There are things I like about where I’m at but if MS really wanted to they could send enough dump trucks full of cash to ruin the local traffic situation. Is it worth staying at a place if you can’t even get out of the driveway to get to your favorite little cafe?
Could probably do it now with a browser plugin and the right llm prompt. Perhaps call it the un-BSifier.
* Inflection shifts focus to AI studio business, developing custom AI models for commercial use.
* Plans to host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure, with plans for other cloud platforms.
* API launch soon, sign-ups for early access open.
* Co-founders Mustafa and Karén to start Microsoft AI, leaving Inflection.
* Sean White appointed new CEO; Reid Hoffman remains on board.
* No immediate changes to Pi service; privacy and data policies unchanged.
Pi (their chat bot) is pretty nice to talk to. It’s really good with the whole para-social aspect of chatting without being weird. Is that useful? Maybe for research, probably less so for a direct product.Microsoft can probably get something useful from that.
More importantly though, Microsoft is now hosting a whole suite of LLMs on Azure. This is the lesson they learned after OpenAI had that acute leadership crisis. This is another hedge against OpenAI. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft start distancing themselves from OpenAI in the future.
Mustafa Suleyman is the ultimate AI grifter.
He has ZERO technical skills. ZERO hardcore STEM background. He was just friends with Demis at the right time and road that hype train.
At Google he had a similar role VP of AI products or something and he contributed nothing (except all the garbage ethics, safety crap that didn't help google, probably kneecapped it actually)
This is Satya Nadella's worst AI move yet.
They say their Inflection-2.5 model is the world's best personal AI[0] which is a dumb claim to make considering it is done off of automated benchmarks which we know are flawed and even if you assume automated benchmarks are good enough to claim that title, it would be held by dozens of other open weight models on HF, not Inflection-2.5.
They said their Inflection-2 model was the second best in the world[1] while comparing it to Palm-2 which no one considers close to the best in the world. They again, based their claim on automated benchmarks which anyone knowledgeable in the space would know can be gamed and is not representative of actual conversational performance. (take a look at the Lmsys Arena Leaderboard for a better metric)
They list other models they consider good while failing to mention or compare to Mixtral 8x7b, the best open model that exists.
And they introduce buzzwords no one in the area uses like IQ and EQ as if they are innovative concepts.
Making big, bold claims without evidence is the exact kind of manipulative PR speak I'd expect from a company with little to no substance.
The quality of our product is so high, it is being compared to a perfect diamond the size of the entire solar system. But, we are humble, and while we think our tech is pretty darn good, we know that we can do better. That's why we are introducing v2 in just 2 business days from today, which will render all other forms of intelligence (human and artificial) irrelevant."
It really captures what I felt as I started to read this PR bullshit. I fed it through an LLM to summarize it, and there was no substantive content in that summary.
Lampooning aside, the sobering reality is that a tiny number of people are acquiring O($10^8) wealth (or more) via such shenanigans, and that is the reason we will see a lot more of this.
I'm not even talking for porn purposes. Sex is a basic and healthy part of most peoples' lives, any number of relationship issues revolve around it, and for plenty of people it's literally their profession, legal or not. Anything that pretends it can 'personally' help a broad spectrum of people while treating sex as verboten is just bullshit.
And here we are ensuring our models are cut in the same cloth we are. Reflections of the cages we wish to design for others.
War is peace. Oppression is safety.
They learned that most people can't tell the difference between actual technical concepts and PR speak and it worked to sell NFTs, so now that AI is all the hype, guess what.
I’m now extremely wary of blusteringly confident, glib talkers. Experienced a high correlation between these traits and sociopathy.
The deck is completely stacked against you based on hierarchy. Behavior that a fast food manager would proactively solve in 30 seconds gets ignored in white collar tech. No one above you will even mention it - they know you can't win and they just hope you'll quietly give up.
If someone above you in the informal hierarchy is messing with you, there's massive confirmation bias if you complain. They'll spin it to whoever you complain to make you the bad guy. HR never helps - their job is to investigate, and then give the results to someone 2-3 steps above you to do something with.
The higher ups control the outcome, and they designed the power structure in the first place, their confirmation bias is accept the spin.
If you want to survive, avoid conflict 100% of the time. Let people blame you, fail reviews undeservedly.
My Google career ended from just doing exactly what I was supposed to do in order to get a 3 year delayed project done, that 4 separate VPs had been asking for all those years. I spent 6 months warning my manager fuckery was afoot. Didn't matter. TPM witnessed and defended me, didn't matter. Guy who led it hired his unqualified childhood buddy to replace me. Didn't matter. All on me. Everyone wanted to do it, and gee whillakers, refulgentis went mad and dropped the ball completely for some reason.
