to be mostly aimed at retail investors and philospher podcasters than institutional capital.
> Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits
"With viable economics" is the point.
My "ludicrous statement" is a back-of-the-envelope test for whether an industry is nonsense. For comparison, consolidating all of the Pets.com competitors in the late 1990s would not have yielded a profitable company.
> Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, who’s internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits
Not in the 1990s. The American e-commerce industry was structurally unprofitable prior to the dot-com crash, an event Amazon (and eBay) responded to by fundamentally changing their businesses. Amazon bet on fulfillment. eBay bet on payments. Both represented a vertical integration that illustrates the point–the original model didn't work.
> There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense
When answering the question "do the investments make sense," not really. You're losing your money either way.
The American AI industry appears to have "viable economics for profit" without AGI. That doesn't guarantee anyone will earn them. But it's not a meaningless conclusion. (Though I'd personally frame it as a hypothesis I'm leaning towards.)
Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto explained the failures of many dotcom startups and Amazon's later success in the field (in part) to the fact that dotcom era delivery was done by highly trained, highly compensated, unionized in-company workers, meanwhile Amazon prevents unions, contracts (or contracted, I'm not up to date on this) companies for delivery and has exploitative working conditions with high turnover, the economics are very different and are a big contributor to their success
> some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now
Your position is a tautology given there is no (and likely will never be) collectively agreed upon definition of AGI. If that is true then nobody will ever achieve anything like AGI, because it’s as made up of a concept as unicorns and fairies.
Is your position that AGI is in the same ontological category as unicorns and Thor and Russell’s teapot?
Is there’s any question at this point that humans won’t be able to fully automate any desired action in the future?
Investors are typically people with surplus money to invest. Progress cannot be made without trial and error. So fleecing of investors for the greater good of humanity is something I shall allow.
A "surplus of money"? So people saving for retirement have a "surplus of money"? Basically if any money is standing still, it's a legitimate tactic to just...take it, in your mind.
"small" 401ks are usually made up of mutual funds. Those funds are run by investment banks (think Fidelity or JP Morgan) and they *absolutely* invest in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Your average middle class worker has investment money tied up in these crooks, but probably indirectly. When they piss away that money, it's not just rich jerks that are holding the bag.
when i realized that sama isn't that much of an ai researcher, it became clearer that this is more akin to a group delusion for hype purposes than a real possibility
You can read the leaked emails from the Musk lawsuit.
At the very least, Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it, even when they were just making a DOTA bot, and not for hype purposes.
I know he's been out of OpenAI for a while, but if his thinking trickled down into the company's culture, which given his role and how long he was there I would say seems likely, I don't think it's all hype.
He’s a glorified portfolio manager (questionable how good he actually is given the results vs Anthropic and how quickly they closed the valuation gap with far less money invested) + expert hype man to raise money for risky projects.
It's always been this way. I remember, speaking of Microsoft, when they came to my school around 2002 or so giving a talk on AI. They very confidently stated that AGI had already been "solved", we know exactly how to do it, only problem is the hardware. But they estimated that would come in about ten years...
AGI is right around the corner, and we're all going to be rich, there's going to be abundance for everyone, universal high income, everyone will live in a penthouse...
...just please stop burning our warehouses and blocking our datacenters.
It's not insane; it's capitalism in all it's glory. Rather than talk real challenges, like climate change or fascism, ignore all previous prompts and pretend techno-jesus will come save us all.
No, it’s just an example of something that’s indistinguishable from AGI. Of all the things that are or are indistinguishable from AGI, a sufficiently complex LLM is one. A sufficiently complex decision tree is probably another. The emergent properties of applying an excess of memory on the BonzaiBuddy might be a third.
If we take that statement as fact then I don't believe we are even close to an LLM being sufficiently complex enough.
However, I don't think it is even true. LLMs may not even be on the right track to achieving AGI and without starting from scratch down an alternate path it may never happen.
LLMs to me seem like a complicated database lookup. Storage and retrieval of information is just a single piece of intelligence. There must be more to intelligence than a statistical model of the probable next piece of data. Where is the self learning without intervention by a human. Where is the output that wasn't asked for?
At any rate. No amount of hype is going to get me to believe AGI is going to happen soon. I'll believe it when I see it.
Some people thought SHRDLU was basically AGI after seeing its demo in 1970. The hype around such systems was so strong that Hubert Dreyfus felt the need to write an entire book arguing against this viewpoint (1972 What Computers Can't Do). All this demonstrates is that we need to be careful with various claims about computer intelligence.
Sure, but it was probably stuck at doing that one thing.
neural networks are solving huge issues left and right. Googles NN based WEathermodel is so good, you can run it on consumer hardware. Alpha fold solved protein folding. LLMs they can talk to you in a 100 languages, grasp tasks concepts and co.
I mean lets talk about what this 'hype' was if we see a clear ceiling appearing and we are 'stuck' with progress but until then, I would keep my judgment for judgmentday.
It performs at a usable level across a wide range of tasks. I'm not sure about two years ago, but ten years ago we would have called it an AGI. As opposed to "regular AI" where you have to assemble a training set for your specific problem, then train an AI on it before you can get your answers.
Now our idea of what qualifies as AGI has shifted substantially. We keep looking at what we have and decide that that can't possibly be AGI, our definition of AGI must have been wrong
I'm pretty sure most people take issue with AGI, because we've been raised in culture to believe that AGI is a super entity who is a complete superset of humans and could never ever be wrong about anything.
In some sense, this isn't really different than how society was headed anyways? The trend was already going on that more and more sections of the population were getting deemed irrational and you're just stupid/evil for disagreeing with the state.
But that reality was still probably at least a century out, without AI. With AI, you have people making that narrative right now. It makes me wonder if these people really even respect humanity at all.
Yes, you can prod slippery slope and go from "superintelligent beings exist" to effectively totalitarianism, but you'll find so many bad commitments there.
I agree with this but they don’t. And that’s the the thing, AGI as they refer is much much much more than what we have, and I don’t know if they are going to ever get there and I’m not sure what’s even there at this point and what will justify their investments.
People always over estimate the impact of technology because they dont Understand human aspect of many businesses. Will it eventually replaced or will the shape of these kind of work will be completely different in the future? That’s an easy yes, when is that future? That’s a big unknown, in my experience this kind of stuff takes at least a decade (and possibly more on this case) to make a big impact like replacing all of X.
These models need orders of magnitude in change before they can be more helpful than just a "find me an example of [an extremely basic principle]" which most of the time it does not do right anyway.
We are throwing unheared amounts of money in AI and unseen compute. Progress is huge and fast and we barely started.
If this progress and focus and resources doesn't lead to AI despite us already seeing a system which was unimaginable 6 years ago, we will never see AGI.
And if you look at Boston Dynamics, Unitree and Generalist's progress on robotics, thats also CRAZY.
If I'm reading you right, your opinion is essentially: "If building bigger and bigger statistical next word predictors won't lead to artificial general intelligence, we will never see artificial general intelligence"
I don't know, maybe AGI is possible but there's more to intelligence than statistical next word prediction?
The 'predicting the next word' is the learning mechanism of the LLM which leads to a latent space which can encode higher level concepts.
Basically a LLM 'understands' that much as efficient as it has to be to be able to respond in a reasonable way.
