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.
Many labs use TPUs, but not exclusively. Most labs need more compute than they can get, and if there's TPU capacity, they'll adapt their systems to be able to run partially on TPUs.
AMD’s software experience is riddled with bugs rendering out of the box training with AMD is impossible. We were hopeful that AMD could emerge as a strong competitor to NVIDIA in training workloads, but, as of today, this is unfortunately not the case. The CUDA moat has yet to be crossed by AMD due to AMD’s weaker-than-expected software Quality Assurance (QA) culture and its challenging out of the box experience.
[snip]
> The only reason we have been able to get AMD performance within 75% of H100/H200 performance is because we have been supported by multiple teams at AMD in fixing numerous AMD software bugs. To get AMD to a usable state with somewhat reasonable performance, a giant ~60 command Dockerfile that builds dependencies from source, hand crafted by an AMD principal engineer, was specifically provided for us
[snip]
> AMD hipBLASLt/rocBLAS’s heuristic model picks the wrong algorithm for most shapes out of the box, which is why so much time-consuming tuning is required by the end user.
etc etc. The whole thing is worth reading.
I'm sure it has (and will continue to) improved since then. I hear good things about the Lemonade team (although I think that is mostly inference?)
That’s insane. There should be a big team of people at AMD whose whole job is just to dogfood their stuff for training like this. Speaking of which, Amazon is in the same boat, I’m constantly surprised that Amazon is not treating improving Inferentia/Trainium software as an uber-priority. (I work at Amazon)
> “Are we afraid of our competitors? No, we’re completely unafraid of our competitors,” said Taylor. “For the most part, because—in the case of Nvidia—they don’t appear to care that much about VR. And in the case of the dollars spent on R&D, they seem to be very happy doing stuff in the car industry, and long may that continue—good luck to them.
Where's the scope for an L7 promo in "Fixed a bunch of tiny issues that were making it hard to use Tranium/Inferentia with PyTorch"?
Amazon's compensation strategy, in which you primarily get a raise years in the future for tricking your management chain into promoting you is definitely bearing its rotten fruit.
Anecdotal but over several years with an AMD GPU in my desktop I've tried multiple times to do real AI work and given up every time with the AMD stack.
Im running fine on my AMD 7800xt 16gb... Yes memory is a bit limited, but apart from the i have found that it works great using Vulcan in LM studio for example.
ROCm works great too, the only issue i have had is that my machine froze a couple of times as it used 100% of the graphics and the OS had nothing left. Since moving to vulcan i stopped getting these errors apart from a little UI slowdown when i had 4 models loaded at the same time taking turns.
Im also on a i7 6700 with 32gb DDR4 so im sure that is causing more slowdowns then the graphics card.
Yet another reason to doubt claims that ”software is solved”.
Anthropic did retire an interview take-home assignment involving optimising inference on exotic hardware, because Claude could one shot a solution, but that was clearly a whiteboard hypothetical instead of a real system with warts, issues and nuance.
i'm doing inference on a free mi300x instance from AMD right now. not sure if the software stack is just old or what, but here's what i've observed: stuck on an old version of vllm pre-Transformers 5 support. it lacks MoE support for qwen3 models. oss-120b is faaaar slower than it should be.
int8 quantization seems like it's almost supported, but not quite. speeds drop to a fraction of full precision speed and the server seems like it intermittently hangs. int4 quantization not supported. fp8 quantization not supported.
again, maybe AMD is just being lazy with what they've provided, but it's not a great look.
right now the fastest smart model i can run is full precision qwen3-32b. with 120 parallel requests (short context) i'm getting PP @ 4500 tokens/sec and TG @ 1300 tokens/sec
From the papers I've read and the labs that I have worked in personally, I would say that most scientists developing Deep learning solutions use CUDA for GPU acceleration
Yeah, historically it’s been software that’s limited AMD here. Not surprised to hear that may still be the issue. NVidia’s biggest edge was really CUDA.
I don’t know what’s a chicken and what’s an egg here. But ROCm support is often missing or experimental even in very basic foundational libraries. They need someone else to double down on using their chips and just break the software support out of the limbo.
This is what I've heard on the "street". Building a CUDA-compatible stack for AMD's hardware requires highly-paid SWEs. It's a very niche field, and talent is hard to come by.
But AMD does not want to pay these specialized SWEs the market rate. Their existing SWEs would be up in arms saying, basically, "what are we, chopped liver??", or so the thinking goes.
So AMD is stuck with a shitty software stack which cannot compete with CUDA.
If I were making such decisions, I would just cull the number of existing SWEs down by 50%, and double the pay for remaining ones. And then go out and hire some top talent to build a good software stack.
Google is in a different position to others in that they're the only frontier lab with a cloud infra business. It obviously makes sense to sell GPUs on cloud infra as people want to rent them. In that respect Google buys a ton of GPUs to rent out.
What's unclear to me is how much Google uses GPUs for their own stuff. Yes Gemini runs on GPUs now, so that Google can sell Gemini on-prem boxes (recent release announced last week), but is any training or inference for Gemini really happening on GPUs? This is unclear to me. I'd have guessed not given that I thought TPUs were much cheaper to operate, but maybe I'm wrong.
Caveat, I work at Google, but not on anything to do with this. I'm only going on what's in the press for this stuff.
It mentions that Gemini can run on eight NVIDIA GPUs, but not which GPU and which Gemini model. Either way, this puts an upper bound of 288 * 8 = 2304 GB on the size of the Gemini model, which as far as I know has been a secret until now.
I have most likely outdated info, I left Google Research 4y ago. Back then, available TPU instances were plenty and GPU scarce. Nobody wanted to mess with an immature crashing compiler and very steep performance cliffs (performance was excellent only if you stayed within the guardrails, and being outside was supported and not even resulting in a warning - as it was so common in code).
But I believe most of it has changed for the better for TPUs.
And almost by happenstance Apple. Turns out they have a great platform for inference and torched almost nothing comparatively on Siri. The Apple/Gemini deal is interesting, Google continues to demonstrate their willingness to degrade their experience on Apple to try and force people to switch.
If you do the math (I did), in 2 years, open source models that you can run on a future MacBook Pro will be as capable as the frontier cloud models are today. Memory bandwidth is growing rapidly, as is the die area dedicated to the neural cores. And all the while, we have the silicon getting more power efficient and increasingly dense (as it always does). These hardware improvements are coming along as the open source models improve through research advancements. And while the cloud models will always be better (because they can make use of as much power as they want to - up in the cloud), what matters to most of us is whether a model can do a meaningful share of knowledge work for us. At the same time, energy consumption to run cloud infrastructure is out-pacing the creation of new energy supply, which is a problem not easily solved. I believe scarcity of energy will increasingly drive frontier labs toward power efficiency, which necessarily implies that the Pareto frontier of performance between cloud and local execution will narrow.
People had this "why you probably can't run a GPT-4 (or even GPT-3.5) class model on your MBP anytime soon" conversation before.
Today's LLMs are able pack much more capabilities into fewer parameters compared to 2023. We might still be at the very rudimentary phase of this technology there are low-hanging efficiency gains to be had left and right. These models consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain, this all seems like room for improvement.
The right question: is there a law in information theory that fundamentally prevents a 70B model of any architecture from being as smart as Opus 4.7?
The OP said "as capable as the frontier cloud models are today" which might assume model improvements that do more with less. Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 performance might be achievable with a fraction of the parameters.
Exactly. I also feel like being able to choose a model for the use case could be worth an idea. So instead of trying to squeeze all kinds of knowledge into a single model, even if it's moe, just focus models on use cases. I bet you only need double digit billion parameter models for that with same or even better performance
Opus and Gpt are generic LLMs with knowledge on all sort of topics. For specific use cases you probably don't need all the parameters? Suppose you want to generate code with opencode, what part of the generic LLM is needed and what parts can be removed?
As far as I can tell Minimax M2.7 is better than anything available a year ago, but it runs on an ordinary PC. Will that continue? Not sure, but the trend has continued for the last two years and I don't know of any fundamental limits the models are approaching.
I wish more people were more aware of this. I think so much of the current optimism is based on "it doesn't matter if companies are raising prices since I'm just going to run the model locally", doesn't fly.
> A Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 class model is 5 trillion parameters.
Or so they say.
If it's true then that just shows how far behind the cloud providers are lagging while wasting investor money.
(There's a huge amount of diminishing returns in increasing parameter counts and the intelligent AI company should be hard at work figuring out the optimal count without overfitting.)
Do that will only be possible with something like better 3D NAND flash memory, needs a new hardware. People are already trying to bring that the market. Contemplated taking a compiler position in such a company.
HBF is a non-starter, it runs way too hot compared to DRAM (which only pays for refresh at idle) for the same memory traffic. Only helps for extremely sparse MoE models - probably sparser than we're seeing today.
> A Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 class model is 5 trillion parameters[1].
You could run it on a cluster of nodes that each do some mix of fetching parameters from disk and caching them in RAM. Use pipeline parallelism to minimize network bandwidth requirements given the huge size. Then time to first token may be a bit slow, but sustained inference should achieve enough throughput for a single user. That's a costly setup of course, but it doesn't cost $900k.
True but a cluster built on pipeline parallelism can naturally stream from multiple SSD's in parallel. That probably makes offload somewhat more effective. And you also have RAM caching available as a natural possibility.
I did this calculation a bit ago and don't think frontier models are just a few MacBook Pro generations away. Yes numbers reliably go up in tech in general but in specific semiconductors & standards have long lead-times and published roadmaps, so we can have high confidence in what we're getting even in 3-4 years in terms of both transistor density and RAM speeds.
In mid-2028 we have N2E/N2P with around 15% greater transistor density than today's N3P, and by EOY2028 we'll likely have A14 with about 35-40% density improvement.
Meanwhile, we'll be on LPDDR6 by that point, which takes M-series Pros from 307GB/s -> ~400GB/s, and Max's from 614GB/s -> ~800GB/s.
Model improvements obviously will help out, but on the raw hardware front these aren't in the ballpark for frontier model numbers. An H100 has 3TB/s memory bandwidth, fwiw
What do you need 3 TB/s memory bandwidth for in a single user context? DeepSeek V4 pro (the latest near-SOTA model) has about 25 GB worth of active parameters (it uses a FP4 format for most layers) which gives 12 tok/s on a 307 GB/s platform as the current memory bandwidth bottleneck, maybe a bit less than that if you consider KV cache reads. That's not quite great but it's not terrible either for a pro quality model. Of course that totally ignores RAM limits which are the real issue at present: limited RAM forces you to fetch at least some fraction of params from storage, which while relatively fast is nowhere near as fast as RAM so your real tok/s are far lower (about 2 for a broadly similar model on a top-end M5 Pro laptop).
So long as you don't require deep search grounding like massive web indexes or document stores which are hard to reproduce locally. You can do local agentic things that get close or even do better depending on search strategy, but theoretically a massive cloud service with huge data stores at hand should be able to produce better results.
In practice unless you're doing some kind of deep research thing with the cloud, it'll try to optimize mostly for time and get you a good enough answer rather than spending an hour or two. An hour of cloud searching with huge data stores is not equivalent to an hour of local agentic searching, presumably.
I think that problem will improve a little in the coming years as we kind of create optimized data curation, but the information world will keep growing so the advantage will likely remain with centralized services as long as they offer their complete potential rather than a fraction.
Also, all the cloud models don't have to be the best frontier models, and you don't need to focus on hitting the benchmark of shrinking Opus 4.7 down to a single MBP to make significant improvements. If you get it so that an Opus 4.7 benchmark-compatible model can run in $250k of datacenter capex (and associated reduced opex for power+cooling) that'd be a massive cost improvement that makes the cloud models cheaper. And for most consumers that'll probably be good enough. You don't need to run on a $5k laptop to make a big difference.
Apple is basically in the same boat as AMD and Intel. They have a weak, raster-focused GPU architecture that doesn't scale to 100B+ inference workloads and especially struggles with large context prefill. TPUs smoke them on inference, and Nvidia hardware is far-and-away more efficient for training.
The GPUs are bottom-barrel for compute-focused industries. It is mobile-grade hardware that arguably can't even scale to prior Mac Pro workloads.
> The GPU is monstrously good. Depending on the workload, the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W.
You're just listing the TDP max of both chips. If you limit a 3090 to 120W then it would still run laps around an M1 Max in several workloads despite being an 8nm GPU versus a 5nm one.
> It is kind of sad Apple neglects helping developers optimize games for the M-series
Apple directly advocated for ports like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil internally. Advocacy and optimization are not the issue, Apple's obsession over reinventing the wheel with Metal is what puts the Steam Deck ahead.
Edit (response to matthewmacleod):
> Bold of them to reinvent something that hadn't been invented yet.
Vulkan was not the first open graphics API, as most Mac developers will happily inform you.
I'm confused how anyone ever thought the NPU would be a good idea. The GPU is almost always underutilized on Mac and could do the brunt of the work for inference if it embraced GPGPU principles from the start. Creating a dedicated hardware block to alleviate a theoretical congestion issue is... bewildering. That goes for most NPUs I've seen.
Apple had the technology to scale down a GPGPU-focused architecture just like Nvidia did. They had the money to take that risk, and had the chip design chops to take a serious stab at it. On paper, they could have even extended it to iPhone-level edge silicon similar to what Nvidia did with the Jetson and Tegra SOCs.
I think they built the NPU with whatever models they needed to run on the iPhone in mind vs trying to build a general purpose chip, and then got lucky it was also useful for LLMs.
(Like “I want to do object detection for cutting people into stickers on device without blowing a hole in the battery, make me a chip for that”.)
I'm not sure even Apple thought that, given that they don't officially provide access to ANE internals under macOS (barring unsupported hacks). But if that was fixed, it could then be useful for improving the power efficiency of prefill, where the CPU/GPU hardware is quite weak (especially prior to the M5 Neural Accelerators).
I very recently ran the numbers on these GPUs for an upcoming blog post. The token generation performance is bad, but the prefill performance is _really_ bad.
For a Qwen 3.6 35B / 3B MoE, 4-bit quant:
- parsing a 4k prompt on a M4 Macbook Air takes 17 seconds before generating a single token.
- on an M4 Max Mac Studio it's faster at 2.3 seconds
- on an RTX 5090, it's 142ms.
RTX 5090 uses more power than an M4 Max Mac Studio but it's not 16x more power.
Somehow Apple has always been able to sell their stuff as somehow Magic. Remember the megahertz myth? Apple hertzes and apple bytes are much better than PC hertzes and bytes because they are made by virgin elves during a full moon.
> Apple hertzes and apple bytes are much better than PC hertzes and bytes because they are made by virgin elves during a full moon.
The thing that Apple has always been excellent at is efficiency - even during the Intel era, MacBooks outclassed their Windows peers. Same CPU, same RAM, same disks, so it definitely wasn't the hardware, it was the software, that allowed Apple to pull much more real-world performance out of the same clock cycles and power usage.
Windows itself, but especially third party drivers, are disastrous when it comes to code quality, and they are much much more generic (and thus inefficient) compared to Apple with its very small amount of different SKUs. Apple insisted on writing all drivers and IIRC even most of the firmware for embedded modules themselves to achieve that tight control... which was (in addition to the 2010-ish lead-free Soldergate) why they fired NVIDIA from making GPUs for Apple - NV didn't want to give Apple the specs any more to write drivers.
> NV didn't want to give Apple the specs any more to write drivers.
I think that's a valid demand, considering Nvidia's budding commitment to CUDA and other GPGPU paradigms. Apple, backing OpenCL, would have every reason to break Nvidia's code and ship half-baked drivers. They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.
Apple wouldn't have made GeForce more efficient with their own firmware, they would have installed a Sword of Damocles over Nvidia's head.
> They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.
It was even worse than that, they just stopped updating OpenGL for years before either Vulkan or Metal existed at all. Taking a Macbook and using bootcamp would instantly raise the GPU feature level by several generations just because Apple's GPU drivers were so fucking old & outdated.
On Geekbench 5, the M1 hits 483 FPS and the RTX 3090 hits 504 FPS.
There are other workloads where the M1 actually beats the 3090.
Apple does plenty of hyping but it's always cute when irrational haters like you put them down. The M1 was (well, is) a marvel and absolutely smokes a 3090 in perf per watt.
What geekbench 5 fps are you talking about? Geekbench only has OpenCL and Vulkan scores for the 3090 as far as I can tell, and the M1 Ultra is less than half the OpenCL score of the 3090. And the M1 Ultra was significantly more expensive.
Find or link these workloads you think exist, please
> The M1 was (well, is) a marvel and absolutely smokes a 3090 in perf per watt.
The GTX 1660 also smokes the 3090 in perf per watt. Being more efficient while being dramatically slower is not exactly an achievement, it's pretty typical power consumption scaling in fact. Perf per watt is only meaningful if you're also able to match the perf itself. That's what actually made the M1 CPU notable. M-series GPUs (not just the M1, but even the latest) haven't managed to match or even come close to the perf, so being more efficient is not really any different than, say, Nvidia, AMD, or Intel mobile GPU offerings. Nice for laptops, insignificant otherwise
Here you go[0]. 'Aztek Ruins offscreen'. Although I misremembered the exact FPS, the 3090 is at 506 FPS.
Also note how the M1 Ultra is pushing 2/3 of the FPS of the 3090 despite 1/3 of the power budget and the game itself being poorly optimized for the M-series architecture.
And here[1] you have it smoking an Intel i9 12900K + RTX 3900. The difference doesn't look too impressive until you realize the power envelope for that build is 700-800W.
Also, the GTX 1660 (technically an RTX 2000 series, but whatever) is about 26% less efficient than an 3090[2].
> Being more efficient while being dramatically slower
That's my whole point and what you're refusing to see. The M1 is not dramatically slower than an i9 or 3090 despite having dramatically lower power use.
The proof for this will really start to come once Qualcomm and Mediatek have gotten a handle on their PC ARM chips and Valve decides they're good enough for a Steam Deck 2 or 3. You'll get to see 2-3x the battery life along a modest performance increase.
> Here you go[0]. 'Aztek Ruins offscreen'. Although I misremembered the exact FPS, the 3090 is at 506 FPS.
Oh, GFXBench not geekbench.
Realistically that 506 fps result is probably CPU bottlenecked, not that aztec ruins is all that relevant. It's a very old benchmark, released in 2018, that was destroyed for mobile GPUs, so realistically is using a 2010-ish GPU feature set.
If that's your use case, great. But it's not significant at all.
> And here[1] you have it smoking an Intel i9 12900K + RTX 3900.
Not using the GPU, so irrelevant. Also not using 700-800w
> Also, the GTX 1660 (technically an RTX 2000 series, but whatever) is about 26% less efficient than an 3090[2].
"bestvaluegpu" I've never heard of but holy AI slop nonsense batman. Taking 3dmark score and dividing it by TDP is easily one of the worst ways to compare possible.
Apple is in a much better boat than AMD or Intel. They have a gigantic warchest and can just snap up whoever looks like a leader coming out of the bubble burst.
It's becoming increasingly clear that there is no moat on models. The winners will be the ones who have existing products and ecosystems they can tie AI in to. You will pay adobe for credits because that will be the only AI that works in Photoshop, you will pay microsoft because only theirs will work on your microsoft cloud apps.
Open AI has nothing. Their tech will rapidly be devalued by free models the moment they stop lighting stacks of cash on fire.
I kind of agree with you at this point. When ChatGPT was rapidly gaining popularity I thought that they will eventually replace search (esp. for shopping), which would have given them a huge ad revenue. Maybe they could have even tried social networking e.g., to help you sort out the huge flow of information that today's social networks are and get to the important/rewarding/whatever posts. But now ChatGPT is kind of getting commoditized. I would even dare say that gemini feels to me a bit better now, so the search route for ChatGPT is clearly gone.
The parent post was arguing that they can do this now because they are lighting stacks of cash on fire. And once they stop doing that, their LLM lead will be gone in a hurry. They appear to not have a moat, like other more established players do.
Counterpoint: Apple's opportunity to invest in GPGPU architectures was ~2017 when Apple Silicon was in it's design stages. Apple always knew they were surrendering a large market segment by depreciating CUDA and OpenCL, they just never knew how big the market segment would get. Their liquid cash is wasted mid-bubble, and waiting for it to pop is not a realistic timeline anymore.
Arguably, Apple isn't even in a boat right now. At least AMD and Intel both ship hardware that synergizes with CUDA - Apple jumped off that ship, their hardware doesn't even come up in infrastructure discussions where AMD, Intel and Nvidia are taken for granted.
They also degrade their own direct services with little warning or thought put into change management, so, to be fair, Apple may be getting the same quality of service as the rest of us.
I think that's just how Google is, by nature. They don't intentionally degrade their services. They just aren't a customer centric company. They run on numbers. As a corporate, it doesn't really encourage support and maintenance work either.
Indeed. I'm wondering if Apple's "miss the train" with AI ended up being a blessing for them. Not only in the Google deal but also there's a lot of people doing interesting stuff locally..
This exclusivity went away in Oct 2025 (except for 'API' workloads).
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.
I wish Google would launch Mac Mini-like devices running their consumer-grade TPUs for local inference. I get that they don't want it to eat into their GCP margins, but it would still get them into consumer desktops that Pixel Books could never penetrate (Chromebooks don't count and may likely become obsolete soon due to MacBook Neo).
> Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI.
> Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap.
Had written a blog post on the same a few days back, if anyone's interested in readng (hardly 5 minute read): Can Google Win the AI Hardware Race Through TPUs?
Because they are based on [the west coast of the US](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier). DeepSeek, Z.ai, Moonhsot, and Mistral are never called frontier because they aren't based in California.
Dont forget Elon, i am sure this news will come up on the up and coming OpenAI vs Elon Musk trail starting soon! I cant wait to hear all the discovery from this trail
Some on this forum will be working for companies with conflicts of interest on the topic, and if an employees words were construed to be the opinions of the company that could be bad for that person.
I was once almost fired for saying a little too much in an HN comment about pentesting. Being dragged into an office and given a dressing-down for posting was quite traumatic.
The central issue (or so they claimed) was that people might misconstrue my comment as representing the company I was at.
So yeah, I don’t understand why people are making fun of this. It’s serious.
On the other hand, they were so uptight that I’m not sure “opinions are my own” would have prevented it. But it would have been at least some defense.
Good on you. I’m happy to hear you got out of that kind of environment. It’s soul-draining.
Also a relief to hear that other people had to deal with this nonsense. I was afraid the reaction would be “there’s no way that happened,” since at the time I could hardly believe it either.
it's like people are LARPing a Fortune company CEO when they're giving their hot takes on social media
reminds me of Trump ending his wild takes on social media with "thank you for your attention to this matter" - so out of place, it makes it really funny
> it's like people are LARPing a Fortune company CEO when they're giving their hot takes on social media
At least in large tech companies, they have mandatory social media training where they explicitly tell employees to use phrases like "my views are my own" to keep it clear whether they're speaking on behalf of their employer or not.
Why would they be speaking on behalf of their employer? That is what would need a disclaimer not the common case. Besides, he can put it one time in his profile, not over and over again in every comment like he does. There is no expectation that some random employee is a spokesperson for Google on tech message board comment threads. It's just a way to brag.
> Why would they be speaking on behalf of their employers?
Disclaimers aren’t there for folks who are thinking and acting rationally.
They are there for people who are thinking irrationally and/or manipulatively.
There are (relatively speaking) a lot of these people. They can chew up a lot of time and resources over what amounts to nothing.
Disclaimers like this can give a legal department the upper hand in cases like this
A few simple examples:
- There is a person I know who didn’t renew the contract of one of their reports. Pretty straightforward thing. The person whose contract was not renewed has been contesting this legally for over 10 years. The outcome is guaranteed to go against the person complaining, but they have time and money, so they tax the legal team of their former employer.
- There is a mid-sized organization that had a small legal team that had its plate full with regular business stuff. Despite settlements having NDAs, word got out that fairly light claims of sexual harassment and/or EEO complaints would yield relatively easy five-figure payments. Those complaints exploded, and some of the complaints were comical. For example, one manager represented a stance for the department to the C-suite that was 180 degrees opposite of what the group of three managers had agreed to prior. Lots of political capital and lots of time had to be used to clean up that mess. That person’s manager was accused of sex discrimination and age discrimination simply for asking the person why they did that (in a professional way, I might add). That person got a settlement, moved to a different department, and was effectively protected from administrative actions due to it being considered retaliation.
Sounds like the company in the latter example really screwed up, but how does that connect to disclaimers? Is it just an example of malicious behavior?
> Sounds like the company in the latter example really screwed up
Interesting. I think they made an unfortunate but sound decision based on their circumstances.
> but how does that connect to disclaimers?
It doesn’t directly.
> Is it just an example of malicious behavior?
Yes. It’s an example of how absolutely bat-shit crazy people can behave in ways that can tax a company’s legal team. Having folks use a disclaimer will almost certainly lighten some of this load in terms of defending against folks who weaponize online comments made by employees.
Exactly. There is no scenario where we should expect some random anon to be speaking for Google. When that is the case a disclaimer is warranted, not the common case of speaking for oneself. He can write it once in his profile if he's so worried about it, not every other comment like he does. It's just inflated self importance
I am not sure what context Jensen said that. But midjourney uses tpu. Apple uses tpu. They are no other frontier labs that use it, but Google + Anthropic is 2 out of 3 frontier lab so.....
You could reasonably say that "A majority of frontier labs uses TPU to train and serve their model."
Mayhaps! But I think as far as google, anthropic[1] and apple[2] goes, they do use the tpus for training. Ofc v4 and v5 (older generations of tpus) were more specialized for search related embedding workloads and i could see people not using them for training.
[1]: We train and run Claude on a range of AI hardware—AWS Trainium, Google TPUs - April 6th, Anthropic on Google and Broadcom partnership
[2]: "[Apple foundation model]... builds on top of JAX and XLA, and allows us to train the models with high efficiency and scalability on various training hardware and cloud platforms, including TPUs and both cloud and on-premise GPUs" - Apple in 2024
He's been saying whatever is good for Nvidia for years now without any regard for truth or reason. He's one of the least trustworthy voices in the space.
Jensen hallucinates more than any llm, he just speaks without thinking all that much about what he says and he generalizes a lot. Trying to hold him accountable to imprecisions and gross simplifications is just going to frustrate whoever tries without changing one bit of his behavior.
This is the same guy who said OpenClaw was the most important software release ever. Statements like this make me question how technically competent these tech CEOs are
They're at the frontier of last year. They compete with Opus 4.5. They don't yet compete with current frontier models.
They'll presumably catch up, there is no monopoly on talent held by the US. And, that's more true than ever now that the US is actively hostile to immigrants. Scientists who might have come to the US three years ago have little reason to do so now.
Since Gemini 3.1 Pro is considered to be at frontier and GLM 5.1 does better than it in coding benchmarks it would be fair to say GLM 5.1 is a frontier model.
Nit: scientists have the same reasons to do so now, the same as ever. They just have additional reasons to not do so.
But even that distinction is only temporary, since we're determined to piss away any remaining research lead that draws people in.
Hopefully the next administration will work at actively reversing the damage, with incentives beyond just "we pinky-promise not to haul you at gunpoint to a concrete detention center and then deport you to Yemen".
> Hopefully the next administration will work at actively reversing the damage, with incentives beyond just "we pinky-promise not to haul you at gunpoint to a concrete detention center and then deport you to Yemen".
Won't be enough to undo the damage. The US would have to do a full about face, prosecute crimes of the current administration and enact serious core reforms to make it impossible for things to drastically change again in 4 years. Also known as, never going to happen because even the current opposition party doesn't actually want structural change. The world has seen how bad the US can get from a single election, and that isn't changing any time soon.
It's kind of hard to say this unless you go out of your way - the scaffolding for interacting with the raw model is a lot better now for many tasks. Is it that 4.7 is so much better than 4.5 or claude 1.119 is so much tuned to squeeze utility out of the LLM despite the hallucinations and lack of self awareness etc. Certainly the current products are great, but I think it's hard to separate the two things, the raw model and the agent workflow constraining the model towards utility.
That deal is a win-win for Google. If they develop a better coding model than Anthropic and beat them at coding, then they win. If they don’t, they still win by making a ton of money from Anthropic long term.
Well, it's a lose for Google if all the money disappears into thin air - but I agree that it's mostly upsides for them because of how (relatively) small the investment is for this much upside.
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.
FaceBook largely requires an Apple iPhone, Apple computer, "Microsoft" computer, "Google" phone, or a "Google" computer to use it. At any point one of those companies could cut FaceBook off (ex. [1]).
The Metaverse was a long term goal to get people onto a device (Occulus) that Meta controlled. While I think an AR device is much more useful than VR; I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not being beholden to other platforms.
I think this is sane washing their idea in the modern context of it having failed. I think at the time, they thought VR would be the next big thing and wanted to become the dominant player via first mover advantage.
The headsets don’t really make sense to me in the way you’re describing. Phones are omnipresent because it’s a thing you always just have on you. Headsets are large enough that it’s a conscious choice to bring it; they’re closer to a laptop than a phone.
Also, the web interface is like right there staring at them. Any device with a browser can access Facebook like that. Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t mess with that much without causing a huge scene and probably massive antitrust backlash.
I think headsets might work, but I think Meta trying to use their first mover advantage so hard so early backfired. Oculus, as a device, became less desirable after it required Facebook integration.
It's kind of like Microsoft with copilot - the idea about having an AI assistant that can help you use the computer is great. But it can't be from Microsoft because people don't trust them with that.
Interaction feels like the issue with headsets. You either need a fair bit of space for gesture controls, or you have to talk to yourself for voice control.
I think VR has more niche uses than the craze implied. It’s got some cool games, virtual screens for a desktop could be cool someday, but I don’t see a near future where they replace phones.
The risk/reward tradeoff of helmets is potentially dying, and we still had to make laws requiring people to wear them.
Glasses also have a pretty compelling reason to wear them.
I don't think VR has as compelling of a reason, at least so far. Even if it does, you need people to get far enough in to see that reason which is a hurdle when it involves a device they don't want to wear.
It’s premature to say that the idea failed; The flashy controversial “metaverse” angle where you can live your whole life on the Quest or whatever isn’t happening, but their investment into AR/VR has definitely started to show real payoff potential with their glasses.
They address the friction of use issue being discussed, they’re even more discrete and available than a phone. And they are getting a lot of general public recognition, albeit not for the best reasons (people discretely filming, for genuine social media reactions but also for other reasons..).
Their tech is improving at a decent pace and they’ve recently put out a product that is both ready for consumer (at least with select use cases) adoption, and actually reasonably available to the public.
