zlacker

Seems more damage control than power move. I'm sure their first choice was to reinstate Altman and get more control over OpenAI governance. What they've achieved here is temporarily neutralizing Altman/Brockman from starting a competitor, at the cost of potentially destroying OpenAI (who they remain dependent on for next couple of years) if too many people quit.

Seems a bit of a lose-lose for MSFT and OpenAI, even if best that MSFT could do to contain the situation. Competitors must be happy.

>>HarHar+(OP)
Disagree. MSFT extending an open invitation to all OpenAI employees to work under sama at a subsidiary of MSFT sounds to me like it'll work well for them. They'll get 80% of OpenAI for negative money - assuming they ultimately don't need to pay out the full $10B in cloud compute credits.

Competitors should be fearful. OpenAI was executing with weights around their ankles by virtue of trying to run as a weird "need lots of money but cant make a profit" company. Now they'll be fully bankrolled by one of the largest companies the world has ever seen and empowered by a whole bunch of hypermotivated-through-retribution leaders.

>>SeanAn+R1
AFAIK MSFT/Altman can't just fork GPT-N and continue uninterrupted. All MSFT has rights to is weights and source code - not the critical (and slow to recreate) human-created and curated training data, or any of the development software infrastructure that OpenAI has built.

The leaders may be motivated by retribution, but I'm sure none of leaders or researchers really want to be a division of MSFT rather than a cool start-up. Many developers may chose to stay in SF and create their own startups, or join others. Signing the letter isn't a commitment to go to MSFT - just a way to pressure for a return to status quo they were happy with.

Not everyone is going to stay with OpenAI or move to MSFT - some developers will move elsewhere and the knowledge of OpenAI's secret sauce will spread.