Ask HN: Why do Sam and Greg need Microsoft?
Starting their own company seems much more attractive. Many would love to fund anything they create.
If they started there own company, they would then need to do a deal with someone like Microsoft anyway, so why not just work at the source and then you get priority on that.
Plus as a secondary, Microsoft's access to OpenAI's models, I believe they have certain rights, so it would mean they are not starting at zero again.
Starting a new company, no matter what the talent they bring, with no compute resources and starting from zero puts them way behind in what is a flat out sprint / race at the big tech companies at this point, not advisable.
1. Compute (H100s are almost impossible to get ahold of, especially in the quantities they'd need to train a competitive model)
2. Data (OpenAI has a very rich set of user data from ChatGPT that is necessary for creating a model like GPT-4; a new venture would lack this data -- the cold start problem -- but Microsoft may* have similarly usable data from non-enterprise Bing Chat)
* Someone please feel free to prove me wrong on this - I'm not aware of a MS policy saying they won't use Bing Chat prompts for training, but it could very well exist.
The answer is obvious and resources to make it happen are immense.
Microsoft can lose a fortune if OpenAI disappears or becomes irrelevant. Sam is the key point. With Sam, Microsoft is safer.
On top of that they have people at Microsoft in their professional network.
And lastly and perhaps most importantly, Microsoft is not a Silicon Valley company [1] and navigates the world by different winds.
[1]: Neither is Amazon.