zlacker

>>himara+(OP)
The only power MS has is soft power as a backer. Will that win over the board's actual power? If MS pulls investment it will be a catastrophic blow.

>>cedws+d3
pulling investment would be a hard power. Imagine if Microsoft says the change in leadership and idiotic board means the contract is done, no more compute for openAI and then goes on to back Sam Altmans new company

openai will be writing papers and asking for donations within a weeks time at that point as the rest of openAI quits

>>bilal4+m5
.. and MS takes a massive hit financially as they're hardpdroven as an unreliable cloud service.

>>dontup+r6
No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult. You don’t tell your partner investing billions of dollars of value you’re about to fire a CEO over perspective differences in a very public way, coloring it as malfeasance or dishonesty, and you think someone is ever going to take you seriously again?

Anyone with even a basic level of business sense isn’t going to hold Microsoft responsible in a negative light for prudent reactions to volatile partner behaviors. These are not just startup cloud credits being given to OpenAI.

>>toomuc+K8
> No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult.

But will they leave Microsoft (or, at least, be less inclined to rely on Microsoft in the future where competitors exsit) because of Microsoft terminating a relationship on which their access to a technology at the core of an enterprise service that enterprise customers rely on is based?

>>dragon+z9
Microsoft will make the case that those customers should onboard to Microsoft offerings when at parity due to the unreliability of OpenAIs governance. And they won’t be wrong. Enterprise customers don’t want to hear about a critical vendor staging a board coup on Bloomberg, with a bunch of key employees quitting in solidarity, and then reading only a day or two later “on second thought, we were wrong, CEO is coming back.” This will make your vendor/third party risk team very twitchy. This will make executive leadership give the command down the chain to constantly explore alternatives.

OpenAI’s actions do not give people who approve tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in spend the warm fuzzy feeling. Microsoft knows exactly the consistency and stability these customers desire. They are the conduit by which value flows from OpenAI to Microsoft customers until Microsoft can deliver the value themselves.

(also why people get fed Teams vs Slack; because of who is making the purchasing decision, and why it’s being made)

>>toomuc+qa
Citation for example of my thesis:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/sam-altma... | https://archive.is/sv8SH ("Bloomberg: The Doomed Mission Behind Sam Altman's Shock Ouster From OpenAI")

> At the same time, companies that depend on OpenAI’s software were hastily looking at competing technologies, such as Meta Plaforms Inc.’s large language model, known as Llama. “As a startup, we are worried now. Do we continue with them or not?” said Amr Awadallah, the CEO of Vectara, which creates chatbots for corporate data.

> He said that the choice to continue with OpenAI or seek out a competitor would depend on reassurances from the company and Microsoft. “We need Microsoft to speak up and say everything is stable, we’ll continue to focus on our customers and partners,” Awadallah said. “We need to hear something like that to restore our confidence.”