They needed the Microsoft investment before GPT scaling was proven out. I imagine many entities would be willing to put money into a truly open research lab given OpenAI’s track record.
OpenAI’s biggest customer and investor starts buying AMD chips and simultaneously building their own chips
there are a lot of ignorable cracks in the armor that support any number of theories
let alone Altman himself, who knows
OpenAI (the board that made this decision) is still ultimately a non-profit, so it's possible that interests might not be aligned.
And then Greg being all "committed to safety" in his resignation statement makes me think this was a conflict between being an open OpenAI with global research or being closed and proprietary in the name of safety.
Why? It’s hard to imagine anyone putting any significant amounts of money (in comparison to the MS deal anyway) without any exclusivity rights at least
Tough luck, considering all the obligations they have to MS now.
Which is going to be hard considering they promised MS a 49% stake in OpenAI.
Which is something AMD/Nvidia will have to take in to account before agreeing to any partnership.