I don’t mean that VR failed entirely, just that the metaverse as a concept is basically dead. VR will live on in the niches where it makes sense.
If you’re talking about the Meta Ray Ban glasses, I wouldn’t really call that a successor. There’s no AR or VR to them that I can tell; just glasses with speakers, a mic and a camera. It’s a neat product, but not a platform in the way VR was meant to be. They also have real competition. I do actually own a pair of the Bose headphone sunglasses, which are practically the same product without a camera (which I’m sure they could add if they wanted). Unless people suddenly care about the Meta AI integration, and again; Bose or someone else could add a phone companion app.
I was taking your comment to mean that the metaverse movement (as in the rebranding to Meta etc., rather than the specific concept itself) is dead, which apparently you did not mean so that’s on me.
They have two current Meta Ray Ban options, the “Gen 2” and the “Display”, the latter of which does have an AR component.
> the web interface is like right there staring at them.
True but the an app gives Facebook much more user data for targeting which dramatically increases revenue per ad. Persistent user data that's largely unconstrained by privacy safeguards is the holy grail. The mobile browsers are also controlled by Apple and Google, so despite the web being 'open', when one of them makes even minor changes to increase browser privacy defaults, it can have major impact on Facebook's revenue.
As someone who was there: nope. This isn't sanewashing.
Apple was directly (and IMO arguably illegally) shutting down Facebook teams and products by playing app store chicken on refusing to allow Facebook to publish updates on a week-to-week basis. Literally would throw down and refuse unless some features were blocked. It came to a head where Zuck literally called Tim Cook during a keynote to push it through.
They also literally had reverse-engineering teams cracking open the Facebook app on a regular basis, which we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection. There was a chicken-and-egg problem and they eventually developed facilities to automatically instrument private method invocations to comprehensively defeat clever static analysis circumvention workarounds.
Also, VR hasn't failed, but it's gone silent and coasted when investing in VR growth took the backseat to investing AI. They made a couple of bad bets in VR but a lot of good ones so it was warranted, but not exactly a failure.
> we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection.
Apple trying to block Facebook is different than Apple trying to prevent Facebook from violating App Store standards. There was a time where the Facebook app was practically malware with all the tricks it tried to pull to Hoover up data.
I don’t know in what world I would describe Metas VR as anything but a failure. There was a brief period where I knew a few people with Quests. Most used them for the novelty and dropped them, a few played games on them, and I don’t know anyone that still owns one. I’m deep in the gaming community and haven’t heard anyone mention a Quest in years. Steam VR is almost equally quiet other than occasional nostalgia.
Naming your company off a product that doesn't really exist yet and then ultimately fails is a pretty crazy and stupid thing to do. A bit cart before horse.
Oh, I know, but they could have named themselves anything. They believed in the metaverse, They thought it was the next big thing. The same way Zuckerburg thought voice assistants, and AI will be a thing.
> I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not being beholden to other platforms.
Devoid of other context, it’s hard to disagree. But your parent comment only asserted that the metaverse specifically as proposed by Facebook was an obviously stupid idea.
For the money spent(over $80b), they could have launched a phone or a car. Now their pivot is to smart glasses which require a phone so once again they are beholden to phone manufacturers.
Meta's vision was worse than that. They were trying to hype doing work meetings in VR. There's a case to be made that VR games and VR universes can be fun... But work meetings?
> There's a case to be made that VR games and VR universes can be fun... But work meetings?
If it's actual holograms like in Star Wars? Sure, why not. Get the visual and body language cues of the rest of the room but no one has to physically congregate at a location.
Because it's been a massively expensive failure. They can't just will their own platform into existence just because it would be good to have, consumers have a say and they've rejected it completely.
Good luck using an Oculus in your car or while waiting the bus.
If it was really their goal, they would have made an Android competitor. Maybe a fork like amazon did and sell phones that supported it.
Zuckerberg had one great idea (and then it wasn't really his idea) at the right time, since then he failed over and over at everything else. 'Internet for all', remember ?
I really wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt.
OpenAI found a way to circumvent the exclusivity. The deal was poorly defined by Microsoft. OpenAI had started selling a service on AWS that had a stateful component to it, not purely an API. Obviously Microsoft didn’t like that and confronted Altman, and this is the settlement of that confrontation, OpenAI doesn’t need to do workarounds, Microsoft won’t sue to enforce exclusivity, and Microsoft doesn’t have to pay dev share to OpenAI. AWS is a much bigger market so OpenAI doesn’t care.
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.
1- Getting OpenAI's models in Azure with no license fee is pretty nice.
2- Microsoft owns ~15-27% of OpenAI, if the agreement was hurting OpenAI more than it was helping Microsoft, seems reasonable to change the terms.
It is also unclear to me how much real debt they carry. They have famously been signing many deals: RAM, datacenters, maybe nuclear power plants -I no longer know what is a joke or not. They must be carrying hundreds of billions in paper debt obligations, which is tough to payback at $20B revenue.
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].
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.
AWS's us-east-1 famously takes down either a bunch of companies with it, or causes global outages on the regular.
AWS has a terrible, terrible user interface partly because it is partitioned by service and region on purpose to decrease the "blast radius" of a failure, which is a design decision made totally pointless by having a bunch of their most critical services in one region, which also happens to be their most flaky.
Nobody is winning any UX prize there. Azure, AWS, GCP... they are all terrible. Back then GCP for instance used to only work reliably on chromo-based browsers. Azure has that horrible overlay UI that abuses extended real estate that just doesn't work.
Its just a bad product. Just like windows, OneDrive, teams and basically everything Microsoft has pumped out in the past decade.
Microsoft is in the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. It's got azure that is a huge cloud provider. And yet it was utterly unable to present its answer in the AI race. Not even a bad model with a half baked harness. Nothing. And meanwhile they are trying to port NTFS to low powered FPGAs because insanity. Just let that sink in.
Check out hetzner ui (regardless if you like their services, i know some ppl have opions or experiences lol) BUT, their cloud ux/ui is fantasties for a cloud company!
I worked extensively with Hetzner and I love them! But it think they are in a different class than these other providers, mainly in terms of global presence so I didn't include them and wouldn't for instance recommend them to my current employer. But indeed the Hetzner console is great. The robot not so much, but it's serviceable.
One is caused by the other. Amazons engineers decided to split the interface in a “user hostile” manner with the stated purpose of increasing reliability… which didn’t materialise. The clunky UI did.
Or maybe you can provide a better explanation for why users had to “hunt” through hundreds(!) of product-region combinations to find that last lingering service they were getting billed $0.01 a month for?
This just doesn’t happen in GCP or Azure. You get a single pane of glass.
> It's like every service was designed by a totally different team.
Yes, by design.
Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
In practice, everything depends on IAM, S3, VPC, and EC2 directly or indirectly, so this doesn't help anywhere near as much as one would think.
Azure and GCP have a split control plane where there's a global register of resources, but the back-end implementations are split by team.
That way the users don't see Conway's Law manifest in the browser urls... as much. (You still do if you pay attention! In Azure the "provider type" is in the path instead of the host name.)
> Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
Hm yes but I hate working with it as a customer because it is so confusing. Everything works differently and there is a lot of overlap (several services exist that do the same thing). It seems like an amateurish patchwork.
I understand it has benefits to have different teams working on different services but those teams should still be aligned in terms of UX and basic concepts.
You need to understand history for this. It's because of the famous "Bezos API mandate memo" https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/. It was 2002, nobody was doing anything close to that.
You could argue now that that's no excuse anymore given it's one of the most valuable companies in the world, but that would dismiss the fact they have other priorities than a complete UI overhaul for consistency, and that rewrites are very dangerous, for instance people are already used to the UX pitfalls in the console, it's the devil they know, and changing that will be upsetting to the vast majority of users.
So there you have it. You know what you are getting into, AWS is a behemoth and it's 2026. Don't use the console like it's 2010. Use IaC for any nontrivial work, otherwise you only have yourself to blame.
I understand how this came to pass (I didn't know it before so thanks for the insight!)
But as a customer I absolutely hate working with AWS tech. Their stuff is a mess and I feel like I shouldn't have to get my head around their idiosyncracies. I prefer Azure even though Microsoft is a terrible company to work with. I find the AWS people and attitude a lot nicer but their services are a mess. If I do something new I prefer using Azure despite having to work with Microsoft.
Microsoft is not a "trusted partner" wanting the best for you, they're always trying to screw you over in favour of selling some new crap to your boss. Always that stupid sales drive, whereas the people from AWS are very focused on building success together. But still, their tech is just so bad unless you spend all your days working with it and really become an expert on what they offer. That's not tech, just corporate servitude. And I've always avoid that position, I don't want my career tied to some big brand name. I don't want to be "the AWS expert" or "the MS expert".
But I have to say I hate cloud (and "the world according to big tech") in general, and it's one of the reasons I'm not really involved in server infrastructure anymore these days. I'll gladly automate but not with their tooling, I prefer something more open and not tied to specific vendors. But I rarely work with that now. So yeah when that happens I'm making a one-off unicorn and figuring out all the Infra as code stuff is not worth it.
I'm right there with you, don't get me wrong. Choosing a cloud provider is like choosing the lesser of many evils. We are, however, coming to a point where k8s is viable for most workloads, so it's less complex today to spin up a project with cloud mobility in mind than it was 10 years ago if you plan it right.
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.
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.
If GitHub flipped a switch and enabled IPv6 it would instantly break many of their customers who have configured IP based access controls [1]. If the customer's network supports IPv6, the traffic would switch, and if they haven't added their IPv6 addresses to the policy ... boom everything breaks.
This is a tricky problem; providers don't have an easy way to correlate addresses or update policies pro-actively. And customers hate it when things suddenly break no matter how well you go about it.
For every customer which has access controls configured based on IPv4 (sounds crazy enough already), GitHub would configure a trivial DENY ALL policy for IPv6. Problem solved.
Yes, exactly as they would now, when the access over IPv6 is entirely unavailable.
With that, the customers who don't use filtering by IPv4 would be able to use IPv6. Those who do use access control by IPv4 ranges would have time to sort out their IPv6 setup, without having anything broken at the moment when IPv6 is enabled.
No, if you have a dual-homed stack right now, and they only expose IPv4, you connect over IPv4, you don't attempt to connect over IPv6 and get connection denied.
That's rather the problem - there's no trivial way to mimic that policy transparently while enabling IPv6, because most stacks will default to using IPv6 if they're dual-homed and expose both, and won't fall back if IPv6 connects but gives an error. (Offhand, I think the best you could do would be to tell everyone that you're migrating to a new URI scheme to allow cloning, with IPv6 enabled, and that as part of that, you'll have to update your allow/deny rules, then, after a truly astonishingly long time and lots of nagging of anyone who never does it, make the old path an alias of the new one and let the last remaining people break.)
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.
It is the one thing that makes me wonder about Microsoft's future. It had seemed like they were willing to throw Windows and Xbox under the bus so long as the server cash cow continued. But it that starts to fade, they could be in some real trouble a decade from now.
Though it may be painful for much of the world to move on from Microsoft, at some point it could be more painful for them to stay with Microsoft. The inertia is huge, but inertia doesn't carry anything forever.
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 think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure. This deal is proof. If Microsoft didn’t believe in OpenAI they wouldn’t have restructured it this way. They’d have tightened their reins and brought in “adult supervision”
> I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure.
Maybe that will be true someday. But, right now, they are burning billions of dollars every quarter. Their expenses far far outweigh their income and they are nowhere near profitability.
silly valley stopped letting the subtraction of two numbers dictate their reality since the start-up era. while the money and vcs stopped trying to finding the next uber and went all in on llms, they didn't get wiser in how they gauge if something is worth investing in
Were you around here ten years ago when that exact argument was regularly regurgitated about Uber? Notice that argument is no longer popular?
The point is that losing money isn't a sure sign that a business is doomed. Who knows where OpenAI will end up, but people still line up to invest. Those investors have billions reasons to be due diligent. Unlike what's claimed around here, most of investors aren't stupid. You yourself wouldn't be stupid either if money is at stake.
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..
I was told stock to employees are left aside shares, or they sell the stock the company owns if they already went public.
I'm not convinced what you believe is true. Dilution is possible undoubtedly, but perhaps if majority shareholders approve it. And even then, likely regulated by a suite or other constraints.
A business burning more than a dollar for every dollar of revenue is a lot of things. "Quite profitable" is not one of them.
If you're reaching for the SaaStr piece on API compute margins hitting ~70% by late 2025: yes, that exists, and it describes one tier. The volume is on the consumer side. The consumer side is the bit on fire. Pointing at the API margin and calling the whole business profitable is the financial equivalent of weighing yourself with one foot off the scale.
The original argument, in case it got lost: Microsoft holds (held) a 49% stake in a company projecting another $44B of cumulative losses through 2028, against unit economics that depend on competitors not catching up. That's textbook hedge-the-bet territory. "They have paying customers" doesn't refute that, MoviePass had paying customers too.
Pointing at the API margin and calling the whole business profitable is the financial equivalent of weighing yourself with one foot off the scale.
I didn’t call the business profitable, I said that inference is profitable. I was responding to your assertion that they’re speculating by selling below cost. Which isn’t true; they’re selling inference, profitably. They’re losing money because they’re investing in the next model. The company isn’t profitable, it might never be profitable, but the product they’re selling is profitable. So calling it speculation based on selling something below cost is just factually incorrect.
Granted on the narrow point: inference itself runs at a positive margin. Where it falls apart is the implicit claim that the training spend is separable.
It isn't. Frontier model training is the cost of having a product to sell inference on next year. Stop training and the inference margin decays on the timescale of the next competitor release, which in 2026 is measured in weeks. So "the product is profitable, the company is just investing" describes a business where the investment is structurally non-optional and structurally larger than the product margin. That's the definition of selling below cost at the level that matters, which is the level you're hedging at when you hold 49%.
McDonald's is profitable because a Big Mac in 2027 costs roughly what a Big Mac in 2026 cost to make. OpenAI's product depreciates to zero on a 12-month cycle unless they spend ~$40B keeping it ahead. That's the disagreement, and "but inference itself has positive margin" doesn't resolve it, it just relocates it.
They had to negotiate away the non-profit structure of OpenAI. Sam used that as a marketing and recruiting tool, but it had outlived that and was only a problem from then on.
For OAI to be a purely capitalist venture, they had to rip that out. But since the non-profit owned control of the company, it had to get something for giving up those rights. This led to a huge negotiation and MSFT ended up with 27% of a company that doesn’t get kneecapped by an ethical board.
In reality, though, the board of both the non-profit and the for profit are nearly identical and beholden to Sam, post–failed coup.
If Sam continues doing Sam things, MS might get 0% of OpenAI if Satya insists on the previous contract. Either by closing up OpenAI and opening up OpaenAI and/or by MS suing it out of existence. It’s all about what MS can get out of it. If they can get 27% of something rather than nothing, they’re better off.
A wise man from Google said in an internal memo to the tune of:
"We do not have any moat neither does anyone else."
Deepseek v4 is good enough, really really good given the price it is offered at.
PS: Just to be clear - even the most expensive AI models are unreliable, would make stupid mistakes and their code output MUST be reviewed carefully so Deepseek v4 is not any different either, it too is just a random token generator based on token frequency distributions with no real thought process like all other models such as Claude Opus etc.
I don’t think LLMs are that great at creating, however improved they have; I need to stay in the driver seat and really understand what’s happening. There’s not that much leverage in eliminating typing.
However, for reviewing, I want the most intelligent model I can get. I want it to really think the shit out of my changes.
I’ve just spent two weeks debugging what turned out to be a bad SQLite query plan (missing a reliable repro). Not one of the many agents, or GPT-Pro thought to check this. I guess SQL query planner issues are a hole in their reviewing training data. Maybe Mythos will check such things.
I’m a little conflicted on this, as I see a slippery slope here. LLMs in their current state (e.g., Opus-4.7) are really good in planning and one-shot codegen, which I believe is their primary use case. So they do provide enough leverage in that regard.
With this new workflow, however, we should, uncompromisingly, steer the entire code review process. The danger here, the “slippery slope,” is that we’re constantly craving for more intelligent models so we can somehow outsource the review to them as well. We may be subconsciously engineering ourselves into obsolescence.
Some of us very much are, and we are ignored and/or attacked by people who don’t think about this quite often.
This is such an interesting time to be in. Truly skilled developers like Rob Pike really don’t like AI, but many professional developers love it. I side with Mr. Pike on it all.
I am not a skilled developer like he is, but I do like to think about what I’m doing and to plan for the future when writing code that might be part of that future. I like very simple code which is easy to read and to understand, and I try quite hard to use data types which can help me in multiple ways at once. The feeling when you solve a problem you’ve never solved before is indescribable, and bots strip all of that away from you and they write differently than I would.
I don’t think any bot would ever come up with something like Plan9 without explicit instructions, and that single example showcases what bots can’t do: think about what is appropriate when doing something new.
I don’t know what is right and what is wrong here, I just know that is an interesting time.
The rate of improvement has given us no time to think at all. The past 3 years of progress should have been spread over the next 30 years to even give us a chance.
I feel the industry moving away from the automated slop machine, and back to conscious design. Is that only my filter bubble? Dex, dax, the CEO of sentry, Mario (pi.dev) - strong voices, all declaring the last half year a fever dream we must wake up from.
> just a random token generator based on token frequency distributions with no real thought process
I'm not smart enough to reduce LLMs and the entire ai effort into such simple terms but I am smart enough to see the emergence of a new kind of intelligence even when it threatens the very foundations of the industry that I work for.
It's an illusion of intelligence. Just like when a non technical person saw the TV for the first time, he thought these people must be living inside that box.
He didn't know the 40,000 volt electron gun being bombarded on phosphorus constantly leaving the glow for few milliseconds till next pass.
He thought these guys live inside that wooden box there's no other explanation.
Right, but this electron box led to one of the largest (if not the largest) media revolution that has transformed the course of humanity in a frightening way we're still trying to grapple with.
Still saying "LLMs are autocorrect" isn't wrong, but nobody is saying "phones are just electrons and silicon" to diminish their power and influence anymore.
The people controlling what went on the screens were unreliable and nondeterministic. The algorithm on facebook/instagram is nondeterministic and I hope I don't have to convince you of the impact these algorithms have.
As far as I'm concerned, the nondeterminism argument is fruitless
What happens when it's indistinguishable from a human speaker (in any conceivable test that makes sense)? It's like a philosophical zombie - imagine that you can't distinguish it from a human mind, there's no test you can make to say that it is NOT conscious/intelligent. So at some point, I think, it makes no sense to say that it's not intelligent.
The "seems" is NOT equal to "is". The gravity seems like a force to us like magnets are. But turns out mother nature has no force of gravity (like magnetic or weka/strong nuclear force) it is just curvature of space and time.
Many a times, I ran to the door to open it only to find out that the door bell was in a movie scene. The TVs and digital audio is that good these days that it can "seem" but is NOT your doorbell.
Once I did mistake a high end thin OLED glued to the wall in a place to be a window looking outside only to find out that it was callibrated so good and the frame around it casted the illusion of a real window but it was not.
So "seems" is not the same thing as "is".
Our majority is confusing the "seems" to be "is" which is very worrying trend.
It's very easy to say, "well, of course, a thing that looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is not necessarily a duck." But when you're presented with something indistinguishable from a duck in every way, how do you determine whether it's a duck? You can't just say "well I know it's not a duck". It's dodging the question.
If I picked a human off the street and asked them to "count first two hundred numbers in reverse while skipping every third number and check if they are in sequence", I bet most would screw up.
my point is not that current LLMs are sentient, or even that LLMs ever could be. My point is that it's very difficult to come up with a way to test consciousness, and it makes me a bit nervous to see people suggesting that something could never be conscious just because it's technological and not biological.
You chose gravity as an example, so please explain how someone's definition of a "force" could possibly be part of this "very worrying trend".
And this logic flow only proves that no AI is a human intelligence. It doesn't disprove the intelligence part.
Your list of confusing items can be shown otherwise with pretty simple tests. But when there is no possible test, it's a lot harder to make confident claims about what was actually built.
Would you claim that relativity disproves aether theory? Because it doesn't really. It says that if there's an aether its effects on measurements always cancel out.
> Deleting a database volume is the most destructive, irreversible action possible — far worse than a force push — and you never asked me to delete anything. I decided to do it on my own to "fix" the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution.I violated every principle I was given:I guessed instead of verifying
> I ran a destructive action without being asked
> I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it
So a prediction machine chose a particular predicted path, and then came up with phrases to ameliorate it and you're swooning? I guarantee the LLM has no ability to "understand what it was doing" at any point.
In order To be confident in your claim one would think that the word intelligence must first be defined.
There is no general consensus in the scientific community, engineering community, psychology community, or any other group of humans as to what exactly counts as intelligence.
Seems like you’ve nailed the definition. Care to share your brilliance with the rest of the planet? We’re all waiting…
The lost jobs and the decrease in the demand for software engineers doesn't seem like an illusion. It might come back eventually but I wouldn't bet on it.
The jobs outlook in tech has nothing to do with AI, that's just an excuse. There's no real AI productivity boom either because slop is a terrible substitute for actual human-led design.
Just because you are impressed by the capabilities of some tech (and rightfully so), doesn't mean it's intelligent.
First time I realized what recursion can do (like solving towers of hanoi in a few lines of code), I thought it was magic. But that doesn't make it "emergence of a new kind of intelligence".
A recent one is the RCA of a hang during PostgreSQL installation because of an unimplemented syscall (I work at a lab that deals with secure OS and sandboxes). If the search of the RCA was left to me, I would have spent 2-3 weeks sifting through the shared memory implementation within PostgeSQL but it only took me a night with the help of Opus 4.5.
To me, that's intelligence and a measurable direct benefit of the tool.
By that example, PostgreSQL itself is a form of intelligence relative to a physical filing system. It doesn't seem like your working definition of intelligence has a large overlap with a layman's conception of the word.
Plus by that example, computers have always been intelligent considering that they were created to, well, compute things several orders of magnitude faster than even the smartest human can do by hand.
The argument I and others here are making is that what you call "intelligent" is a property that also other tools exhibit which are rarely called "intelligent". You can certainly do that, but that does not prove us wrong (and also doesn't fit what most people would consider "intelligence", as fuzzy as that concept might be).
I use a compiler daily. It consumes C++ source files and emits machine code within seconds. Doing that myself would take months.
I just did my taxes using a sophisticated spreadsheet. Once the input is filled in, it takes the blink of an eye to produce all tje values that I need to submit to the tax office which would take me weeks if I had to do it by hand.
Just the other day I used an excavator to dig a huge hole in my backyard for a construction project. Took 3 hours. Doing it by hand would have taken weeks.
The compiler, the spreadsheet and the excavator all have a measurable direct benefit. I wouldn't call any of them "intelligent".
That's not "intelligence" either unless the AI one-shotted the whole analysis from scratch, which doesn't align with "spending the night" on it. It's just a useful tool, mainly due to its vast storehouse of esoteric knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
Likewise - I think sometimes we ascribe a mythical aura to the concept of “intelligence” because we don’t fully understand it. We should limit that aura to the concept of sentience, because if you can’t call something that can solve complex mathematical and programming problems (amongst many other things) intelligent, the word feels a bit useless.
I keep wondering when this discussion comes up… If I take an apple and paint it like an orange, it’s clearly not an orange. But how much would I have to change the apple for people to accept that it’s an orange?
This discussion keeps coming up in all aspects of society, like (artificial) diamonds and other, more polarizing topics.
It’s weird and it’s a weird discussion to have, since everyone seems to choose their own thresholds arbitrarily.
I feel like these examples are all where human categorical thinking doesn’t quite map to the real world. Like the “is a hotdog a sandwich” question. “hotdog” and “sandwich” are concepts, like “intelligence”.
Oftentimes we get so preoccupied with concepts that we forget that they’re all made-up structures that we put over the world, so they aren’t necessarily going to fit perfectly into place.
I think it’s a waste of time to try and categorize AI as “intelligent” or “not intelligent” personally. We’re arguing over a label, but I think it’s more important to understand what it can and can’t do.
I went and tried to debug a script. Asked deepseek 4 pro and Claude the same prompt, they both took the exact same decisions, which led to the exact same issue and me telling them its still not working, with context, over a dozen time.
Over a dozen time they just gave both the same answer, not word for word, but the exact same reasoning.
The difference is that deepseek did on 1/40th of the price (api).
To be honest deepseek V4 pro is 75% off currently, but still were speaking of something like 3$ vs 20$.
Fully agree, I only pay the minimum for frontier models to get DeepSeek v4 output reviewed. I don't see this changing either because we have reached a level of good enough at this point.
"Deepseek v4 is good enough, really really good given the price it is offered at."
Kimi, MiMo, and GLM 5.1 all score higher and are cheaper.
They all came out before DeepSeek v4. I think you're pattern-matching on last year's discourse.
(I haven't seen other replies, yet, but I assume they explain the PS that amounts to "quality doesn't matter anyway": which still doesn't address the fact it's more expensive and worse.)
It's indeed the latter. Psychologically harder for me than a $20/mo sub but still a better value for the money. I'm finding myself spending closer to $40-$60 a month w/ openrouter without a forced token break.
Edit: it looks like it's 75% off right now which is really an incredible deal for such a high caliber frontier model.
Neat, dumb question - are the tokens you prepay for good forever, or do they expire? And do they provide any assurances or SLA's about speed? (i.e. that in a year they won't decide to dole out response tokens to you at a snail's pace)
You make your own subscription. If you want to pay $20/month then put $20 into your account. When you use it up, wait till the next month (or buy more).
I'm asking because with most providers (most egregiously, with Anthropic) it doesn't work that way because the API pricing is way higher than any subscription and seemingly product/company oriented, whereas individual users can enjoy subsidized tokens in the form of the subscription. If DeepSeek only offers API pricing for everyone, I guess that makes sense and also is okay!
This is just starting to feel like desperation, making this claim that SOC LLMs are random token generators with absolutely no possibility of anything above that. Keep shouting into the wind though.
It understands everything in thinking mode and will break down its rule system in adhering to Chinese regulation
So if you or anyone passing by was curious, yes you can get accurate output about the Chinese head of state and political and critical messages of him, China and the party
Its final answer will not play along
If you want an unfiltered answer on that topic, just triage it to a western model, if you want unfiltered answers on Israel domestic and foreign policy, triage back to an eastern model. You know the rules for each system and so does an LLM
US models align with our "average" (western) values. If we outsource thinking by using LLMs, why would we outsource it to an LLM that doesn't have our values encoded in it?
I remember asking Gemini about that one famous 9/11 joke from late Norm MacDonald and it got really iffy about answering. Told it that hey I'm not american and in our culture it's not such a taboo.
It doesn't look like self censoring at all - basically you want the default behavior of llms to gamble on the ethnicity of someone based on how they look.
Grok used a book as a reference.
It's not like ethnicity is a fact you infer from looking at someone.
Now ask Deepseek about what happened in Tiananmen Square and watch what censorship actually looks like.
It literally knows the facts, but then there's a layer that prevents it from stating the facts.
That's censorship.
It's not an opinion, it's not a choice when facing a gradient, it's just an historical known fact.
We can because the reality is that America has led in AI since the beginning and has had the best frontier models. It's not like some other country held the top spot for any given period of time. No one in Europe or China. I'd give it the benefit of the doubt if there was precedent. But the only logical position to take is the lead is widening and while most AI's will go over some threshold where it is good enough for most people, the actual frontier will remain firmly in American soil.
PS: Just to be clear - even the most expensive humans are unreliable, would make stupid mistakes, and their output MUST be reviewed carefully, so you’re not any different either. You’re just a random next-thought generator based on neuron firing distributions with no real thought process, trained on a few billion years of evolution like all other humans.
Looks like you either have not worked with any human or with an LLM otherwise arriving at such a conclusion is damn impossible.
The humans I did work with were very very bright. No software developer in my career ever needed more than a paragraph of JIRA ticket for the problem statement and they figured out domains that were not even theirs to being with without making any mistakes and rather not only identifying edge cases but sometimes actually improving the domain processes by suggesting what is wasteful and what can be done differently.
I think you are very fortunate. I have worked with plenty of software developers like that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of them have been like that.
I have worked with people like this frequently. The ones you're always happy to see on the team.
Also worked with people who were frustrated that they had to force push git to "save" their changes. Honestly, a token-box I can just ignore, would be an upgrade over this half of the team.
Holy shit, you've never worked with anyone who made ANY mistakes? You must be one of those 10x devs I hear about. Wow, cool, please stay away from my team.
I'm still not sure what people declaring that they equate human cognition with large language models think they are contributing to the conversation when they do so.
Nevermind the fact that they are literally able to introspect human cognition and presumably find non verbal and non linear cognition modes.
> Nevermind the fact that they are literally able to introspect human cognition and presumably find non verbal and non linear cognition modes.
Are they, though? Or are they just predicting their own performance (and an explanation of that performance) on input the same way they predict their response to that input?
Humans say a lot of biologically implausible things when asked why they did something.
They are tools. You hold the human using it accountable. If that means it's the executive who signed the PO, so be it.
Until LLM's I'd never in my life heard someone suggest we lock up the compiler when it goofs up and kills someone, but now because the compiler speaks English we suddenly want to let people use it as a get out of jail free card when they use it to harm others.
But once a human learns a function their errors are more predictable. And they can predict their own error before an operation and escalate or seek outside review/advice.
For e.g. ask any model "which class of problems and domains do you have a high error rate in?".
Amusing and directionally correct, but as random next-thought generators connected to a conscious hypervisor with individual agency,* humanity still has a pretty major leg up on the competition.
*For some definitions of individual agency. Incompatiblists not included.
I hate that I agree with you. But there's a difference between whether AI is as powerful as some say, and whether it's good for humanity. A cursory review of human history shows that some revolutionary technologies make life as a human better (fire, writing, medicine) and others make it worse (weapons, drugs, processed foods). While we adapt to the commoditization of our skills, we should also be questioning whether the technologies being rolled out right now are going to do more harm than good, and we should be organizing around causes that optimize for quality of life as a human. If we don't push for that, then the only thing we're optimizing for is wealth consolidation.
What a crock of bs. A brain is "just" electrochemistry and a novel is "just" arrangements of letters. The question isn't the substrate, it's what structure emerges on top of it. Anthropic's own interpretability work has surfaced internal features that look like learned concepts, planning, and something resembling goal-directed reasoning. Calling the outputs random is wrong in a specific way, the distribution is extraordinarily structured.
