All guesses wrong

Satan Altman joined Microsoft. All guesses, including mine, were wrong.

It’s still a good soap opera. MS does not belong to the Move Fast And Break Things camp. MS has always been disciplined by the needs of its customers who use its products for real work.

This morning I’ve been thinking about a new computer because my existing machine is starting to make suspicious noises. I’m thinking about surrendering to Win 11 after sticking to Win 7 for many years. Will my VERY OLD Win programs still work? I know Kedit will work. MS makes a big point of maintaining compatibility, so maybe it’s worth the risk.

Will MS restrain Satan’s worst impulses, or will he pull MS toward the Ellison model of Move Fast And Destroy The World? Stay tuned for next hour’s episode!

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From Microsoft’s standpoint, this is a fast cheap riskless acqui-hire. They picked up the whole team from OpenAI and collapsed a competitor. Normally a big merger would require negotiating and then paying the shareholders, and paying lawyers to draw up contracts and write SEC disclosures. SEC might disapprove or delay the merger. MS will still have to pay Satan and his team as employees, but they would be doing that anyway after the standard acquisition.

Per Tiffany, MS was already the biggest investor in OpenAI. So this isn’t even a full-fledged purchase. MS is just repossessing the collateral. Several writers, who seem to be sucked into the Effective Altruism fakery, are asking which way OpenAI will go now. How can it continue to pursue “safety” and “ethics”? Silly question. OpenAI can’t continue to do anything. One of Bloomberg’s reporters asked the right question. Who owns the code? And I’m sure MS knows the answer.