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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but Microsoft could also walk away today and leave OpenAI high and dry. They hold ALL the power here.

Microsoft terminating the agreement by which they supply compute to OpenAI and OpenAI licenses technology to them would be an existential risk to OpenAI (though other competing cloud providers might step in and fill the gap Microsoft created under similar terms), but -- whether or not OpenAI ended up somewhere else immediately (the tech eventually would, even if OpenAI failed completely and was dissolved) Microsoft would go from the best positioned enterprise AI cloud provider to very far behind overnight.

And while that might hurt OpenAI as an institution more than it hurts Microsoft as an institution, the effect on Microsoft's top decision-makers personally vs. OpenAI's top decisionmakers seems likely to be the other way around.

Not if they invested in Sam’s new startup, under agreeable profit-focused terms this time, and all the OpenAI talent (minus Ilya) followed.

At best, that might enable them to eventually come back, once new products are built from scratch, but that takes non-zero time.

Non-zero time, but not a lot either. Main hangup would be acquiring data for training, as their engineers would remember the parameters for GPT-4 and Microsoft would provide the GPUs. But Microsoft with access to Bing and all its other services ought to be able to help here too.

Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.

Amateurs ?

Non-corporate groups.

If Open AI were to be in true crisis, I'm sure Amazon will step in to invest, for exclusive access to GPT4 (in spite of their Anthropic investment). That would put Azure in a bad place. So not exactly "All" the power.

Not to mention, after that, MSFT might be left bagholding onto a bunch of unused compute.

Sam and Greg have already said they’re starting an OpenAI competitor, and at least 3 senior engineers have jumped ship already. More are expected tonight. Microsoft would just back them as well, then take their time playing kingmaker in choosing the winner.

That's true, but Sutskever and Co still have the head start. On the models, the training data, the GPT4 licenses, etc. Their Achilles heel is the compute which Microsoft will pull out. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia may sell their Open AI stakes at a discount, but I'm sure either Google or Amazon will snap it up.

All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Microsoft and Softbank, while OpenAI is the orphan child with the huge estate. Microsoft isn't exactly the kingmaker here.

It doesn’t sound like Sutskever is running anything. OpenAI reportedly put out a memo saying they’re trying to get Sam and Greg back: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-optimistic-it...

Sutskever built the models behind GPT4, if I reckon correctly (all credit to the team, but he's the focal point behind expanding on Google transformers). I don't see Sam and Greg working with him under the same roof after this fiasco, since he voted them out (he could have been the tiemaker vote).

OpenAI leadership (board, CEO) didn't say that ... your link said their "Chief Strategy Officer" Jason Kwon said it.

Most likely outcome here does seem to be that Altman/Brockman come back, Sutskever leaves and joins Google, and OpenAI becomes for all intensive purposes a commercial endeavor, with Microsoft wielding a lot more clout over them (starting with one or more board seats).

Big winner in this scenario would be Google.

Sam just posted a selfie wearing an OpenAI guest badge at the SF offices. He's back there for some sort of negotiations.

Could they? I don't know the details of MSFTs contracts with OpenAI... but even if they can legally just walk away, it would certainly have some negative impact on MSFTs reputation when dealing with future negotiations for them to do so.

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