Of course, 6 months later they delayed the project a 4th year because they could, documenting the only downside being a strained relationship with a less influential partner team. (my orgs managers didn't realize their...unvarnished...takes were in a doc shared with all of Google)
At the end of the day, HR will funnel you into taking mental health leave -- 6 months worth, exactly long enough that an EEOC complaint can no longer be filed. (took me 6 years to realize why "disgruntled Google employee" news articles always included a bit referencing leave/6 months off as if it was a bad thing. go/mh-leave if you're at Google. You don't actually need to talk to HR, and I don't recommend going to them ever. I didn't for this, but they wouldn't have helped.)
The whole system is broken.
Hahah. You know, the word 'creator' has truly become co-opted by consumerism and greedy bigcorps. What a lot of posts like this never mention is one of the primary uses of AI: to make more efficient the system of trying to get us to buy even more things we don't need. I mean, who are we kidding? In a well-balanced life, we shouldn't need or even interact with personal AIs. We should slow down and appreciate what we have and seek for simplicity.
If there's too much data to be handled in business, it means business is not going in the right direction, not that we need new tools to handle it.
If we are pressured to write more, then we are creating things not of true value but merely to amuse.
If we feel like becoming more efficient is a good thing, it simply is an extension of the original psychological manipulation of advertising demanding MORE for the industrial machine.
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking this garbage is something good.
Our default state as humans is pretty awful and materially deprived, so I think making technology to improve our conditions is good. Making technology that does powerful things in the real world is difficult partly because of the vast quantity of data in its structure. If we make powerful AI systems equipped to handle that scale and built to make our lives better, it would be good, but we’re failing to do that which is the issue.
It's not a dichotomy! When I rail against technology, I am not saying that everyone need go back to the stone age. But don't you think there might be a happy medium?
At least personally, I've found that giving up a fair amount of technology in many cases has actually improved life in ways that I didn't think possible. Not everyone needs to be ascetic, but we seem to be headed to a life very tightly integrated with technology, and I think it's arguable that THIS POINT is past the point of that happy medium.
Becoming more effective in and of itself simply means becoming more productive, which means creating goods and services with less, which means more "welfare" to people
If people are being convinced to buy shit they don't need, that's a separate issue. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
In my well balanced life, I love interacting with LLMs. I also appreciate the things I have all of the time, without needing to slowing down technological progress to do so
I won't assume bad faith on your part, but your argument also relies on a big assumption with regards to productivity gains, and who reaps them, and at the detriment of whom and what.
Okay that's fine, but you are not the rest of the world. While you enjoy the ultimate fruits of capitalism, there are people in developing countries suffering because of it through a lack of freedom and a destructiom of the landbases that they could once depend on. When climate change comes because of consumerism, it is you and other well-off people that will be able to move first.
OF COURSE, you will disagree with me, because you are probably at the apex. (Just the very fact that you have a well-balanced life means you are close to it, proportionally speaking to the entire human population.)
I don't claim that all capitalism is bad BTW. Rather, what I claim to be bad is global capitalism where other considerations have been eliminated or decimated.
There might be a world where what you say is possible of course, but I don't see it in this one when it comes to more advanced forms of automation.
In fact, sometimes the joys of life can be found in the most simple of mechanical tasks. Of course, not everyone thinks so.
Edit: I still can't even trust Siri to be fully accurate 100% of the time about turning the lights on and off, let alone anything more complicated than that.
Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple are has-beens.
A plausible theory with less coordination required: Microsoft is a large company with lots of money attempting to regain competitive advantages against their rivals through acquisition.
I don't know how I feel about Microsoft's involvement here.
My guess is that the founders were all in on Pi, their conversational language model, and investors lost confidence in their ability to build a sustainable venture-scale company on the ~4th best AI chatbot.
Yes, broken interview system currently rewards people who interview more, but when you combine it with other signals like resume, project presentations and other things, the chances of hiring bad candidates are low. Yes, you miss out on a lot of great candidates, but that is not a problem that big tech companies need to solve. Besides, not knowing the status of your employment 3-6 months down the line is not a great thing for candidates.
"This is why we decided to make Inflection a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). It means we have a legal obligation to run our AI studio in a way that balances the financial interests of stockholders, the best interests of people materially affected by our activities, and the promotion of our specific public benefit purpose. That purpose is to “develop products and technologies that harness the power of AI to improve human well-being and productivity, whilst respecting individual freedoms, working for the common good and ensuring our products widely benefit current and future generations”. > https://inflection.ai/an-inflection-point
TITLE 8 Corporations CHAPTER 1. General Corporation Law Subchapter XV. Public Benefit Corporations > https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
You can’t serve the LLM for every iOS device in the world without a big pile of inference machines and the only companies that fit that bill are Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
What can Pi do that is unique over the best of cloud LLMs and the hundreds of $0 free LLMs out there?
It appears that it is a vehicle for VCs to quickly run this company to the ground for a quick exit, knowing that this company is extremely overvalued.
Probably after this acqui-hire, the value of Inflection AI is now down to its real value of $200M at most.
I can think of 4-10 other large vc funded operations in this boat.
Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot
The real story here I think.
Some chatter about this on PI's Discord --> https://discord.com/channels/1108047623623020575/12218898363...
Feels dark. Totes nonsensical. Fishy as fuk.