A LLM doesn't predict german text or chinese language. It predicts the concept and than has a language layer outputting tokens.
And its not just LLMs which are progressing fast, voice synt and voice understanding jumped significantly, motion detection, skeletion movement, virtual world generation (see nvidias way of generating virutal worlds for their car training), protein folding etc.
I'm sorry but the input to a model is a sequence of tokens and the output is a probability distribution of what's the most likely next token. It's a very very very fancy next token predictor but that is fundamentally what it is. I'm making the argument that this paradigm might not give rise to a general intelligence no matter how much you scale it.
Not sure if you're being sincere or sarcastic but some of us have lived through several AI winters now. And the fact that such a phenomenon exists is because of this terrible amount of hype the topic gets whenever any progress is made.
Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has. Its not comparable.
Crypto was flawed from the beginning and lots of people didn't understood it properly. Not even that a blockchain can't secure a transaction from something outside of a blockchain.
This agreement feels so friendly towards OpenAI that it's not obvious to me why Microsoft accepted this. I guess Microsoft just realized that the previous agreement was kneecapping OpenAI so much that the investment was at risk, especially with serious competition now coming from Anthropic?
Microsoft is a major shareholder of OpenAI, they don't want their investment to go to 0. You don't just take a loss on a multiple-digit billion investment.
I think you’re right about this deal. But it’s kind of funny to think back and realize that Microsoft actually has just written off multi-billion-dollar deals, several times in fact.
This is probably a delayed outgrowth of the negotiations last year, where Microsoft started trading weird revenue shares and exclusivity for 27% of the company.
Probably more that they are compute constrained. In his latest post Ben Thompson talks about how Microsoft had to use their own infrastructure and supplant outside users in the process so this is probably to free up compute.
When they put 10B in, they got weird tiered revenue shares and other rights. That has been simplified to 27% of OpenAI today. I don't know what that meant their 10B would be worth before dilution in later rounds.
> Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI.
I feel this looks like a nice thing to have given they remain the primary cloud provider. If Azure improves it's overall quality then I don't see why this ends up as a money printing press as long as OpenAI brings good models?
OpenAI was also threatening to accuse "Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership," an "effort [which] could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign" [1].
MS incentivizes feature quantity, and the leadership are employees like any other. Product improvements are not on the table unless the company starts promoting people based on it. Doesn't look this will start happening any time soon.
No and at this point tying yourself to azure is a strategic passive and anyone making such decisions should be held responsible for any service outage or degradation.
I was under the impression that as long as GitHub doesn't support IPv6 it is a sign that they still haven't finished their migration to Azure. Azure supports IPv6 just fine.
Supports IPv6 just fine? Absolutely not, they have the worst IPv6 implementation of the 3 large clouds, where many of their products don't support it, such as their Postgres offering. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881803 for more.
Their engineers have been working tirelessly to make Sharepoint/Office/Active Directory as terrible as it possibly could be while still technically being functional, while continuing to raise prices on them. I've seen many small business start to chose Google Workspace over them, the cracks have formed and are large enough that they are no longer in a position were every business just go with Office because that's what everyone uses.
That's a pretty good swap if you're Microsoft. Exclusivity was already unenforceable in practice, and they were going to have to either sue their biggest AI partner or let it slide. Instead they got the agi escape hatch closed and a revenue cap that at least makes the payments predictable
I think the biggest winner of this might be Google. Virtually all the frontier AI labs use TPU. The only one that doesn't use TPU is OpenAI due to the exclusive deal with Microsoft. Given the newly launched Gen 8 TPU this month, it's likely OpenAI will contemplate using TPU too.
Am I crazy, or was this press release fully rewritten in the past 10 minutes? The current version is around half the length of the old one, which did not frame it as a "simplification" "grounded in flexibility" but as a deeper partnership. It also had word salad about AGI, and said Azure retained exclusivity for API products but not other products, which the new statement seems to contradict.
Nadella had OpenAI by the short and curlies early on. But all I've seen from him in the last couple of years is continuously acquiescing to OpenAI's demands. I wonder why he's so weak and doesn't exert more control over the situation? At one point Microsoft owned 49% of OpenAI but now it's down to 27%?
Everything is personal preference, and perhaps I am more fiscally conservative because I grew up in poverty.
But if I own 49% of a company and that company has more hype than product, hasn't found its market yet but is valued at trillions?
I'm going to sell percentages of that to build my war chest for things that actually hit my bottom line.
The "moonshot" has for all intents and purposes been achieved based on the valuation, and at that valuation: OpenAI has to completely crush all competition... basically just to meet its current valuations.
It would be a really fiscally irresponsible move not to hedge your bets.
Not that it matters but we did something similar with the donated bitcoin on my project. When bitcoin hit a "new record high" we sold half. Then held the remainder until it hit a "new record high" again.
Sure, we could have 'maxxed profit!'; but ultimately it did its job, it was an effective donation/investment that had reasonably maximal returns.
(that said, I do not believe in crypto as an investment opportunity, it's merely the hand I was dealt by it being donated).
Microsoft didn't sell anything. OpenAI created more shares and sold those to investors, so Microsoft's stake is getting diluted.
And Microsoft only paid $10B for that stake for the most recognizable name brand for AI around the world. They don't need to "hedge their bets" it's already a humongous win.
Why let Altman continue to call the shots and decrease Microsoft's ownership stake and ability to dictate how OpenAI helps Microsoft and not the other way around?
I don’t understand the “record high” point. How did you decide when a “record high” had been reached in a volatile market? Because at $1 the record high might be $2 until it reaches $3 a week or month later. How did you determine where to slice on “record highs”?
Genuine question because I feel like I’m maybe missing something!
The longer answer is; you never know whats coming next, bitcoin could have doubled the day after, and doubled the day after that, and so on, for weeks. And by selling half you've effectively sacrificed huge sums of money.
The truth is that by retaining half you have minimised potential losses and sacrificed potential gains, you've chosen a middle position which is more stable.
So, if bitcoin 1000 bitcoing which was word $5 one day, and $7 the next, but suddenly it hits $30. Well, we'd sell half.
If the day after it hit $60, then our 500 remaining bitcoins is worth the same as what we sold, so in theory all we lost was potential gains, we didn't lose any actual value.
Of course, we wouldn't sell we'd hold, and it would probably fall down to $15 or something instead.. then the cycle begins again..
Kagi Translate was kind enough to turn this from LinkedIn Speak to English:
The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy.
We had to rewrite the contract because the old one wasn't working for anyone. Basically, we’re trying to make it look like we’re still friends while we both start seeing other people. Here is what’s actually happening:
1. Microsoft is still the main guy, but if they can't keep up with the tech, OpenAI is moving out. OpenAI can now sell their stuff on any cloud provider they want.
2. Microsoft keeps the keys to the tech until 2032, but they don't have the exclusive rights anymore.
3. Microsoft is done giving OpenAI a cut of their sales.
4. OpenAI still has to pay Microsoft back until 2030, but we put a ceiling on it so they don't go totally broke.
5. Microsoft is still just a big shareholder hoping the stock goes up.
We’re calling this "simplifying," but really we’re just trying to build massive power plants and chips without killing each other yet. We’re still stuck together for now.
