I'd retitle this as "OpenAI's blunder and Microsoft's excellent damage control"
I don't think Microsoft is necessarily in a better position than it was on Thursday. If we're tallying up points:
+ More control over the full AI stack
+ Effectively they will own what was once OpenAI, but is now really OpenAI 2.0
- OpenAI 2.0 is probably a worse business than OpenAI 1.0, which was, prior to the coup, a well-oiled machine
+ Control over OpenAI 2.0 operations, which can lead to better execution in the long term
- Higher wage costs
- Business disruption at OpenAI, delaying projects
- Potential OpenAI departures to competitors like Google, Meta, Anthropic, Amazon, Apple (?)
- Risk that OpenAI 1.0 (what's left of it) either sells to any of those competitors
- Risk that OpenAI 1.0 actually goes open source and releases GPT-4 weights
>Risk that OpenAI 1.0 (what's left of it) either sells to any of those competitors
Who else is positioned that they could possibly do anything with it commercially? Even Microsoft is supposedly renting GPUs from Oracle (deals with the devil!) to keep up with demand.
Amazon is the only other company with the potential computational power + business acumen to strike, but they already have their own ventures. Google could, but not sure they would willingly take the reputation hit to use a non-Google model.
Seems like a pretty good list, but I think a lot depends on how much you weight each item and how many of the negatives were already "priced in" to the status quo ante when Microsoft was strategically linked to OpenAI without any formal control.
I don't think Microsoft is necessarily in a better position than it was on Thursday. If we're tallying up points: