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Well, despite what Musk did, X (Twitter?) has still been limping along for quite a while now. While more abrupt and surprising, this doesn't seem nearly as bad as that.

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This is far worse. OpenAI simply cannot survive without Microsoft and skeleton staff. It's not like a static codebase where you can keep the service up and running indefinitely barring bugs. Why would anyone building with the OpenAI APIs, their customers, have any faith in the company if they openly don't care about business? Working on AI is highly capital intensive, on the scale of many tens of billions of dollars. Where are they going to get that funding? How will they pay their staff? There is no way Microsoft is going to HODL after this embarrassment.

Musk fired most of the engineers. I'd be pretty surprised if we see the level of attrition at OpenAI getting within an order of magnitude of that. We are just making predictions, though. I could be way off the mark and many more people are willing to jump ship than I imagine.

As for Microsoft, if they let OpenAI go, then what? Does Google pick them up? Elon? They are still looking to invent AGI, so I'd be surprised if no one wants to take advantage of that opportunity. I'd expect Microsoft to be aware of this and weigh into their calculus.

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