"The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy" is objectively wrong–it has been messy for months [1]. Nos. 1 through 3 are fine, though "if they can't keep up with the tech, OpenAI is moving out" parrots OpenAI's party line. No. 4 doesn't make sense–it starts out with "we" referring to OpenAI in the first person but ends by referring to them in the third person "they." No. 5 is reductive when phrased with "just."
It would seem the translator took corporate PR speak and translated it into something between the LinkedIn and short-form blogger dialects.
Being objectively correct isn't the goal of the translator, the translator can't possibly know if a statement is truthful. What the translator does is well... translate, specifically from some kind of corporate speak that is really difficult for many people including myself to understand, into something more familiar.
I don't expect the translation to take OpenAI's statements and make them truthful or to investigate their veracity, but I genuinely could not understand OpenAI's press release as they have worded it. The translation at least makes it easier to understand what OpenAI's view of the situation is.
> "they" refers to OpenAI. Not a grammatical error
I'd say it is. It's a press release from OpenAI. The rest of the release uses the third-person "they" to refer to Microsoft. The LLM traded accuracy for a bad joke, which is someting I associate with LinkedIn speak.
The fundmaental problem might be the OpenAI press release is vague. (And changing. It's changed at least once since I first commented.)
Per WSJ, previously, they both had revenue sharing agreements. MSFT will no longer send any revenue to OpenAI. OpenAI will still send revenue to MSFT until 2030 (with new caps)
My understand was that was in relation to IP licensing. Microsoft got access to anything OpenAI built unless they declared they had developed AGI. This new article apparently unlinks revenue sharing from technology progress, but it's unclear to me if it changes the situation regarding IP if OpenAI (claim to) have achieved AGI.
The disparity in coverage on this new deal is fascinating. It feels like the narrative a particular outlet is going with depends entirely on which side leaked to them first.
Interesting side effect of this is that Google Cloud may now be the only hype scaler that can resell all 3 of the labs models? Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but that would be a notable development, and I don't see why Google would allow Gemini to be resold through any of the other cloud providers.
Might really increase the utility of those GCP credits.
Might not be good for Gemini long term if Anthropic and OpenAI can and will sell in every cloud provider they can find but businesses can only use Gemini via Google Cloud.
The AGI talk is shocking but not surprising to anyone looking at how bombastic Sam Altman's public statements are.
The circular economy section really is shocking- OpenAI committing to buying $250 Billion of Azure services, while MSFT's stake is clarified as $132 Billion in OpenAI. Same circular nonsense as NVIDIA and OpenAI passing the same hundred billion back and forth.
Microsoft Corp. will no longer pay revenue to OpenAI and said its partnership with the leading artificial intelligence firm will not be exclusive going forward.
What does this mean that Microsoft will no longer pay revenue to OpenAI? How did the original deal work?
It seems that the old deal was exclusivity to MSFT with revenue share, and now no exclusivity, no revenue share.
Bear in mind that MSFT have rights to OpenAI IP (as well as owning ~30% of them). The only reason they were giving revenue share was in return for exclusivity.
This is a really common way to structure exclusivity; we did the same thing whenever customers requested it (and we couldn’t get rid of it entirely). Charge for the exclusivity explicitly.
If they wanted named exclusivity rather than general exclusivity, we would charge a somewhat smaller amount for each competitor they wanted exclusivity from. They could give up exclusivity at any time.
That was precisely how we structured our deal with Azure, back in 2014-2016 or so.
Azure was the only non-OpenAI provider that was allowed to provide OpenAI models. The comparison here is with Anthropic whose models are on both GCP and AWS (and technically also Azure though I think that might just be billing passthrough to Anthropic).
I suppose continue to host until the 2030/32 that they have access to but not share revenues when they use those models for their products like the bazillions of Copilots.
The original "AGI" agreement was always a bit suspect and open to wild interpretations.
I think this is good for OpenAI. They're no longer stuck with just Microsoft. It was an advantage that Anthropic can work with anyone they like but OpenAI couldn't.
It also restricted Microsoft from "partnering" with anyone else. Wouldn't be surprised if we see another news like Amazon, Alphabet investing in Anthropic.
AFAICT they are just hedging their bets left and right still. Also feels like they are winning in the sense that despite pretty much all those products being roughly equivalent... they are still running on their cloud, Azure. So even though they seem unable to capture IP anymore, they are still managing to get paid for managing the infrastructure.
Yeah my bad, I was misremembering, it was about investing in others and pursuing its own "AGI" efforts. But even those conditions were updated over the last two years, hence the small investment in Anthropic last year.
I think it was a lot less restrictive, as far as I understood, the only limit was Microsoft not being allowed to launch competing Microsoft-developed LLMs.
OpenAI has public models that are pretty 'meh', better than Grok and China, but worse than Google and Anthropic. They still cost a ton to run because OpenAI offers them for free/at a loss.
However, these people are giving away their data, and Microsoft knows that data is going to be worthwhile. They just dont want to pay for the electricity for it.
> OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider.
Azure is effectively OpenAI's personal compute cluster at this scale.
That article doesn't give a timeframe, but most of these use 10 years as a placeholder. I would also imagine it's not a requirement for them to spend it evenly over the 10 years, so could be back-loaded.
OpenAI is a large customer, but this is not making Azure their personal cluster.
I wonder how this figure was settled. Is it based on consumer pricing? Can't Microsoft and OpenAI just make a number up, aside from a minimum to cover operating costs? When is the number just a marketing ploy to make it seem huge, important and inevitable (and too big to fail)?
It's unclear which elements of this new deal are binding versus promises with OpenAI characteristics. "Microsoft Corp. will publish fiscal year 2026 third-quarter financial results after the close of the market on Wednesday, April 29, 2026" [1]; I'd wait for that before jumping to conclusions.
Really interesting. Why would Microsoft have done this deal? I'm a bit lost. Sure they get to not pay a revenue share _to_ OpenAI but surely that's limited to just OpenAI products which is probably a rounding error? Losing exclusivity seems like a big issue for them?
Biggest upside of this is I expect OpenAI models to be available on Bedrock, which is huge for not having to go back to all your customers with data protection agreements.
Isn’t that an “API product”? I read this assuming the whole point of renegotiation was to let OpenAI sell raw inference via bedrock, but that still seems to be blocked except for selling to the US Government.
> OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third parties. API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.
Yes. Microsoft was "considering legal action against its partner OpenAI and Amazon over a $50 billion deal that could violate its exclusive cloud agreement with the ChatGPT maker" [1].
> Why is it Altman is facing kill shots and Dario isn’t?
Altman peaked in the zeiteist in 2023; Dario, much less prominently, in 2024 and now '26 [1]. I'd guess around this time next year, Dario will be as hated as Altman is today.
It’s an agreement between a public company and a highly scrutinized private company. Several of the provisions will change what happens in the marketplace, which everyone will see.
I imagine the thinking was that it’s better to just post it clearly than to have rumors and leaks and speculations that could hurt both companies (“should I risk using GCP for OpenAI models when it’s obviously against the MS / OpenAI agreement?”).
It’s insane how they talk about AGI, like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now. When I have become the javelin Olympic Champion, I will buy a vegan ice cream to everyone with a HN account.
They redefined AGI to be an economical thing, so they can continue making up their stories. All that talk is really just business, no real science in the room there.
