I have to admit, of the four, Karpathy and Sutskever were the two I was most impressed with. I hope he goes on to do something great.
When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.
ChatGPT is the number 1 brand in AI and as such needs to learn what it's selling, not how its technology works. It always sucks when mission and vision don't align with the nerds ideas, but I think it's probably the best move for both parties.
But this race to add 'AI' into everything is producing a lot of nonsense. I'd rather go fullsteam ahead on the science and the new models, because that is what will actually get us something decent, rather than milking what we already have.