Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

yellow_lead·

> Microsoft's investment does not amount to control of the company.

We can't know this without seeing the agreement.

> ""While details of our agreement remain confidential..."

View on HN

I wonder if this was triggered by Microsoft having a big part in forcing Sam back into OpenAI. Certainly, housing the infrastructure and compute of OpenAI gives them some effective power.

But that's not how it played out though. MS offered them a new home, so from the outside at least, they had leverage that any other player could have had.

MS very quickly had an agreement with the ex-CEO to form OpenAI 2.0 within Microsoft. Maybe another player could have done that, but it seems more likely that Sam Altman and Microsoft have a Special Relationship.

Not based on what Satya Nadella said in an interview:

> "We have all the rights and all the capability. I mean, look, right, if tomorrow, if OpenAI disappeared, I don't want any customer of ours to be worried about it, quite honestly, because we have all of the rights to continue the innovation, not just to serve the products."[1]

If you're an OpenAI employee looking to continue working on the product, would you rather go to SalesForce and start from scratch or Microsoft and continue (roughly) where you left off?

[1] https://stackdiary.com/satya-nadella-we-have-all-the-rights-...

What we do know is that Microsoft has exclusive permission to all OpenAI products, until AGI is reached.

Do we need to know the rest?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com