> internal features that look like learned concepts, planning, and something resembling goal-directed reasoning.
It's always so un-specific. Resembles this, seems that, almost such, danger that... A lot of magical thinking coming from AI-researchers who have hit the ceiling with a legacy technology that exists since 1940s and simply won't start reasoning on it's own, no matter how much GPUs they burn.
> Calling the outputs random is wrong in a specific way, the distribution is extraordinarily structured.
No, it's actually very correct in a very specific way. Ask any programmer using the parrots, and lately the "quality" has deteriorated so much, that coupled with the incoming price hikes, many will just forfeit the technology, unless someone else is carrying the cost, such as their employer. But as an employer, I also don't want to carry the costs for a technology which benefits as ever less.
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.
It’s extraordinary how much standards have slipped. Completely rewriting a major press release that’s already been sent out, while pretending it’s ostensibly the same document would have been a major corporate scandal just 15 years ago.
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.
I think the public pricing usually has it cheaper (relatively). Obviously since AI is constantly evolving it's not going to compare as favourably farther to a major Gemini release
I was mainly referring to the TPU hardware advantage + GCP running and designing their own datacenter stack.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had already, internally. An OpenAI employee tweeted today that Codex has achieved "escape velocity" and is now improving rapidly. Make of that what you will.
This strikes me as a pullback by Microsoft. Coupled with some of the other news coming out of Microsoft it appears they are hoping to have "good enough" AI in their products. I think Microsoft knows they can win a lot of business customers by bundling with Office 365.
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.
At those numbers it's all a silly game. How much of that was paid to shareholders rather than the business so they can cash out? How much of that is vendors buying future revenue? What liquidation preference is that at?
From what has been reported it's clearly not as simple as raising 122 billion. Some folks called it "scraping the barrel", supposedly Anthropic has surpassed them on the secondary market, etc.
When you reposition the core strategic posture of how you make money on very compressed time scales it’s because there is a massive cash crunch. They killed sora, the type of deal with Disney that should have been an 100 year strategic win, but wasn’t viable economically and they don’t have the assets to weather that storm.
Same with a few other steps we are seeing them take.
It all looks fine until it doesn’t. Once the cash crunch hits. It’s too late
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's unclear. That was never disclosed. It's similarly unclear what it means that they will no longer pay revenue share to OpenAI. Do they get the models for free now? How does OpenAI make money from the models hosted on Azure if not via revenue share?
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.
It's kind of shocking, given financial transparency, that Microsoft gets away with not disclosing any details of this agreement (or the one it is replacing) to its shareholders. We know there's a cap on the revenue share from OpenAI to Microsoft, but we have no idea what that cap is (not whether it's higher, lower, or unchanged from the prior agreement).
We have no idea what it means to be the "primary cloud provider" and have the products made available "first on Azure". Does MSFT have new models exclusively for days, weeks, months, or years?
Both facts and more details from the agreement are quite frankly highly relevant to judge whether this is a net positive, negative or neutral for MSFT. It's unbelievable that the SEC doesn't force MSFT to publish at least an economic summary of the deal.
It’s American Business as usual. Personally I’m miffed how little data Apple needs to provide about product categories, and especially about how much they’ve burnt on the car program. If they shared any data about that at all some the leadership might end up having to take responsibility for mismanagement…
> And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it’s true, that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And OpenAI’s new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for their capped return and said “bye” and went back to running OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign, carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity’s problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And capitalism came to an end.
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
This sounds like an issue where the hyperscalers are acknowledging that the new Foundation model firms may in fact be worth more than they are. Anthropic looks increasingly likely to exceed AWS revenue next year, and OpenAI will likely do the same with Azure.
3 years ago a Foundation model seemed like a feature of a hyper scaler, now hyper scalers look like part of the supply chain.
I think both got taken by surprise. Last year the talk was that AI was a bubble, demand was soft, pilots projects were failing, etc. Model providers still believed, but thought they had a long ramp up period to build out their own datacenters. Then in late Autumn/Winter, something happened. Model capability reached a threshold and demand exploded, then just kept exploding. Model firms are scrambling to find any compute capacity they can, which means striking any deals problem with hyper scalers. So question is whether model providers can get enough compute without having to effectively sell themselves to hyper scalers.
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.
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.)
(Andy Jassy) "Very interesting announcement from OpenAI this morning. We’re excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks, alongside the upcoming Stateful Runtime Environment. With this, builders will have even more choice to pick the right model for the right job. More details at our AWS event in San Francisco tomorrow."
Likely, and via vertex on gcp (or whatever they are calling it this year).
Which also means, if you are a big boring AWS or GCP shop, and have a spend commitment with either as part of a long term partnership, it will count towards that. And, you won't likely have to commit to a spend with OpenAI if you want the EU data residency for instance. And likely a bit more transparency with infra provisioning and reserved capacity vs. OpenAI. All substantial improvements over the current ways to use OpenAI in real production.
> 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)?
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.
Inevitable, really...the deal made sense when OpenAI needed capital and Microsoft needed an AI story, but that has changed since. OpenAI is now valuable enough to act on its own, and keeping Microsoft as a privileged partner don't make much sense anymore...
Dario is a lot more focused on enabling people with AI, Sam goes on interviews like he's Wormtongue trying to summon a "god". Then there is the whole "open"ai where he took it closed source for profit, the engineers kicking sama out but he wiggled back in (at the cost of a lot of the founding engineers), the suspicious death of a whistleblower, the crazy investment schemes of billions of dollars that he's hoping taxes will save him from, the immediate curtailing to Pete in the DoD, and a few other things that make him at least a highly questionable fellow.
Dario left OpenAI because of the bad he saw there, and made a superior product (though these things change very rapidly).
> 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.
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].
this just validates why building multi-model routing is the future. if even microsoft couldn't lock down openai with $13b, enterprise customers definitely shouldn't lock themselves into a single ecosystem. the orchestration layer is about to get so valuable.
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?
I assume this is part of why Github Copilot is going to usage billing. The cheap/free models in Copilot were OpenAI models. e.g. the GPT-based Raptor Mini, which was counted toward usage limits at a 0 multiplier, so basically unlimited usage for Pro and Pro+.
I used both copilot and kiro
copilot sonet 1
copilot opus 3
kiro sonet 1.3
kiro opus 2.2
IMHO lot of people will switch to kiro and or deep seek
it look like AWS done best inference
google is another big player , has model and also cloud
byt my 2 cents form Cents on AWS
Partners with OpenAI then builds 4 products that compete with each other, runs out of compute despite owning datacenters and having infinite cash, then deploys it all in a way that makes people hate them (Copilot)
And now they are out of chips
That's always the moto with Microslop, buy what's good, established and liked by everyone, to then turn it to shit
History repeats itself, this company should be dismantled
Microsoft and OpenAI quietly killed the AGI clause. The provision that decided what happens when OpenAI builds human-level intelligence, gone. Six months ago that was the most important sentence in tech. Now it's a footnote in a revenu restructuring. Tells you everything about where the AGI conversation actually is.
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.
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.
Small nitpick: the models probably make some money on actual inference. Might not be a massive amount, but hard to see them not having a positive contribution margin purely on inference.
What's losing OpenAI money is paying for the whole of R&D, including training and staff. Microsoft doesn't pay that, so they get the money making part of AI without the associated costs.
I fear for the end user we'll still see more open-microslop spam. I see that daily on youtube - tons of AI generated fakes, in particular with that addictive swipe-down design (ok ok, youtube is Google but Google is also big on the AI slop train).
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.
I think we keep changing the goalposts on AGI. If you gave me CC in the 80's I would probably have called it 'alive' since it clearly passes the Turing test as I understood it then (I wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from a person for most conversations). Now every time it gets better we push that definition further and every crack we open to a chasm and declare that it isn't close. At the same time there are a lot of people I would suspect of being bots based on how they act and respond and a lot of bots I know are bots mainly because they answer too well.
Maybe we need to start thinking less about building tests for definitively calling an LLM AGI and instead deciding when we can't tell humans aren't LLMs for declaring AGI is here.
I think the advancement in AI over the last four years has greatly exceeded the advancement in understanding the workings of human intelligence. What paradigm shift has there been recently in that field?
> What have we learned that isn't in my textbook from the 90s?
Does it matter?
We can do countless things people in the 90's would think was black magic.
If I showed the kid version of myself what I can do with Opus or Nano Banana or Seedance, let alone broadband and smartphones, I think I'd feel we were living in the Star Trek future. The fact that we can have "conversations" with AI is wild. That we can make movies and websites and games. It's incredible.
I would agree with you if we were talking about trying to replicate some form of general intelligence, but we are talking about creating artificial intelligence.
I don't think the goalpost has been shifted for AGI or the definition of AGI that is used by these corporations. It's just they broke it down to stages to claim AGI achieved. It was always a model or system that surpasses human capabilities at most tasks/being able to replace a human worker. The big companies broke it down to AGI stage 1, stage 2, etc to be able to say they achieved AGI.
The Turing Test/Imitation Game is not a good benchmark for AGI. It is a linguistics test only. Many chatbots even before LLMs can pass the Turing Test to a certain degree.
Regardless, the goalpost hasn't shifted. Replacing human workforce is the ultimate end goal. That's why there's investors. The investors are not pouring billions to pass the Turing Test.
Turing himself argued that trying to measure if a computer is intelligent is a fool's errand because it is so difficult to pin down definitions. He proposed what we call the "Turing test" as a knowable, measurable alternative. The first paragraph of his paper reads:
> I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin
> with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The
> definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use
> of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words
> "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used
> it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the
> question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as
> a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I
> shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is
> expressed in relatively unambiguous words.
Many people who want to argue about AGI and its relation to the Turing test would do well to read Turing's own arguments.
The Turing test ended up being kind of a flop. We basically passed it and nobody cared. That's because the turing test is about whether a machine can fool a human, not about its intelligent capabilities per se.
No, it's because certain people moved the goal posts. Nothing an LLM does or will do will make them belive that it's "intelligent" because they have a mental model of "intelligence" that is more religious than empirical.
We don’t have agents that are able to work entirely autonomously, even in the coding realm, which is where they seem to be most valuable. In fact, they’re seemingly not even close to replacing software engineers.
I don't think so... I think most of the sci-fi I grew up reading presented AGI that could reason better than humans could, like make a plan and carry it out.
Like do people not know what word "general" means? It means not limited to any subset of capabilities -- so that means it can teach itself to do anything that can be learned. Like start a business. AI today can't really learn from its experiences at all.
The truth is, we have had AGI for years now. We even have artificial super intelligence - we have software systems that are more intelligent than any human. Some humans might have an extremely narrow subject that they are more intelligent than any AI system, but the people on that list are vanishing small.
AI hasn't met sci-fi expectations, and that's a marketing opportunity. That's all it is.
AGI in the common man's world model is ASI in the AI researcher's definitions, i.e. something obviously smarter at anything and everything you could ask it for regardless of how good of an expert you are in any domain.
also, I'm pretty sure some people will move goalposts further even then.
Hasn't met your sci-fi expectations, maybe. I pull a computer out of my pocket, and talk with it. Sure, I gets tripped up here and there, but take a step back, holy shit that's freaking amazing! I don't have a flying car or transparent aluminum, and society has its share of issues right now, but my car drives itself. Coming from the 90's, I think living in the sci-fi future! (Only question is, which one.)
The Turing test pits a human against a machine, each trying to convince a human questioner that the other is the machine. If the machine knows how humans generally behave, for a proper test, the human contestant should know how the machine behaves. I think that this YouTube channel clearly shows that none of today's models pass the Turing test: https://www.youtube.com/@FatherPhi
> Maybe we need to start thinking less about building tests for definitively calling an LLM AGI and instead deciding when we can't tell humans aren't LLMs for declaring AGI is here.
If you've never read the original paper [1] I recommend that you do so. We're long past the point of some human can't determine if X was done by man or machine.
Sure, in the 80s after interacting with CC 1 time you would call it 'alive'. After having interacted with it for 5-10 minutes you would clearly see that it is as far from AGI as something more mundane as C compiler is.
People thought Eliza was alive too in the 60s. AGI is not determined by how ignorant, uninformed humans view a technology they don't understand. That is the single dumbest criterion you could come up with for defining it.
Regarding shifting goalposts, you are suggesting the goalposts are being moved further away, but it's the exact opposite. The goalposts are being moved closer and closer. Someone from the 50s would have had the expectation that artificial intelligence ise something recognisable as essentially equivalent to human intelligence, just in a machine. Artificial intelligence in old sci-fi looked nothing like Claude Code. The definition has since been watered down again and again and again and again so that anything and everything a computer does is artificial intelligence. We might as well call a calculator AGI at this point.
The goal post keeps moving because LLM hypeists keep saying LLMs are "close" to AGI (or even are, already). Any reasonably intelligent individual that knows anything about LLMs obviously rejects those claims, but the rest of the world doesn't.
An AGI would not have problems reading an analog clock. Or rather, it would not have a problem realizing it had a problem reading it, and would try to learn how to do it.
An AGI is not whatever (sophisticated) statistical model is hot this week.
AGI means artificial general intelligence, as opposed to artificial narrow intelligence. General intelligence means being able to generalise to many tasks beyond the single narrow one that an AI has been designed/trained on, and LLMs fit that description perfectly, being able to do anything from writing poetry, programming, summarising documents, translating, NLP, and if multi-modal, vision, audio, image generation... not all to human-level performance, but certainly to a useful one. As opposed to previous AI that was able to do only a single thing, like play chess or classify images, and had no way of being generalised to other tasks.
LLMs aren't artificial superintelligence and might not reach that point, but refusing to call them AGI is absolutely moving the goalposts.
Vision is still much weaker than text for LLMs. So you could argue we already have AGI for text but not vision inputs, or you could argue AGI requires being human level at text vision and sound.
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.
> 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
That's not the definition they have been using. The definition was "$100B in profits". That's less than the net income of Microsoft. It would be an interesting milestone, but certainly not "most of the jobs in an economy".
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.
> Economically relevant knowledge work is things that humans find cognitively demanding. Otherwise they wouldn't be valued in the first place.
Deep scientific discoveries are also cognitively demanding, but are not really valued (see the precarious work environment in academia).
Another point: a lot of work is rather valued in the first place because the work centers around being submissive/docile with regard to bullshit (see the phenomenon of bullshit jobs). You really know better, but you have to keep your mouth shut.
Yeah, I'm sure there could be a better metric, if the metric's purpose was to check on the progress until the AGI target rather than doing business based on it (and so, hammering the metric to fit the shape of "realistic goal")
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.
For some definition of Artificial this holds perfectly
A self-running massive corporation with no people that generates billions in profit, no matter what you call it, would completely upend all previous structural assumptions under capitalism
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.
The question was about their redefinition of AGI in economical terms for which others provided links, not the one from their (obviously fake) mission statement.
BTW I didn't downwote you (I hate it, if many people downvote a comment it's harder to read), I was just trying to explain why others did. On second thought, my comment was wrong, because your answer was related to the question but it wasn't really the intended one.
When we are having serious conversations about AI rights and shutting off a model + harness was impactful as a death sentence. (I'm extremely skeptical that given the scale of computer/investment needed to produce the models we have _good as they are_ that our current llm architecture gets us there if there is even somewhere we want to go).
It makes sense though. Humans are coherent to the economy based on their ability to perform useful work. If an AI system can perform work as well as or better than any human, than with respect to "anything any human has ever been willing to pay for", it is AGI.
I don't get why HN commenters find this so hard to understand. I have a sense they are being deliberately obtuse because they resent OpenAI's success.
It doesn’t though, AGI have far greater implications than doing mundane work of today. Actual AGI would self improve, that in itself would change literally every single thing of human civilization, instead we are talking about replacing white collar jobs.
An AGI that can do all that would also necessarily be able to do all white collar work. That latter definition I'd consider a "soft threshold" that would be hit before recursive self-improvement, which I imagine would happen soon after.
The current estimation on the time between this is fairly small, bottlenecked most likely by compute constraints, risk aversion, and need to implement safeguards. Metaculus puts it at about 32 months
Sure, but that’s like saying we’re close att infinite life because we’ve expanded our life expectancy.
I don’t really buy into the ”one part equals another”, we are very quick to make those assumptions but they are usually far from the science fiction promised. Batteries and self driving cars comes to mind, and organic or otherwise crazy storage technologies, all ”very soon” for multiple decades.
It’s very possible that white collar jobs get automated to a large degree and we’ll be nowhere closer to AGI than we were in the 70’s, I would actually bet on that outcome being far more likely.
I think AGI by that definition (ability to self-improve) is closer than many people think largely because current models are very close to human intelligence in many domains. They can answer questions, derive theorems, write code, navigate websites, etc. All the work that current AI research scientists do is no more than these general information processing tasks, scaled up in terms of creativity, long-term coherence, sensitivity to bad/good ideas over the span of a larger context window, etc.
The leap between Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 and what would be sufficient for AGI seems smaller than the leap between The invention of the Transformer model (2017) and today, thus by a very conservative estimate I think it will take no more time between then and now as it will between now and an AI model as smart as any human in all respects (so by 2035). I think it will be shorter though because the amount of money being put into improving and scaling AI models and systems is 100000x greater than it was in 2017.
Eschatology (/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last' and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of present age, human history, or the world itself.
I'm case anyone else is vocabulary skill checked like me
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.
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
> like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing
OpenAI and Microsoft do (did?) have a quantifiable definition of AGI, it’s just a stupid one that is hard to take seriously and get behind scientifically.
> The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. That’s far from the rigorous technical and philosophical definition of AGI many expect.
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)
What do you mean we were "supposed to have AGI last summer"?
People obviously have really strong opinions on AI and the hype around investments into these companies but it feels like this is giving people a pass on really low quality discourse.
This source [1] from this time last year says even lab leaders most bullish estimate was 2027.
It’s insane to me how yesterday someone posted an example of ChatGPT Pro one-shotting an Erdos problem after 90 minutes of thinking and today you’re saying that AGI is a fairy tale.
It's not one-shot. Other people had attempted the same problem w/ the same AI & failed. You're confused about terms so you redefine them to make your version of the fairy tale real.
We already know that same problem has been examined by many credible mathematicians already and couldn't be solved by any of them yet.
Why are we expecting AGI to one shot it? Can't we have an AGI that can fails occasionally to solve some math problem? Is the expectation of AGI to be all knowing?
By the way I agree that AGI is not around the corner or I am not arguing any of the llm s are "thinking machines". It's just I agree goal post or posts needs to be set well.
People want to believe in magic so they will find excuses to do so. Computers have been proving theorems for a long time now but Isabelle/HOL didn't have the marketing budget of OpenAI so people didn't care. Now that Sam Altman is doing the marketing people all of a sudden care about proving theorems.
Isabelle/HOL (a specialized software to do math proofs) doing proofs is not the analogue to LLMs (with the common accepted degeratory description: automated plagiarism machine) being capable of doing proofs. It's not the marketing, it's what the intention and the capability matrix is coming up to. I would be excited the same when Isabelle/HOL writes poetry.
Chemistry is magic to uninitiated. Perhaps LLMs are to you because you are not initiated yet? I never said LLMs are AGI or will ever be AGI. I also never suggested LLMs are perfect and can prove math problems. But having incidents suggesting there are instances that does excites me. Because it was never in my expectation levels.
You were misrepresenting what actually happened b/c you want to believe in magic. I'm not calling it magic, I'm saying your interpretation of events is magical b/c you don't actually understand how computers work. There is nothing magical about theorem proving, Isabelle/HOL has been doing it for decades.
Isabelle/HOL haven't been solving open problems, as far as I'm aware. They've been used for making fully-formal proofs of problems that were already considered proved to a satisfactory level by the mathematical community. I believe mathematicians generally consider proving something to the mathematical community the "hard part", while making it fully formal is just a kind of tedious bookkeeping thing.
It is a simple mathematical fact that if you get married one year and have twins the next, your household will contain over a million people within 20 years.
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
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'm curious, do you recall if they gave any technical details about how they thought about AGI? Like, was it based on neural networks or something else, like symbolic AI?
Asking because, reading the tea leaves from the outside, until ChatGPT came along, MSFT (via Bill Gates) seemed to heavily favor symbolic AI approaches. I suspect this may be partly why they were falling so far behind Google in the AI race, which could leverage its data dominance with large neural networks.
So based on the current AI boom, MSFT may have been chasing a losing strategy with symbolic AI, but if they were all-in on NN, they were on the right track.
Yes, they did. We had guest speakers from Microsoft talking about AI. AI has been a decades-long grift, it's not something that just appeared out of thin air a few years ago.
What part do you find hard to believe? That tech companies would send people to speak at a university's computer science functions?
Let me give you another one you'll think I'm making up: virtual reality was a thing back in the mid- to late-90s and people were confidently hyping it up back then.
> 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?
I saw a founder make decisions based on what openai,claude was recommending all the time. I think all leaders, founders etc
Will converge on same decisions, ideas, features etc. I think form factor of AGI is probably not what we expect it to be. AGI is probably here, we just dont know it or acknowledge it.
> 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
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.
401ks are run by investment banks and investment banks invest in OpenAI/Anthropic, but those aren't the same parts of the company in any meaningful way. The 401ks are in public companies or bonds.
Yeah, but those public companies are going to include the so called magnificent seven, so unless they're really really careful, there's still a ton of exposure in their 401k to AI if you think it's a bubble that's going to pop.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yes, all of the people involved live in a delusion bubble. Their economic and social existence depends, at this point, on making increasingly bombastic and eschatological claims about AGI. By the standards of normal human psychological function, these people are completely insane.
Definitely interesting to watch from the perspective of human psychology but there is no real content there and there never was.
The stuff around Mythos is almost identical to O1. Leaks to the media that AGI had probably been achieved. Anonymous sources from inside the company saying this is very important and talking about the LLM as if it was human. This has happened multiple times before.
If someone working on early computer networks thought they could scale up world wide and that soon everyone people would be launching trillion dollar companies on the internet you would have called that delusion right?
He doesn't need to be right but it's not crazy at all to look at super human performance in DOTA and think that could lead to super human performance at general human tasks in the long run
1) True believers
2) Hype
3) A way to wash blatant copyright infringement
True believers are scary and can be taken advantage of. I played DOTA from 2005 on and beating pros is not enough for AGI belief. I get that the learning is more indirect than a deterministic decision tree, but the scaling limitations and gaps in types of knowledge that are ingestible makes AGI a pipe dream for my lifetime.
I’m most likely going to be downvoted, but Tofutti Cuties are absolutely delicious vegan ice cream bars. And i’d consume one in celebration of your accomplishment.
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.
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
No one who read science fiction in 1955 would call any of the various models we know to be "artificial intelligence". They would be impressed with it, even excited at first that it was that... until they'd had a chance to evaluate it.
Science fiction from that era even had the concept of what models are... they'd call it an "oracle". I can think of at least 3 short stories (though remembering the authors just isn't happening for me at the moment). The concept was of a device that could provide correct answers to any question. But these devices had no agency, were dependent on framing the question correctly, and limited in other ways besides (I think in one story, the device might chew on a question for years before providing an answer... mirroring that time around 9am PST when Claude has to keep retrying to send your prompt).
We've always known what we meant by artificial intelligence, at least until a few years ago when we started pretending that we didn't. Perhaps the label was poorly chosen (all those decades ago) and could have a better label now (AGI isn't that better label, it's dumber still), but it's what we're stuck with. And we all know what we mean by it. We all almost certainly do not want that artificial intelligence because most of us are certain that it will spell the doom of our species.
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.
I've been working with a startup, and I want to invest in it, and for the paperwork for that, all the nitty gritty details; instead of spending $20k in lawyers and a whole bunch more time going back and forth with them as well, the four of us, me, their CEO, my AI, and their AI; we all sat in a room together and hashed it out until both of us were equally satisfied with the contract. (There's some weird stuff so a templated SAFE agreement wasn't going to work.) I'm not saying you're wrong, just that lawyers, as a profession isn't going to be unchanged either.
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.
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.
A few years ago most people here would have said the same thing about an AI doing most of their programming. Now people here are saying it about AGI. It's a ridiculous inability to extrapolate.
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.
LLM proponents believe that these higher level encodings in latent space do in fact match the real world concepts described by our language(s).
However, a much simpler explanation for what we see with LLMs is that instead the higher level encodings in latent space match only the patterns of our language(s), and no deeper encoding/understanding is present.
It's Plato's Cave - the shadows on the wall are all an LLM ever sees, and somehow it is expected to derive the real reality behind them.
Could be, yes for sure but I think it would be very naive in the current state of progress we are in, to down play what progress is happening.
At least Mythos model with its 10 Trillion parameter might indicate that the scaling law is valid. Its a little bit unfortunate that we still don't know that much more about that model.
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.
I'm not sure why you think you know the human brain works through predicting the next token.
It's not supernatural, I believe that an artificial intelligence is possible because I believe human intelligence is just a clever arrangement of matter performing computation, but I would never be presumptuous enough to claim to know exactly how that mechanism works.
My opinion is that human intelligence might be what's essentially a fancy next token predictor, or it might work in some completely different way, I don't know. Your claim is that human intelligence is a next token predictor. It seems like the burden on proof is on you.
> Your claim is that human intelligence is a next token predictor.
Literally it is, at least in many of its forms.
You accepted CamperBob2’s text as input and then you generated text as output. Unless you are positing that this behavior cannot prove your own general intelligence, it seems plain that “next token generator” is sufficient for AGI. (Whether the current LLM architecture is sufficient is a slightly different question.)
Before I start typing, I think abstractly about the topic and decide on what I shall write in response. Due to the linear nature of time, typing necessarily happens one word at a time, but I am never producing a probability distribution of words (at least not in a way that my conscious self can determine), I consider an entire idea and then decide what tokens to enter into the computer in order to communicate the idea to you.
And while I am typing, and while I am thinking before I type, I experience an array of non-textual sensory input, and my whole experience of self is to a significant extent non-lingual. Sometimes, I experience an inner monologue, sometimes I think thoughts which aren't expressed in language such as the structure of the data flow in a computer program, sometimes I don't think and just experience feelings like a kiss or the sun on my skin or the euphoria of a piece of music which hits just right. These experiences shape who I am and how I think.
When I solve difficult programming problems or other difficult problems, I build abstract structures in my mind which represents the relevant information and consider things like how data flows, which parts impact which other parts, what the constraints are, etc. without language coming in to play at all. This process seems completely detached from words. In contrast, for a language model, there is no thinking outside of producing words.
It seems self-evident to me that at least parts of the human experience fundamentally can not be reduced to next token prediction. Further, it seems plausible to me that some of these aspects may be necessary for what we consider general intelligence.
Therefore, my position is: it is plausible that next token prediction won't give rise to general intelligence, and I do not find your argument convincing.
COCONUT, PCCoT, PLaT and co are directly linked to 'thinking in latent space'. yann lecun is working on this too, we have JEPA now.
Also how do you describe or explain how an LLM is generating the next token when it should add a feature to an existing code base? In my opinion it has structures which allows it to create a temp model of that code.
For sure a LLM lack the emotional component but what we humans also do, which indicates to me, that we are a lot closer to LLMs that we want to be, if you have a weird body feeling (stress, hot flashes, anger, etc.) your 'text area/llm/speech area' also tries to make sense of it. Its not always very good in doing so. That emotional body feeling is not that aligned with it and it takes time to either understand or ignore these types of inputs to the text area/llm/speech part of our brain.
I'm open for looking back in 5 years and saying 'man that was a wild ride but no AGI' but at the current quality of LLMs and all the other architectures and type of models and money etc. being thrown at AGI, for now i don't see a ceiling at all. I only see crazy unseen progress.
You state how you think and plan and have thoughts on how to do things etc. and i assumed you mention your way of thinking because you assume a LLM is not doing any of it.
Btw. just because you have to do something with the LLM to trigger the flow of information through the model, doesn't mean it can't think. It only means that we have to build an architecture around the model or build it into the models base architecture to enable more thinking.
We do not know how the brain architecture is setup for this. We could have sub agents or we can be a Mixture of Experts type of 'model'.
There is also work going on in combining multimodal inputs and diffusion models which look complelty different from a output pov etc.
If you look how a LLM does math, Anthropic showed in a blog article, that they found similiar structures for estimating numbers than how a brain does.
Another experiment from a person was to clone layers and just adding them beneth the original layer. This improved certain tasks. My assumption here is, that it lengthen and strengthen kind of a thinking structure.
But because using LLMs are still so good and still return relevant improvements, i think a whole field of thinking in this regard is still quite unexplored.
If you ask a model to multiply 322423324 by 8675309232 without using tools, it's interesting to think about how it does it. Where are the intermediate results being maintained?
"In context" is the obvious answer... but if you view the chain of thought from a reasoning model, it may have little or nothing to do with arriving at the correct answer. It may even be complete nonsense. The model is working with tokens in context, but internally the transformer is maintaining some state with those tokens that seems to be independent of the superficial meanings of the tokens. That is profoundly weird, and to me, it makes it difficult to draw a line in the sand between what LLMs can do and what human brains can do.
> I consider an entire idea and then decide what tokens to enter into the computer in order to communicate the idea to you.
This overestimates introspective access.
The brain is very good at producing a coherent story after the fact. Touch the hot stove and your hand moves before the conscious thought of "too hot" arrives. The hot message hits your spinal cord and you move before it reaches your brain. Your conscious mind fills in the rest afterwards.
I don't think that means that conscious thought is fake. But it does make me skeptical of the claim that we first possess a complete idea and only then does it serialize into words. A lot of the "idea" may be assembled during the act of expression, with consciousness narrating the process as if it had the whole thing in advance.
With writing, as in this comment, there's also a lot a backtracking and rewording that LLMs don't have the ability to do, so there's that.
> I am never producing a probability distribution of words (at least not in a way that my conscious self can determine)
Inability to introspect your own word selections does not mean it’s meaningfully different from what an LLM does. There is plenty of evidence that humans do a lot of things that are not driven by conscious choice and we rationalize it after the fact.
> I consider an entire idea and then decide what tokens to enter into the computer in order to communicate the idea to you.
And how is that different? You are not so subtly implying that an LLM can’t consider an idea but you haven’t established this as fact. i.e. You are starting with the assumption that an LLM cannot possibly think and therefore cannot be intelligent, but this is just begging the question.
> sometimes I don't think and just experience feelings like a kiss or the sun on my skin or the euphoria of a piece of music which hits just right. These experiences shape who I am and how I think.
You cannot spin experience as intelligence. LLMs have the experience of reading the entire internet, something you cannot conceive of. Certainly your experiences shape who you are. This is a different axis from intelligence, though.
