zlacker

>>himara+(OP)
This is why, when you claim to be running a non-profit to "benefit humankind," you shouldn't put all your resources into a for-profit subsidiary. Eventually, the for-profit arm, and its investors, will find its nonprofit parent a hindrance, and an insular board of directors won't stand a chance against corporate titans.

>>jasonh+4t
The most logical outcome would be for Microsoft to buy the for-profit OpenAI entity off its non-profit parent for $50B or some other exorbitant sum. They have the money, this would give the non-profit researchers enough play money that they can keep chasing AGI indefinitely, all the employees who joined the for-profit entity chasing a big exit could see their payday, and the new corporate parent could do what they want with the tech, including deeply integrate it within their systems without fear of competing usages.

Extra points if Google were to sweep in and buy OpenAI. I think Sundar is probably too sleepy to manage it, but this would be a coup of epic proportions. They could replace their own lackluster GenAI efforts, lock out Microsoft and Bing from ChatGPT (or if contractually unable to, enshittify the product until nobody cares), and ensure their continued AI dominance. The time to do it is now, when the OpenAI board is down to 4 people, the current leader of whom has prior Google ties, and their interest is to play with AI as an academic curiosity, which a fat warchest would accomplish. Plus if the current board wants to slow down AI progress, one sure way to accomplish that would be to sell it to Google.

>>nostra+Zy
The new investors entered at a ~90B USD valuation for info.

Microsoft I don't think they need it:

Assuming they have the whole 90B USD to spend: it doesn't really make sense;

they have full access to the source-code of OpenAI and datasets (because the whole training and runtime runs on their servers already).

They could poach employees and make them better offers, and get away with a much more efficient cost-basis, + increase employee retention (whereas OpenAI employees may just become so rich after a buy-out that they could be tempted to leave).

They can replicate the tech internally without any doubt and without OpenAI.

Google is in deep trouble for now, perhaps they will recover with Gemini. In theory they could buy OpenAI but it seems out-of-character for them. They have strong internal political conflicts within Google, and technically it would be a nightmare to merge the infrastructure+code within their /google3 codebase and other Google-only dependencies soup.

>>rvnx+hz
> They can replicate the tech internally without any doubt and without OpenAI.

Would they be also able to keep up with development?

>>timeon+Sz
Would a 2.75 trillion dollar software company that has been around since the inception of the modern computer be able to keep up?

Probably. If the people running it and the shareholders were committed to keeping up and spending money to do so.