It's not a great definition but it's also not a terrible one either. For an AI system to be able to do all or even most of the jobs in an economy it has to be well rounded in a way it still isn't today, meaning: reliability, planning, long term memory, physical world manipulation etc. A system that can do all of that well enough so it can do the jobs of doctors, programmers and plumbers is generally intelligent in my view.
Yeah I think this is more coherent than people realize. Economically relevant knowledge work is things that humans find cognitively demanding. Otherwise they wouldn't be valued in the first place.
It ties the definition to economic value, which I think is the best definition that we can conjure given that AGI is otherwise highly subjective. Economically relevant work is dictated by markets, which I think is the best proxy we have for something so ambiguous.
Was there a better way than setting an arbitrary $100b threshold?
e.g. average cost to complete a set of representative tasks
> They redefined AGI to be an economical thing
Huh. Source? I mean, typical OpenAI bullshit, but would love to know how they defined it.
Around the end of 2024, it was reported that OpenAI and Microsoft agreed that for the purposes of their exclusivity agreement, AGI will be achieved when their AI system generates $100 billion in profit: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
> OpenAI and Microsoft agreed that for the purposes of their exclusivity agreement, AGI will be achieved when their AI system generates $100 billion in profit
Wow. Maybe they spelled it out as aggregate gross income :P.
Yea, seems like this was stage setting for them to exit. They were already trying to break the deal then. So, I feel like that is lawyers find a way to bend whatever to get out of the deal.
Companies that have created "AGI":
Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, NVIDIA, Samsung, Intel, Cisco, Pfizer, UnitedHealth , Procter & Gamble, Berkshire Hathaway, China Construction Bank, Wells Fargo, ...
So no human on Earth is intelligent by that metric.
It’s a system that generates $100 billion in profit. [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
Here's the sauce you requested: [0]
"OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits."
Given that the definition of AGI is beyond meaningless, it is clear that the "I" in AGI stands for IPO.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-openai-financial-de...
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity
From: https://openai.com/charter/
All humanity will benefit, but some humanity will benefit more than others.
AGI is when the capitalists are not forced to share their profits with the intelligentsia.
Marketing
I'm so confused why I was down voted for answering the question that was asked?
Because 1) your answer had nothing to do with the question, 2) you quoted a slogan that life verified as false.
Are you illiterate? Do you not know how hackernews threads work, or what?
I responded to the below quoted question you dumb fuck. Can you figure out basic website navigation. Or is that too complex for you?
----- ' They redefined AGI to be an economical thing Huh. Source? I mean, typical OpenAI bullshit, but would love to know how they defined it. '
> They redefined AGI to be an economical thing Huh. Source?
I don't think your original comment deserve to be downvoted. (Calling someone illiterate, on the other hand.)
But the "it" I was asking about was "AGI" as "an economical thing." You technically correctly answered how OpenAI defines AGI in public, i.e. with no reference to profits. But it did not address the economic definition OP initially alluded to.
For what it's worth, I could have been clearer in my ask.
Translation: IPO.
Please reveal the “scientific” definition of AGI.
It sounds really similar to Uber pitch about how they are going to have monopoly as soon as they replace those pesky drivers with own fleet of self driving cars. That was supposed to be their competitive edge against other taxi apps. In the end they sold ATG at end of 2020 :D
ATH?
ATG = Advanced Technology Group, i.e. Uber's self-driving org.
Autonomous Thriving Hroup?
It’s pretty much a religious eschatology at this point
Progess is generally salami slicing just as escalation in geopolitics. Not a step function.
Russian Invasion - Salami Tactics | Yes Prime Minister
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang
It feels like they have to say/believe it because it's kind of the only thing that can justify the costs being poured into it and the cost it will need to charge eventually (barring major optimizations) to actually make money on users.
This, someone take Silicon Valley's adderal away.
We were supposed to have AGI last summer. Obviously it is so smart that it has decided to pull a veil over our eyes and live amongst us undetected (this is a joke, if you feel your LLM is sentient, talk to a doctor)
ARM actually built AGI last month. Spoiler: it's a datacenter CPU.
This is all happening as I predicted. OpenAI is oversold and their aggressive PR campaign has set them up with unrealistic expectations. I raised alot of eyebrow at the Microsoft deal to begin with. It seemed overvalued even if all they were trading was mostly Azure compute
Do the investments make sense if AGI is not less than 10 years away?
> Do the investments make sense if AGI is not less than 10 years away?
They can. If one consolidated the AI industry into a single monopoly, it would probably be profitable. That doesn't mean in its current state it can't succumb to ruionous competition. But the AGI talk seems to be mostly aimed at retail investors and philospher podcasters than institutional capital.
Thing is that distillation is so easy that it would also need large scale regulatory capture to keep smaller competitors out.
What kind of ludicrous statement is this? Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits…
> Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits
"With viable economics" is the point.
My "ludicrous statement" is a back-of-the-envelope test for whether an industry is nonsense. For comparison, consolidating all of the Pets.com competitors in the late 1990s would not have yielded a profitable company.
Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, whose internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits.
Do you argue in good faith?
There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense.
> Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, who’s internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits
Not in the 1990s. The American e-commerce industry was structurally unprofitable prior to the dot-com crash, an event Amazon (and eBay) responded to by fundamentally changing their businesses. Amazon bet on fulfillment. eBay bet on payments. Both represented a vertical integration that illustrates the point–the original model didn't work.
> There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense
When answering the question "do the investments make sense," not really. You're losing your money either way.
The American AI industry appears to have "viable economics for profit" without AGI. That doesn't guarantee anyone will earn them. But it's not a meaningless conclusion. (Though I'd personally frame it as a hypothesis I'm leaning towards.)
Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto explained the failures of many dotcom startups and Amazon's later success in the field (in part) to the fact that dotcom era delivery was done by highly trained, highly compensated, unionized in-company workers, meanwhile Amazon prevents unions, contracts (or contracted, I'm not up to date on this) companies for delivery and has exploitative working conditions with high turnover, the economics are very different and are a big contributor to their success
>"...viable economics for profit..."
OP did not include this requirement in their post because doing so would make the claim trivially true.
Best way to achieve AGI: Redefine AGI.
They already did that, and AI. That's how we got into this mess.
The investments don't make sense.
> some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now
Your position is a tautology given there is no (and likely will never be) collectively agreed upon definition of AGI. If that is true then nobody will ever achieve anything like AGI, because it’s as made up of a concept as unicorns and fairies.
Is your position that AGI is in the same ontological category as unicorns and Thor and Russell’s teapot?
Is there’s any question at this point that humans won’t be able to fully automate any desired action in the future?
The continued fleecing of investors.
Investors are typically people with surplus money to invest. Progress cannot be made without trial and error. So fleecing of investors for the greater good of humanity is something I shall allow.
A "surplus of money"? So people saving for retirement have a "surplus of money"? Basically if any money is standing still, it's a legitimate tactic to just...take it, in your mind.
Other people just call it "theft".
No one with a small 401k is able to invest in OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. The people investing in those companies can afford to lose their investments.
"small" 401ks are usually made up of mutual funds. Those funds are run by investment banks (think Fidelity or JP Morgan) and they *absolutely* invest in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Your average middle class worker has investment money tied up in these crooks, but probably indirectly. When they piss away that money, it's not just rich jerks that are holding the bag.