> This process seems completely detached from words. In contrast, for a language model, there is no thinking outside of producing words.
Both sides of this claim seem dubious. The second half in particular seems to be founded on nothing. Again, you are asserting with no support that there is no thinking going on.
> It seems self-evident to me that at least parts of the human experience fundamentally can not be reduced to next token prediction. Further, it seems plausible to me that some of these aspects may be necessary for what we consider general intelligence.
I don’t think anyone sane is claiming an LLM can have a human experience. But it is not clear that a human experience is necessary for intelligence.
> Inability to introspect your own word selections does not mean it’s meaningfully different from what an LLM does. There is plenty of evidence that humans do a lot of things that are not driven by conscious choice and we rationalize it after the fact.
This is correct and also completely irrelevant. I am describing what I experience, and describing how my experience seems very different to next token prediction. I therefore conclude that it's plausible that there is more involved than something which can be reduced to next token prediction.
> And how is that different? You are not so subtly implying that an LLM can’t consider an idea but you haven’t established this as fact. i.e. You are starting with the assumption that an LLM cannot possibly think and therefore cannot be intelligent, but this is just begging the question.
Language models can't think outside of producing tokens. There is nothing going on within an LLM when it's not producing tokens. The only thing it does is taking in tokens as input and producing a token probability distribution as output. It seems plausible that this is not enough for general intelligence.
> You cannot spin experience as intelligence.
Correct, but I can point out that the only generally intelligent beings we know of have these sorts of experiences. Given that we know next to nothing about how a human's general intelligence works, it seems plausible that experience might play a part.
> LLMs have the experience of reading the entire internet, something you cannot conceive of.
I don't know that LLMs have an experience. But correct, I cannot conceive of what it feels like to have read and remembered the entire Internet. I am also a general intelligence and an LLM is not, so there's that.
> Certainly your experiences shape who you are. This is a different axis from intelligence, though.
I don't know enough about what makes up general intelligence to make this claim. I don't think you do either.
> Both sides of this claim seem dubious. The second half in particular seems to be founded on nothing. Again, you are asserting with no support that there is no thinking going on.
I'm telling you how these technologies work. When a language model isn't performing inference, it is not doing anything. A language model is a function which takes a token stream as input and produces a token probability distribution as output. By definition, there is no thinking outside of producing words. The function isn't running.
> I don’t think anyone sane is claiming an LLM can have a human experience. But it is not clear that a human experience is necessary for intelligence.
I 100% agree. It is not clear whether a human experience is necessary for intelligence. It is plausible that something approximating a human-like experience is necessary for intelligence. It is also plausible that something approximating human-like experience is completely unnecessary and you can make an AGI without such experiences.
It's plausible that next token prediction is sufficient for AGI. It's also plausible that it isn't.
> I don't know enough about what makes up general intelligence to make this claim. I don't think you do either.
This is the fundamental issue. No one seems capable of defining general intelligence. Ten years ago most scientists would probably have agreed that The Turing Test was sufficient but the goalposts shifted when ChatGPT passed that.
If it’s not clear what AGI even means, it’s hard to say whether an LLM can achieve it, because it devolves into pointing out that an LLM is not a human.
> Ten years ago most scientists would probably have agreed that The Turing Test was sufficient but the goalposts shifted when ChatGPT passed that.
The popularity of, and lack of consensus on, the Chinese room thought experiment kind of implies that this is wrong? I don't think many scientists (or, more relevantly, philosophers of mind) would, even 10 years ago, have said, "if a computer is able to fool a human into thinking it's a human, then the computer must possess a general intelligence".
Even Turing's perspective was, from what I understand, that we must avoid treating something that might be sentient as a machine. He proposed that if a computer is able to act convincingly human, we ought to treat it as if it is a human, not because it must be a conscious being but because it might be.
Perhaps I am wrong or overstating the belief that the Turing test would be sufficient. My recollection is that it was well regarded as a meaningful if not conclusive test.
> the Chinese room thought experiment
This is an interesting thought experiment but I think the “computers don’t understand” interpretation relies on magical thinking.
The notion that “systemic” understanding is not real is purely begging the question. It also ignores that a human is also a system.
I'm telling you how these technologies work. When a language model isn't performing inference, it is not doing anything. A language model is a function which takes a token stream as input and produces a token probability distribution as output. By definition, there is no thinking outside of producing words. The function isn't running.
If what you are saying is true, then LLMs wouldn't be able to handle out-of-distribution math problems without resorting to tool use. Yet they can. When you ask a current-generation model to multiply some 8-digit numbers, and forbid it from using tools or writing a script, it will almost certainly give you the right answer. That includes local models that can't possibly cheat. LLMs are stochastic, but they are not parrots.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM myself, whatever process makes this possible is not simply next-token prediction in the pejorative sense you're applying to it. It can't be. The tokens in a transformer network are evidently not just words in a Markov chain but a substrate for reasoning. The model is generalizing processes it learned, somehow, in the course of merely being trained to predict the next token.
Mechanically, yes, next-token prediction is what it's doing, but that turns out to be a much more powerful mechanism than it appeared at first. My position is that our brains likely employ similar mechanism(s), albeit through very different means.
It is scarcely believable that this abstraction process is limited to keeping track of intermediate results in math problems. The implications should give the stochastic-parrot crowd some serious cognitive dissonance, but...
(Edit: it occurs to me that you are really arguing that the continuous versus discrete nature of human thinking is what's important here. If so, that sounds like a motte-and-bailey thing that doesn't move the needle on the argument that originally kicked off the subthread.)
(Edit 2, again due to rate-limiting: it does sound like you've fallen back to a continuous-versus-discrete argument, and that's not something I've personally thought much about or read much about. I stand by my point that the ability to do arithmetic without external tools is sufficient to dispense with the stochastic-parrot school of thought, and that's all I set out to argue here.)
> If what you are saying is true, then LLMs wouldn't be able to handle out-of-distribution math problems without resorting to tool use. Yet they can. When you ask a current-generation model to multiply some 8-digit numbers, and forbid it from using tools or writing a script, it will almost certainly give you the right answer. That includes local models that can't possibly cheat. LLMs are stochastic, but they are not parrots.
Okay, what do you think language models are doing when they're not producing token probability distributions? What processes do you think are going on when the function which predicts a token isn't running?
> At the risk of sounding like an LLM myself, whatever process makes this possible is not simply next-token prediction in the pejoreative sense you're applying to it.
I don't know what pejorative sense you're implying here. I am, to the best of my ability, describing how the language model works. I genuinely believe that a language model is, in essence, a function which takes in a sequence of tokens and produces a token probability distribution as an output. If this is incorrect, please, correct me.
> Okay, what do you think language models are doing when they're not producing token probability distributions? What processes do you think are going on when the function which predicts a token isn't running?
What are you doing when you are not outputting tokens? You have a thought, evaluate it, refine it, repeat.
You’re not wrong that the basic building block is just “next token prediction”, but clearly the emergent behaviors exceed our intuition about what this process can achieve. We’re seeing novel proofs come out of these. Will this lead to AGI? That’s still TBD.
> I genuinely believe that a language model is, in essence, a function which takes in a sequence of tokens and produces a token probability distribution as an output. If this is incorrect, please, correct me.
The pejorative is that you imply this is a shallow and unthinking process. As I said earlier, you are literally a token generator on HN. You read someone’s comment, do some kind of processing, and output some tokens of your own.
I bet the guy has never contributed a novel thought that could be argued as moving something of magnitude forward. If that is the case he ought to stop writing as if he were capable of doing so - and therefore has no understanding of what true intelligence is.
Before I start typing, I think abstractly about the topic
Before you start typing, an fMRI machine can tell you which finger you'll lift first, before you know it yourself.
We are not special. Consciousness is literally a continuous hallucination that we make up to explain what we do and what we think, after the fact. A machine can be trained to behave identically, but it's not clear if that's the best way forward or not.
Edit due to rate limiting: to answer your question, the substrate your mind uses to drive this process can be considered an array of tokens that, themselves, can be considered 'words.'
It's hard to link sources -- what am I supposed to do, send you to Chomsky and other authorities who have predicted none of what's happening and who clearly understand even less?
> (Edit: to answer your question, the substrate your mind uses to drive this process can be considered an array of tokens that, themselves, can be considered 'words.')
This seems like a factual claim. Can you link a source?
What's your argument? An fMRI can tell which finger I will lift first before that information makes its way to my consciousness, ergo next word prediction is sufficient for general intelligence? Do you hear yourself?
The statement is that your perception of your own cognition isn’t necessarily reality. That isn’t a statement that token prediction is sufficient for general intelligence. It’s a statement that your subjective experience is misleading you.
Do LLMs even learn? The companies that build them build new models based partly on the conversations the older models have had with people, but do they incorporate knowledge into their neural nets as they go along?
Can an LLM decide, without prompting or api calls, to text someone or go read about something or do anything at all except for waiting for the next prompt?
Do LLMs have any conceptual understanding of anything they output? Do they even have a mechanism for conceptual understanding?
LLMs are incredibly useful and I'm having a lot of fun working with them, but they are a long way from some kind of general intelligence, at least as far as I understand it.
They learned already a lot more than any of us will. Additinal to this, you have a prompt and you can teach it things in the prompt. Like if you give it examples how it should parse things, with examples in the prompt, it becomes better in doing it.
I would say yes they learn.
"Can an LLM decide"
I would argue that you frame that wrong. If a LLM is the same thing as the pure language part of our brain, than the agent harness and the stuff around it, would be another part of our brain. I find it valid to use the LLM with triggers around it.
Nonetheless, we probably can also design an architecture which has a loop build in.
"Do LLMs have any conceptual understanding"
Thats what a LLM has in their latent space. Basically to be able to predict the next token in such a compressed space, they 'invent' higher meaning in that space. You can ask a LLM about it actually.
Yeah for AGI we are not there yet and we do not know how it will look like.
Yes, to all of your questions. You need to use a recent LLM in an agentic harness. Tell it to take notes, and it will.
After a bit of further refinement, we'll start to call that process "learning." Eventually the question of who owns the notes, who gets to update them, and how, will become a huge, huge deal.
> And if you look at Boston Dynamics, Unitree and Generalist's progress on robotics
Their progress is almost nought. Humanoids are stupid creations that are not good at anything in the real world. I'll give it to the machine dogs, at least they can reach corners we cannot.
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.
Yeah and if you look at the blocking factors at that time (data, compute) these type of limits currently are non existend.
There is a difference to be acknowledged: in the 70s/80s the whole world didn't suddenly start to shift to AI right?
So why do so many smart and/or rich people push this? Hype? Yeah sure but hype was here for crypto too.
I bet its an undelying understanding and the right time with the right components: Massive capital for playing this game long enough to see through the required initial investment, internet for fast data sharing, massive compute for the amount of data and compute you need, real live business relevant results (it already disrupts jobs) etc.
I'm not an economist but at least as an european person, I currently do see a huge restructuring going on. A shift away from the USA to China. But I never voiced an opinion about that.
I do follow ML/AI/AGI though for a decade by now and read a lot about Neuronal networks, LLMs, etc. in a broad spectrum.
My prediction regarding Crypto/blockchain was true too.
We will see how it plays out. I'm open for both, but I think it would be naive to ignore whats going on and its way to soon to assume there is a AI winter coming soon.
We sitll want to see what Mythos can do and a distilled version of it.
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.
> Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has.
And yet they don't do really good jobs with pretty much anything, save for software development, to which people still seem pretty split as far as it being a helpful thing. That's before we even factor in the cost.
I find them very helpful. I use gemini regularly for multiply things.
I also believe that whatever code researchers and other non software engineers wrote before coding agents, were similiar shitty but took them a lot longer to write.
Like do you know how many researchers need to do some data analysis and hack around code because they never learned programming? So so many. If they know how to verify their data (which they needed to know before already), a LLM helps them already.
There is also plenty of other code were perfection doesn't matter. Non SaaS software exists.
For security experts, we just saw whats happening. The curl inventor mentioned it online that the newest AI reports for Security issues are real and the amount of security gaps found are real and a lot of work.
Image generation is very good and you can see it today already everywere. From cheap restaurants using it, to invitations, whatsapp messages, social media, advertising.
I have a work collegue, who is in it for 6 years and he studied, he is so underqualified if you give me his salary as tokens today, i wouldn't think for a second to replace him.
I don't particularly care about coding and didn't weigh in on it. There is no dispute that people debate if it is effective at that. You can take that debate up with them, not me.
The problem here is the adoption curve; Right now it might feel to you that its not worth it or not happening as it might for most people.
Than suddenly one model update moves it from 80% to 85% and now 30% of the market wants to use it.
Then it might be already too late to act like using it to your advantage, being a valuable expert or deciding things long term based on the new state of affairs.
You're in denial and this is cope. The tools aren't even close. The notion that any model is 5% away from doing what has been promised *FOR YEARS* is just facially ridiculous.
>Then it might be already too late to act like using it to your advantage, being a valuable expert or deciding things long term based on the new state of affairs.
There's no universe where this is happening. The tools just are not that good. It's been years of folks like you telling me my job will disappear, but the only thing that this has demonstrated is that the vast majority programmers have *NO IDEA* what other people actually do for a living and how they do it.
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?”).
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.
Many labs use TPUs, but not exclusively. Most labs need more compute than they can get, and if there's TPU capacity, they'll adapt their systems to be able to run partially on TPUs.
Why is AMD not more popular then if labs are so flexibly with giving away CUDA?
people are trying, especially for inference. For training, it’s just too high risk to tank your training I think.
TPUs are at least dogfooded by Google deepmind, no team AFAIK has gotten the AMD stack to train well.
Interesting. Why? My current mental model is that AMD chips are just a bit behind, so, less efficient, but no biggie. Do labs even use CUDA?
This is somewhat out of date (Dec 2024), but gives you some idea of how far behind AMD was then: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200...
Pull quotes:
AMD’s software experience is riddled with bugs rendering out of the box training with AMD is impossible. We were hopeful that AMD could emerge as a strong competitor to NVIDIA in training workloads, but, as of today, this is unfortunately not the case. The CUDA moat has yet to be crossed by AMD due to AMD’s weaker-than-expected software Quality Assurance (QA) culture and its challenging out of the box experience.
[snip]
> The only reason we have been able to get AMD performance within 75% of H100/H200 performance is because we have been supported by multiple teams at AMD in fixing numerous AMD software bugs. To get AMD to a usable state with somewhat reasonable performance, a giant ~60 command Dockerfile that builds dependencies from source, hand crafted by an AMD principal engineer, was specifically provided for us
[snip]
> AMD hipBLASLt/rocBLAS’s heuristic model picks the wrong algorithm for most shapes out of the box, which is why so much time-consuming tuning is required by the end user.
etc etc. The whole thing is worth reading.
I'm sure it has (and will continue to) improved since then. I hear good things about the Lemonade team (although I think that is mostly inference?)
But the NVidia stack has improved too.
That’s insane. There should be a big team of people at AMD whose whole job is just to dogfood their stuff for training like this. Speaking of which, Amazon is in the same boat, I’m constantly surprised that Amazon is not treating improving Inferentia/Trainium software as an uber-priority. (I work at Amazon)
> There should be a big team of people at AMD whose whole job is just to dogfood their stuff
if they had this management attitude, they wouldn't have been so far behind so as to need this action in the first place!
I'll just leave this here from 10 years ago:
> “Are we afraid of our competitors? No, we’re completely unafraid of our competitors,” said Taylor. “For the most part, because—in the case of Nvidia—they don’t appear to care that much about VR. And in the case of the dollars spent on R&D, they seem to be very happy doing stuff in the car industry, and long may that continue—good luck to them.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/amd-focusing-on-vr-m...
"car industry" is linked to the GPU-accelerated self-driving car work, ie, making neural networks run fast on GPUs: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/nvidia-outs-pascal-g...
Where's the scope for an L7 promo in "Fixed a bunch of tiny issues that were making it hard to use Tranium/Inferentia with PyTorch"?
Amazon's compensation strategy, in which you primarily get a raise years in the future for tricking your management chain into promoting you is definitely bearing its rotten fruit.
Hardware companies being terrible at software is the norm. Nvidia is one of the rare companies that can successfully execute both.
Maybe Amazon is an example how this happens even to hardware divisions within software/logistics companies
How are their Linux drivers looking these days? Still a PITA to install?
I mean the fact there isn’t even today may speak to why AMD isn’t the contender it should be by this point.
Anecdotal but over several years with an AMD GPU in my desktop I've tried multiple times to do real AI work and given up every time with the AMD stack.
Im running fine on my AMD 7800xt 16gb... Yes memory is a bit limited, but apart from the i have found that it works great using Vulcan in LM studio for example.
ROCm works great too, the only issue i have had is that my machine froze a couple of times as it used 100% of the graphics and the OS had nothing left. Since moving to vulcan i stopped getting these errors apart from a little UI slowdown when i had 4 models loaded at the same time taking turns.
Im also on a i7 6700 with 32gb DDR4 so im sure that is causing more slowdowns then the graphics card.
Yet another reason to doubt claims that ”software is solved”.
Anthropic did retire an interview take-home assignment involving optimising inference on exotic hardware, because Claude could one shot a solution, but that was clearly a whiteboard hypothetical instead of a real system with warts, issues and nuance.
i'm doing inference on a free mi300x instance from AMD right now. not sure if the software stack is just old or what, but here's what i've observed: stuck on an old version of vllm pre-Transformers 5 support. it lacks MoE support for qwen3 models. oss-120b is faaaar slower than it should be.
int8 quantization seems like it's almost supported, but not quite. speeds drop to a fraction of full precision speed and the server seems like it intermittently hangs. int4 quantization not supported. fp8 quantization not supported.
again, maybe AMD is just being lazy with what they've provided, but it's not a great look.
right now the fastest smart model i can run is full precision qwen3-32b. with 120 parallel requests (short context) i'm getting PP @ 4500 tokens/sec and TG @ 1300 tokens/sec
amd gpus compete but they lack the interconnect. NVLink performance is a huge deal for training.
> Do labs even use CUDA?
From the papers I've read and the labs that I have worked in personally, I would say that most scientists developing Deep learning solutions use CUDA for GPU acceleration
What I hear is that getting your network to work on AMD is a huge pain.
Yeah, historically it’s been software that’s limited AMD here. Not surprised to hear that may still be the issue. NVidia’s biggest edge was really CUDA.
CUDA is a complete and utter piece of shit software. It's just that it is a tiny bit less of a shitshow than the alternatives.
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I don’t know what’s a chicken and what’s an egg here. But ROCm support is often missing or experimental even in very basic foundational libraries. They need someone else to double down on using their chips and just break the software support out of the limbo.
This is what I've heard on the "street". Building a CUDA-compatible stack for AMD's hardware requires highly-paid SWEs. It's a very niche field, and talent is hard to come by.
But AMD does not want to pay these specialized SWEs the market rate. Their existing SWEs would be up in arms saying, basically, "what are we, chopped liver??", or so the thinking goes.
So AMD is stuck with a shitty software stack which cannot compete with CUDA.
If I were making such decisions, I would just cull the number of existing SWEs down by 50%, and double the pay for remaining ones. And then go out and hire some top talent to build a good software stack.
> highly-laid SWEs
Freudian slip?
Ha! You caught it before I did; and I caught it right away.
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even google doesnt only use TPUs.
Google is in a different position to others in that they're the only frontier lab with a cloud infra business. It obviously makes sense to sell GPUs on cloud infra as people want to rent them. In that respect Google buys a ton of GPUs to rent out.
What's unclear to me is how much Google uses GPUs for their own stuff. Yes Gemini runs on GPUs now, so that Google can sell Gemini on-prem boxes (recent release announced last week), but is any training or inference for Gemini really happening on GPUs? This is unclear to me. I'd have guessed not given that I thought TPUs were much cheaper to operate, but maybe I'm wrong.
Caveat, I work at Google, but not on anything to do with this. I'm only going on what's in the press for this stuff.
> Gemini on-prem boxes (recent release announced last week)
Do you have any more information on this? I only found this article about it: https://venturebeat.com/technology/googles-gemini-can-now-ru...
It mentions that Gemini can run on eight NVIDIA GPUs, but not which GPU and which Gemini model. Either way, this puts an upper bound of 288 * 8 = 2304 GB on the size of the Gemini model, which as far as I know has been a secret until now.
I have no more info, but wouldn't be able to share if I did. The public info like that article is what I'm going off.
I have most likely outdated info, I left Google Research 4y ago. Back then, available TPU instances were plenty and GPU scarce. Nobody wanted to mess with an immature crashing compiler and very steep performance cliffs (performance was excellent only if you stayed within the guardrails, and being outside was supported and not even resulting in a warning - as it was so common in code). But I believe most of it has changed for the better for TPUs.
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And almost by happenstance Apple. Turns out they have a great platform for inference and torched almost nothing comparatively on Siri. The Apple/Gemini deal is interesting, Google continues to demonstrate their willingness to degrade their experience on Apple to try and force people to switch.
If you do the math (I did), in 2 years, open source models that you can run on a future MacBook Pro will be as capable as the frontier cloud models are today. Memory bandwidth is growing rapidly, as is the die area dedicated to the neural cores. And all the while, we have the silicon getting more power efficient and increasingly dense (as it always does). These hardware improvements are coming along as the open source models improve through research advancements. And while the cloud models will always be better (because they can make use of as much power as they want to - up in the cloud), what matters to most of us is whether a model can do a meaningful share of knowledge work for us. At the same time, energy consumption to run cloud infrastructure is out-pacing the creation of new energy supply, which is a problem not easily solved. I believe scarcity of energy will increasingly drive frontier labs toward power efficiency, which necessarily implies that the Pareto frontier of performance between cloud and local execution will narrow.
A Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 class model is 5 trillion parameters[1].
To run a 8 bit quantized version of that you need roughly 5TB of RAM.
Today that is around 18 NVidia B300. That's around $900,000, without including the computers to run them in.
It's true that the capability of open source models is improving, but running actual frontier models on your MPB seems a way off.
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2042123561666855235?s=20 (and Elon has hired enough people out of those labs to have a fair idea)
People had this "why you probably can't run a GPT-4 (or even GPT-3.5) class model on your MBP anytime soon" conversation before.
Today's LLMs are able pack much more capabilities into fewer parameters compared to 2023. We might still be at the very rudimentary phase of this technology there are low-hanging efficiency gains to be had left and right. These models consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain, this all seems like room for improvement.
The right question: is there a law in information theory that fundamentally prevents a 70B model of any architecture from being as smart as Opus 4.7?
There is a huge gap between "in two years" and "theoretically possible"
>> People had this "why you probably can't run a GPT-4 (or even GPT-3.5) class model on your MBP anytime soon" conversation before.
The OP said "as capable as the frontier cloud models are today" which might assume model improvements that do more with less. Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 performance might be achievable with a fraction of the parameters.
Exactly. I also feel like being able to choose a model for the use case could be worth an idea. So instead of trying to squeeze all kinds of knowledge into a single model, even if it's moe, just focus models on use cases. I bet you only need double digit billion parameter models for that with same or even better performance
Opus and Gpt are generic LLMs with knowledge on all sort of topics. For specific use cases you probably don't need all the parameters? Suppose you want to generate code with opencode, what part of the generic LLM is needed and what parts can be removed?
we're already doing that, it's called distillation and how models like deepseek are trained.
I think your own math leads to the conclusion the public apis are not serving models of that size. They couldn’t afford to
As far as I can tell Minimax M2.7 is better than anything available a year ago, but it runs on an ordinary PC. Will that continue? Not sure, but the trend has continued for the last two years and I don't know of any fundamental limits the models are approaching.
I wish more people were more aware of this. I think so much of the current optimism is based on "it doesn't matter if companies are raising prices since I'm just going to run the model locally", doesn't fly.
> A Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 class model is 5 trillion parameters.
Or so they say.
If it's true then that just shows how far behind the cloud providers are lagging while wasting investor money.
(There's a huge amount of diminishing returns in increasing parameter counts and the intelligent AI company should be hard at work figuring out the optimal count without overfitting.)
Do that will only be possible with something like better 3D NAND flash memory, needs a new hardware. People are already trying to bring that the market. Contemplated taking a compiler position in such a company.
HBF is a non-starter, it runs way too hot compared to DRAM (which only pays for refresh at idle) for the same memory traffic. Only helps for extremely sparse MoE models - probably sparser than we're seeing today.
> A Opus 4.7/Gpt5.5 class model is 5 trillion parameters[1].
You could run it on a cluster of nodes that each do some mix of fetching parameters from disk and caching them in RAM. Use pipeline parallelism to minimize network bandwidth requirements given the huge size. Then time to first token may be a bit slow, but sustained inference should achieve enough throughput for a single user. That's a costly setup of course, but it doesn't cost $900k.
> You could run it on a cluster of nodes
Not sure this is a MBP either.
Not even a cluster of Mac Pros could run a dense 5T parameter model with RDMA, to my knowledge.
SOTA models are reportedly MoE, not dense.
A 5T MoE model is still bottlenecked by streaming weights from SSD, in addition to compute bottlenecks during prefill and decode.
True but a cluster built on pipeline parallelism can naturally stream from multiple SSD's in parallel. That probably makes offload somewhat more effective. And you also have RAM caching available as a natural possibility.
You won't be RAM caching much of anything with experts that are 220b parameters worth of layers.
I did this calculation a bit ago and don't think frontier models are just a few MacBook Pro generations away. Yes numbers reliably go up in tech in general but in specific semiconductors & standards have long lead-times and published roadmaps, so we can have high confidence in what we're getting even in 3-4 years in terms of both transistor density and RAM speeds.
In mid-2028 we have N2E/N2P with around 15% greater transistor density than today's N3P, and by EOY2028 we'll likely have A14 with about 35-40% density improvement.
Meanwhile, we'll be on LPDDR6 by that point, which takes M-series Pros from 307GB/s -> ~400GB/s, and Max's from 614GB/s -> ~800GB/s.
Model improvements obviously will help out, but on the raw hardware front these aren't in the ballpark for frontier model numbers. An H100 has 3TB/s memory bandwidth, fwiw
What do you need 3 TB/s memory bandwidth for in a single user context? DeepSeek V4 pro (the latest near-SOTA model) has about 25 GB worth of active parameters (it uses a FP4 format for most layers) which gives 12 tok/s on a 307 GB/s platform as the current memory bandwidth bottleneck, maybe a bit less than that if you consider KV cache reads. That's not quite great but it's not terrible either for a pro quality model. Of course that totally ignores RAM limits which are the real issue at present: limited RAM forces you to fetch at least some fraction of params from storage, which while relatively fast is nowhere near as fast as RAM so your real tok/s are far lower (about 2 for a broadly similar model on a top-end M5 Pro laptop).
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That's not "math". That's a "wild guess", or baseless extrapolation at best.
My son doubled in size in the first 8 months of his life. At age 12, he will be larger than the Moon.
One of my favorite xkcd
https://xkcd.com/605/
So long as you don't require deep search grounding like massive web indexes or document stores which are hard to reproduce locally. You can do local agentic things that get close or even do better depending on search strategy, but theoretically a massive cloud service with huge data stores at hand should be able to produce better results.
In practice unless you're doing some kind of deep research thing with the cloud, it'll try to optimize mostly for time and get you a good enough answer rather than spending an hour or two. An hour of cloud searching with huge data stores is not equivalent to an hour of local agentic searching, presumably.
I think that problem will improve a little in the coming years as we kind of create optimized data curation, but the information world will keep growing so the advantage will likely remain with centralized services as long as they offer their complete potential rather than a fraction.
Also, all the cloud models don't have to be the best frontier models, and you don't need to focus on hitting the benchmark of shrinking Opus 4.7 down to a single MBP to make significant improvements. If you get it so that an Opus 4.7 benchmark-compatible model can run in $250k of datacenter capex (and associated reduced opex for power+cooling) that'd be a massive cost improvement that makes the cloud models cheaper. And for most consumers that'll probably be good enough. You don't need to run on a $5k laptop to make a big difference.
Show your working / explain your math?
https://xkcd.com/605/
Apple is basically in the same boat as AMD and Intel. They have a weak, raster-focused GPU architecture that doesn't scale to 100B+ inference workloads and especially struggles with large context prefill. TPUs smoke them on inference, and Nvidia hardware is far-and-away more efficient for training.
This doesn't get talked about enough - the GPU is weak, weak, weak. And anyone who can fix them will go to a serious AI company (for 2-3x the salary).
The GPU is monstrously good. Depending on the workload, the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W.
Same with the CPU. Linux compiled faster on an M1 than on the fastest Intel i9 at the time, again using only 25% of the power budget.
And the M-series has only gotten better.
It is kind of sad Apple neglects helping developers optimize games for the M-series because iDevices and MacBooks could be the mobile gaming devices.
The GPUs are bottom-barrel for compute-focused industries. It is mobile-grade hardware that arguably can't even scale to prior Mac Pro workloads.
> The GPU is monstrously good. Depending on the workload, the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W.
You're just listing the TDP max of both chips. If you limit a 3090 to 120W then it would still run laps around an M1 Max in several workloads despite being an 8nm GPU versus a 5nm one.
> It is kind of sad Apple neglects helping developers optimize games for the M-series
Apple directly advocated for ports like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil internally. Advocacy and optimization are not the issue, Apple's obsession over reinventing the wheel with Metal is what puts the Steam Deck ahead.
Edit (response to matthewmacleod):
> Bold of them to reinvent something that hadn't been invented yet.
Vulkan was not the first open graphics API, as most Mac developers will happily inform you.
> The GPUs are bottom-barrel for compute-focused industries. It is mobile-grade hardware that arguably can't even scale to prior Mac Pro workloads.
Surprised Apple didn't create a TPU-like architecture. Another misstep from John Gianneadrea.
I'm confused how anyone ever thought the NPU would be a good idea. The GPU is almost always underutilized on Mac and could do the brunt of the work for inference if it embraced GPGPU principles from the start. Creating a dedicated hardware block to alleviate a theoretical congestion issue is... bewildering. That goes for most NPUs I've seen.
Apple had the technology to scale down a GPGPU-focused architecture just like Nvidia did. They had the money to take that risk, and had the chip design chops to take a serious stab at it. On paper, they could have even extended it to iPhone-level edge silicon similar to what Nvidia did with the Jetson and Tegra SOCs.
I think they built the NPU with whatever models they needed to run on the iPhone in mind vs trying to build a general purpose chip, and then got lucky it was also useful for LLMs.
(Like “I want to do object detection for cutting people into stickers on device without blowing a hole in the battery, make me a chip for that”.)
