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Comment by ynniv | Hacker News Reader

Maybe those comments are no longer true?

  "OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT

  Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them. Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT.

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Almost guaranteed this is it. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft swallows OpenAI whole. And at that point there will be several competing products like Dynamics Copilot, etc. The lines are blurring, but I probably think the comment was fair and probably needs the right context: the research team within OpenAI will unlikely compete head to head with developers building apps on top of it, but why would it ever restrict itself to such a limitation? It doesn’t make any sense. That said, it means they will focus on their platform and have probably no line of sight to any apps they would build.

Is that even possible? I was under the impression that there are contracts preventing MSFT from aquiring more than 49% of OpenAI.

49% control with one entity is effectively 100% control. You only need about 2% of the remaining votes to get your way in any decision.

Any percent control can be 100% control if OpenAI relies on Microsoft for something critical like compute, and is contractually bound to not go to anyone else for compute. If MS can threaten to take their toys and go home, they can get anything they want.

That is an excellent point, but I have to think that MS wouldn't want OpenAI to walk to one of the other big cloud compute shops at the end of a contract. So, not quite 100% control. But that goes for the 49% limit too.

Who knows how long that contract is, though. Or if it's indefinite.

Contracts just means more money that MS needs to pay.

Why not remove the one question/response from the interview? that would have caused much less of a hubbub

It's probably something they don't want people to know exactly how they think.

If they specified what to remove, we would be able to imply fairly how they think.

You say that like nobody here has made any implications

It's one thing to make a guess; it's another for them to tell you.

every platform starts this way. no one wants to use a platform that will actively cannibalize its customer base

It sounds extremely limiting for a company to never release another product. That is setting your company up for failure.

Apple has done that too. Remember Flipboard vs Apple news, Spotify vs Apple music, Apple podcasts, etc.

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