My favorite part about the Microsoft translation is that MS reportedly had to go out and buy a bunch of MacOS machines for the Open AI folks because they didn’t want to use the operating system that their future employer made.
I wonder if Apple’s two week return policy works for enterprise purchases of hundreds of machines.
I can assure you that Microsoft already purchases a ton of Macs. They develop software for Mac and iOS, after all.
Do they just hand them out though to developers?
Yup they do, I worked there. Had 2 macs and an iPhone for development. Many employees use Mac laptops over surfaces as well
Were you working specifically on Mac or iPhone related software? If I’m an Azure developer, can I use a Mac?
Most mid-large companies do if it’s required.
Maybe not MacBooks, but some OSX device is needed if you want to develop for iOS. And I don’t see why they wouldn’t do that, a Mac is not that expensive from a business point of view.
No they don’t. Microsoft makes software. Outsourcing making software makes no sense.
Hardly any startups in Silicon Valley use Windows.
That’s wild. I can’t dev for shit on a MacBook. I usually have to install Parallels or something if that’s the case.
Or use Linux (when possible).
It makes sense. You can develop for Windows and Linux on Mac, but you can’t develop for Mac or iOS anywhere else but on Mac; at least not easily. In my job, I develop full stack web but also device code for Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS. It’s way more convenient for me to use a Mac with VMware running Windows and ChromeOS than trying to cobble together a device lab.
Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”
I despise Microsoft’s advertising and some of its anti-competitive practices, but man, fuck these out of touch, clout chasing, dorks. Microsoft has been making products for 30 years that are stable enough for most of the world’s companies to build successful businesses on top of.
There are flat out no SV companies that can claim the same longevity, and only one or two, like Google / Salesforce, that actually enable the rest of the economy in any meaningful way.
SV is a beautiful place and the money that flows into it makes it seem like paradise, but it also deludes everyone there into thinking that they’re vastly smarter and more important than they actually are.
I can’t blame them. Working for a huge company can suck in a lot of ways.
But since OpenAI still makes people move to SF and shlep into an office every day, I don’t want to work there either.
They have likely all, at least most of them, worked in a big corporate environment before and seen all the things it brings. For better or worse.
We will try really, really hard to believe that. Or is letting the wolf in better?
people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”
With the rumors that the ethics board was worried about OpenAI and Altman moving too fast to truly consider ethics… This checks out. Startups are truly a different beast to larger “legacy companies”, who move slower because they have checks and balances and a reputation to maintain.
I do think Microsoft would have given them a lot of leeway though, given the gold mine they were about to be sitting on. Staying at the front of the copilot race is critically important right now, and as Microsoft continues to move all its Office 365 services to the web and cross-connect them, it’s even more important for them to have a copilot for Enterprise clients that spans and can pull data from all those services.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI late last month, the startup’s employees threatened to leave and accept a blanket offer from Microsoft to hire them all.
After the sudden ouster of their CEO, hundreds of OpenAI employees signed an open letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement and the resignation of the board.
At the time, their main source of leverage was a plan to all quit and join Altman and President Greg Brockman at a new AI group within Microsoft.
The letter itself was drafted by a group of longtime staffers who have the most clout and money at stake with years of industry standing and equity built up, as well as higher pay.
While OpenAI staffers would have followed through with their threat and joined Microsoft, they probably would have left at the first opportunity for other AI startups such as Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Cohere, the employee added.
Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”
The original article contains 964 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It’s the money . Always the money . They talk about where they like to work, but it’s about their stock.
It’s often about the money, yes. But highly sought after engineers who can choose where they want to work probably have other criteria too, like not getting stuck in MS corporate ladder long term. That being said, money compensates for a lot of things, that’s just the world we live in.
“highly sought after engineers” Tend not to get stuck