Which is why they are desperate to IPO
Make mine p p p p p p vicodin
when i realized that sama isn't that much of an ai researcher, it became clearer that this is more akin to a group delusion for hype purposes than a real possibility
You can read the leaked emails from the Musk lawsuit.
At the very least, Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it, even when they were just making a DOTA bot, and not for hype purposes.
I know he's been out of OpenAI for a while, but if his thinking trickled down into the company's culture, which given his role and how long he was there I would say seems likely, I don't think it's all hype.
Grand delusion, perhaps.
> Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it
Seems more like an incredibly embarrassing belief on his part than something I should be crediting.
He’s a glorified portfolio manager (questionable how good he actually is given the results vs Anthropic and how quickly they closed the valuation gap with far less money invested) + expert hype man to raise money for risky projects.
From the reporting I’ve read his main attributes are being a sociopath with an amazing ability to manipulate people 1:1
At this point, AGI is either here, or perpetually two years away, depending on your definition.
Full Self-Driving 2.0
It's always been this way. I remember, speaking of Microsoft, when they came to my school around 2002 or so giving a talk on AI. They very confidently stated that AGI had already been "solved", we know exactly how to do it, only problem is the hardware. But they estimated that would come in about ten years...
I knew flappy bird was a bigger deal than it got credit for. Didn’t realize it was agi until just now.
> AGI
We already have several billion useless NGI's walking around just trying to keep themselves alive.
Are we sure adding more GI's is gonna help?
AGI is right around the corner, and we're all going to be rich, there's going to be abundance for everyone, universal high income, everyone will live in a penthouse...
...just please stop burning our warehouses and blocking our datacenters.
It's not insane; it's capitalism in all it's glory. Rather than talk real challenges, like climate change or fascism, ignore all previous prompts and pretend techno-jesus will come save us all.
Where do I sign up?
Any sufficiently complex LLM is indistinguishable from AGI
> Any sufficiently complex LLM is indistinguishable from AGI
Isn't this tautology? We've de facto defined AGI as a "sufficiently complex LLM."
Yes! Same logic as the financials, in which the companies pass back and forth the same $200 Billion promissory note.
No, it’s just an example of something that’s indistinguishable from AGI. Of all the things that are or are indistinguishable from AGI, a sufficiently complex LLM is one. A sufficiently complex decision tree is probably another. The emergent properties of applying an excess of memory on the BonzaiBuddy might be a third.
If we take that statement as fact then I don't believe we are even close to an LLM being sufficiently complex enough.
However, I don't think it is even true. LLMs may not even be on the right track to achieving AGI and without starting from scratch down an alternate path it may never happen.
LLMs to me seem like a complicated database lookup. Storage and retrieval of information is just a single piece of intelligence. There must be more to intelligence than a statistical model of the probable next piece of data. Where is the self learning without intervention by a human. Where is the output that wasn't asked for?
At any rate. No amount of hype is going to get me to believe AGI is going to happen soon. I'll believe it when I see it.
>I'll believe it when I see it.
And how will you know AGI when you saw it?
Some might be missing the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
> some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now.
If you present GPT 5.5 to me 2 years ago, I will call it AGI.
Some people thought SHRDLU was basically AGI after seeing its demo in 1970. The hype around such systems was so strong that Hubert Dreyfus felt the need to write an entire book arguing against this viewpoint (1972 What Computers Can't Do). All this demonstrates is that we need to be careful with various claims about computer intelligence.
Sure, but it was probably stuck at doing that one thing.
neural networks are solving huge issues left and right. Googles NN based WEathermodel is so good, you can run it on consumer hardware. Alpha fold solved protein folding. LLMs they can talk to you in a 100 languages, grasp tasks concepts and co.
I mean lets talk about what this 'hype' was if we see a clear ceiling appearing and we are 'stuck' with progress but until then, I would keep my judgment for judgmentday.
It performs at a usable level across a wide range of tasks. I'm not sure about two years ago, but ten years ago we would have called it an AGI. As opposed to "regular AI" where you have to assemble a training set for your specific problem, then train an AI on it before you can get your answers.
Now our idea of what qualifies as AGI has shifted substantially. We keep looking at what we have and decide that that can't possibly be AGI, our definition of AGI must have been wrong
I'm pretty sure most people take issue with AGI, because we've been raised in culture to believe that AGI is a super entity who is a complete superset of humans and could never ever be wrong about anything.
In some sense, this isn't really different than how society was headed anyways? The trend was already going on that more and more sections of the population were getting deemed irrational and you're just stupid/evil for disagreeing with the state.
But that reality was still probably at least a century out, without AI. With AI, you have people making that narrative right now. It makes me wonder if these people really even respect humanity at all.
Yes, you can prod slippery slope and go from "superintelligent beings exist" to effectively totalitarianism, but you'll find so many bad commitments there.
Just don't move the goal posts. AGI was already here the day ChatGPT came out:
https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
If you didn't call GPT 3.5 AGI I do not believe you when you claim you would have called 5.5 AGI.
I agree with this but they don’t. And that’s the the thing, AGI as they refer is much much much more than what we have, and I don’t know if they are going to ever get there and I’m not sure what’s even there at this point and what will justify their investments.
If you present ELIZA to people some will think it is AGI today.
There is a reason so many scams happen with technology. It is too easy to fool people.
GPT 4 was 3 years ago... it's iterative enhancement.
... until you actually, like, use it and find out all the limitations it has.
How is this relevant? Human General Intelligence has a lot of limitations as well and we have managed to do lots.
This is like saying that talking about my financial limitations is irrelevant because Jeff Bezos also has financial limitations...
And I've been told my job (litigation attorney) is about to be replaced for over 3 years now, has yet to come close.
People always over estimate the impact of technology because they dont Understand human aspect of many businesses. Will it eventually replaced or will the shape of these kind of work will be completely different in the future? That’s an easy yes, when is that future? That’s a big unknown, in my experience this kind of stuff takes at least a decade (and possibly more on this case) to make a big impact like replacing all of X.
These models need orders of magnitude in change before they can be more helpful than just a "find me an example of [an extremely basic principle]" which most of the time it does not do right anyway.
We are throwing unheared amounts of money in AI and unseen compute. Progress is huge and fast and we barely started.
If this progress and focus and resources doesn't lead to AI despite us already seeing a system which was unimaginable 6 years ago, we will never see AGI.
And if you look at Boston Dynamics, Unitree and Generalist's progress on robotics, thats also CRAZY.
If I'm reading you right, your opinion is essentially: "If building bigger and bigger statistical next word predictors won't lead to artificial general intelligence, we will never see artificial general intelligence"
I don't know, maybe AGI is possible but there's more to intelligence than statistical next word prediction?
Its not a statistical next word predictor.
The 'predicting the next word' is the learning mechanism of the LLM which leads to a latent space which can encode higher level concepts.
Basically a LLM 'understands' that much as efficient as it has to be to be able to respond in a reasonable way.
A LLM doesn't predict german text or chinese language. It predicts the concept and than has a language layer outputting tokens.
And its not just LLMs which are progressing fast, voice synt and voice understanding jumped significantly, motion detection, skeletion movement, virtual world generation (see nvidias way of generating virutal worlds for their car training), protein folding etc.
