Microsoft wants access to all of Open AI's intellectual property; this partnership won't end well.
IIRC when Microsoft invested in OpenAI, it was supposed to use Azure only.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-is-renting-gpu-power...
Ratting MSFT out to the government doesn't seem like the move of someone with a strong hand.
Since then, MSFT has made other regulatory-aggressive investments, and the recent Meta / Scale AI is similarly aggressively designed.
A lot of people seem to think multi-cloud is an unrealistic dream. But using best in class primitives that are available in each cloud is not an unreasonable thing to do.
Regardless of whether they bring in the Kubernetes complexity.
(Internal codename: Goober Yetis.)
There is only pain on the path of recreating it, it will end up almost as complex as k8s and it will be hell to hire and train for. Best to just use something battle-tested that works with a large pool of people trained for it, even better: their own LLM has gobbled up all the content possible about k8s to help their engineers. K8s complexity came to be for reasons discovered during growing the stack which anyone doing a bespoke similar system might run into, and it's pretty modular since you can pick-and-choose the parts you actually need for your cluster.
Wasting manpower to recreate a bespoke Kubernetes doesn't sound great for a company burning billions per quarter, it's just more waste.
And, given their unusual needs and scale, there will probably be some kind of bespoke abstraction, whether it's an SDK, or a document, that says this is the subset of things you should be using, and how to use them, so that we can practically deploy our very unusual setup with different providers and customer facilities.
OpenAI has the resources to define that abstraction, and make it work well across multiple providers.
Now I understand what you meant, I wouldn't have classified this as a bespoke solution since it's more of an operational guide and tooling, most places I worked at running k8s had something similar (a tech radar/best practices of sorts). When I read "bespoke" I thought of "custom built" which I don't think would be the right approach, running k8s and customising the control plane is quite common.
There's a reason why company vision & mission exists. OpenAI's mission is not to build next k8s, but to build better AI models.
OpenAI and Microsoft are at a standoff over the terms of the startup’s $3 billion acquisition of the coding startup Windsurf, the people said. Microsoft currently has access to all of OpenAI’s IP, according to their agreement. It offers its own AI coding product, GitHub Copilot, that competes with OpenAI. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.
Why does OpenAI then buy Windsurf if such an agreement is in place?
It's not like he hasn't done such things before.
I’m a fan of the ChatGPT product but he feels like a David Mamet creation.
Didn't Sam Altman essentially ask the government to abolish intellectual property?
There is specific class of grossly unprincipled positions in these things which consists of superpositions: one principle for me, another one for others.
First they said it was in everyone's interest for them to be released from their nonprofit obligations. Then they argued that AI needed to be regulated—just enough to deter new competition, but not so much that it could affect OAI's plans in any way. Now they want to be released from the Microsoft deal.
Usually with anticompetitive practices you think about abuse of market power. But OpenAI's mindset seems to be that any impediment to them dominating AI is a societal problem that the government needs to fix for them. It's remarkable.
coloneltcb•7mo ago