1. OpenAI just got bumped up to my top address to apply to (if I would have the skills of a scientist, I am only an engineer level), I want AGI to happen and can totally understand that the actual scientists don't really care for money or becoming a big company at all, this is more a burden than anything else for research speed. It doesn't matter that the "company OpenAI" implodes here as long as they can pay their scientists and have access to compute, which they have do.
2. Microsoft can quite seamlessly pick up the ball and commercialize GPTs like no tomorrow and without restraint. And while there are lots of bad things to say about microsoft, reliable operations and support is something I trust them more than most others, so if the OAI API simply is moved as-is to some MSFT infrastructure thats a _good_ thing in my book.
3. Sam and his buddies are taken care of because they are in for the money ultimately, whereas the true researchers can stay at OpenAI. Working for Sam now is straightforward commercialization without the "open" shenaningans, and working for OpenAI can now become the idealistic thing again that also attracts people.
4. Satya Nadella is becoming celebrated and MSFT shareholder value will eventually rise even further. They actually don't have any interest in "smashing OAI" but the new setup actually streamlines everything once the initial operational hurdles (including staffing) are solved.
5. We outsiders end up with a OpenAI research focussed purely on AGI (<3), some product team selling all steps along the way to us but with more professionality in operations (<3).
6. I am really waiting for when Tim Cook announces anything about this topic in general. Never ever underestimate Apple, especially when there is radio silence, and when the first movers in a field have fired their shots already.
There's been a lot of uncertainty created.
It's interesting that others see so much "win" certainty.
So MSFT still needs to compete with OpenAI - which will likely have an extremely adversarial relationship with MSFT if MSFT poaches nearly everyone.
What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?
Doesn't seem like a win for MSFT at all.
Then they would be on roughly equal footing with Microsoft, since they'd have an abundance of engineers and a cloud partner. More or less what they just threw away, on a smaller scale and with less certain investors.
This is quite literally the best attainable outcome, at least from Microsoft's point of view. The uncertainty came from the board's boneheaded (and unrepresentative) choice to kick Sam out. Now the majority of engineers on both sides are calling foul on OpenAI and asking for their entire board to resign. Relative to the administrative hellfire that OpenAI now has to weather, Microsoft just pulled off the fastest merger of their career.