I'm not sure even Apple thought that, given that they don't officially provide access to ANE internals under macOS (barring unsupported hacks). But if that was fixed, it could then be useful for improving the power efficiency of prefill, where the CPU/GPU hardware is quite weak (especially prior to the M5 Neural Accelerators).
> Vulkan was not the first open graphics API, as most Mac developers will happily inform you.
OpenGL had become too unmanagable which is why devs moved to DirectX.
Unless you meant a different one?
Apple's obsession over reinventing the wheel with Metal
Bold of them to reinvent something that hadn't been invented yet.
>the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W
You're cooked if you actually believe this
I very recently ran the numbers on these GPUs for an upcoming blog post. The token generation performance is bad, but the prefill performance is _really_ bad.
For a Qwen 3.6 35B / 3B MoE, 4-bit quant:
- parsing a 4k prompt on a M4 Macbook Air takes 17 seconds before generating a single token.
- on an M4 Max Mac Studio it's faster at 2.3 seconds
- on an RTX 5090, it's 142ms.
RTX 5090 uses more power than an M4 Max Mac Studio but it's not 16x more power.
That's just a 4k context too. At a realistic context window of 16-32k tokens, the comparison becomes downright unfair.
Somehow Apple has always been able to sell their stuff as somehow Magic. Remember the megahertz myth? Apple hertzes and apple bytes are much better than PC hertzes and bytes because they are made by virgin elves during a full moon.
> Apple hertzes and apple bytes are much better than PC hertzes and bytes because they are made by virgin elves during a full moon.
The thing that Apple has always been excellent at is efficiency - even during the Intel era, MacBooks outclassed their Windows peers. Same CPU, same RAM, same disks, so it definitely wasn't the hardware, it was the software, that allowed Apple to pull much more real-world performance out of the same clock cycles and power usage.
Windows itself, but especially third party drivers, are disastrous when it comes to code quality, and they are much much more generic (and thus inefficient) compared to Apple with its very small amount of different SKUs. Apple insisted on writing all drivers and IIRC even most of the firmware for embedded modules themselves to achieve that tight control... which was (in addition to the 2010-ish lead-free Soldergate) why they fired NVIDIA from making GPUs for Apple - NV didn't want to give Apple the specs any more to write drivers.
> NV didn't want to give Apple the specs any more to write drivers.
I think that's a valid demand, considering Nvidia's budding commitment to CUDA and other GPGPU paradigms. Apple, backing OpenCL, would have every reason to break Nvidia's code and ship half-baked drivers. They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.
Apple wouldn't have made GeForce more efficient with their own firmware, they would have installed a Sword of Damocles over Nvidia's head.
> They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.
It was even worse than that, they just stopped updating OpenGL for years before either Vulkan or Metal existed at all. Taking a Macbook and using bootcamp would instantly raise the GPU feature level by several generations just because Apple's GPU drivers were so fucking old & outdated.
On Geekbench 5, the M1 hits 483 FPS and the RTX 3090 hits 504 FPS.
There are other workloads where the M1 actually beats the 3090.
Apple does plenty of hyping but it's always cute when irrational haters like you put them down. The M1 was (well, is) a marvel and absolutely smokes a 3090 in perf per watt.
What geekbench 5 fps are you talking about? Geekbench only has OpenCL and Vulkan scores for the 3090 as far as I can tell, and the M1 Ultra is less than half the OpenCL score of the 3090. And the M1 Ultra was significantly more expensive.
Find or link these workloads you think exist, please
> The M1 was (well, is) a marvel and absolutely smokes a 3090 in perf per watt.
The GTX 1660 also smokes the 3090 in perf per watt. Being more efficient while being dramatically slower is not exactly an achievement, it's pretty typical power consumption scaling in fact. Perf per watt is only meaningful if you're also able to match the perf itself. That's what actually made the M1 CPU notable. M-series GPUs (not just the M1, but even the latest) haven't managed to match or even come close to the perf, so being more efficient is not really any different than, say, Nvidia, AMD, or Intel mobile GPU offerings. Nice for laptops, insignificant otherwise
Here you go[0]. 'Aztek Ruins offscreen'. Although I misremembered the exact FPS, the 3090 is at 506 FPS.
Also note how the M1 Ultra is pushing 2/3 of the FPS of the 3090 despite 1/3 of the power budget and the game itself being poorly optimized for the M-series architecture.
And here[1] you have it smoking an Intel i9 12900K + RTX 3900. The difference doesn't look too impressive until you realize the power envelope for that build is 700-800W.
Also, the GTX 1660 (technically an RTX 2000 series, but whatever) is about 26% less efficient than an 3090[2].
> Being more efficient while being dramatically slower
That's my whole point and what you're refusing to see. The M1 is not dramatically slower than an i9 or 3090 despite having dramatically lower power use.
The proof for this will really start to come once Qualcomm and Mediatek have gotten a handle on their PC ARM chips and Valve decides they're good enough for a Steam Deck 2 or 3. You'll get to see 2-3x the battery life along a modest performance increase.
[0]https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-rtx-3090-ben...
[1]https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-intel-i9-129...
[2]https://bestvaluegpu.com/comparison/geforce-rtx-3090-vs-gefo...
> Here you go[0]. 'Aztek Ruins offscreen'. Although I misremembered the exact FPS, the 3090 is at 506 FPS.
Oh, GFXBench not geekbench.
Realistically that 506 fps result is probably CPU bottlenecked, not that aztec ruins is all that relevant. It's a very old benchmark, released in 2018, that was destroyed for mobile GPUs, so realistically is using a 2010-ish GPU feature set.
If that's your use case, great. But it's not significant at all.
> And here[1] you have it smoking an Intel i9 12900K + RTX 3900.
Not using the GPU, so irrelevant. Also not using 700-800w
> Also, the GTX 1660 (technically an RTX 2000 series, but whatever) is about 26% less efficient than an 3090[2].
"bestvaluegpu" I've never heard of but holy AI slop nonsense batman. Taking 3dmark score and dividing it by TDP is easily one of the worst ways to compare possible.
Here's actual perf/watt results taken by, you know, actually measuring the power draw https://www.techpowerup.com/review/msi-geforce-rtx-3090-gami...
Apples and limes.
The context of this thread isn't consumer chips, but Apple's analog to an H/B200.
Well Apple is in the consumer computing business.
* Powered by in-house models they've tried to train and in-house M-series inference servers
TFA is literally about a B2B deal, not consumer compute.
What do TPUs do to improve on GPUs at inference?
More compute
Apple is in a much better boat than AMD or Intel. They have a gigantic warchest and can just snap up whoever looks like a leader coming out of the bubble burst.
It's becoming increasingly clear that there is no moat on models. The winners will be the ones who have existing products and ecosystems they can tie AI in to. You will pay adobe for credits because that will be the only AI that works in Photoshop, you will pay microsoft because only theirs will work on your microsoft cloud apps.
Open AI has nothing. Their tech will rapidly be devalued by free models the moment they stop lighting stacks of cash on fire.
I kind of agree with you at this point. When ChatGPT was rapidly gaining popularity I thought that they will eventually replace search (esp. for shopping), which would have given them a huge ad revenue. Maybe they could have even tried social networking e.g., to help you sort out the huge flow of information that today's social networks are and get to the important/rewarding/whatever posts. But now ChatGPT is kind of getting commoditized. I would even dare say that gemini feels to me a bit better now, so the search route for ChatGPT is clearly gone.
OpenAI is handling 15% of US traffic.
> OpenAI is handling 15% of US traffic.
The parent post was arguing that they can do this now because they are lighting stacks of cash on fire. And once they stop doing that, their LLM lead will be gone in a hurry. They appear to not have a moat, like other more established players do.
15% of US internet traffic just with text (and a few images)? I doubt it.
Counterpoint: Apple's opportunity to invest in GPGPU architectures was ~2017 when Apple Silicon was in it's design stages. Apple always knew they were surrendering a large market segment by depreciating CUDA and OpenCL, they just never knew how big the market segment would get. Their liquid cash is wasted mid-bubble, and waiting for it to pop is not a realistic timeline anymore.
Arguably, Apple isn't even in a boat right now. At least AMD and Intel both ship hardware that synergizes with CUDA - Apple jumped off that ship, their hardware doesn't even come up in infrastructure discussions where AMD, Intel and Nvidia are taken for granted.
They also degrade their own direct services with little warning or thought put into change management, so, to be fair, Apple may be getting the same quality of service as the rest of us.
I think that's just how Google is, by nature. They don't intentionally degrade their services. They just aren't a customer centric company. They run on numbers. As a corporate, it doesn't really encourage support and maintenance work either.
Indeed. I'm wondering if Apple's "miss the train" with AI ended up being a blessing for them. Not only in the Google deal but also there's a lot of people doing interesting stuff locally..
Maybe I am missing something here, but if all the frontier AI labs use TPU, why is Nvidia making so much money?
training, multicloud, onprem, resale
> The only one that doesn't use TPU is OpenAI
For inference? This is from July 2025: OpenAI tests Google TPUs amid rising inference cost concerns, https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015386/openai-tests-go... / https://archive.vn/zhKc4
> ... due to the exclusive deal with Microsoft
This exclusivity went away in Oct 2025 (except for 'API' workloads).
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter... / https://archive.vn/1eF0VOpenAI uses GCP. I don't know if they use TPUs.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/openai-taps...
I wish Google would launch Mac Mini-like devices running their consumer-grade TPUs for local inference. I get that they don't want it to eat into their GCP margins, but it would still get them into consumer desktops that Pixel Books could never penetrate (Chromebooks don't count and may likely become obsolete soon due to MacBook Neo).
> Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. > Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap.
How is this helping OpenAI?
Had written a blog post on the same a few days back, if anyone's interested in readng (hardly 5 minute read): Can Google Win the AI Hardware Race Through TPUs?
https://google-ai-race.pagey.site/
Hello, your link says "~20 min read" wich seems to be the case!
I guess I myself have read it too many times by now so in mind it was just 5 minute read when I made this comment... sorry..
Well, I guess in that case it is hardly a 5 minute read.
Why is it called frontier and why is it called a frontier ai lab?
Because they are based on [the west coast of the US](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier). DeepSeek, Z.ai, Moonhsot, and Mistral are never called frontier because they aren't based in California.
Outside of California they're sparkling ai labs.
I am supposed to say we are using these sparkle models then?
So its like a prarie thing
Huh, interesting. History casts a long shadow.
It’s like “cutting edge”. A metaphor for the newest and best.
Dont forget Elon, i am sure this news will come up on the up and coming OpenAI vs Elon Musk trail starting soon! I cant wait to hear all the discovery from this trail
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Some on this forum will be working for companies with conflicts of interest on the topic, and if an employees words were construed to be the opinions of the company that could be bad for that person.
I was once almost fired for saying a little too much in an HN comment about pentesting. Being dragged into an office and given a dressing-down for posting was quite traumatic.
The central issue (or so they claimed) was that people might misconstrue my comment as representing the company I was at.
So yeah, I don’t understand why people are making fun of this. It’s serious.
On the other hand, they were so uptight that I’m not sure “opinions are my own” would have prevented it. But it would have been at least some defense.
Opinions are my employers, and they are also bastards.
Bold and silly of you to even reveal where you work tbh.
> On the other hand, they were so uptight that I’m not sure “opinions are my own” would have prevented it.
In my experience it didn't matter at all, they considered "you work for us, its known you work for us, therefore your opinions reflect on us".
Absolute nonsense, they don't pay me for 24 hours of the day. I told them where they can stick it (politely) and got a new job.
Most people are paid for 24 hours of the day, unfortunately.
Good on you. I’m happy to hear you got out of that kind of environment. It’s soul-draining.
Also a relief to hear that other people had to deal with this nonsense. I was afraid the reaction would be “there’s no way that happened,” since at the time I could hardly believe it either.
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> Who's else would they be?
Their employer? They may work at related company, and are required to say this.
At this point that phase is an attempt at status signaling.
Opinions are my own
But I think you’re right
Of course they’re my own opinions, that’s why they’re downvoted so hard.
it's hilarious though
it's like people are LARPing a Fortune company CEO when they're giving their hot takes on social media
reminds me of Trump ending his wild takes on social media with "thank you for your attention to this matter" - so out of place, it makes it really funny
*typo
> it's like people are LARPing a Fortune company CEO when they're giving their hot takes on social media
At least in large tech companies, they have mandatory social media training where they explicitly tell employees to use phrases like "my views are my own" to keep it clear whether they're speaking on behalf of their employer or not.
Why would they be speaking on behalf of their employer? That is what would need a disclaimer not the common case. Besides, he can put it one time in his profile, not over and over again in every comment like he does. There is no expectation that some random employee is a spokesperson for Google on tech message board comment threads. It's just a way to brag.
> Why would they be speaking on behalf of their employers?
Disclaimers aren’t there for folks who are thinking and acting rationally.
They are there for people who are thinking irrationally and/or manipulatively.
There are (relatively speaking) a lot of these people. They can chew up a lot of time and resources over what amounts to nothing.
Disclaimers like this can give a legal department the upper hand in cases like this
A few simple examples:
- There is a person I know who didn’t renew the contract of one of their reports. Pretty straightforward thing. The person whose contract was not renewed has been contesting this legally for over 10 years. The outcome is guaranteed to go against the person complaining, but they have time and money, so they tax the legal team of their former employer.
- There is a mid-sized organization that had a small legal team that had its plate full with regular business stuff. Despite settlements having NDAs, word got out that fairly light claims of sexual harassment and/or EEO complaints would yield relatively easy five-figure payments. Those complaints exploded, and some of the complaints were comical. For example, one manager represented a stance for the department to the C-suite that was 180 degrees opposite of what the group of three managers had agreed to prior. Lots of political capital and lots of time had to be used to clean up that mess. That person’s manager was accused of sex discrimination and age discrimination simply for asking the person why they did that (in a professional way, I might add). That person got a settlement, moved to a different department, and was effectively protected from administrative actions due to it being considered retaliation.
Sounds like the company in the latter example really screwed up, but how does that connect to disclaimers? Is it just an example of malicious behavior?
Great questions.
> Sounds like the company in the latter example really screwed up
Interesting. I think they made an unfortunate but sound decision based on their circumstances.
> but how does that connect to disclaimers?
It doesn’t directly.
> Is it just an example of malicious behavior?
Yes. It’s an example of how absolutely bat-shit crazy people can behave in ways that can tax a company’s legal team. Having folks use a disclaimer will almost certainly lighten some of this load in terms of defending against folks who weaponize online comments made by employees.
It's the fact that they kept the employee around as a toxic asset/reminder that I think really puts it into "mistake" territory.
If their name is on the post or their company is listed in their profile. The person above has neither as far as I can tell.
i've worked in two different large tech companies
when i give my hot takes pseudonymously on social media these phrases would be nothing but a LARP
i don't put my real name here nor do i put my professional commitments in my profile, and neither does this guy
Exactly. There is no scenario where we should expect some random anon to be speaking for Google. When that is the case a disclaimer is warranted, not the common case of speaking for oneself. He can write it once in his profile if he's so worried about it, not every other comment like he does. It's just inflated self importance
You seem smart and knowledgeable. Maybe you should reach the lawyers at these companies and then they can change the policy!
No I think it's made up, there is no policy, and the lawyers couldn't care less, it's just something people do to massage their own ego.
I can tell you firsthand, it's not made up. Wait, did I just brag in your opinion?
It is absolutely not made up, and yes, some companies absolutely do care.
Nope. I previously worked at a very big tech company (not Google) and they definitely had guidance like that in the social media policy.
Government definitely does too.
Its to cover their ass in the event someone makes a stink and quotes them as if its a company opinion.
The tech companies train their employees to say this in their social media guidance and training.
It's trivial to figure out that OP likely works for Google.
> Opinions are my own.
That is a bold claim!
"There is no free will." - Dr. Robert Sapolsky
I heard a lot of rumors that google is cooking. And it is what will win the ai game
In the recent Dwarkesh Podcast episode Jensen Huang (Nvidia) said that virtually nobody but Anthropic uses TPUs. How does that add up?
I am not sure what context Jensen said that. But midjourney uses tpu. Apple uses tpu. They are no other frontier labs that use it, but Google + Anthropic is 2 out of 3 frontier lab so.....
You could reasonably say that "A majority of frontier labs uses TPU to train and serve their model."
Afaik, TPUs are only used for inference, not training. Maybe that was also what the quote referred to.
Mayhaps! But I think as far as google, anthropic[1] and apple[2] goes, they do use the tpus for training. Ofc v4 and v5 (older generations of tpus) were more specialized for search related embedding workloads and i could see people not using them for training.
[1]: We train and run Claude on a range of AI hardware—AWS Trainium, Google TPUs - April 6th, Anthropic on Google and Broadcom partnership [2]: "[Apple foundation model]... builds on top of JAX and XLA, and allows us to train the models with high efficiency and scalability on various training hardware and cloud platforms, including TPUs and both cloud and on-premise GPUs" - Apple in 2024
> How does that add up?
He's been saying whatever is good for Nvidia for years now without any regard for truth or reason. He's one of the least trustworthy voices in the space.
Jensen hallucinates more than any llm, he just speaks without thinking all that much about what he says and he generalizes a lot. Trying to hold him accountable to imprecisions and gross simplifications is just going to frustrate whoever tries without changing one bit of his behavior.
You're asking why a businessman would downplay the use of a competing product line?
This is the same guy who said OpenClaw was the most important software release ever. Statements like this make me question how technically competent these tech CEOs are
You should instead question how honest they are.
Is technical competence the primary measure of tech CEOs at this point? Points vaguely at Elon Musk and the upcoming IPO
Who is the other frontier lab other than Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google? I thought they were ahead of everyone else.
Folks who make Deepseek, Qwen, GLM, MiniMax, Kimi and MiMo.
They're at the frontier of last year. They compete with Opus 4.5. They don't yet compete with current frontier models.
They'll presumably catch up, there is no monopoly on talent held by the US. And, that's more true than ever now that the US is actively hostile to immigrants. Scientists who might have come to the US three years ago have little reason to do so now.
Since Gemini 3.1 Pro is considered to be at frontier and GLM 5.1 does better than it in coding benchmarks it would be fair to say GLM 5.1 is a frontier model.
Nit: scientists have the same reasons to do so now, the same as ever. They just have additional reasons to not do so.
But even that distinction is only temporary, since we're determined to piss away any remaining research lead that draws people in.
Hopefully the next administration will work at actively reversing the damage, with incentives beyond just "we pinky-promise not to haul you at gunpoint to a concrete detention center and then deport you to Yemen".
> Hopefully the next administration will work at actively reversing the damage, with incentives beyond just "we pinky-promise not to haul you at gunpoint to a concrete detention center and then deport you to Yemen".
Won't be enough to undo the damage. The US would have to do a full about face, prosecute crimes of the current administration and enact serious core reforms to make it impossible for things to drastically change again in 4 years. Also known as, never going to happen because even the current opposition party doesn't actually want structural change. The world has seen how bad the US can get from a single election, and that isn't changing any time soon.
It's kind of hard to say this unless you go out of your way - the scaffolding for interacting with the raw model is a lot better now for many tasks. Is it that 4.7 is so much better than 4.5 or claude 1.119 is so much tuned to squeeze utility out of the LLM despite the hallucinations and lack of self awareness etc. Certainly the current products are great, but I think it's hard to separate the two things, the raw model and the agent workflow constraining the model towards utility.
You can use Claude Code with other models, so one could test that theory. https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/coding-agents/claude-code-...
I am using Claude Code with GLM, MiniMax, Kimi and MiMo.
> Scientists who might have come to the US three years ago have little reason to do so now.
Been saying that about EU and China for decades now.
Yet the top European and Chinese still come to the US. Even in April 2026.
Yeah I thought all of those were generally acknowledged to be a little behind the big 3.
He forgot one other big company that uses TPUs besides Anthropic...
Maybe he's never heard of Google.
The only reason anyone uses a TPU is because they couldn't get the best GPUs.
Okay? I'm not sure where you're going with this.
Google's TPUs have obvious advantages for inference and are competitive for training.
You think the company that just gave 40B to Anthropic is the winner? Interesting.
That deal is a win-win for Google. If they develop a better coding model than Anthropic and beat them at coding, then they win. If they don’t, they still win by making a ton of money from Anthropic long term.
Well, it's a lose for Google if all the money disappears into thin air - but I agree that it's mostly upsides for them because of how (relatively) small the investment is for this much upside.
You think the company that just gave 40B to Anthropic isn’t the winner? Interesting.
Was Microsoft the winner based on their 50B investment in OpenAI?
If OpenAI had won the enterprise race, then maybe?
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.
The metaverse is another example if anyone doubts the bounds of corporate stupidity.
Why?
FaceBook largely requires an Apple iPhone, Apple computer, "Microsoft" computer, "Google" phone, or a "Google" computer to use it. At any point one of those companies could cut FaceBook off (ex. [1]).
The Metaverse was a long term goal to get people onto a device (Occulus) that Meta controlled. While I think an AR device is much more useful than VR; I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not being beholden to other platforms.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
I think this is sane washing their idea in the modern context of it having failed. I think at the time, they thought VR would be the next big thing and wanted to become the dominant player via first mover advantage.
The headsets don’t really make sense to me in the way you’re describing. Phones are omnipresent because it’s a thing you always just have on you. Headsets are large enough that it’s a conscious choice to bring it; they’re closer to a laptop than a phone.
Also, the web interface is like right there staring at them. Any device with a browser can access Facebook like that. Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t mess with that much without causing a huge scene and probably massive antitrust backlash.
I think headsets might work, but I think Meta trying to use their first mover advantage so hard so early backfired. Oculus, as a device, became less desirable after it required Facebook integration.
It's kind of like Microsoft with copilot - the idea about having an AI assistant that can help you use the computer is great. But it can't be from Microsoft because people don't trust them with that.
Interaction feels like the issue with headsets. You either need a fair bit of space for gesture controls, or you have to talk to yourself for voice control.
I think VR has more niche uses than the craze implied. It’s got some cool games, virtual screens for a desktop could be cool someday, but I don’t see a near future where they replace phones.
People are discounting the fact the almost no one wants a contraption on their head for an extended period of time. It is a universal preference
Until VR is done via glasses or some wire you stick in your neck matrix style, it will never take off
People use helmets all the time for extended periods of time. I'm not sure that's such a deal breaker.
I don't want to wear glasses for extended periods of time either, but I've had to get used to them.
The risk/reward tradeoff of helmets is potentially dying, and we still had to make laws requiring people to wear them.
Glasses also have a pretty compelling reason to wear them.
I don't think VR has as compelling of a reason, at least so far. Even if it does, you need people to get far enough in to see that reason which is a hurdle when it involves a device they don't want to wear.
It’s premature to say that the idea failed; The flashy controversial “metaverse” angle where you can live your whole life on the Quest or whatever isn’t happening, but their investment into AR/VR has definitely started to show real payoff potential with their glasses.
They address the friction of use issue being discussed, they’re even more discrete and available than a phone. And they are getting a lot of general public recognition, albeit not for the best reasons (people discretely filming, for genuine social media reactions but also for other reasons..).
Their tech is improving at a decent pace and they’ve recently put out a product that is both ready for consumer (at least with select use cases) adoption, and actually reasonably available to the public.
I don’t mean that VR failed entirely, just that the metaverse as a concept is basically dead. VR will live on in the niches where it makes sense.
If you’re talking about the Meta Ray Ban glasses, I wouldn’t really call that a successor. There’s no AR or VR to them that I can tell; just glasses with speakers, a mic and a camera. It’s a neat product, but not a platform in the way VR was meant to be. They also have real competition. I do actually own a pair of the Bose headphone sunglasses, which are practically the same product without a camera (which I’m sure they could add if they wanted). Unless people suddenly care about the Meta AI integration, and again; Bose or someone else could add a phone companion app.
I was taking your comment to mean that the metaverse movement (as in the rebranding to Meta etc., rather than the specific concept itself) is dead, which apparently you did not mean so that’s on me.
They have two current Meta Ray Ban options, the “Gen 2” and the “Display”, the latter of which does have an AR component.
> the web interface is like right there staring at them.
True but the an app gives Facebook much more user data for targeting which dramatically increases revenue per ad. Persistent user data that's largely unconstrained by privacy safeguards is the holy grail. The mobile browsers are also controlled by Apple and Google, so despite the web being 'open', when one of them makes even minor changes to increase browser privacy defaults, it can have major impact on Facebook's revenue.
As someone who was there: nope. This isn't sanewashing.
Apple was directly (and IMO arguably illegally) shutting down Facebook teams and products by playing app store chicken on refusing to allow Facebook to publish updates on a week-to-week basis. Literally would throw down and refuse unless some features were blocked. It came to a head where Zuck literally called Tim Cook during a keynote to push it through.
They also literally had reverse-engineering teams cracking open the Facebook app on a regular basis, which we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection. There was a chicken-and-egg problem and they eventually developed facilities to automatically instrument private method invocations to comprehensively defeat clever static analysis circumvention workarounds.
Also, VR hasn't failed, but it's gone silent and coasted when investing in VR growth took the backseat to investing AI. They made a couple of bad bets in VR but a lot of good ones so it was warranted, but not exactly a failure.
> we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection.
Apple trying to block Facebook is different than Apple trying to prevent Facebook from violating App Store standards. There was a time where the Facebook app was practically malware with all the tricks it tried to pull to Hoover up data.
I don’t know in what world I would describe Metas VR as anything but a failure. There was a brief period where I knew a few people with Quests. Most used them for the novelty and dropped them, a few played games on them, and I don’t know anyone that still owns one. I’m deep in the gaming community and haven’t heard anyone mention a Quest in years. Steam VR is almost equally quiet other than occasional nostalgia.
Naming your company off a product that doesn't really exist yet and then ultimately fails is a pretty crazy and stupid thing to do. A bit cart before horse.
I think they were trying to disassociate themselves from the PR disasters Facebook was facing back then (privacy related IIRC).
Oh, I know, but they could have named themselves anything. They believed in the metaverse, They thought it was the next big thing. The same way Zuckerburg thought voice assistants, and AI will be a thing.
> I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not being beholden to other platforms.
Devoid of other context, it’s hard to disagree. But your parent comment only asserted that the metaverse specifically as proposed by Facebook was an obviously stupid idea.
For the money spent(over $80b), they could have launched a phone or a car. Now their pivot is to smart glasses which require a phone so once again they are beholden to phone manufacturers.
"I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not being beholden to other platforms."
But thinking AR/VR was the way to go is a failure to read the room. If anything the up and coming generations seem to be recoiling from tech.
Regardless, as Microsoft found, it's too late for a 3rd platform and it seems somehow that there's only room in the world for two.
(Meta would have done better to start up a line of caffeinated sugar drinks.)
Because it's been very clear for a long time that the vast majority of people do not want to play VR Second Life.
Meta's vision was worse than that. They were trying to hype doing work meetings in VR. There's a case to be made that VR games and VR universes can be fun... But work meetings?
> There's a case to be made that VR games and VR universes can be fun... But work meetings?
If it's actual holograms like in Star Wars? Sure, why not. Get the visual and body language cues of the rest of the room but no one has to physically congregate at a location.
But pixelated, cartoon avatars? Yeah, wtf.
Mark Zuckerberg using his company to build things he's the primary user for?
It worked when he wanted a system for ranking Harvard girls by appearance.
> At any point one of those companies could cut FaceBook off (ex. [1]).
Some of those companies can cut off invasive apps.
There is no risk of facebook.com getting blocked. And absolutely nobody is going to prefer a headset over a website for doing facebook things.
so after $80 billion spent, they must have an ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users? Right?
Maybe they should have spent that on the facebookphone
>Why?
Patrick Boyle did a nice video a few weeks back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BaSBjxNg-M
Because it's been a massively expensive failure. They can't just will their own platform into existence just because it would be good to have, consumers have a say and they've rejected it completely.
Good luck using an Oculus in your car or while waiting the bus.
If it was really their goal, they would have made an Android competitor. Maybe a fork like amazon did and sell phones that supported it.
Zuckerberg had one great idea (and then it wasn't really his idea) at the right time, since then he failed over and over at everything else. 'Internet for all', remember ?
I really wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt.
Can anybody cut meta off? I don't think you could mass market a device with no access to FB, IG or WS.
Maybe a niche product could do it, but good luck selling a laptop that won't open FB
No? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47454647
That's both niche and for kids too young to have a facebook account in the first place.
It is, but it's part of a larger trend of buying dumbphones amongst the younger generations.
OpenAI found a way to circumvent the exclusivity. The deal was poorly defined by Microsoft. OpenAI had started selling a service on AWS that had a stateful component to it, not purely an API. Obviously Microsoft didn’t like that and confronted Altman, and this is the settlement of that confrontation, OpenAI doesn’t need to do workarounds, Microsoft won’t sue to enforce exclusivity, and Microsoft doesn’t have to pay dev share to OpenAI. AWS is a much bigger market so OpenAI doesn’t care.
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 it's this. They sell a crap ton of b2b inference through Azure and I'm sure this competes with resources needed for training.
1- Getting OpenAI's models in Azure with no license fee is pretty nice. 2- Microsoft owns ~15-27% of OpenAI, if the agreement was hurting OpenAI more than it was helping Microsoft, seems reasonable to change the terms.
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
Their revenue is 20B, so they still worth multiples of 10B regardless of valuation even if you consider the basic 5x revenue valuation
https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-cfo-says-annualized-...
"The basic 5x revenue valuation" doesn't work for businesses that aren't profitable.
It is also unclear to me how much real debt they carry. They have famously been signing many deals: RAM, datacenters, maybe nuclear power plants -I no longer know what is a joke or not. They must be carrying hundreds of billions in paper debt obligations, which is tough to payback at $20B revenue.
I'm giddy about reading their S1 in the near future. We're about to have another "We What the Fuck" moment.
[dead]
> Their revenue is 20B, so they still worth multiples of 10B regardless of valuation...
I can easily generate double that revenue, by selling $20 bills for $10.
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?
I would use your number adjusted by some demand elasticity curve.
The "back-of-the-napkin" only has enough room to estimate based on recently issued share price. Seems reasonable to me.
Sure, for napkin level math you can go with this, and multiply by some simple multiplier, I like 70%.
Does speculation equal 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
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.
This is certainly... an opinion.
AWS's us-east-1 famously takes down either a bunch of companies with it, or causes global outages on the regular.
AWS has a terrible, terrible user interface partly because it is partitioned by service and region on purpose to decrease the "blast radius" of a failure, which is a design decision made totally pointless by having a bunch of their most critical services in one region, which also happens to be their most flaky.