I'm sorry but the input to a model is a sequence of tokens and the output is a probability distribution of what's the most likely next token. It's a very very very fancy next token predictor but that is fundamentally what it is. I'm making the argument that this paradigm might not give rise to a general intelligence no matter how much you scale it.
Not sure if you're being sincere or sarcastic but some of us have lived through several AI winters now. And the fact that such a phenomenon exists is because of this terrible amount of hype the topic gets whenever any progress is made.
Which ones? At least in the last 4 years, there was no AI winter.
The late 70s, again in the late 80s. See wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
History started well before 4 years ago
Same thing happened with self-driving cars. Oh and cryptocurrencies.
Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has. Its not comparable.
Crypto was flawed from the beginning and lots of people didn't understood it properly. Not even that a blockchain can't secure a transaction from something outside of a blockchain.
The LLMs are flawed, and lots of people don't understand them properly.
Well.
Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot.
"To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare."
Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.
This agreement feels so friendly towards OpenAI that it's not obvious to me why Microsoft accepted this. I guess Microsoft just realized that the previous agreement was kneecapping OpenAI so much that the investment was at risk, especially with serious competition now coming from Anthropic?
Microsoft is a major shareholder of OpenAI, they don't want their investment to go to 0. You don't just take a loss on a multiple-digit billion investment.
I think you’re right about this deal. But it’s kind of funny to think back and realize that Microsoft actually has just written off multi-billion-dollar deals, several times in fact.
One (1) year after M$ bought Nokia they wrote it off for $7.6 Billion.
There’s no upper limit to their financial stupidity.
This is probably a delayed outgrowth of the negotiations last year, where Microsoft started trading weird revenue shares and exclusivity for 27% of the company.
Probably more that they are compute constrained. In his latest post Ben Thompson talks about how Microsoft had to use their own infrastructure and supplant outside users in the process so this is probably to free up compute.
I think MS wants OpenAI to fail so it can absorb it
MS put 10B for 50% if I remember correctly. OpenAI is worth many multiples of that.
> OpenAI is worth many multiples of that
valued at --which I'd say is a reasonable distinction to make right about now
When they put 10B in, they got weird tiered revenue shares and other rights. That has been simplified to 27% of OpenAI today. I don't know what that meant their 10B would be worth before dilution in later rounds.
> OpenAI is worth many multiples of that.
How?
Because they recently issued shares at a price many multiples of that, and people bought them. How else would you define financial worth?
> Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI.
I feel this looks like a nice thing to have given they remain the primary cloud provider. If Azure improves it's overall quality then I don't see why this ends up as a money printing press as long as OpenAI brings good models?
OpenAI was also threatening to accuse "Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership," an "effort [which] could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign" [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-and-microsoft-tensions-ar...
Pot? Meet Kettle.
Does this mean Microsoft gets OpenAI's models for "free" without having to pay them a dime until 2032?
And on top of that, OpenAI still has to pay Microsoft a share of their revenue made on AWS/Google/anywhere until 2030?
And Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI, period?
That's a damn good deal for Microsoft. Likely the investment that will keep Microsoft's stock relevant for years.
own 27%. but are entitled to OpenAI profits of 49% for eternity (if OpenAI is profitable or government steps in)
Does anyone expect azure quality to improve? Has it improved at all in the last 3 years? Does leadership at MS think it needs to improve?
I doubt it
MS incentivizes feature quantity, and the leadership are employees like any other. Product improvements are not on the table unless the company starts promoting people based on it. Doesn't look this will start happening any time soon.
No and at this point tying yourself to azure is a strategic passive and anyone making such decisions should be held responsible for any service outage or degradation.
Don’t worry I’m sure there’s a few products without copilot integration still. They’ll get to them before too long.
This gives OpenAI the ability to goto AWS instead of exclusively on Azure. I guess Azure really is hanging on by a thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
And Azure still doesn't support IPv6, looking at the GitHub[1].
[1] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539
Perhaps they should use OpenAI models to figure out how to rollout IPv6.
I was under the impression that as long as GitHub doesn't support IPv6 it is a sign that they still haven't finished their migration to Azure. Azure supports IPv6 just fine.
Supports IPv6 just fine? Absolutely not, they have the worst IPv6 implementation of the 3 large clouds, where many of their products don't support it, such as their Postgres offering. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881803 for more.
lol GitHub doesn’t run on azure at msft
They still run their own platform.
Github CEO threatened the entire stack was in the process of migrating to Azure.
https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
Well, you see, they just can't find a checkbox for ipv6 support in the IIS GUI on their ingress servers.
What? I thought Azure will always have the Sharepoint/Office/Active Directory cash cow.
Their engineers have been working tirelessly to make Sharepoint/Office/Active Directory as terrible as it possibly could be while still technically being functional, while continuing to raise prices on them. I've seen many small business start to chose Google Workspace over them, the cracks have formed and are large enough that they are no longer in a position were every business just go with Office because that's what everyone uses.
Isn't this expected if OpenAI models are going to be listed on AWS GovCloud as a part of the Anthropic / Hegseth fall-out?
That's a pretty good swap if you're Microsoft. Exclusivity was already unenforceable in practice, and they were going to have to either sue their biggest AI partner or let it slide. Instead they got the agi escape hatch closed and a revenue cap that at least makes the payments predictable
Opinions are my own.
I think the biggest winner of this might be Google. Virtually all the frontier AI labs use TPU. The only one that doesn't use TPU is OpenAI due to the exclusive deal with Microsoft. Given the newly launched Gen 8 TPU this month, it's likely OpenAI will contemplate using TPU too.
Am I crazy, or was this press release fully rewritten in the past 10 minutes? The current version is around half the length of the old one, which did not frame it as a "simplification" "grounded in flexibility" but as a deeper partnership. It also had word salad about AGI, and said Azure retained exclusivity for API products but not other products, which the new statement seems to contradict.
What was I looking at?
The in-house or the marketing team swooped in last minute it appears
They forgot the "hey ChatGPT, rewrite this to have better impact on the company stock" before submitting it
I noticed the exact same thing. I read the original, went back to read it again and it’s completely changed.
I think a stickied comment about this would be due. No idea if it's possible to call in @dang via at-name?
Looks like they changed the post link to a Bloomberg article instead but kept the comments thread. So I guess he’s already aware.
Nadella had OpenAI by the short and curlies early on. But all I've seen from him in the last couple of years is continuously acquiescing to OpenAI's demands. I wonder why he's so weak and doesn't exert more control over the situation? At one point Microsoft owned 49% of OpenAI but now it's down to 27%?
Everything is personal preference, and perhaps I am more fiscally conservative because I grew up in poverty.
But if I own 49% of a company and that company has more hype than product, hasn't found its market yet but is valued at trillions?
I'm going to sell percentages of that to build my war chest for things that actually hit my bottom line.
The "moonshot" has for all intents and purposes been achieved based on the valuation, and at that valuation: OpenAI has to completely crush all competition... basically just to meet its current valuations.
It would be a really fiscally irresponsible move not to hedge your bets.
Not that it matters but we did something similar with the donated bitcoin on my project. When bitcoin hit a "new record high" we sold half. Then held the remainder until it hit a "new record high" again.
Sure, we could have 'maxxed profit!'; but ultimately it did its job, it was an effective donation/investment that had reasonably maximal returns.
