zlacker

In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore.

Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.

>>paulpa+(OP)
Msft/Amazon/Google would light 13 billion on fire to acquire OpenAI in a heartbeat.

(but also a good chunk of the 13bn was pre-committed Azure compute credits, which kind of flow back to the company anyway).

>>paulpa+(OP)
They acquired Activision for 69B recently.

While Activision makes much more money I imagine, acquiring a whole division of productive, _loyal_ staffers that work well together on something as important as AI is cheap for 13B.

Some background: https://sl.bing.net/dEMu3xBWZDE

>>paulpa+(OP)
There's acquihires and then I guess there's acquifishing where you just gut the company you're after like a fish and hire away everyone without bothering to buy the company. There's probably a better portmanteau. I seriously doubt Microsoft is going to make people whole by granting equivalent RSUs, so you have to wonder what else is going on that so many seem ready to just up and leave some very large potential paydays.

>>paulpa+(OP)
If the change in $MSFT pre-open market cap (which has given up its gains at the time of writing, but still) of hundreds of billions of dollars is anything to go by, shareholders probably see this as spending a dime to get a dollar.

>>techno+z3
How about: acquimire

>>paulpa+(OP)
>, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year.

For investment deals of that magnitude, Microsoft probably did not literally wire all $13 billion to OpenAI's bank account the day the deal was announced.

More likely that the $10b to $13 headline-grabbing number is a total estimated figure that represents a sum of future incremental investments (and Azure usage credits, etc) based on agreed performance milestones from OpenAI.

So, if OpenAI doesn't achieve certain milestones (which can be more difficult if a bunch of their employees defect and follow Sam & Greg out the door) ... then Microsoft doesn't really "lose $10b".

>>paulpa+(OP)
> In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board

surely the really self-destructive gamble was hiring him? he's a venture capitalist with weird beliefs about AI and privacy, why would it be a good idea to put him in charge of a notional non-profit that was trying to safely advance the start of the art in artificial intelligence?

>>Kye+V6
one thing for sure this is one hell of a quagmire /s

>>techno+z3
I feel like that's giving them too much credit; this is more of a flukuisition. Being in the right place at the right time when your acquisition target implodes.

>>janeje+b5
Awesome point. Microsoft's market cap today went up to 2.8 trillion, up 44.68 billion today.