I was confused when the whole thing was going down.
I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down.
I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO.
...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative.
I remain, confused.
I think Sam just took the easier route to rebuild OpenAI within MSFT.
Now the trouble comes to the SV VCs they now will be furious.
Like if they don’t like OpenAI they can go to 10 other places that pay more and treat researchers better than MSFT
MSRA invented ResNet. MSFT also contributed DeepSpeed to the open source, which is critical in OSS LLM scene.
It is now more of just a branding thing. It will become the new cool again.
And OpenAI? After this week, how would the people view them? Definitely not envious or prestige.