> Look at Apple, their software game is mediocre now because of that culture, but they're at the top of their hardware game because instead of outsourcing and acquiring, they built in-house.
Apple acquired Touch ID (AuthenTec) in 2012 and Face ID (PrimeSense) in 2013. They acquired most of the depth mapping tech for Portrait Mode (LinX Imaging) in 2015. They purchased a ton of companies on the road to making their chips, including PA Semi, Intrinsity, and Dialog Semiconductor. It seems like they acquired their flash memory controller (Anobit Technologies) in 2011?
I totally agree that Apple improves the stuff in house--or even kind of throws it away and starts over to achieve better verticality--after integrating the teams, but so do all of these companies if they aren't making some grave mistake (as was seemingly the case with pretty much everything that Twitter bought, lol). Like, AFAIK, it isn't actually that rare that companies successfully pull that off? WhatsApp didn't even have end-to-end encryption before Facebook bought them!
> Others said this is an acquihire, and that might be the case, but are the new hires going to easily follow OpenAI's vision or try to interpret things according to what they're used to?
FWIW, I honestly don't know how this is being characterized on either side, but a lot of times this is just how people are hired: the way you build something "in house" by "attracting the talent" (from your next paragraph) is to give them the moral equivalent of a big signing bonus from the "capital" you mention they have by acquiring a company someone started that is effectively the resume of not just one person but an entire team of people who are able to become a turn-key department.
This strategy has the fascinating benefit that often the money that is then paid for the company and earned by the various players (such as the founders) gets taxed at a long term capital gains rate rather than as income (as we'd expect a normal signing bonus), and if the turnaround is short enough and a lot of the original money came from angel investors or friends and family rather than venture capital, you don't need all that much of a multiple to make it worth everyone's involvement.
I'll only say that touch id and faceid isn't what comes to mind when I think about apple doing great in terms of hardware (I loathe those features myself, so I'm biased). When people say apple has better build quality, the m-series chips and now the wireless chips, that's what I meant.
Apple acquired Touch ID (AuthenTec) in 2012 and Face ID (PrimeSense) in 2013. They acquired most of the depth mapping tech for Portrait Mode (LinX Imaging) in 2015. They purchased a ton of companies on the road to making their chips, including PA Semi, Intrinsity, and Dialog Semiconductor. It seems like they acquired their flash memory controller (Anobit Technologies) in 2011?
I totally agree that Apple improves the stuff in house--or even kind of throws it away and starts over to achieve better verticality--after integrating the teams, but so do all of these companies if they aren't making some grave mistake (as was seemingly the case with pretty much everything that Twitter bought, lol). Like, AFAIK, it isn't actually that rare that companies successfully pull that off? WhatsApp didn't even have end-to-end encryption before Facebook bought them!
> Others said this is an acquihire, and that might be the case, but are the new hires going to easily follow OpenAI's vision or try to interpret things according to what they're used to?
FWIW, I honestly don't know how this is being characterized on either side, but a lot of times this is just how people are hired: the way you build something "in house" by "attracting the talent" (from your next paragraph) is to give them the moral equivalent of a big signing bonus from the "capital" you mention they have by acquiring a company someone started that is effectively the resume of not just one person but an entire team of people who are able to become a turn-key department.
This strategy has the fascinating benefit that often the money that is then paid for the company and earned by the various players (such as the founders) gets taxed at a long term capital gains rate rather than as income (as we'd expect a normal signing bonus), and if the turnaround is short enough and a lot of the original money came from angel investors or friends and family rather than venture capital, you don't need all that much of a multiple to make it worth everyone's involvement.