Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

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This is not just a "non-profit"... it's a non-profit that owns a $90B for-profit company developing revolutionary, once-in-a-century technology. There is a LOT of money at play here.

Others have commented on how Microsoft actually has access to the IP, so the odds that they could pack their toys and rebuild OpenAI 2.0 somewhere else with what they've learned, their near infinite capital and not have to deal with the non-profit shenanigans are meaningful.

I'm not saying Sam is needed to make OpenAI what it is, but he's definitely "the investors' guy" in the organization, based on what has surfaced over the last 24 hours. Those investors would rather have him there over someone else, hence the pressure to put him back. It doesn't matter whether you and I think he's the man for the job -- what matters is whether investors think they are.

TL;DR the board thinks they have leverage, but as it turns out, they don't

Microsoft doesn’t have ownership rights to OpenAI IP. They license it. They can’t pack up anything as they just have an IAM and billing model on top of GPT4 they use to resell OpenAI tech.

Not really. They run custom GPT model lol

Not one they own they don’t. OpenAI owns all of the GPT IP. Microsoft has a licensing arrangement with OpenAI. I’d note that azure GPT is not a custom model, only the bing chat is custom. And even the customizations aren’t owned by Microsoft.

> Microsoft doesn’t have ownership rights to OpenAI IP. They license it.

Honest question, do you have a source for that? Is it conceivable that Microsoft has some clause that grants them direct access to IP if OpenAI does not meet certain requirements. It is difficult to believe that Microsoft handed over $10B without any safeguards in place. Surely they did their due diligence on OpenAI's corporate structure.

OpenAI for-profit main purpose is to fulfill the desires of the non-profit. If there's a contract that goes against that, the contract would be void if necessary or that stipulation just crossed out.

I would expect that Microsoft would have negotiated terms like a perpetual license to the IP, given that they were the main investor and were in a strong negotiating position.

Microsoft has a lot of experience interacting with small companies, including in situations like this one where the small company implodes. The people there know how to protect Microsoft's interests in such scenarios, and they definitely are aware that such things can happen.

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