Is Sam going to MS actually useful for MS in the long run? MS has a CEO. What they want is mostly-exclusive access to the best LLM.

They had that last week. If Sam returns to OpenAI, they will continue to have it. If Sam brings most of the OpenAI team to MS, there will be an awkward recreation of IP and MS will likely get it again [0]. But other than being the one to bring the team along, I’m not sure what Sam, personally, would bring.

(Sam at OpenAI is a different story obviously.)

[0] OpenAI has some maybe-dubious IP in the form of a massive dataset. MS may prefer not to possess such a thing. And I don’t know whether MS is permitted under its contract to create derivative works of whatever it licensed from OpenAI.