Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of profit in about a month.
Microsoft also “has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights.”
If you’re a scientist, OpenAI is a fine place to be, though less differentiated than before. If you’re an engineer more interested in money and don’t want the risk of a start-up, Microsoft seems the obvious path forward.
Ilya just said he will do everything he can to reunite the company. If that’s the case the easiest way to do it is to resign and join MS
Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.
So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
Non-profit boards have no incentive to be rational.
Microsoft stock is up in the pre-market, because they basically got half of the OpenAI team for free.
The majority of top researchers at OpenAI are expressing solidarity for Sam and basically signalling they want to move too, just check out twitter. That also includes like the majority of the execs tehre.