This is what's so brilliant about the Microsoft "partnership". OpenAI gets the Microsoft enterprise legitimacy, meanwhile Microsoft can build interfaces on top of ChatGPT that they can swap out later for whatever they want when it suits them
Microsoft owns the customer relationship, owns the product experience, and in many ways owns the productionisation of a model into a useful feature. They also happen to own the datacenter side as well.
Because Microsoft is the whole wrapper around OpenAI, they can also negotiate. If they think they can get a better price from Anthropic, Google (in theory), or their own internally created models, then they can pressure OpenAI to reduce prices.
OpenAI doesn't get Microsoft's enterprise legitimacy, Microsoft keep that. OpenAI just gets preferential treatment as a supplier.
On the way up the hype curve it's the folks selling shovels that make all the money, but in a market of mature productionisation at scale, it's those closest to customers who make the money.
Note: they announced recently that that they will have invented AGI in precisely 1000 days.
OpenAI are clearly going for the BHAG. You may or may not believe in AGI-soon but they do, and are all in on this bet. So they simply don’t care about the failure case (ie no AGI in the timeframe that they can maintain runway).
Still seems like owning the customer relationship like Microsoft is far more valuable.