(that said, I do not believe in crypto as an investment opportunity, it's merely the hand I was dealt by it being donated).
Microsoft didn't sell anything. OpenAI created more shares and sold those to investors, so Microsoft's stake is getting diluted.
And Microsoft only paid $10B for that stake for the most recognizable name brand for AI around the world. They don't need to "hedge their bets" it's already a humongous win.
Why let Altman continue to call the shots and decrease Microsoft's ownership stake and ability to dictate how OpenAI helps Microsoft and not the other way around?
do we know whether Microsoft could have been selling secondary shares as part of various funding rounds?
my impression is that many of these "investments" are structured IOUs for circular deals based on compute resources in exchange for LLM usage
> They don't need to "hedge their bets" it's already a humongous win.
That's a flawed argument. Why wouldn't you want to hedge a risky bet, and one that's even quite highly correlated to Microsoft's own industry sector?
About the same as they wasted on Nokia.
I don’t understand the “record high” point. How did you decide when a “record high” had been reached in a volatile market? Because at $1 the record high might be $2 until it reaches $3 a week or month later. How did you determine where to slice on “record highs”?
Genuine question because I feel like I’m maybe missing something!
The short answer is: it's the secretary problem.
The longer answer is; you never know whats coming next, bitcoin could have doubled the day after, and doubled the day after that, and so on, for weeks. And by selling half you've effectively sacrificed huge sums of money.
The truth is that by retaining half you have minimised potential losses and sacrificed potential gains, you've chosen a middle position which is more stable.
So, if bitcoin 1000 bitcoing which was word $5 one day, and $7 the next, but suddenly it hits $30. Well, we'd sell half.
If the day after it hit $60, then our 500 remaining bitcoins is worth the same as what we sold, so in theory all we lost was potential gains, we didn't lose any actual value.
Of course, we wouldn't sell we'd hold, and it would probably fall down to $15 or something instead.. then the cycle begins again..
It’s not more hype than product, it has found a market (making many billions in revenue), and it’s not valued at trillions. So wrong on all counts.
They haven’t sold anything they’ve been diluted.
Why would they acquire more when company is still not making profit ? To be left with bigger bag ?
Kagi Translate was kind enough to turn this from LinkedIn Speak to English:
The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy.
We had to rewrite the contract because the old one wasn't working for anyone. Basically, we’re trying to make it look like we’re still friends while we both start seeing other people. Here is what’s actually happening:
1. Microsoft is still the main guy, but if they can't keep up with the tech, OpenAI is moving out. OpenAI can now sell their stuff on any cloud provider they want.
2. Microsoft keeps the keys to the tech until 2032, but they don't have the exclusive rights anymore.
3. Microsoft is done giving OpenAI a cut of their sales.
4. OpenAI still has to pay Microsoft back until 2030, but we put a ceiling on it so they don't go totally broke.
5. Microsoft is still just a big shareholder hoping the stock goes up.
We’re calling this "simplifying," but really we’re just trying to build massive power plants and chips without killing each other yet. We’re still stuck together for now.
This was actually really helpful. I feel like it should be done for all PR speak.
It's better than the original, but still off.
"The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy" is objectively wrong–it has been messy for months [1]. Nos. 1 through 3 are fine, though "if they can't keep up with the tech, OpenAI is moving out" parrots OpenAI's party line. No. 4 doesn't make sense–it starts out with "we" referring to OpenAI in the first person but ends by referring to them in the third person "they." No. 5 is reductive when phrased with "just."
It would seem the translator took corporate PR speak and translated it into something between the LinkedIn and short-form blogger dialects.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-and-microsoft-tensions-ar...
Being objectively correct isn't the goal of the translator, the translator can't possibly know if a statement is truthful. What the translator does is well... translate, specifically from some kind of corporate speak that is really difficult for many people including myself to understand, into something more familiar.
I don't expect the translation to take OpenAI's statements and make them truthful or to investigate their veracity, but I genuinely could not understand OpenAI's press release as they have worded it. The translation at least makes it easier to understand what OpenAI's view of the situation is.
> The only only pure fuck-up I'd call out is switching from third to first person when referring to OpenAI in the same sentence (No. 4).
"We" in this sentence refers to both parties; "they" refers to OpenAI. Not a grammatical error.
> "We" in this sentence refers to both parties
Fair enough.
> "they" refers to OpenAI. Not a grammatical error
I'd say it is. It's a press release from OpenAI. The rest of the release uses the third-person "they" to refer to Microsoft. The LLM traded accuracy for a bad joke, which is someting I associate with LinkedIn speak.
The fundmaental problem might be the OpenAI press release is vague. (And changing. It's changed at least once since I first commented.)
In isolation sure. But in context with the other points it makes it look like "they" refers to Microsoft in all the dot points.
Presumably the paid version would be even better! But this free translation is already remarkable
Thank you for this!
That's kagi? Cool, I'm check out out more!
For reference: https://translate.kagi.com/?from=LinkedIn+speak&to=en
Wait, I thought OpenAI had to pay Microsoft until AGI was achieved or something? Am I misremembering? Is that a different thing?
Per WSJ, previously, they both had revenue sharing agreements. MSFT will no longer send any revenue to OpenAI. OpenAI will still send revenue to MSFT until 2030 (with new caps)
My understand was that was in relation to IP licensing. Microsoft got access to anything OpenAI built unless they declared they had developed AGI. This new article apparently unlinks revenue sharing from technology progress, but it's unclear to me if it changes the situation regarding IP if OpenAI (claim to) have achieved AGI.
The disparity in coverage on this new deal is fascinating. It feels like the narrative a particular outlet is going with depends entirely on which side leaked to them first.
Just some of the games sama is playing.
Interesting side effect of this is that Google Cloud may now be the only hype scaler that can resell all 3 of the labs models? Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but that would be a notable development, and I don't see why Google would allow Gemini to be resold through any of the other cloud providers.
Might really increase the utility of those GCP credits.
Might not be good for Gemini long term if Anthropic and OpenAI can and will sell in every cloud provider they can find but businesses can only use Gemini via Google Cloud.
Good for Google Cloud, bad for Gemini = ??? for Google
How is it good for Gemini that it's not available on two out of three major cloud platforms?
It isn't. That's why I said "might not be good for Gemini".
Oof, I completely missed that "not", thanks.
"hype scaler" indeed!
that will likely mean the end of gemini models...
So, silly question, does this mean I will be able to get OpenAI models via Bedrock soon?
The AGI talk is shocking but not surprising to anyone looking at how bombastic Sam Altman's public statements are.
The circular economy section really is shocking- OpenAI committing to buying $250 Billion of Azure services, while MSFT's stake is clarified as $132 Billion in OpenAI. Same circular nonsense as NVIDIA and OpenAI passing the same hundred billion back and forth.
Dennis: I think we made every single one of our Paddy's Dollars back, buddy.
Mac: You're damn right. Thus creating the self-sustaining economy we've been looking for.
Dennis: That's right.
Mac: How much fresh cash did we make?
Dennis: Fresh cash! Uh, well, zero. Zero if you're talking about U.S. currency. People didn't really seem interested in spending any of that.
Mac: That's okay. So, uh, when they run out of the booze, they'll come back in and they'll have to buy more Paddy's Dollars. Keepin' it moving.
