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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.
Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is a board member) hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology in a way that seemed designed to make its investors whole.
Last Friday, Amazon announced that it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another would-be OpenAI competitor that raised about $400 million from top-tier investors to build, in the words of CEO David Luan, “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.”
In an internal memo published by GeekWire’s Taylor Soper, SVP Rohit Prasad said that, like Microsoft with Inflection, Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology to “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”
Adept’s corporate blog post about the news suggests it was running out of money: “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.” Recent reports say the company has been looking to sell itself.
Reid Hoffman, meanwhile, should probably be congratulated for more than just an accurate prediction about the future of these deals — one of Adept’s earliest investors was none other than his venture capital firm, Greylock.
The original article contains 561 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Oh no! Big tech company bought out my barely functioning, small, energy inefficient AI business! Whatever will I do with these wads of cash!
Boil an ocean or two trying to cool their LLM farms? https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
Such a waste… all that heat could be used for something.
How’s a data center going to use a lot of hot air? Maybe they could use specialized heat pumps to condense it even more and spin some turbines, but the efficiency would be extremely low and probably not worth the investment. Best option is probably to just heat a few adjacent buildings in the winter.
No I mean if stuff like this was built in better locations the waste heat could be used by … another company or to warm homes…
I understand what you’re saying, I just don’t think it’s easy to deliver such low density heat in a useful way. Large datacenters are located away from residential land because they can be unpleasant to live near, and while businesses could be close by, what industries can utilize a huge volume of ~100 degree air?
Heat is heat, “low density large volume” or whatever, they’ve successfully used it in cold climate locations to heat residential homes already.
Let’s hope they choke.