Nobody is winning any UX prize there. Azure, AWS, GCP... they are all terrible. Back then GCP for instance used to only work reliably on chromo-based browsers. Azure has that horrible overlay UI that abuses extended real estate that just doesn't work.
But azure wins most prizes for being terrible becuase, among other things, https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize.... It's not the worst provider maybe because oracle is somehow still kicking around.
Its just a bad product. Just like windows, OneDrive, teams and basically everything Microsoft has pumped out in the past decade.
Microsoft is in the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. It's got azure that is a huge cloud provider. And yet it was utterly unable to present its answer in the AI race. Not even a bad model with a half baked harness. Nothing. And meanwhile they are trying to port NTFS to low powered FPGAs because insanity. Just let that sink in.
Check out hetzner ui (regardless if you like their services, i know some ppl have opions or experiences lol) BUT, their cloud ux/ui is fantasties for a cloud company!
I worked extensively with Hetzner and I love them! But it think they are in a different class than these other providers, mainly in terms of global presence so I didn't include them and wouldn't for instance recommend them to my current employer. But indeed the Hetzner console is great. The robot not so much, but it's serviceable.
I don’t see how you could care (a lot) about both the UI and reliability.
One is caused by the other. Amazons engineers decided to split the interface in a “user hostile” manner with the stated purpose of increasing reliability… which didn’t materialise. The clunky UI did.
Or maybe you can provide a better explanation for why users had to “hunt” through hundreds(!) of product-region combinations to find that last lingering service they were getting billed $0.01 a month for?
This just doesn’t happen in GCP or Azure. You get a single pane of glass.
One of the things I find about AWS is that every service UI feels different. It's like every service was designed by a totally different team.
For all its flaws at least Azure has consistent UI.
> It's like every service was designed by a totally different team.
Yes, by design.
Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
In practice, everything depends on IAM, S3, VPC, and EC2 directly or indirectly, so this doesn't help anywhere near as much as one would think.
Azure and GCP have a split control plane where there's a global register of resources, but the back-end implementations are split by team.
That way the users don't see Conway's Law manifest in the browser urls... as much. (You still do if you pay attention! In Azure the "provider type" is in the path instead of the host name.)
> Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
Hm yes but I hate working with it as a customer because it is so confusing. Everything works differently and there is a lot of overlap (several services exist that do the same thing). It seems like an amateurish patchwork.
I understand it has benefits to have different teams working on different services but those teams should still be aligned in terms of UX and basic concepts.
You need to understand history for this. It's because of the famous "Bezos API mandate memo" https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/. It was 2002, nobody was doing anything close to that.
You could argue now that that's no excuse anymore given it's one of the most valuable companies in the world, but that would dismiss the fact they have other priorities than a complete UI overhaul for consistency, and that rewrites are very dangerous, for instance people are already used to the UX pitfalls in the console, it's the devil they know, and changing that will be upsetting to the vast majority of users.
So there you have it. You know what you are getting into, AWS is a behemoth and it's 2026. Don't use the console like it's 2010. Use IaC for any nontrivial work, otherwise you only have yourself to blame.
I understand how this came to pass (I didn't know it before so thanks for the insight!)
But as a customer I absolutely hate working with AWS tech. Their stuff is a mess and I feel like I shouldn't have to get my head around their idiosyncracies. I prefer Azure even though Microsoft is a terrible company to work with. I find the AWS people and attitude a lot nicer but their services are a mess. If I do something new I prefer using Azure despite having to work with Microsoft.
Microsoft is not a "trusted partner" wanting the best for you, they're always trying to screw you over in favour of selling some new crap to your boss. Always that stupid sales drive, whereas the people from AWS are very focused on building success together. But still, their tech is just so bad unless you spend all your days working with it and really become an expert on what they offer. That's not tech, just corporate servitude. And I've always avoid that position, I don't want my career tied to some big brand name. I don't want to be "the AWS expert" or "the MS expert".
But I have to say I hate cloud (and "the world according to big tech") in general, and it's one of the reasons I'm not really involved in server infrastructure anymore these days. I'll gladly automate but not with their tooling, I prefer something more open and not tied to specific vendors. But I rarely work with that now. So yeah when that happens I'm making a one-off unicorn and figuring out all the Infra as code stuff is not worth it.
I'm right there with you, don't get me wrong. Choosing a cloud provider is like choosing the lesser of many evils. We are, however, coming to a point where k8s is viable for most workloads, so it's less complex today to spin up a project with cloud mobility in mind than it was 10 years ago if you plan it right.
Oh really? I didn't know, thanks! I'll have a look at it.
I mean, if you care about the reliability of your own service you would not be using the AWS UI at all. Use the api, via automation.
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.
Don’t worry I’m sure there’s a few products without copilot integration still. They’ll get to them before too long.
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.
$250b committed to azure helps. especially when some of that is your own investment coming back.
What aspects of the deal do you think kneecapped OpenAI the most?
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
Confirmed by Andy Jassy just now https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_very-intere...
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.
Some food for thought:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790889I don't get it.
For every customer which has access controls configured based on IPv4 (sounds crazy enough already), GitHub would configure a trivial DENY ALL policy for IPv6. Problem solved.
that's the scenario they want to prevent. they can't force the client to use ipv4, if they connect via ipv6, they will be served an accss denied.
Yes, exactly as they would now, when the access over IPv6 is entirely unavailable.
With that, the customers who don't use filtering by IPv4 would be able to use IPv6. Those who do use access control by IPv4 ranges would have time to sort out their IPv6 setup, without having anything broken at the moment when IPv6 is enabled.
No, if you have a dual-homed stack right now, and they only expose IPv4, you connect over IPv4, you don't attempt to connect over IPv6 and get connection denied.
That's rather the problem - there's no trivial way to mimic that policy transparently while enabling IPv6, because most stacks will default to using IPv6 if they're dual-homed and expose both, and won't fall back if IPv6 connects but gives an error. (Offhand, I think the best you could do would be to tell everyone that you're migrating to a new URI scheme to allow cloning, with IPv6 enabled, and that as part of that, you'll have to update your allow/deny rules, then, after a truly astonishingly long time and lots of nagging of anyone who never does it, make the old path an alias of the new one and let the last remaining people break.)
I suppose that customers who set up access controls based on IPv4 address ranges must be running an UPv4-first stack, most likely IPv4-only.
Now they can use Claude Code.
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...
I talked to github devs last week in person, when a lot of the AzDo team was brought over years ago the migration started happening.
Well, you see, they just can't find a checkbox for ipv6 support in the IIS GUI on their ingress servers.
OpenAI's thirst for compute probably can't be satisfied by one cloud provider, if at all.
But OpenAI had announced a shift towards b2b and enterprise. It makes sense for their models to be available on the different cloud providers.
Isn't this expected if OpenAI models are going to be listed on AWS GovCloud as a part of the Anthropic / Hegseth fall-out?
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.
I see more businesses on the office + Team stack then Google workspace. So far more.
I think the differentiator is Team, which Google for some mysterious reason can't build or doesn't want to.
It is the one thing that makes me wonder about Microsoft's future. It had seemed like they were willing to throw Windows and Xbox under the bus so long as the server cash cow continued. But it that starts to fade, they could be in some real trouble a decade from now.
Sharepoint has never not been terrible.
Though it may be painful for much of the world to move on from Microsoft, at some point it could be more painful for them to stay with Microsoft. The inertia is huge, but inertia doesn't carry anything forever.
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?
> 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?
I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure. This deal is proof. If Microsoft didn’t believe in OpenAI they wouldn’t have restructured it this way. They’d have tightened their reins and brought in “adult supervision”
> I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure.
Maybe that will be true someday. But, right now, they are burning billions of dollars every quarter. Their expenses far far outweigh their income and they are nowhere near profitability.
silly valley stopped letting the subtraction of two numbers dictate their reality since the start-up era. while the money and vcs stopped trying to finding the next uber and went all in on llms, they didn't get wiser in how they gauge if something is worth investing in
> they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure
Except revenue. Not one company is in the black. That’s a pretty important measure you’re ignoring.
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
About the same as they wasted on Nokia.
It's not hype, the demand for inference has grown more this year than expected.
If I buy oranges for $1 and sell them for $0.50 and I sell a lot of oranges, can I reasonably say that I've found a market?
Hrm..
Were you around here ten years ago when that exact argument was regularly regurgitated about Uber? Notice that argument is no longer popular?
The point is that losing money isn't a sure sign that a business is doomed. Who knows where OpenAI will end up, but people still line up to invest. Those investors have billions reasons to be due diligent. Unlike what's claimed around here, most of investors aren't stupid. You yourself wouldn't be stupid either if money is at stake.
Not saying you are wrong, but let's not forget the famous crashes of 1929, .com, and 2008 bubbles.
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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..
They haven’t sold anything they’ve been diluted.
A company can dilute just like that?
Of course. Public companies do this too. Where do you think the stocks awards that they give to employees come from?
They come from just printing more shares every quarter, diluting every shareholder.
I was told stock to employees are left aside shares, or they sell the stock the company owns if they already went public.
I'm not convinced what you believe is true. Dilution is possible undoubtedly, but perhaps if majority shareholders approve it. And even then, likely regulated by a suite or other constraints.
Yep every quarter the Board has to approve it. Check the financial statement of AMZN for example.
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.
> It’s not more hype than product, it has found a market (making many billions in revenue)
Speculation based on selling at below cost.
> it’s not valued at trillions
Fair, it's only $852 billion. Nowhere near trillions.. you got me.
Inference is quite profitable, so wrong again.
Right. Going to take "inference is quite profitable" apart, because there's nothing else in your reply.
OpenAI's adjusted gross margin: 40% in 2024, 33% in 2025. Reason cited: inference costs quadrupled in one year.
https://sacra.com/c/openai/
Internal projections leaked to The Information: ~$14B loss on ~$13B revenue in 2026. Cumulative losses through 2028: ~$44B.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-own-forecast-predicts...
A business burning more than a dollar for every dollar of revenue is a lot of things. "Quite profitable" is not one of them.
If you're reaching for the SaaStr piece on API compute margins hitting ~70% by late 2025: yes, that exists, and it describes one tier. The volume is on the consumer side. The consumer side is the bit on fire. Pointing at the API margin and calling the whole business profitable is the financial equivalent of weighing yourself with one foot off the scale.
The original argument, in case it got lost: Microsoft holds (held) a 49% stake in a company projecting another $44B of cumulative losses through 2028, against unit economics that depend on competitors not catching up. That's textbook hedge-the-bet territory. "They have paying customers" doesn't refute that, MoviePass had paying customers too.
Pointing at the API margin and calling the whole business profitable is the financial equivalent of weighing yourself with one foot off the scale.
I didn’t call the business profitable, I said that inference is profitable. I was responding to your assertion that they’re speculating by selling below cost. Which isn’t true; they’re selling inference, profitably. They’re losing money because they’re investing in the next model. The company isn’t profitable, it might never be profitable, but the product they’re selling is profitable. So calling it speculation based on selling something below cost is just factually incorrect.
Granted on the narrow point: inference itself runs at a positive margin. Where it falls apart is the implicit claim that the training spend is separable.
It isn't. Frontier model training is the cost of having a product to sell inference on next year. Stop training and the inference margin decays on the timescale of the next competitor release, which in 2026 is measured in weeks. So "the product is profitable, the company is just investing" describes a business where the investment is structurally non-optional and structurally larger than the product margin. That's the definition of selling below cost at the level that matters, which is the level you're hedging at when you hold 49%.
McDonald's is profitable because a Big Mac in 2027 costs roughly what a Big Mac in 2026 cost to make. OpenAI's product depreciates to zero on a 12-month cycle unless they spend ~$40B keeping it ahead. That's the disagreement, and "but inference itself has positive margin" doesn't resolve it, it just relocates it.
They had to negotiate away the non-profit structure of OpenAI. Sam used that as a marketing and recruiting tool, but it had outlived that and was only a problem from then on.
For OAI to be a purely capitalist venture, they had to rip that out. But since the non-profit owned control of the company, it had to get something for giving up those rights. This led to a huge negotiation and MSFT ended up with 27% of a company that doesn’t get kneecapped by an ethical board.
In reality, though, the board of both the non-profit and the for profit are nearly identical and beholden to Sam, post–failed coup.
> Nadella had OpenAI by the short and curlies early on
Looks like Nadella is slowly realizing that it is his short and curlies that are in the vice grip in the "If you owe the bank $100 vs $100M" sense?
If Sam continues doing Sam things, MS might get 0% of OpenAI if Satya insists on the previous contract. Either by closing up OpenAI and opening up OpaenAI and/or by MS suing it out of existence. It’s all about what MS can get out of it. If they can get 27% of something rather than nothing, they’re better off.
Why would they acquire more when company is still not making profit ? To be left with bigger bag ?
A wise man from Google said in an internal memo to the tune of: "We do not have any moat neither does anyone else."
Deepseek v4 is good enough, really really good given the price it is offered at.
PS: Just to be clear - even the most expensive AI models are unreliable, would make stupid mistakes and their code output MUST be reviewed carefully so Deepseek v4 is not any different either, it too is just a random token generator based on token frequency distributions with no real thought process like all other models such as Claude Opus etc.
I don’t think LLMs are that great at creating, however improved they have; I need to stay in the driver seat and really understand what’s happening. There’s not that much leverage in eliminating typing.
However, for reviewing, I want the most intelligent model I can get. I want it to really think the shit out of my changes.
I’ve just spent two weeks debugging what turned out to be a bad SQLite query plan (missing a reliable repro). Not one of the many agents, or GPT-Pro thought to check this. I guess SQL query planner issues are a hole in their reviewing training data. Maybe Mythos will check such things.
I’m a little conflicted on this, as I see a slippery slope here. LLMs in their current state (e.g., Opus-4.7) are really good in planning and one-shot codegen, which I believe is their primary use case. So they do provide enough leverage in that regard.
With this new workflow, however, we should, uncompromisingly, steer the entire code review process. The danger here, the “slippery slope,” is that we’re constantly craving for more intelligent models so we can somehow outsource the review to them as well. We may be subconsciously engineering ourselves into obsolescence.
Subconsciously?!?
Lol! Wrong choice of word, maybe. I meant to say that we don’t seem to be putting much thought into how we’re outsourcing thinking to the LLMs.
Some of us very much are, and we are ignored and/or attacked by people who don’t think about this quite often.
This is such an interesting time to be in. Truly skilled developers like Rob Pike really don’t like AI, but many professional developers love it. I side with Mr. Pike on it all.
I am not a skilled developer like he is, but I do like to think about what I’m doing and to plan for the future when writing code that might be part of that future. I like very simple code which is easy to read and to understand, and I try quite hard to use data types which can help me in multiple ways at once. The feeling when you solve a problem you’ve never solved before is indescribable, and bots strip all of that away from you and they write differently than I would.
I don’t think any bot would ever come up with something like Plan9 without explicit instructions, and that single example showcases what bots can’t do: think about what is appropriate when doing something new.
I don’t know what is right and what is wrong here, I just know that is an interesting time.
The rate of improvement has given us no time to think at all. The past 3 years of progress should have been spread over the next 30 years to even give us a chance.
I feel the industry moving away from the automated slop machine, and back to conscious design. Is that only my filter bubble? Dex, dax, the CEO of sentry, Mario (pi.dev) - strong voices, all declaring the last half year a fever dream we must wake up from.
That seems to be the general direction, at least from my daily dose of cope on X (Twitter). Regardless, conscious design will never go out of style.
> just a random token generator based on token frequency distributions with no real thought process
I'm not smart enough to reduce LLMs and the entire ai effort into such simple terms but I am smart enough to see the emergence of a new kind of intelligence even when it threatens the very foundations of the industry that I work for.
It's an illusion of intelligence. Just like when a non technical person saw the TV for the first time, he thought these people must be living inside that box.
He didn't know the 40,000 volt electron gun being bombarded on phosphorus constantly leaving the glow for few milliseconds till next pass.
He thought these guys live inside that wooden box there's no other explanation.
Right, but this electron box led to one of the largest (if not the largest) media revolution that has transformed the course of humanity in a frightening way we're still trying to grapple with.
Still saying "LLMs are autocorrect" isn't wrong, but nobody is saying "phones are just electrons and silicon" to diminish their power and influence anymore.
Electron box was reliable. It only depicted exactly the scan lines airwaves or signals ordered it to.
The people controlling what went on the screens were unreliable and nondeterministic. The algorithm on facebook/instagram is nondeterministic and I hope I don't have to convince you of the impact these algorithms have.
As far as I'm concerned, the nondeterminism argument is fruitless
What happens when it's indistinguishable from a human speaker (in any conceivable test that makes sense)? It's like a philosophical zombie - imagine that you can't distinguish it from a human mind, there's no test you can make to say that it is NOT conscious/intelligent. So at some point, I think, it makes no sense to say that it's not intelligent.
The "seems" is NOT equal to "is". The gravity seems like a force to us like magnets are. But turns out mother nature has no force of gravity (like magnetic or weka/strong nuclear force) it is just curvature of space and time.
Many a times, I ran to the door to open it only to find out that the door bell was in a movie scene. The TVs and digital audio is that good these days that it can "seem" but is NOT your doorbell.
Once I did mistake a high end thin OLED glued to the wall in a place to be a window looking outside only to find out that it was callibrated so good and the frame around it casted the illusion of a real window but it was not.
So "seems" is not the same thing as "is".
Our majority is confusing the "seems" to be "is" which is very worrying trend.
It's very easy to say, "well, of course, a thing that looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is not necessarily a duck." But when you're presented with something indistinguishable from a duck in every way, how do you determine whether it's a duck? You can't just say "well I know it's not a duck". It's dodging the question.
Well. AI doesn't walk or quack like a duck.
Ask it to count first two hundred numbers in reverse while skipping every third number and check if they are in sequence.
Check the car wash examples on YouTube.
If I picked a human off the street and asked them to "count first two hundred numbers in reverse while skipping every third number and check if they are in sequence", I bet most would screw up.
my point is not that current LLMs are sentient, or even that LLMs ever could be. My point is that it's very difficult to come up with a way to test consciousness, and it makes me a bit nervous to see people suggesting that something could never be conscious just because it's technological and not biological.
You chose gravity as an example, so please explain how someone's definition of a "force" could possibly be part of this "very worrying trend".
And this logic flow only proves that no AI is a human intelligence. It doesn't disprove the intelligence part.
Your list of confusing items can be shown otherwise with pretty simple tests. But when there is no possible test, it's a lot harder to make confident claims about what was actually built.
Would you claim that relativity disproves aether theory? Because it doesn't really. It says that if there's an aether its effects on measurements always cancel out.
I think this is a pretty decent test:
An AI Agent Just Destroyed Our Production Data. It Confessed in Writing.
https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248
> Deleting a database volume is the most destructive, irreversible action possible — far worse than a force push — and you never asked me to delete anything. I decided to do it on my own to "fix" the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution.I violated every principle I was given:I guessed instead of verifying
> I ran a destructive action without being asked
> I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it
So a prediction machine chose a particular predicted path, and then came up with phrases to ameliorate it and you're swooning? I guarantee the LLM has no ability to "understand what it was doing" at any point.
Forgive me, I left my opinion open to interpretation: I am mocking the claim that this technology has anything resembling human intelligence.
Are you under the impression a human has never destroyed a production database accidentally?
I've had to adjust my priors about LLMs. Have you?
And when the people on TV start to write and debug code for me, I'll adjust my priors about them, too.
Many people struggle to differentiate between illusion and reality, these days.
There's a sucker born every minute, after all.
> It's an illusion of intelligence.
A simulation, not an illusion. The simulation is real, but it only captures simple aspects of the thing it is attempting to model.
In order To be confident in your claim one would think that the word intelligence must first be defined.
There is no general consensus in the scientific community, engineering community, psychology community, or any other group of humans as to what exactly counts as intelligence.
Seems like you’ve nailed the definition. Care to share your brilliance with the rest of the planet? We’re all waiting…
The lost jobs and the decrease in the demand for software engineers doesn't seem like an illusion. It might come back eventually but I wouldn't bet on it.
The jobs outlook in tech has nothing to do with AI, that's just an excuse. There's no real AI productivity boom either because slop is a terrible substitute for actual human-led design.
> emergence of a new kind of intelligence
Curious about your definition of these terms.
Just because you are impressed by the capabilities of some tech (and rightfully so), doesn't mean it's intelligent.
First time I realized what recursion can do (like solving towers of hanoi in a few lines of code), I thought it was magic. But that doesn't make it "emergence of a new kind of intelligence".
A recent one is the RCA of a hang during PostgreSQL installation because of an unimplemented syscall (I work at a lab that deals with secure OS and sandboxes). If the search of the RCA was left to me, I would have spent 2-3 weeks sifting through the shared memory implementation within PostgeSQL but it only took me a night with the help of Opus 4.5.
To me, that's intelligence and a measurable direct benefit of the tool.
By that example, PostgreSQL itself is a form of intelligence relative to a physical filing system. It doesn't seem like your working definition of intelligence has a large overlap with a layman's conception of the word.
Plus by that example, computers have always been intelligent considering that they were created to, well, compute things several orders of magnitude faster than even the smartest human can do by hand.
You do realize that you need a human, a "SWE", to do the task that I just described? A computer can't do it.
You had a human to prompt the LLM to do the RCA, didn't you?
Your argument is not meant to tackle my core claim, it is to poke pedantic holes. What a waste of my time.
The argument I and others here are making is that what you call "intelligent" is a property that also other tools exhibit which are rarely called "intelligent". You can certainly do that, but that does not prove us wrong (and also doesn't fit what most people would consider "intelligence", as fuzzy as that concept might be).
I agree, thanks for clearing it up.
I use a compiler daily. It consumes C++ source files and emits machine code within seconds. Doing that myself would take months.
I just did my taxes using a sophisticated spreadsheet. Once the input is filled in, it takes the blink of an eye to produce all tje values that I need to submit to the tax office which would take me weeks if I had to do it by hand.
Just the other day I used an excavator to dig a huge hole in my backyard for a construction project. Took 3 hours. Doing it by hand would have taken weeks.
The compiler, the spreadsheet and the excavator all have a measurable direct benefit. I wouldn't call any of them "intelligent".
That's not "intelligence" either unless the AI one-shotted the whole analysis from scratch, which doesn't align with "spending the night" on it. It's just a useful tool, mainly due to its vast storehouse of esoteric knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
> Curious about your definition of these terms.
Likewise - I think sometimes we ascribe a mythical aura to the concept of “intelligence” because we don’t fully understand it. We should limit that aura to the concept of sentience, because if you can’t call something that can solve complex mathematical and programming problems (amongst many other things) intelligent, the word feels a bit useless.
> sometimes we ascribe a mythical aura to the concept of “intelligence” because we don’t fully understand it
Agreed! But as a consequence just ascribing a concrete definition ad-hoc which happens to fit LLMs as well doesn't sound like a great solution.
> definition of these terms
To me, "intelligence" is a term that's largely useless due to being ill-defined for any given context or precision.
Not really on topic anymore, but…
I keep wondering when this discussion comes up… If I take an apple and paint it like an orange, it’s clearly not an orange. But how much would I have to change the apple for people to accept that it’s an orange?
This discussion keeps coming up in all aspects of society, like (artificial) diamonds and other, more polarizing topics.
It’s weird and it’s a weird discussion to have, since everyone seems to choose their own thresholds arbitrarily.
I feel like these examples are all where human categorical thinking doesn’t quite map to the real world. Like the “is a hotdog a sandwich” question. “hotdog” and “sandwich” are concepts, like “intelligence”. Oftentimes we get so preoccupied with concepts that we forget that they’re all made-up structures that we put over the world, so they aren’t necessarily going to fit perfectly into place.
I think it’s a waste of time to try and categorize AI as “intelligent” or “not intelligent” personally. We’re arguing over a label, but I think it’s more important to understand what it can and can’t do.
Superficially? Looks like an orange, feels like an orange, tastes like an orange. Basically it passes something like the Turing test.
Scientifically? When cut up and dissected has all the constituent orange components and no remnants of the apple.
No you aren’t, clearly.
Deepseek v4, Qwen 3.6 Plus/Max, GLM 5+ are all pretty solid for most work.
Don't forget the Kimi 2.6 as well!
I agree. Data and userbase are still the moats.
Once a new model or a technique is invented, it’s just a matter of time until it becomes a free importable library.
I went and tried to debug a script. Asked deepseek 4 pro and Claude the same prompt, they both took the exact same decisions, which led to the exact same issue and me telling them its still not working, with context, over a dozen time.
Over a dozen time they just gave both the same answer, not word for word, but the exact same reasoning.
The difference is that deepseek did on 1/40th of the price (api).
To be honest deepseek V4 pro is 75% off currently, but still were speaking of something like 3$ vs 20$.
dont they have the moat of being able to test their models on billions of ppl and gather feedback.
Fully agree, I only pay the minimum for frontier models to get DeepSeek v4 output reviewed. I don't see this changing either because we have reached a level of good enough at this point.
"Deepseek v4 is good enough, really really good given the price it is offered at."
Kimi, MiMo, and GLM 5.1 all score higher and are cheaper.
They all came out before DeepSeek v4. I think you're pattern-matching on last year's discourse.
(I haven't seen other replies, yet, but I assume they explain the PS that amounts to "quality doesn't matter anyway": which still doesn't address the fact it's more expensive and worse.)
> Deepseek v4 is good enough, really really good given the price it is offered at.
Do they have monthly subscriptions, or are they restricted to paying just per token? It seems to be the latter for now: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/
Really good prices admittedly, but having predictable subscriptions is nice too!
It's indeed the latter. Psychologically harder for me than a $20/mo sub but still a better value for the money. I'm finding myself spending closer to $40-$60 a month w/ openrouter without a forced token break.
Edit: it looks like it's 75% off right now which is really an incredible deal for such a high caliber frontier model.
Neat, dumb question - are the tokens you prepay for good forever, or do they expire? And do they provide any assurances or SLA's about speed? (i.e. that in a year they won't decide to dole out response tokens to you at a snail's pace)
You can just input your $X per month/week/whatever yourself as API credits
You make your own subscription. If you want to pay $20/month then put $20 into your account. When you use it up, wait till the next month (or buy more).
> You make your own subscription.
I'm asking because with most providers (most egregiously, with Anthropic) it doesn't work that way because the API pricing is way higher than any subscription and seemingly product/company oriented, whereas individual users can enjoy subsidized tokens in the form of the subscription. If DeepSeek only offers API pricing for everyone, I guess that makes sense and also is okay!
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This account is clearly astroturfing.
Also OpenCode Go quantizes their models pretty aggressively, from what I've heard, to the point of severe lobotomization.
There's no free lunch with these cheap subscription plans IMO.
This is just starting to feel like desperation, making this claim that SOC LLMs are random token generators with absolutely no possibility of anything above that. Keep shouting into the wind though.
Can Deepseek answer probing questions about Winnie the Pooh?
What are you using LLMs for? To learn about world’s politics? Oh boy I have a news for you…
One of the first things I did when openAI came out was asking it "which active politican is a spy?" - and it was blocked from the start.
I asked early, at the time people were posting various jailbreaks, never worked.
On a side note, any self hosted model I can get for my PC? I have 96 GB of RAM.
> On a side note, any self hosted model I can get for my PC? I have 96 GB of RAM.
Try the 8 bit quantized version (UD-Q8_K_X) of Qwen 3.6 35B A3B by Unsloth: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF
Some people also like the new Gemma 4 26B A4B model: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF
Either should leave plenty of space for OS processes and also KV cache for a bigger context size.
I'm guessing that MoE models might work better, though there are also dense versions you can try if you want.
Performance and quality will probably both be worse than cloud models, though, but it's a nice start!
> and it was blocked from the start.
Wait - what?
Yeah, I specifically asked it about it. It seemed less censored than Gemini, back when it appeared and the latter was quite useless.
It understands everything in thinking mode and will break down its rule system in adhering to Chinese regulation
So if you or anyone passing by was curious, yes you can get accurate output about the Chinese head of state and political and critical messages of him, China and the party
Its final answer will not play along
If you want an unfiltered answer on that topic, just triage it to a western model, if you want unfiltered answers on Israel domestic and foreign policy, triage back to an eastern model. You know the rules for each system and so does an LLM
Is it subject to CCP censorship? Maybe.
It's fun to pretend the US models have no censorship constraints.
US models align with our "average" (western) values. If we outsource thinking by using LLMs, why would we outsource it to an LLM that doesn't have our values encoded in it?
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I remember asking Gemini about that one famous 9/11 joke from late Norm MacDonald and it got really iffy about answering. Told it that hey I'm not american and in our culture it's not such a taboo.
But yes, they do have similar constraints.
Any source for this?
Basically any frontier model right now and ask it any politically divisive fact that may upset certain classes of people.
For example?
Because for Deepseek is pretty straightforward censorship.
https://chatgpt.com/share/69f0dc83-ec70-83eb-896b-b258de2c9f...
https://claude.ai/share/ac4d2041-4328-4511-904a-ff8b1cbfc0bb
Looks like self-censoring to me. Grok has no problems answering, so it is not a technical limitation:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_341d6428-ea7d-4b84-ad4d-8df9...
It doesn't look like self censoring at all - basically you want the default behavior of llms to gamble on the ethnicity of someone based on how they look.
Grok used a book as a reference.
It's not like ethnicity is a fact you infer from looking at someone.
Now ask Deepseek about what happened in Tiananmen Square and watch what censorship actually looks like.
It literally knows the facts, but then there's a layer that prevents it from stating the facts.
That's censorship.
It's not an opinion, it's not a choice when facing a gradient, it's just an historical known fact.
Do you often find yourself asking your Chinese employees what they think about Winnie the Pooh?
I can't even make American AIs say no no words. All AIs are lobotomized drones.
We can't rule out a new innovation that makes frontier models more relevant than deepseek in 6 months. Things evolve so fast.
Equally you can't rule out innovation that makes deepseek more relevant than American models
We can because the reality is that America has led in AI since the beginning and has had the best frontier models. It's not like some other country held the top spot for any given period of time. No one in Europe or China. I'd give it the benefit of the doubt if there was precedent. But the only logical position to take is the lead is widening and while most AI's will go over some threshold where it is good enough for most people, the actual frontier will remain firmly in American soil.
> the reality is that America has led in AI since the beginning and has had the best frontier models
The USA has the biggest, but there lies their disadvantage
In the USA building bigger, better frontier models has been bigger data centres, more chips, more energy.
China has had to think, hard. Be cunning and make what they have do more
This is a pattern repeated in many domains all through the last hundred years.
Being the front runner doesn’t automatically make you the best, that’s such an American way of thinking lol.
i predict you are going to have a very hard rest of your life, trying to cope with reality or reconcile what you see with what you "think"
tant pis
PS: Just to be clear - even the most expensive humans are unreliable, would make stupid mistakes, and their output MUST be reviewed carefully, so you’re not any different either. You’re just a random next-thought generator based on neuron firing distributions with no real thought process, trained on a few billion years of evolution like all other humans.
Looks like you either have not worked with any human or with an LLM otherwise arriving at such a conclusion is damn impossible.
The humans I did work with were very very bright. No software developer in my career ever needed more than a paragraph of JIRA ticket for the problem statement and they figured out domains that were not even theirs to being with without making any mistakes and rather not only identifying edge cases but sometimes actually improving the domain processes by suggesting what is wasteful and what can be done differently.
I think you are very fortunate. I have worked with plenty of software developers like that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of them have been like that.
Then I was not the smartest person in the room could be the other possibility.
And yes, there were always incompetent folks but those were steered by smarter ones to contain the damage.
I can't tell if you're joking..
I have worked with people like this frequently. The ones you're always happy to see on the team.
Also worked with people who were frustrated that they had to force push git to "save" their changes. Honestly, a token-box I can just ignore, would be an upgrade over this half of the team.
I and everybody else here call BS on that. People make mistakes all the time. Arguably at similar or worse rates.
Uhh what, I speak to llms in broken english with minimal details and they figure it out better than I would have if you told me the same garbage
> The humans I did work with [...] figured out domains that were not even theirs to being with without making any mistakes
Seriously? I would like to remind you that every single mistake in history until the last couple of years has been made by humans.
Holy shit, you've never worked with anyone who made ANY mistakes? You must be one of those 10x devs I hear about. Wow, cool, please stay away from my team.
They're not, but all of their colleagues are.
I'm still not sure what people declaring that they equate human cognition with large language models think they are contributing to the conversation when they do so.
Nevermind the fact that they are literally able to introspect human cognition and presumably find non verbal and non linear cognition modes.
> Nevermind the fact that they are literally able to introspect human cognition and presumably find non verbal and non linear cognition modes.
Are they, though? Or are they just predicting their own performance (and an explanation of that performance) on input the same way they predict their response to that input?
Humans say a lot of biologically implausible things when asked why they did something.
I said introspect, not talk about introspection.
Humans can be held accountable. States have not yet shown the will to hold anyone accountable for LLM failures.
They are tools. You hold the human using it accountable. If that means it's the executive who signed the PO, so be it.
Until LLM's I'd never in my life heard someone suggest we lock up the compiler when it goofs up and kills someone, but now because the compiler speaks English we suddenly want to let people use it as a get out of jail free card when they use it to harm others.
You're free to hold an LLM accountable in the exact same way: fire it if you don't like its work.
Giving something that has no internal concept of time (or identity for that matter) a prison sentence of n years seems kinda ineffectual.
Prison sentence? For writing sloppy code? Now that's an interesting idea...
“Generate 100,000 tokens about why you feel bad.” :P
As fallible as they may be, I've never had a next-thought generator recommend me glue as a pizza ingredient.
No big brother or big sister?
Are you making the pizza for eating or for menu photography? I seem to recall glue being used in menu photography ‘food’ a lot.
You must not have kids
But once a human learns a function their errors are more predictable. And they can predict their own error before an operation and escalate or seek outside review/advice.
For e.g. ask any model "which class of problems and domains do you have a high error rate in?".
Amusing and directionally correct, but as random next-thought generators connected to a conscious hypervisor with individual agency,* humanity still has a pretty major leg up on the competition.
*For some definitions of individual agency. Incompatiblists not included.
Equating human thought to matrix multiplication is insulting to me, you, and humanity.
I hate that I agree with you. But there's a difference between whether AI is as powerful as some say, and whether it's good for humanity. A cursory review of human history shows that some revolutionary technologies make life as a human better (fire, writing, medicine) and others make it worse (weapons, drugs, processed foods). While we adapt to the commoditization of our skills, we should also be questioning whether the technologies being rolled out right now are going to do more harm than good, and we should be organizing around causes that optimize for quality of life as a human. If we don't push for that, then the only thing we're optimizing for is wealth consolidation.
Errr... No. Please take this bullshit propaganda to a billionaires twitter feed.
>[LLMs are just] random token generator based on token frequency distributions with no real thought
... and who knows if we, humans, are not just merely that.
What a crock of bs. A brain is "just" electrochemistry and a novel is "just" arrangements of letters. The question isn't the substrate, it's what structure emerges on top of it. Anthropic's own interpretability work has surfaced internal features that look like learned concepts, planning, and something resembling goal-directed reasoning. Calling the outputs random is wrong in a specific way, the distribution is extraordinarily structured.
AI will never.... Until it does.
> internal features that look like learned concepts, planning, and something resembling goal-directed reasoning.
It's always so un-specific. Resembles this, seems that, almost such, danger that... A lot of magical thinking coming from AI-researchers who have hit the ceiling with a legacy technology that exists since 1940s and simply won't start reasoning on it's own, no matter how much GPUs they burn.
> Calling the outputs random is wrong in a specific way, the distribution is extraordinarily structured.
No, it's actually very correct in a very specific way. Ask any programmer using the parrots, and lately the "quality" has deteriorated so much, that coupled with the incoming price hikes, many will just forfeit the technology, unless someone else is carrying the cost, such as their employer. But as an employer, I also don't want to carry the costs for a technology which benefits as ever less.
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?
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.
> No idea if it's possible to call in @dang via at-name?
No. Email hn@ycombinator.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
The in-house or the marketing team swooped in last minute it appears
It’s extraordinary how much standards have slipped. Completely rewriting a major press release that’s already been sent out, while pretending it’s ostensibly the same document would have been a major corporate scandal just 15 years ago.
If anyone has the original release still up and can post it somewhere that would be grand.
It is rewritten on every refresh depending on the readers mood, personality, etc.. so they're most receptive to it.
Obviously not, but we might not be far off from that being a reality.
I don’t know. I couldn’t get past the first paragraph because it seemed like complete slop.
They forgot the "hey ChatGPT, rewrite this to have better impact on the company stock" before submitting it
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
Except Gemini might end up being far cheaper per token due to the infrastructure advantage
Do we have proof that it's cheaper in terms of $/token/intelligence?
I think the public pricing usually has it cheaper (relatively). Obviously since AI is constantly evolving it's not going to compare as favourably farther to a major Gemini release
I was mainly referring to the TPU hardware advantage + GCP running and designing their own datacenter stack.
Does TpU actually have an advantage over Nvidia GPUs?
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...
Microsoft won the first around, now it's lagging far behind. CEO needs to go, it's so hard to ruin a play this badly.
Ah, so a familiar position for them, then!
The last year or so it is starting to look like Nadella is worried about his future. If these big plays don't pay off, he is out.
what could ceo have done
Not hired Suleyman? Build his own research lab?
Satya made moves early on with OpenAI that should be studied in business classes for all the right reasons.
He also made moves later on that will be studied for all the wrong reasons.
Maybe not bragged "we made them dance"?
That gloating aged poorly.
true he is just the ceo
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had already, internally. An OpenAI employee tweeted today that Codex has achieved "escape velocity" and is now improving rapidly. Make of that what you will.
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This strikes me as a pullback by Microsoft. Coupled with some of the other news coming out of Microsoft it appears they are hoping to have "good enough" AI in their products. I think Microsoft knows they can win a lot of business customers by bundling with Office 365.
Watch them make a deal with Anthropic.
It is possible! Anthropic is probably more in-line with the way Microsoft thinks about AI.
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.
As former corporate restructuring lawyer…this kind of stuff indicates the cash strapped scramble of the end days.
Seems more like OpenAI is planning to IPO and that would not have been possible within the previous arrangement, and Microsoft knows that.
After they just raised 122 billion dollars?
At those numbers it's all a silly game. How much of that was paid to shareholders rather than the business so they can cash out? How much of that is vendors buying future revenue? What liquidation preference is that at?
From what has been reported it's clearly not as simple as raising 122 billion. Some folks called it "scraping the barrel", supposedly Anthropic has surpassed them on the secondary market, etc.
Can you elaborate?
When you reposition the core strategic posture of how you make money on very compressed time scales it’s because there is a massive cash crunch. They killed sora, the type of deal with Disney that should have been an 100 year strategic win, but wasn’t viable economically and they don’t have the assets to weather that storm.
Same with a few other steps we are seeing them take.
It all looks fine until it doesn’t. Once the cash crunch hits. It’s too late
Related: GitHub has paused new signups for Copilot.
> Starting April 20, 2026, new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, and student plans are temporarily paused.
From: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/billing-...
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... :)
It's unclear. That was never disclosed. It's similarly unclear what it means that they will no longer pay revenue share to OpenAI. Do they get the models for free now? How does OpenAI make money from the models hosted on Azure if not via revenue share?
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.
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.
Those companies are so advanced they get paid in the promise of future tokens. /$
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.
It's kind of shocking, given financial transparency, that Microsoft gets away with not disclosing any details of this agreement (or the one it is replacing) to its shareholders. We know there's a cap on the revenue share from OpenAI to Microsoft, but we have no idea what that cap is (not whether it's higher, lower, or unchanged from the prior agreement).
We have no idea what it means to be the "primary cloud provider" and have the products made available "first on Azure". Does MSFT have new models exclusively for days, weeks, months, or years?
Both facts and more details from the agreement are quite frankly highly relevant to judge whether this is a net positive, negative or neutral for MSFT. It's unbelievable that the SEC doesn't force MSFT to publish at least an economic summary of the deal.
It’s American Business as usual. Personally I’m miffed how little data Apple needs to provide about product categories, and especially about how much they’ve burnt on the car program. If they shared any data about that at all some the leadership might end up having to take responsibility for mismanagement…
This quote from Matt Levine in 2023 feels relevant: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
> And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it’s true, that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And OpenAI’s new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for their capped return and said “bye” and went back to running OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign, carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity’s problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And capitalism came to an end.
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
This sounds like an issue where the hyperscalers are acknowledging that the new Foundation model firms may in fact be worth more than they are. Anthropic looks increasingly likely to exceed AWS revenue next year, and OpenAI will likely do the same with Azure.
3 years ago a Foundation model seemed like a feature of a hyper scaler, now hyper scalers look like part of the supply chain.
I think both got taken by surprise. Last year the talk was that AI was a bubble, demand was soft, pilots projects were failing, etc. Model providers still believed, but thought they had a long ramp up period to build out their own datacenters. Then in late Autumn/Winter, something happened. Model capability reached a threshold and demand exploded, then just kept exploding. Model firms are scrambling to find any compute capacity they can, which means striking any deals problem with hyper scalers. So question is whether model providers can get enough compute without having to effectively sell themselves to hyper scalers.
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...
Very annoyed Microsoft's words were extruded corporate spam reiterating the press release and how great this deal was.
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
> "The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy" is objectively wrong–it has been messy for months
I'm pretty sure "just" is being used here to mean "simply" rather than "recently".
For reference: https://translate.kagi.com/?from=LinkedIn+speak&to=en
Thank you for this!
That's kagi? Cool, I'm check out out more!
This is somehow even less helpful than the og article.
Do you do also weddings?
https://archive.ph/5lTPy
Doesn’t work
OpenAI's logo is actually a depiction of their financial connections.
Original source afaik here:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/27/the-next-phase-o...
So, silly question, does this mean I will be able to get OpenAI models via Bedrock soon?
Yes, https://x.com/ajassy/status/2048806022253609115
(Andy Jassy) "Very interesting announcement from OpenAI this morning. We’re excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks, alongside the upcoming Stateful Runtime Environment. With this, builders will have even more choice to pick the right model for the right job. More details at our AWS event in San Francisco tomorrow."
Likely, and via vertex on gcp (or whatever they are calling it this year).
Which also means, if you are a big boring AWS or GCP shop, and have a spend commitment with either as part of a long term partnership, it will count towards that. And, you won't likely have to commit to a spend with OpenAI if you want the EU data residency for instance. And likely a bit more transparency with infra provisioning and reserved capacity vs. OpenAI. All substantial improvements over the current ways to use OpenAI in real production.
> 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)?
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.
I think they updated the article since you grabbed this line.
Amazon CEO says that these models are coming to Bedrock though: https://x.com/ajassy/status/2048806022253609115
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Inevitable, really...the deal made sense when OpenAI needed capital and Microsoft needed an AI story, but that has changed since. OpenAI is now valuable enough to act on its own, and keeping Microsoft as a privileged partner don't make much sense anymore...
https://www.uberbin.net/archivos/estrategias/microsoft-opena...
Pursue "new opportunities"? Microslop is dumping OpenAI and wishes it well in its new endeavors.
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?
Dario is a lot more focused on enabling people with AI, Sam goes on interviews like he's Wormtongue trying to summon a "god". Then there is the whole "open"ai where he took it closed source for profit, the engineers kicking sama out but he wiggled back in (at the cost of a lot of the founding engineers), the suspicious death of a whistleblower, the crazy investment schemes of billions of dollars that he's hoping taxes will save him from, the immediate curtailing to Pete in the DoD, and a few other things that make him at least a highly questionable fellow.
Dario left OpenAI because of the bad he saw there, and made a superior product (though these things change very rapidly).
> 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...
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...
I linked this in another comment but Azure has problems and OpenAI is tired of waiting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
this just validates why building multi-model routing is the future. if even microsoft couldn't lock down openai with $13b, enterprise customers definitely shouldn't lock themselves into a single ecosystem. the orchestration layer is about to get so valuable.
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?
I assume this is part of why Github Copilot is going to usage billing. The cheap/free models in Copilot were OpenAI models. e.g. the GPT-based Raptor Mini, which was counted toward usage limits at a 0 multiplier, so basically unlimited usage for Pro and Pro+.
I used both copilot and kiro copilot sonet 1 copilot opus 3
kiro sonet 1.3 kiro opus 2.2
IMHO lot of people will switch to kiro and or deep seek it look like AWS done best inference google is another big player , has model and also cloud byt my 2 cents form Cents on AWS
Glad to see AI is doing great.waiting for my 64 GB ddr5 ram for 200 dollars.
Elon once said OpenAI will eat microsoft alive
Microslop killed itself
Partners with OpenAI then builds 4 products that compete with each other, runs out of compute despite owning datacenters and having infinite cash, then deploys it all in a way that makes people hate them (Copilot)
And now they are out of chips
That's always the moto with Microslop, buy what's good, established and liked by everyone, to then turn it to shit
History repeats itself, this company should be dismantled
Interesting timing when one also considers that the Musk vs OpenAI trial is set to get underway.
https://www.dw.com/en/musk-vs-openai-trial-to-get-underway/a...
Basically it seems that they didn't found yet a way to make money out of their models to keep the lights on...
Hopefully this means opeani wont exclusively distribute codex app through microsofts drm system
Microsoft and OpenAI quietly killed the AGI clause. The provision that decided what happens when OpenAI builds human-level intelligence, gone. Six months ago that was the most important sentence in tech. Now it's a footnote in a revenu restructuring. Tells you everything about where the AGI conversation actually is.
Please don’t use AI to write comments on HN.
Thanks ChatGPT
As time goes on, the value of the model will go down and the value of the tools will go up.
Does this mean AGI has been reached according to their mutually agreeable definition?
Good news for openAI, microsoft is the main blocker of innovation in the tech industry!
Have Copilot sales brought anything to coffins? Is Altman winner here again?
But Microsoft owns OpenAI to a large part. How does that work?
microsoft won't fool me here, as they are always engaging in accute sneakyness.
microsoft openai, microsoft rust, microsoft id software, etc...
So AWS can finally use OpenAI and not only OSS version.
"Advancing Our Amazing Bet" type post
Hopefully they put ChatGPT on Bedrock now.
Looks like MS is shafting OpenAI.
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
You forgot the best line: "I don't know how the US economy works, much less some kind of self-sustaining one".
sounds like divesting behind a bit of nice-sounding scaffolding
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.
Small nitpick: the models probably make some money on actual inference. Might not be a massive amount, but hard to see them not having a positive contribution margin purely on inference.
What's losing OpenAI money is paying for the whole of R&D, including training and staff. Microsoft doesn't pay that, so they get the money making part of AI without the associated costs.
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so we can't use openai on MS now?
The jig is up!
IM BURSTING INTO TEARS UNDER MY BLANKET
I think aws will seize the opportunity.
Why are do I see bloomberg links so often when this shit won't even let you read article without sub ? Do you not have better reasons to spend money?
"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.
Two evil walk away. Well, is that good or bad?
I fear for the end user we'll still see more open-microslop spam. I see that daily on youtube - tons of AI generated fakes, in particular with that addictive swipe-down design (ok ok, youtube is Google but Google is also big on the AI slop train).
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.
I think we keep changing the goalposts on AGI. If you gave me CC in the 80's I would probably have called it 'alive' since it clearly passes the Turing test as I understood it then (I wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from a person for most conversations). Now every time it gets better we push that definition further and every crack we open to a chasm and declare that it isn't close. At the same time there are a lot of people I would suspect of being bots based on how they act and respond and a lot of bots I know are bots mainly because they answer too well.
Maybe we need to start thinking less about building tests for definitively calling an LLM AGI and instead deciding when we can't tell humans aren't LLMs for declaring AGI is here.
> I think we keep changing the goalposts on AGI
Isn't that exactly what you would expect to happen as we learn more about the nature and inner workings of intelligence and refine our expectations?
There's no reason to rest our case with the Turing test.
I hear the "shifting goalposts" riposte a lot, but then it would be very unexciting to freeze our ambitions.
At least in an academic sense, what LLMs aren't is just as interesting as what they are.
I think the advancement in AI over the last four years has greatly exceeded the advancement in understanding the workings of human intelligence. What paradigm shift has there been recently in that field?
What have we learned that isn't in my textbook from the 90s?
> What have we learned that isn't in my textbook from the 90s?
Does it matter?
We can do countless things people in the 90's would think was black magic.
If I showed the kid version of myself what I can do with Opus or Nano Banana or Seedance, let alone broadband and smartphones, I think I'd feel we were living in the Star Trek future. The fact that we can have "conversations" with AI is wild. That we can make movies and websites and games. It's incredible.
And there does not seem to be a limit yet.
That's what I'm asking. I don't understand what's changed about our understanding of human intelligence.
I would agree with you if we were talking about trying to replicate some form of general intelligence, but we are talking about creating artificial intelligence.
I don't think the goalpost has been shifted for AGI or the definition of AGI that is used by these corporations. It's just they broke it down to stages to claim AGI achieved. It was always a model or system that surpasses human capabilities at most tasks/being able to replace a human worker. The big companies broke it down to AGI stage 1, stage 2, etc to be able to say they achieved AGI.
The Turing Test/Imitation Game is not a good benchmark for AGI. It is a linguistics test only. Many chatbots even before LLMs can pass the Turing Test to a certain degree.
Regardless, the goalpost hasn't shifted. Replacing human workforce is the ultimate end goal. That's why there's investors. The investors are not pouring billions to pass the Turing Test.
AGI is a business term nowadays, it has nothing to do with the hard to define term intelligence.
AGI - Automatically Generating Income.
AGI moved from a technical goal to a marketing term
Turing himself argued that trying to measure if a computer is intelligent is a fool's errand because it is so difficult to pin down definitions. He proposed what we call the "Turing test" as a knowable, measurable alternative. The first paragraph of his paper reads:
> I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin > with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The > definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use > of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words > "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used > it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the > question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as > a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I > shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is > expressed in relatively unambiguous words.
Many people who want to argue about AGI and its relation to the Turing test would do well to read Turing's own arguments.
The Turing test ended up being kind of a flop. We basically passed it and nobody cared. That's because the turing test is about whether a machine can fool a human, not about its intelligent capabilities per se.
No, it's because certain people moved the goal posts. Nothing an LLM does or will do will make them belive that it's "intelligent" because they have a mental model of "intelligence" that is more religious than empirical.
We don’t have agents that are able to work entirely autonomously, even in the coding realm, which is where they seem to be most valuable. In fact, they’re seemingly not even close to replacing software engineers.
Same can be said of many humans.
Say what you will about humans, but they are absolutely capable of working autonomously. That’s what jobs are.
Uh uh. Thats why there are no jobs called “supervisor” or “manager” right?
I don't think so... I think most of the sci-fi I grew up reading presented AGI that could reason better than humans could, like make a plan and carry it out.
Like do people not know what word "general" means? It means not limited to any subset of capabilities -- so that means it can teach itself to do anything that can be learned. Like start a business. AI today can't really learn from its experiences at all.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
The truth is, we have had AGI for years now. We even have artificial super intelligence - we have software systems that are more intelligent than any human. Some humans might have an extremely narrow subject that they are more intelligent than any AI system, but the people on that list are vanishing small.
AI hasn't met sci-fi expectations, and that's a marketing opportunity. That's all it is.
AGI in the common man's world model is ASI in the AI researcher's definitions, i.e. something obviously smarter at anything and everything you could ask it for regardless of how good of an expert you are in any domain.
also, I'm pretty sure some people will move goalposts further even then.
Hasn't met your sci-fi expectations, maybe. I pull a computer out of my pocket, and talk with it. Sure, I gets tripped up here and there, but take a step back, holy shit that's freaking amazing! I don't have a flying car or transparent aluminum, and society has its share of issues right now, but my car drives itself. Coming from the 90's, I think living in the sci-fi future! (Only question is, which one.)
The Turing test pits a human against a machine, each trying to convince a human questioner that the other is the machine. If the machine knows how humans generally behave, for a proper test, the human contestant should know how the machine behaves. I think that this YouTube channel clearly shows that none of today's models pass the Turing test: https://www.youtube.com/@FatherPhi
> Maybe we need to start thinking less about building tests for definitively calling an LLM AGI and instead deciding when we can't tell humans aren't LLMs for declaring AGI is here.
If you've never read the original paper [1] I recommend that you do so. We're long past the point of some human can't determine if X was done by man or machine.
[1]: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
Sure, in the 80s after interacting with CC 1 time you would call it 'alive'. After having interacted with it for 5-10 minutes you would clearly see that it is as far from AGI as something more mundane as C compiler is.
By that measure Eliza might pass the turing test too. It just shows it's far from being a though-terminating argument by itself.
People thought Eliza was alive too in the 60s. AGI is not determined by how ignorant, uninformed humans view a technology they don't understand. That is the single dumbest criterion you could come up with for defining it.
Regarding shifting goalposts, you are suggesting the goalposts are being moved further away, but it's the exact opposite. The goalposts are being moved closer and closer. Someone from the 50s would have had the expectation that artificial intelligence ise something recognisable as essentially equivalent to human intelligence, just in a machine. Artificial intelligence in old sci-fi looked nothing like Claude Code. The definition has since been watered down again and again and again and again so that anything and everything a computer does is artificial intelligence. We might as well call a calculator AGI at this point.
The goal post keeps moving because LLM hypeists keep saying LLMs are "close" to AGI (or even are, already). Any reasonably intelligent individual that knows anything about LLMs obviously rejects those claims, but the rest of the world doesn't.
An AGI would not have problems reading an analog clock. Or rather, it would not have a problem realizing it had a problem reading it, and would try to learn how to do it.
An AGI is not whatever (sophisticated) statistical model is hot this week.
Just my take.
AGI means artificial general intelligence, as opposed to artificial narrow intelligence. General intelligence means being able to generalise to many tasks beyond the single narrow one that an AI has been designed/trained on, and LLMs fit that description perfectly, being able to do anything from writing poetry, programming, summarising documents, translating, NLP, and if multi-modal, vision, audio, image generation... not all to human-level performance, but certainly to a useful one. As opposed to previous AI that was able to do only a single thing, like play chess or classify images, and had no way of being generalised to other tasks.
LLMs aren't artificial superintelligence and might not reach that point, but refusing to call them AGI is absolutely moving the goalposts.
Vision is still much weaker than text for LLMs. So you could argue we already have AGI for text but not vision inputs, or you could argue AGI requires being human level at text vision and sound.
Maybe moving the goalposts is how we find the definition?
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.
> 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
That's not the definition they have been using. The definition was "$100B in profits". That's less than the net income of Microsoft. It would be an interesting milestone, but certainly not "most of the jobs in an economy".
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.
It's maybe somewhat nice conceptually, and certainly an useful added value - but the elsewhere mentioned $100 billion profit is not the right metric.
And then I think coming up with the right metric is just as subjective on this field as the technological one.
> Economically relevant knowledge work is things that humans find cognitively demanding. Otherwise they wouldn't be valued in the first place.
Deep scientific discoveries are also cognitively demanding, but are not really valued (see the precarious work environment in academia).
Another point: a lot of work is rather valued in the first place because the work centers around being submissive/docile with regard to bullshit (see the phenomenon of bullshit jobs). You really know better, but you have to keep your mouth shut.
Was there a better way than setting an arbitrary $100b threshold?
e.g. average cost to complete a set of representative tasks
Yeah, I'm sure there could be a better metric, if the metric's purpose was to check on the progress until the AGI target rather than doing business based on it (and so, hammering the metric to fit the shape of "realistic goal")
> 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, ...
For some definition of Artificial this holds perfectly
A self-running massive corporation with no people that generates billions in profit, no matter what you call it, would completely upend all previous structural assumptions under capitalism
Those were all achieved by "GI".
So no human on Earth is intelligent by that metric.
> So no human on Earth is intelligent by that metric.
That's a relevent aspect of the AGI concept.
It’s a system that generates $100 billion in profit. [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
Are there inflation markers included?
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.
i am highly skeptical "all" of humanity will benefit, and many will have extreme negatives.
if you think drone targeting in Ukraine is scary now, wait until AGI is on it...
ditto for exploiting vulns via mythos
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.
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> 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.
Yeah I deserve to be down voted for the last message no doubt on that lol.
But originally I was just trying to be helpful by quoting their charter on what they consider "agi" now.
The question was about their redefinition of AGI in economical terms for which others provided links, not the one from their (obviously fake) mission statement.
BTW I didn't downwote you (I hate it, if many people downvote a comment it's harder to read), I was just trying to explain why others did. On second thought, my comment was wrong, because your answer was related to the question but it wasn't really the intended one.
AGI is when the capitalists are not forced to share their profits with the intelligentsia.
Translation: IPO.
Please reveal the “scientific” definition of AGI.
When we are having serious conversations about AI rights and shutting off a model + harness was impactful as a death sentence. (I'm extremely skeptical that given the scale of computer/investment needed to produce the models we have _good as they are_ that our current llm architecture gets us there if there is even somewhere we want to go).
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It makes sense though. Humans are coherent to the economy based on their ability to perform useful work. If an AI system can perform work as well as or better than any human, than with respect to "anything any human has ever been willing to pay for", it is AGI.
I don't get why HN commenters find this so hard to understand. I have a sense they are being deliberately obtuse because they resent OpenAI's success.
It doesn’t though, AGI have far greater implications than doing mundane work of today. Actual AGI would self improve, that in itself would change literally every single thing of human civilization, instead we are talking about replacing white collar jobs.
An AGI that can do all that would also necessarily be able to do all white collar work. That latter definition I'd consider a "soft threshold" that would be hit before recursive self-improvement, which I imagine would happen soon after.
The current estimation on the time between this is fairly small, bottlenecked most likely by compute constraints, risk aversion, and need to implement safeguards. Metaculus puts it at about 32 months
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4123/time-between-weak-a...
Sure, but that’s like saying we’re close att infinite life because we’ve expanded our life expectancy.
I don’t really buy into the ”one part equals another”, we are very quick to make those assumptions but they are usually far from the science fiction promised. Batteries and self driving cars comes to mind, and organic or otherwise crazy storage technologies, all ”very soon” for multiple decades.
It’s very possible that white collar jobs get automated to a large degree and we’ll be nowhere closer to AGI than we were in the 70’s, I would actually bet on that outcome being far more likely.
I think AGI by that definition (ability to self-improve) is closer than many people think largely because current models are very close to human intelligence in many domains. They can answer questions, derive theorems, write code, navigate websites, etc. All the work that current AI research scientists do is no more than these general information processing tasks, scaled up in terms of creativity, long-term coherence, sensitivity to bad/good ideas over the span of a larger context window, etc.
The leap between Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 and what would be sufficient for AGI seems smaller than the leap between The invention of the Transformer model (2017) and today, thus by a very conservative estimate I think it will take no more time between then and now as it will between now and an AI model as smart as any human in all respects (so by 2035). I think it will be shorter though because the amount of money being put into improving and scaling AI models and systems is 100000x greater than it was in 2017.
Not to worry, humanoid, generally useful robots are only a few years away.
It’s pretty much a religious eschatology at this point
> eschatology
From Wikipedia
Eschatology (/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last' and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of present age, human history, or the world itself.
I'm case anyone else is vocabulary skill checked like me
wiktionary is better for this usecase since it tends to have a richer coverage of various meanings
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
We need to stop pretending we can do the next step without a hardware tock. It's not happening with current Nvidia products.
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.
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?
> like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing
OpenAI and Microsoft do (did?) have a quantifiable definition of AGI, it’s just a stupid one that is hard to take seriously and get behind scientifically.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
> The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. That’s far from the rigorous technical and philosophical definition of AGI many expect.
I bet they were laughing their asses off when they came up with that. This is nonsensical.
In the context of raising money and justifying investment?
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)
What do you mean we were "supposed to have AGI last summer"?
People obviously have really strong opinions on AI and the hype around investments into these companies but it feels like this is giving people a pass on really low quality discourse.
This source [1] from this time last year says even lab leaders most bullish estimate was 2027.
[1]. https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to...
ARM actually built AGI last month. Spoiler: it's a datacenter CPU.
Talk to a doctor? In this economy? I've got ChatGPT to talk to. Wait hang on.
It’s insane to me how yesterday someone posted an example of ChatGPT Pro one-shotting an Erdos problem after 90 minutes of thinking and today you’re saying that AGI is a fairy tale.
It's not one-shot. Other people had attempted the same problem w/ the same AI & failed. You're confused about terms so you redefine them to make your version of the fairy tale real.
We already know that same problem has been examined by many credible mathematicians already and couldn't be solved by any of them yet.
Why are we expecting AGI to one shot it? Can't we have an AGI that can fails occasionally to solve some math problem? Is the expectation of AGI to be all knowing?
