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Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

Or little things like your $10b investment partner having a pissed off CEO and massive legal team ready to strike now. It’s such fucking amateur hour it’s incredible.

It’s unclear what Ilya thinks keeps the lights on when MSFT holds their money hostage now. Which is probably why there is desperation to get Altman back…

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Sorry how could MSFT hold the money hostage exactly? Isn't that kind of investment a big cash transfer directly to OAI's bank account? Genuinely curious

just restricting their access to GPUs would finish them, even if they can't claw back the cash somehow

Not just that, the way they’ve handled this also means that no other large investor will fund them.

> Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.

Per https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...

Microsoft’s “investment” is mostly cloud compute credits on a giga scale. OpenAI has pretty much free rein of every otherwise unallocated azure GPU host, and a lot of hardware spun up just for this purpose.

If Microsoft considers this action a breach of their agreement, they could shut off access tomorrow. Every OpenAI service would go offline.

There are very few services that would be able to backfill that need for GPU compute, and after this clusterfuck not a single one would want to invest their own operating dollars supporting OpenAI. Microsoft has OpenAI by the balls.

Microsoft has Microsoft by the balls. They just integrated GPT4 with their browser, search engine, and _desktop operating system_. It would be a mess to suddenly take all this functionality out. They have too much to lose by turning off compute for OpenAI.

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