I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior.

When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes the primary goal and not the product. If you know beforehand that you are not going to stay long to see it through, you tend to take more shortcuts and risks that becomes the responsibility of maintainers later.

We have a couple of job hoppers in our org where the number of jobs they held is almost equal to their years of experience and their role is similar to those with twice the experience! One can easily guess what their best skill is.

It seems to be more on a spectrum of 'Haha, only joking' where the joke teller makes a statement that is ambiguously humorous to measure the values of the recipients, or if they are not sure of the values of the recipients.

I think the distinction might be on whether the joke teller is revealing (perhaps unintentionally) a personal opinion or whether they are making an observation on the world in general, which might even imply that they hold a counter-opinion.

Where do you see 'kidding on the square' falling?

(apologies for thread derailment)

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

On the other hand "innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team" alone must not be a bad thing.

Innovator types are rarely maintainer types and vice versa.

In the open-source world look at Fabrice Bellard for example. Do you think he would have been able to create so many innovative projects if he had to maintain them too?

Google kills off projects because the legal liability and security risks of those projects becomes too large to justify for something that has niche uses or gives them no revenue. User data is practically toxic waste.

LLMs are a commodity and it's the platform integration that matters. This is the strategy that Google, Apple embraced and now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same.

If OpenAI cares about the long-term welfare of its employees, they would beg Microsoft to acquire them outright, before the markets fully realize what OpenAI is not.

Whatever is there doesn't work half the time. They're hugely dependent on one partner that could jump ship at any moment (granted they are now working to get away from that).

We use Copilot at work but I find it very lukewarm. If we weren't a "Microsoft shop" I don't think would have chosen it.

So hopefully if (when?) this AI stuff turns out to be the colossal boondoggle it seems to be shaping up to be, Microsoft will be able to save face, do a public execution, and the market won't crucify them.

If I recall correctly, Microsoft’s agreement with OpenAI gives them full license to all of OpenAI’s IP, model weights and all. So they already have a SOTA model without doing anything.

I suppose it’s still worth it to them to build out the experience and infrastructure needed to push the envelope on their own, but the agreement with OpenAI doesn’t expire until OpenAI creates AGI, so they have plenty of time.

If you like TypeScript, and you want to build applications for the real world with real users, there is no better front end platform in my book.

Humans typically work 1/3rd duty cycle or less. A robot that can do what a human does is automatically 3x better because it doesn't eat, sleep, have a family, or have human rights.

2. How many such PhD people can it do the work of?

Do you have to pay all sorts of overhead and taxes?

I mean, I don't think it's real. Yet. But for the same "skill level", a single AI agent is going to be vastly more productive than any real person. ChatGPT types out essays in seconds it would take me half an hour to write, and does it all day long.

We were hiring more devs to deal with a want of $10k worth of hardware per year, not per month.

You can't claim it's even comparable to a mid level engineer because then you'd hardly need any engineers at all.

"Create high-quality presentations for communicating OpenAI’s financial performance"

https://openai.com/careers/strategic-finance-generalist/

What is interesting is there is no mention of agents on any job I clicked on. You would think "orchestrating a team of agents to leverage blah blah blah" would be something internally if talking about these absurd price points.

It points to an article on "The Information" as the source, but that link is paywalled.

Ironically if AI companies are actually able to deliver in terms of SWE agents, Nvidia's moat could start to disappear. I believe Nvidia's moat is basically in the form of software which can be automatically verified.

I sold my Nvidia stock when I realized this. The bull case for Nvidia is ultimately a bear case.

Look at Coca Cola, Google, both have plausible competitors, zero switching cost but they maintain their moat without effort.

Being first is still a massive advantage. At this point they should only strive to avoid big mistake and they're set.

If anyone has moat related to Gen AI, I would say it is the data(Google, Meta).

In consumer markets the moat is habits. The switching cost for Google Search is zero. The switching cost for Coke is zero. The switching cost for Crest toothpaste is zero. Yet nobody switches.

Fortunately, they're not anywhere near creating this. I don't think they're even on the right track.

Zima blue was good too

See Thomas Nagels classic piece for more elaboration

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

It’s moats that capture most value not short term profits.

Definitely, but I think it's because they saw OpenAI's moat get narrower and shallower, so to speak. As the article mentions it's still looking like a longer timeline [quote] "but Microsoft still holds exclusive rights to OpenAI’s models for its own products until 2030. That’s a long timeline to unravel."

Which is easier when maintaining an LLM business process, swapping in the latest model or just leaving some old model alone and deferring upgrades?

Swapping is easy for ad hoc queries or version 1 but I think there's a big mess waiting to be handled.

Office is disgraceful trash now, a sad fall (especially of Word) from where it once was.

My thinking is that Lindy Effect runs strong in a lot of Big Tech, and with deep pockets, they can afford to not be innovators but build moats on existing frameworks.

The AI race is super close and interesting at the moment in my opinion.

Another term could be "Hypnotized Models". They're trained to do something bad, and they don't even know it, until a trigger phrase is seen. I mean if we're gonna use the word Hallucinate we might as well use Hypnotized too. :P

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good strategy for MS, but not for datacenter cost reasons.