zlacker

>>medler+(OP)
This makes sense. The board thinks they're calling the shots, but the reality is the people with the money are the ones calling the shots, always. Boards are just appointed by shareholders aka investors aka capital holders to do their bidding.

The capped-profit / non-profit structure muddles that a little bit, but the reality is that entity can't survive without the funding that goes into the for-profit piece

And if current investors + would-be investors threaten to walk away, what can the board really do? They have no leverage.

Sounds like they really didn't "play the tape forward" and think this through...

>>airstr+r3
A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.

If anything they would be miffed about how it was handled, but to be frank, unless GPT4 is sam Altman furiously typing, I don’t know he’s that important. The instability caused by the suddenness, that’s different.

>>fnordp+f7
Nothing matters if you don’t have the money to enforce the system. Come on get real. Whatever the board says MS can turn off the money in a second and invalidate anything.

>>tsunam+A8
Microsoft depends on OpenAI much more than OpenAI depends on Microsoft. If you work with OpenAI as a company very often this is extraordinarily obvious.

>>fnordp+0b
Microsoft is also OpenAI's main cloud provider, so they certainly have some leverage.

>>alumin+Sf
Aws is JP Morgan’s main cloud provider, and Apples too. Do you think aws has leverage over JPMC and Apple due to that? Or does JPMC and Apple have leverage over aws?

Azure gets a hell of a lot more out of OpenAI than OpenAI gets out of azure. I’ll bet you GPT4 runs on nvidia hardware just as well regardless of who resells it.

>>fnordp+ns
I think the larger issue here is that there's just not enough of that nvidia hardware out there if Microsoft decided to really play hardball, even if it hurts themselves in the short term. I don't know that any of the other cloud providers have the capacity to immediately shoulder OpenAI's workloads. JPMC or Apple have other clouds they can viably move to - OpenAI might not have anyone else that can meet their needs on short notice.

I think the situation is tough because I can't imagine there aren't legal agreements in place around what OpenAI has to do to access the funding tranches and compute power, but who knows if they are in a position to force the issue, or if I'm write in my supposition to begin with. Even if I am, a protracted legal battle where they don't have access to compute resources, particularly if they can't get an injunction, might be extremely deleterious to OpenAI.

Perhaps Microsoft even knows that they will take a bath on things if they follow this, but don't want to gain a reputation of allowing this sort of thing to happen - they are big enough to take a total bath on the OpenAI side of things and it not be anything close to a fatal blow.

I was more skeptical of this being the case last night, but less so now.

>>cthalu+Ft
But why would Microsoft do anything to hurt their business in any way? They are almost certainly more furious for the way they found out than the actual action taken. Given how much Microsoft has bet their business on OpenAI (ask yourself who replaces bing chat? Why does anyone actually use azure in 2023?) being surprised by structural business decisions in their most important partner is shocking, and I think if I were the CEO of Microsoft I would be furious at being shocked more than pining in some weird Altman bromance.