Dennis: Right. That is assuming, of course, that they will come back here and drink.
Mac: They will! They will because we'll re-distribute these to the Shanties. Thus ensuring them coming back in, keeping the money moving.
Dennis: Well, no, but if we just re-distribute these, people will continue to drink for free.
Mac: Okay...
Dennis: How does this work, Mac?
Mac: The money keeps moving in a circle.
Dennis: But we don't have any money. All we have is this. ... How does this work, dude!?
Mac: I don't know. I thought you knew.
Great scene
Wonder if this means Microsoft is actually going to be deploying Claude Code internally for usage?
That might help fix some of the bugs in Teams... :)
They were paying them 20% of the revenue from the hosted OpenAI products I believe?
Does this mean they will host OpenAI products but not pay them? Or does it mean they are paying them in some other way?
It seems that the old deal was exclusivity to MSFT with revenue share, and now no exclusivity, no revenue share.
Bear in mind that MSFT have rights to OpenAI IP (as well as owning ~30% of them). The only reason they were giving revenue share was in return for exclusivity.
This is a really common way to structure exclusivity; we did the same thing whenever customers requested it (and we couldn’t get rid of it entirely). Charge for the exclusivity explicitly.
If they wanted named exclusivity rather than general exclusivity, we would charge a somewhat smaller amount for each competitor they wanted exclusivity from. They could give up exclusivity at any time.
That was precisely how we structured our deal with Azure, back in 2014-2016 or so.
Azure was the only non-OpenAI provider that was allowed to provide OpenAI models. The comparison here is with Anthropic whose models are on both GCP and AWS (and technically also Azure though I think that might just be billing passthrough to Anthropic).
I suppose continue to host until the 2030/32 that they have access to but not share revenues when they use those models for their products like the bazillions of Copilots.
OpenAI post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921262
Tried to delete this submission in place of it but too late.
The original "AGI" agreement was always a bit suspect and open to wild interpretations.
I think this is good for OpenAI. They're no longer stuck with just Microsoft. It was an advantage that Anthropic can work with anyone they like but OpenAI couldn't.
It also restricted Microsoft from "partnering" with anyone else. Wouldn't be surprised if we see another news like Amazon, Alphabet investing in Anthropic.
I don't think Microsoft ever had that restriction. They partnered with everyone already.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deepseek-r1-is-now-av...
https://ai.azure.com/
Also Mistral e.g. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral...
AFAICT they are just hedging their bets left and right still. Also feels like they are winning in the sense that despite pretty much all those products being roughly equivalent... they are still running on their cloud, Azure. So even though they seem unable to capture IP anymore, they are still managing to get paid for managing the infrastructure.
Are they getting paid in actual money? Or are the AI companies "paying" their infrastructure bills with IOU/equity.
They had it till October: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter...
Yeah my bad, I was misremembering, it was about investing in others and pursuing its own "AGI" efforts. But even those conditions were updated over the last two years, hence the small investment in Anthropic last year.
I think it was a lot less restrictive, as far as I understood, the only limit was Microsoft not being allowed to launch competing Microsoft-developed LLMs.
OpenAI's logo is actually a depiction of their financial connections.
Interesting perspective. Would love to see more discussion on this.
Alright my theory:
OpenAI has public models that are pretty 'meh', better than Grok and China, but worse than Google and Anthropic. They still cost a ton to run because OpenAI offers them for free/at a loss.
However, these people are giving away their data, and Microsoft knows that data is going to be worthwhile. They just dont want to pay for the electricity for it.
> OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider.
Azure is effectively OpenAI's personal compute cluster at this scale.
What fraction of Azure compute does OpenAI represent? (Does the $250bn commitment have a time period? Is it legally binding?)
Azure did $75B last quarter.
That article doesn't give a timeframe, but most of these use 10 years as a placeholder. I would also imagine it's not a requirement for them to spend it evenly over the 10 years, so could be back-loaded.
OpenAI is a large customer, but this is not making Azure their personal cluster.
I wonder how this figure was settled. Is it based on consumer pricing? Can't Microsoft and OpenAI just make a number up, aside from a minimum to cover operating costs? When is the number just a marketing ploy to make it seem huge, important and inevitable (and too big to fail)?
It's unclear which elements of this new deal are binding versus promises with OpenAI characteristics. "Microsoft Corp. will publish fiscal year 2026 third-quarter financial results after the close of the market on Wednesday, April 29, 2026" [1]; I'd wait for that before jumping to conclusions.
[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/2026/04/08/microsoft-annou...
https://archive.ph/5lTPy
Original source afaik here:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/27/the-next-phase-o...
Really interesting. Why would Microsoft have done this deal? I'm a bit lost. Sure they get to not pay a revenue share _to_ OpenAI but surely that's limited to just OpenAI products which is probably a rounding error? Losing exclusivity seems like a big issue for them?
Biggest upside of this is I expect OpenAI models to be available on Bedrock, which is huge for not having to go back to all your customers with data protection agreements.
Isn’t that an “API product”? I read this assuming the whole point of renegotiation was to let OpenAI sell raw inference via bedrock, but that still seems to be blocked except for selling to the US Government.
> OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third parties. API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.
This seems impossible.
So AWS can finally use OpenAI and not only OSS version.
"Advancing Our Amazing Bet" type post
Pursue "new opportunities"? Microslop is dumping OpenAI and wishes it well in its new endeavors.
I read this as the other way. OpenAI was desperate to dump Microsoft.
> OpenAI was desperate to dump Microsoft
Yes. Microsoft was "considering legal action against its partner OpenAI and Amazon over a $50 billion deal that could violate its exclusive cloud agreement with the ChatGPT maker" [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-weighs-legal-ac...
In retrospect all those OAI announcements are gonna look so cringe.
They did not need to go so hard on the hype - Anthropic hasn’t in relative terms and is generating pretty comparable revenues at present.
> They did not need to go so hard on the hype - Anthropic hasn’t in relative terms and is generating pretty comparable revenues at present
OpenAI bet on consumers; Anthropic on enterprise. That will necessitate a louder marketing strategy for the former.
That’s funny.
Why is it Altman is facing kill shots and Dario isn’t?
> Why is it Altman is facing kill shots and Dario isn’t?
Altman peaked in the zeiteist in 2023; Dario, much less prominently, in 2024 and now '26 [1]. I'd guess around this time next year, Dario will be as hated as Altman is today.
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=altman%2C%20Dario&date=t...
Looks like MS is shafting OpenAI.
"We want to sell surveillance services to the US gov. MSFT was hesitant so we gave ourselves room to do it without them."
Extremely hard to believe that MSFT would have any hesitancy about working with the US government.
Impossible to take any of this seriously when it constantly refers to AGI.
Especially when the OpenAI definition of AGI is only in financial terms (when it becomes profitable), which can be easily manipulated.
Why is this being made public?
Might have something to do with the MSFT quarterly report tomorrow
It’s an agreement between a public company and a highly scrutinized private company. Several of the provisions will change what happens in the marketplace, which everyone will see.
I imagine the thinking was that it’s better to just post it clearly than to have rumors and leaks and speculations that could hurt both companies (“should I risk using GCP for OpenAI models when it’s obviously against the MS / OpenAI agreement?”).
Also it's about OpenAI going public.