What is msft's role here? To act as the ops team for OpenAI? The core AI model is obviously developed by OpenAI and msft is simply deploying it on Azure. Am I missing something?
MS and OpenAI are a partnership and MS is footing a very large bill for them. In exchange for equity and first dibs on their tech.
OpenAI uses mostly (only?) Azure infrastructure at favorable conditions. They gave them like a billion dollars in compute a while back (can't easily find the source now that they've invested more).
MSFT owns a pretty large chunk of equity (with caveats) of the entity which owns OpenAI.