zlacker

While this may be technically true, the reality is that when you take $10 billion from a company there are strings attached. Consultation on a decision of this magnitude is one of those strings. You can choose to push ahead anyway after this is done but dropping the news on them 1 minute before you pull the trigger is unacceptable and MSFT will go for the throat here. You can't be seen to be a company that can be treated like this at MSFT level when you have invested this much money in any org.

>>TapWat+(OP)
Once you take in 10 billions then it’s pretty much the opposite, legality is the only things that matter.

>>hcks+Z
Did they take a wire transfer for $10bn in cash, now sitting in their bank account? Or did they get a promise of various funding over N years, subject to milestones, conditions, in a variety of media including cash, Azure credits, loan lines etc.

I'd imagine the latter, and that it can be easily yanked away.

>>hcks+Z
Depends what you mean. Legally they might be in the clear but guarantee when you fuck around with billions of other people's money, it gets more complicated that that.

>>rich_s+N1
You mean the latter, but yeah. Financing like that is doled out based on a number of things; it would be wildly irresponsible to do otherwise for reasons exactly like this.

>>hcks+Z
No, that's not it; relationships play gigantic roles in large deals.

Besides, even if you had an outstanding contract for $10bn, a judge would not pull a "well technically, you did say <X> even though that's absurd, so they get all the money and you get nothing."

>>WendyT+A7
Fixed, thanks!

>>TapWat+(OP)
There are lots of other people and companies with $10 billion though. Why does it have to be Microsoft? Even after this circus, Open AI could still probably raise a ton of money from new entities if they wanted to. Maybe that is the point of this.