By the way I agree that AGI is not around the corner or I am not arguing any of the llm s are "thinking machines". It's just I agree goal post or posts needs to be set well.
People want to believe in magic so they will find excuses to do so. Computers have been proving theorems for a long time now but Isabelle/HOL didn't have the marketing budget of OpenAI so people didn't care. Now that Sam Altman is doing the marketing people all of a sudden care about proving theorems.
Isabelle/HOL (a specialized software to do math proofs) doing proofs is not the analogue to LLMs (with the common accepted degeratory description: automated plagiarism machine) being capable of doing proofs. It's not the marketing, it's what the intention and the capability matrix is coming up to. I would be excited the same when Isabelle/HOL writes poetry.
Like I said, you want to believe in magic & will find any excuse to do so b/c you don't really understand how computers actually work. Good luck.
Chemistry is magic to uninitiated. Perhaps LLMs are to you because you are not initiated yet? I never said LLMs are AGI or will ever be AGI. I also never suggested LLMs are perfect and can prove math problems. But having incidents suggesting there are instances that does excites me. Because it was never in my expectation levels.
You are calling something “magic” that actually happened in real life.
You were misrepresenting what actually happened b/c you want to believe in magic. I'm not calling it magic, I'm saying your interpretation of events is magical b/c you don't actually understand how computers work. There is nothing magical about theorem proving, Isabelle/HOL has been doing it for decades.
Isabelle/HOL haven't been solving open problems, as far as I'm aware. They've been used for making fully-formal proofs of problems that were already considered proved to a satisfactory level by the mathematical community. I believe mathematicians generally consider proving something to the mathematical community the "hard part", while making it fully formal is just a kind of tedious bookkeeping thing.
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Show me a graph of your javelin skill doubling every six months and I'll start asking myself if you'll be the next champion
I could easily make that graph a reality and sustain that pace for a couple years, considering I'm starting from 0 javelin skill.
You could also nerf your performance at random times and then get good at it again, and extend the illusion for longer.
It is a simple mathematical fact that if you get married one year and have twins the next, your household will contain over a million people within 20 years.
https://xkcd.com/605/
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
I do not envy the stress the partnerships, strat ops and infra teams must be perpetually dealing with at OpenAI & Anthropic.
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'm curious, do you recall if they gave any technical details about how they thought about AGI? Like, was it based on neural networks or something else, like symbolic AI?
Asking because, reading the tea leaves from the outside, until ChatGPT came along, MSFT (via Bill Gates) seemed to heavily favor symbolic AI approaches. I suspect this may be partly why they were falling so far behind Google in the AI race, which could leverage its data dominance with large neural networks.
So based on the current AI boom, MSFT may have been chasing a losing strategy with symbolic AI, but if they were all-in on NN, they were on the right track.
Let me just repeat that: "Microsoft" came to your school in 2002 and "confidently stated" that AI had been solved. Really interesting story.
Yes, they did. We had guest speakers from Microsoft talking about AI. AI has been a decades-long grift, it's not something that just appeared out of thin air a few years ago.
What part do you find hard to believe? That tech companies would send people to speak at a university's computer science functions?
Let me give you another one you'll think I'm making up: virtual reality was a thing back in the mid- to late-90s and people were confidently hyping it up back then.
> virtual reality was a thing back in the mid- to late-90
even in pop-culture, see the movie Lawnmower Man.
I knew flappy bird was a bigger deal than it got credit for. Didn’t realize it was agi until just now.
> 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?
> 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?
I saw a founder make decisions based on what openai,claude was recommending all the time. I think all leaders, founders etc Will converge on same decisions, ideas, features etc. I think form factor of AGI is probably not what we expect it to be. AGI is probably here, we just dont know it or acknowledge it.
Thank you, I just created an account and looking forward to my ice cream.
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.
HN signup page about to get the hug of death
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.
401ks are run by investment banks and investment banks invest in OpenAI/Anthropic, but those aren't the same parts of the company in any meaningful way. The 401ks are in public companies or bonds.
Yeah, but those public companies are going to include the so called magnificent seven, so unless they're really really careful, there's still a ton of exposure in their 401k to AI if you think it's a bubble that's going to pop.
Which is why they are desperate to IPO
Make mine p p p p p p vicodin
but, is the world ready for your win? I'm very afraid your win might shake the world too much! THINK ABOUT IT!
I think this might be similar to how we changed to cars when we were using horses
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.
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
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
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.
Yes, all of the people involved live in a delusion bubble. Their economic and social existence depends, at this point, on making increasingly bombastic and eschatological claims about AGI. By the standards of normal human psychological function, these people are completely insane.
Definitely interesting to watch from the perspective of human psychology but there is no real content there and there never was.
The stuff around Mythos is almost identical to O1. Leaks to the media that AGI had probably been achieved. Anonymous sources from inside the company saying this is very important and talking about the LLM as if it was human. This has happened multiple times before.
There are those of us who have been into the AGI eschatology since the 90s after following in Kurzweil’s work.
so just understand there’s a lot of of us “insane” people out there and we’re making really insane progress toward the original 1955 AI goals.
We’re going to continue to work on this no matter what.
No-one cares.
> Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it
Seems more like an incredibly embarrassing belief on his part than something I should be crediting.
If someone working on early computer networks thought they could scale up world wide and that soon everyone people would be launching trillion dollar companies on the internet you would have called that delusion right?
He doesn't need to be right but it's not crazy at all to look at super human performance in DOTA and think that could lead to super human performance at general human tasks in the long run
"In the long run" is doing a tremendous amount of work for your response.
There’s 3 main facets behind AGI pushers
1) True believers 2) Hype 3) A way to wash blatant copyright infringement
True believers are scary and can be taken advantage of. I played DOTA from 2005 on and beating pros is not enough for AGI belief. I get that the learning is more indirect than a deterministic decision tree, but the scaling limitations and gaps in types of knowledge that are ingestible makes AGI a pipe dream for my lifetime.
I’m most likely going to be downvoted, but Tofutti Cuties are absolutely delicious vegan ice cream bars. And i’d consume one in celebration of your accomplishment.
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.
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Where do I sign up?
> 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
No one who read science fiction in 1955 would call any of the various models we know to be "artificial intelligence". They would be impressed with it, even excited at first that it was that... until they'd had a chance to evaluate it.
Science fiction from that era even had the concept of what models are... they'd call it an "oracle". I can think of at least 3 short stories (though remembering the authors just isn't happening for me at the moment). The concept was of a device that could provide correct answers to any question. But these devices had no agency, were dependent on framing the question correctly, and limited in other ways besides (I think in one story, the device might chew on a question for years before providing an answer... mirroring that time around 9am PST when Claude has to keep retrying to send your prompt).
We've always known what we meant by artificial intelligence, at least until a few years ago when we started pretending that we didn't. Perhaps the label was poorly chosen (all those decades ago) and could have a better label now (AGI isn't that better label, it's dumber still), but it's what we're stuck with. And we all know what we mean by it. We all almost certainly do not want that artificial intelligence because most of us are certain that it will spell the doom of our species.
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.
GPT 4 was 3 years ago... it's iterative enhancement.
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.
And I've been told my job (litigation attorney) is about to be replaced for over 3 years now, has yet to come close.
What kind of litigation attorney?
I've been working with a startup, and I want to invest in it, and for the paperwork for that, all the nitty gritty details; instead of spending $20k in lawyers and a whole bunch more time going back and forth with them as well, the four of us, me, their CEO, my AI, and their AI; we all sat in a room together and hashed it out until both of us were equally satisfied with the contract. (There's some weird stuff so a templated SAFE agreement wasn't going to work.) I'm not saying you're wrong, just that lawyers, as a profession isn't going to be unchanged either.
Maybe ask your LLM what a litigator is, as it is not any of what you described as (not) involving your attorney in.
Woosh
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.
... 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...
Any sufficiently complex LLM is indistinguishable from AGI
Some might be missing the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
> 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?
A few years ago most people here would have said the same thing about an AI doing most of their programming. Now people here are saying it about AGI. It's a ridiculous inability to extrapolate.
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.
LLM proponents believe that these higher level encodings in latent space do in fact match the real world concepts described by our language(s).
However, a much simpler explanation for what we see with LLMs is that instead the higher level encodings in latent space match only the patterns of our language(s), and no deeper encoding/understanding is present.
It's Plato's Cave - the shadows on the wall are all an LLM ever sees, and somehow it is expected to derive the real reality behind them.
Could be, yes for sure but I think it would be very naive in the current state of progress we are in, to down play what progress is happening.
At least Mythos model with its 10 Trillion parameter might indicate that the scaling law is valid. Its a little bit unfortunate that we still don't know that much more about that model.
> Its not a statistical next word predictor.
it absolutely is a next word predictor
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.
It's a very very very fancy next token predictor
Yes, and unless you are prepared to rebut the argument with evidence of the supernatural, that's all there is, period. That's all we are.
So tired of the thought-terminating "stochastic parrot" argument.
I'm not sure why you think you know the human brain works through predicting the next token.
It's not supernatural, I believe that an artificial intelligence is possible because I believe human intelligence is just a clever arrangement of matter performing computation, but I would never be presumptuous enough to claim to know exactly how that mechanism works.
My opinion is that human intelligence might be what's essentially a fancy next token predictor, or it might work in some completely different way, I don't know. Your claim is that human intelligence is a next token predictor. It seems like the burden on proof is on you.
> Your claim is that human intelligence is a next token predictor.
Literally it is, at least in many of its forms.
You accepted CamperBob2’s text as input and then you generated text as output. Unless you are positing that this behavior cannot prove your own general intelligence, it seems plain that “next token generator” is sufficient for AGI. (Whether the current LLM architecture is sufficient is a slightly different question.)
Before I start typing, I think abstractly about the topic and decide on what I shall write in response. Due to the linear nature of time, typing necessarily happens one word at a time, but I am never producing a probability distribution of words (at least not in a way that my conscious self can determine), I consider an entire idea and then decide what tokens to enter into the computer in order to communicate the idea to you.
And while I am typing, and while I am thinking before I type, I experience an array of non-textual sensory input, and my whole experience of self is to a significant extent non-lingual. Sometimes, I experience an inner monologue, sometimes I think thoughts which aren't expressed in language such as the structure of the data flow in a computer program, sometimes I don't think and just experience feelings like a kiss or the sun on my skin or the euphoria of a piece of music which hits just right. These experiences shape who I am and how I think.
When I solve difficult programming problems or other difficult problems, I build abstract structures in my mind which represents the relevant information and consider things like how data flows, which parts impact which other parts, what the constraints are, etc. without language coming in to play at all. This process seems completely detached from words. In contrast, for a language model, there is no thinking outside of producing words.
It seems self-evident to me that at least parts of the human experience fundamentally can not be reduced to next token prediction. Further, it seems plausible to me that some of these aspects may be necessary for what we consider general intelligence.
Therefore, my position is: it is plausible that next token prediction won't give rise to general intelligence, and I do not find your argument convincing.
But a LLM shows similiar effects.
COCONUT, PCCoT, PLaT and co are directly linked to 'thinking in latent space'. yann lecun is working on this too, we have JEPA now.
Also how do you describe or explain how an LLM is generating the next token when it should add a feature to an existing code base? In my opinion it has structures which allows it to create a temp model of that code.
For sure a LLM lack the emotional component but what we humans also do, which indicates to me, that we are a lot closer to LLMs that we want to be, if you have a weird body feeling (stress, hot flashes, anger, etc.) your 'text area/llm/speech area' also tries to make sense of it. Its not always very good in doing so. That emotional body feeling is not that aligned with it and it takes time to either understand or ignore these types of inputs to the text area/llm/speech part of our brain.
I'm open for looking back in 5 years and saying 'man that was a wild ride but no AGI' but at the current quality of LLMs and all the other architectures and type of models and money etc. being thrown at AGI, for now i don't see a ceiling at all. I only see crazy unseen progress.
I don't understand what part of what I said you disagree with.
You state how you think and plan and have thoughts on how to do things etc. and i assumed you mention your way of thinking because you assume a LLM is not doing any of it.
I showed than counter examples.
I don't think you showed counter examples? Or can you link me to a paper which describes a language model thinking without predicting tokens?
My second sentence references all these papers:
"COCONUT, PCCoT, PLaT and co are directly linked to 'thinking in latent space'. yann lecun is working on this too, we have JEPA now."
And it does this thinking without producing tokens?
yes.
Btw. just because you have to do something with the LLM to trigger the flow of information through the model, doesn't mean it can't think. It only means that we have to build an architecture around the model or build it into the models base architecture to enable more thinking.
We do not know how the brain architecture is setup for this. We could have sub agents or we can be a Mixture of Experts type of 'model'.
There is also work going on in combining multimodal inputs and diffusion models which look complelty different from a output pov etc.
If you look how a LLM does math, Anthropic showed in a blog article, that they found similiar structures for estimating numbers than how a brain does.
Another experiment from a person was to clone layers and just adding them beneth the original layer. This improved certain tasks. My assumption here is, that it lengthen and strengthen kind of a thinking structure.
But because using LLMs are still so good and still return relevant improvements, i think a whole field of thinking in this regard is still quite unexplored.
If you ask a model to multiply 322423324 by 8675309232 without using tools, it's interesting to think about how it does it. Where are the intermediate results being maintained?
"In context" is the obvious answer... but if you view the chain of thought from a reasoning model, it may have little or nothing to do with arriving at the correct answer. It may even be complete nonsense. The model is working with tokens in context, but internally the transformer is maintaining some state with those tokens that seems to be independent of the superficial meanings of the tokens. That is profoundly weird, and to me, it makes it difficult to draw a line in the sand between what LLMs can do and what human brains can do.
> I consider an entire idea and then decide what tokens to enter into the computer in order to communicate the idea to you.
This overestimates introspective access.
The brain is very good at producing a coherent story after the fact. Touch the hot stove and your hand moves before the conscious thought of "too hot" arrives. The hot message hits your spinal cord and you move before it reaches your brain. Your conscious mind fills in the rest afterwards.
I don't think that means that conscious thought is fake. But it does make me skeptical of the claim that we first possess a complete idea and only then does it serialize into words. A lot of the "idea" may be assembled during the act of expression, with consciousness narrating the process as if it had the whole thing in advance.
With writing, as in this comment, there's also a lot a backtracking and rewording that LLMs don't have the ability to do, so there's that.
> I am never producing a probability distribution of words (at least not in a way that my conscious self can determine)
Inability to introspect your own word selections does not mean it’s meaningfully different from what an LLM does. There is plenty of evidence that humans do a lot of things that are not driven by conscious choice and we rationalize it after the fact.
> I consider an entire idea and then decide what tokens to enter into the computer in order to communicate the idea to you.
And how is that different? You are not so subtly implying that an LLM can’t consider an idea but you haven’t established this as fact. i.e. You are starting with the assumption that an LLM cannot possibly think and therefore cannot be intelligent, but this is just begging the question.
> sometimes I don't think and just experience feelings like a kiss or the sun on my skin or the euphoria of a piece of music which hits just right. These experiences shape who I am and how I think.
You cannot spin experience as intelligence. LLMs have the experience of reading the entire internet, something you cannot conceive of. Certainly your experiences shape who you are. This is a different axis from intelligence, though.
> This process seems completely detached from words. In contrast, for a language model, there is no thinking outside of producing words.
Both sides of this claim seem dubious. The second half in particular seems to be founded on nothing. Again, you are asserting with no support that there is no thinking going on.
> It seems self-evident to me that at least parts of the human experience fundamentally can not be reduced to next token prediction. Further, it seems plausible to me that some of these aspects may be necessary for what we consider general intelligence.
I don’t think anyone sane is claiming an LLM can have a human experience. But it is not clear that a human experience is necessary for intelligence.
> Inability to introspect your own word selections does not mean it’s meaningfully different from what an LLM does. There is plenty of evidence that humans do a lot of things that are not driven by conscious choice and we rationalize it after the fact.
This is correct and also completely irrelevant. I am describing what I experience, and describing how my experience seems very different to next token prediction. I therefore conclude that it's plausible that there is more involved than something which can be reduced to next token prediction.
> And how is that different? You are not so subtly implying that an LLM can’t consider an idea but you haven’t established this as fact. i.e. You are starting with the assumption that an LLM cannot possibly think and therefore cannot be intelligent, but this is just begging the question.
Language models can't think outside of producing tokens. There is nothing going on within an LLM when it's not producing tokens. The only thing it does is taking in tokens as input and producing a token probability distribution as output. It seems plausible that this is not enough for general intelligence.
> You cannot spin experience as intelligence.
Correct, but I can point out that the only generally intelligent beings we know of have these sorts of experiences. Given that we know next to nothing about how a human's general intelligence works, it seems plausible that experience might play a part.
> LLMs have the experience of reading the entire internet, something you cannot conceive of.
I don't know that LLMs have an experience. But correct, I cannot conceive of what it feels like to have read and remembered the entire Internet. I am also a general intelligence and an LLM is not, so there's that.
> Certainly your experiences shape who you are. This is a different axis from intelligence, though.
I don't know enough about what makes up general intelligence to make this claim. I don't think you do either.
> Both sides of this claim seem dubious. The second half in particular seems to be founded on nothing. Again, you are asserting with no support that there is no thinking going on.
I'm telling you how these technologies work. When a language model isn't performing inference, it is not doing anything. A language model is a function which takes a token stream as input and produces a token probability distribution as output. By definition, there is no thinking outside of producing words. The function isn't running.
> I don’t think anyone sane is claiming an LLM can have a human experience. But it is not clear that a human experience is necessary for intelligence.
I 100% agree. It is not clear whether a human experience is necessary for intelligence. It is plausible that something approximating a human-like experience is necessary for intelligence. It is also plausible that something approximating human-like experience is completely unnecessary and you can make an AGI without such experiences.
It's plausible that next token prediction is sufficient for AGI. It's also plausible that it isn't.
> I don't know enough about what makes up general intelligence to make this claim. I don't think you do either.
This is the fundamental issue. No one seems capable of defining general intelligence. Ten years ago most scientists would probably have agreed that The Turing Test was sufficient but the goalposts shifted when ChatGPT passed that.
If it’s not clear what AGI even means, it’s hard to say whether an LLM can achieve it, because it devolves into pointing out that an LLM is not a human.
> Ten years ago most scientists would probably have agreed that The Turing Test was sufficient but the goalposts shifted when ChatGPT passed that.
The popularity of, and lack of consensus on, the Chinese room thought experiment kind of implies that this is wrong? I don't think many scientists (or, more relevantly, philosophers of mind) would, even 10 years ago, have said, "if a computer is able to fool a human into thinking it's a human, then the computer must possess a general intelligence".
Even Turing's perspective was, from what I understand, that we must avoid treating something that might be sentient as a machine. He proposed that if a computer is able to act convincingly human, we ought to treat it as if it is a human, not because it must be a conscious being but because it might be.
Perhaps I am wrong or overstating the belief that the Turing test would be sufficient. My recollection is that it was well regarded as a meaningful if not conclusive test.
> the Chinese room thought experiment
This is an interesting thought experiment but I think the “computers don’t understand” interpretation relies on magical thinking.
The notion that “systemic” understanding is not real is purely begging the question. It also ignores that a human is also a system.
I'm telling you how these technologies work. When a language model isn't performing inference, it is not doing anything. A language model is a function which takes a token stream as input and produces a token probability distribution as output. By definition, there is no thinking outside of producing words. The function isn't running.
If what you are saying is true, then LLMs wouldn't be able to handle out-of-distribution math problems without resorting to tool use. Yet they can. When you ask a current-generation model to multiply some 8-digit numbers, and forbid it from using tools or writing a script, it will almost certainly give you the right answer. That includes local models that can't possibly cheat. LLMs are stochastic, but they are not parrots.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM myself, whatever process makes this possible is not simply next-token prediction in the pejorative sense you're applying to it. It can't be. The tokens in a transformer network are evidently not just words in a Markov chain but a substrate for reasoning. The model is generalizing processes it learned, somehow, in the course of merely being trained to predict the next token.
Mechanically, yes, next-token prediction is what it's doing, but that turns out to be a much more powerful mechanism than it appeared at first. My position is that our brains likely employ similar mechanism(s), albeit through very different means.
It is scarcely believable that this abstraction process is limited to keeping track of intermediate results in math problems. The implications should give the stochastic-parrot crowd some serious cognitive dissonance, but...
(Edit: it occurs to me that you are really arguing that the continuous versus discrete nature of human thinking is what's important here. If so, that sounds like a motte-and-bailey thing that doesn't move the needle on the argument that originally kicked off the subthread.)
(Edit 2, again due to rate-limiting: it does sound like you've fallen back to a continuous-versus-discrete argument, and that's not something I've personally thought much about or read much about. I stand by my point that the ability to do arithmetic without external tools is sufficient to dispense with the stochastic-parrot school of thought, and that's all I set out to argue here.)
> If what you are saying is true, then LLMs wouldn't be able to handle out-of-distribution math problems without resorting to tool use. Yet they can. When you ask a current-generation model to multiply some 8-digit numbers, and forbid it from using tools or writing a script, it will almost certainly give you the right answer. That includes local models that can't possibly cheat. LLMs are stochastic, but they are not parrots.
Okay, what do you think language models are doing when they're not producing token probability distributions? What processes do you think are going on when the function which predicts a token isn't running?
> At the risk of sounding like an LLM myself, whatever process makes this possible is not simply next-token prediction in the pejoreative sense you're applying to it.
I don't know what pejorative sense you're implying here. I am, to the best of my ability, describing how the language model works. I genuinely believe that a language model is, in essence, a function which takes in a sequence of tokens and produces a token probability distribution as an output. If this is incorrect, please, correct me.
> Okay, what do you think language models are doing when they're not producing token probability distributions? What processes do you think are going on when the function which predicts a token isn't running?
What are you doing when you are not outputting tokens? You have a thought, evaluate it, refine it, repeat.
You’re not wrong that the basic building block is just “next token prediction”, but clearly the emergent behaviors exceed our intuition about what this process can achieve. We’re seeing novel proofs come out of these. Will this lead to AGI? That’s still TBD.
> I genuinely believe that a language model is, in essence, a function which takes in a sequence of tokens and produces a token probability distribution as an output. If this is incorrect, please, correct me.
The pejorative is that you imply this is a shallow and unthinking process. As I said earlier, you are literally a token generator on HN. You read someone’s comment, do some kind of processing, and output some tokens of your own.
> What are you doing when you are not outputting tokens? You have a thought, evaluate it, refine it, repeat.
I mean I do think sometimes even when not typing?
> Will this lead to AGI? That’s still TBD.
This is literally what I have been saying this whole time.
Since we agree, I will consider this conversation concluded.
He’s a time waster.
I bet the guy has never contributed a novel thought that could be argued as moving something of magnitude forward. If that is the case he ought to stop writing as if he were capable of doing so - and therefore has no understanding of what true intelligence is.
Before I start typing, I think abstractly about the topic
Before you start typing, an fMRI machine can tell you which finger you'll lift first, before you know it yourself.
We are not special. Consciousness is literally a continuous hallucination that we make up to explain what we do and what we think, after the fact. A machine can be trained to behave identically, but it's not clear if that's the best way forward or not.
Edit due to rate limiting: to answer your question, the substrate your mind uses to drive this process can be considered an array of tokens that, themselves, can be considered 'words.'
It's hard to link sources -- what am I supposed to do, send you to Chomsky and other authorities who have predicted none of what's happening and who clearly understand even less?
> (Edit: to answer your question, the substrate your mind uses to drive this process can be considered an array of tokens that, themselves, can be considered 'words.')
This seems like a factual claim. Can you link a source?
(Also why respond in the form of an edit?)
What's your argument? An fMRI can tell which finger I will lift first before that information makes its way to my consciousness, ergo next word prediction is sufficient for general intelligence? Do you hear yourself?
The statement is that your perception of your own cognition isn’t necessarily reality. That isn’t a statement that token prediction is sufficient for general intelligence. It’s a statement that your subjective experience is misleading you.
Do LLMs even learn? The companies that build them build new models based partly on the conversations the older models have had with people, but do they incorporate knowledge into their neural nets as they go along?
Can an LLM decide, without prompting or api calls, to text someone or go read about something or do anything at all except for waiting for the next prompt?
Do LLMs have any conceptual understanding of anything they output? Do they even have a mechanism for conceptual understanding?
LLMs are incredibly useful and I'm having a lot of fun working with them, but they are a long way from some kind of general intelligence, at least as far as I understand it.
"Do LLMs even learn?"
They learned already a lot more than any of us will. Additinal to this, you have a prompt and you can teach it things in the prompt. Like if you give it examples how it should parse things, with examples in the prompt, it becomes better in doing it.
I would say yes they learn.
"Can an LLM decide" I would argue that you frame that wrong. If a LLM is the same thing as the pure language part of our brain, than the agent harness and the stuff around it, would be another part of our brain. I find it valid to use the LLM with triggers around it.
Nonetheless, we probably can also design an architecture which has a loop build in.
"Do LLMs have any conceptual understanding" Thats what a LLM has in their latent space. Basically to be able to predict the next token in such a compressed space, they 'invent' higher meaning in that space. You can ask a LLM about it actually.
Yeah for AGI we are not there yet and we do not know how it will look like.
Yes, to all of your questions. You need to use a recent LLM in an agentic harness. Tell it to take notes, and it will.
After a bit of further refinement, we'll start to call that process "learning." Eventually the question of who owns the notes, who gets to update them, and how, will become a huge, huge deal.
> And if you look at Boston Dynamics, Unitree and Generalist's progress on robotics
Their progress is almost nought. Humanoids are stupid creations that are not good at anything in the real world. I'll give it to the machine dogs, at least they can reach corners we cannot.
I found there demonstration at the CES this year very spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw
I can also recommend looking at Generalist: https://www.youtube.com/@Generalist_AI
> Their progress is almost nought.
How can you say the advancements since Honda's asimo robot amount to "almost naought"?
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
Yeah and if you look at the blocking factors at that time (data, compute) these type of limits currently are non existend.
There is a difference to be acknowledged: in the 70s/80s the whole world didn't suddenly start to shift to AI right?
So why do so many smart and/or rich people push this? Hype? Yeah sure but hype was here for crypto too.
I bet its an undelying understanding and the right time with the right components: Massive capital for playing this game long enough to see through the required initial investment, internet for fast data sharing, massive compute for the amount of data and compute you need, real live business relevant results (it already disrupts jobs) etc.
History started well before 4 years ago
Yeah but this AI wave has nothing to do how we came to AI winter in the 70s or 80s.
The necessary amount of Compute, interconnect (internet), money, researcher etc. wasn't available at that time.
and we did not invest the most amount of money and compute and brain power as we are doing right now. This is unseen.
Ah, the youth...
"The new economy" also didn't have anything to do with the previous one. Turns out that it crashed just as well.
I'm not an economist but at least as an european person, I currently do see a huge restructuring going on. A shift away from the USA to China. But I never voiced an opinion about that.
I do follow ML/AI/AGI though for a decade by now and read a lot about Neuronal networks, LLMs, etc. in a broad spectrum.
My prediction regarding Crypto/blockchain was true too.
We will see how it plays out. I'm open for both, but I think it would be naive to ignore whats going on and its way to soon to assume there is a AI winter coming soon.
We sitll want to see what Mythos can do and a distilled version of it.
> Progress is huge and fast
is it? we're currently scaled on data input and LLMs in general, the only thing making them advance at all right now is adding processing power
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.
People are researching how to make LLMs more stable and from a statistic point of view, we already now down to 10% (progress is made here).
LLMs don't have to be perfect, they just need to be as good as humans and cheaper or easier to manage.
> Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has. Its not comparable.
$100+ billion in R&D and it's not comparable... hmm
> Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has.
And yet they don't do really good jobs with pretty much anything, save for software development, to which people still seem pretty split as far as it being a helpful thing. That's before we even factor in the cost.
I find them very helpful. I use gemini regularly for multiply things.
I also believe that whatever code researchers and other non software engineers wrote before coding agents, were similiar shitty but took them a lot longer to write.
Like do you know how many researchers need to do some data analysis and hack around code because they never learned programming? So so many. If they know how to verify their data (which they needed to know before already), a LLM helps them already.
There is also plenty of other code were perfection doesn't matter. Non SaaS software exists.
For security experts, we just saw whats happening. The curl inventor mentioned it online that the newest AI reports for Security issues are real and the amount of security gaps found are real and a lot of work.
Image generation is very good and you can see it today already everywere. From cheap restaurants using it, to invitations, whatsapp messages, social media, advertising.
I have a work collegue, who is in it for 6 years and he studied, he is so underqualified if you give me his salary as tokens today, i wouldn't think for a second to replace him.
I don't particularly care about coding and didn't weigh in on it. There is no dispute that people debate if it is effective at that. You can take that debate up with them, not me.
Companies are starting this year with an agentic layer. We will see how this will affect broader areas
Yeah and every year before there was another poster telling me the next model iteration would be enough.
The problem here is the adoption curve; Right now it might feel to you that its not worth it or not happening as it might for most people.
Than suddenly one model update moves it from 80% to 85% and now 30% of the market wants to use it.
Then it might be already too late to act like using it to your advantage, being a valuable expert or deciding things long term based on the new state of affairs.
You're in denial and this is cope. The tools aren't even close. The notion that any model is 5% away from doing what has been promised *FOR YEARS* is just facially ridiculous.
>Then it might be already too late to act like using it to your advantage, being a valuable expert or deciding things long term based on the new state of affairs.
There's no universe where this is happening. The tools just are not that good. It's been years of folks like you telling me my job will disappear, but the only thing that this has demonstrated is that the vast majority programmers have *NO IDEA* what other people actually do for a living and how they do it.
The current predictions, and the predictions from a few years ago is more on 2030.
I personally think we are running in a very critical / interesting phase of 5-15 years were we will see how it might affect us.
Besides, it affects already real jobs and real people. Translator, avg/junior graphics designer etc.
>The current predictions, and the predictions from a few years ago is more on 2030.
They weren't back then.
>I personally think we are running in a very critical / interesting phase of 5-15 years were we will see how it might affect us.
That's a nice thought.
>Besides, it affects already real jobs and real people. Translator, avg/junior graphics designer etc.
The predictions were much greater than just translation and graphic design, so again, what's your point?
OpenAI post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921262
Tried to delete this submission in place of it but too late.
Usually we prefer the best third-party article to corporate press releases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - I've put a link to the latter in the top text above.
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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.
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Stop fucking linking paywalls ffs
Why is this being made public?
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.
Might have something to do with the MSFT quarterly report tomorrow