5 ms·

You're missing the point. Microsoft doesn't care about the ROI of their investment in OpenAI or who is the CEO. They care about having unfettered access to se

You're missing the point. Microsoft doesn't care about the ROI of their investment in OpenAI or who is the CEO. They care about having unfettered access to sell access to GPT4 and subsequent APIs on Azure and they will fight that to the death in court and will win. If the board wants to turn the company into some fantasy AGI foundation and cease work on their LLMs they will be ousted faster than Sam was.

mattmaroon 3y ago
Ousted by who? To whom do they answer? I’ve got some experience in not for profit boards and for profit boards. For profit boards serve shareholders. Not for profit boards are often the ultimate authority. There are no shareholders. They may have members who fill that role, or they may not. They can also be essentially self-sustaining, with only board members electing new board members. Unless given some authority by contract Microsoft likely has no ability to do anything with their board.
- godzillabrennus 3y ago
  Microsoft can hire the most expensive lawyers in the world to steamroll this board by forcing them to spend all of their funding until they are forced to sell assets to cover costs. It’ll be a dark day for these people who thought ousting Sam was a good day when half the company departs for his next go at this anyway.
  - paganel 3y ago
    And that will help MS how, exactly? Also, "hiring the best lawyers in the world" is similar to the "nine women can't give birth to one baby in one month", that is, from a certain point on both sides can "hire the best lawyers in the world", or pretty much close to it, an order of magnitude (or two or three, like MS has over whoever will stand behind the OpenAI's board members in helping them with money) bigger scale doesn't necessarily guarantee the expected outcome.
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      People have a lot of magical thinking about how the legal system works when they haven’t experienced it first hand. If one company could sue another smaller company out of business at will, there would only be one company. It does happen that companies go bankrupt fighting invalid lawsuits, no doubt, but it’s rare and it’s almost never a company that just built the most talked about product of the decade and raised an 11 digit war chest.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    > forcing them to spend all of their funding until they are forced to sell assets to cover costs It will be hilarious if they sold all their IP to Google or Amazon. But it's more likely in such a case, they will just open source / toss into public domain all their IP, shut their doors, and start a new non-profit which MS has no good reason to sue.
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      It’s more likely that Microsoft won’t sue at all because OpenAI hasn’t done anything to cause them to (when have you ever heard of a company suing another company over a change of leadership?) and it’s just some silly HN speculation that makes no sense. Or that if Microsoft did sue (perhaps because something that happens in the near future violates their contracts) OpenAi just spends like 1% of their cash on legal fees. $100 million in legal fees is not an existential risk to companies who recently raised $10b.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    They have tens of billions of dollars they raised. Microsoft can’t make them spend even 10% of that on legal fees. Also why would Microsoft do that? That just isn’t how the legal system works. You can sue a small business into bankruptcy because a few million in legal fees is enough.
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
> If the board wants to turn the company into some fantasy AGI foundation and cease work on their LLMs Depends on the contract. If the contract says nothing about OpenAI having to work on LLMs ... then there is nothing MS can do if they stopped all LLM work and worked on something else.
theonemind 3y ago
> If the board wants to turn the company into some fantasy AGI foundation https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter I think that's basically literally their charter?

mattmaroon 3y ago

Ousted by who? To whom do they answer? I’ve got some experience in not for profit boards and for profit boards. For profit boards serve shareholders. Not for profit boards are often the ultimate authority. There are no shareholders. They may have members who fill that role, or they may not. They can also be essentially self-sustaining, with only board members electing new board members. Unless given some authority by contract Microsoft likely has no ability to do anything with their board.

godzillabrennus 3y ago
Microsoft can hire the most expensive lawyers in the world to steamroll this board by forcing them to spend all of their funding until they are forced to sell assets to cover costs. It’ll be a dark day for these people who thought ousting Sam was a good day when half the company departs for his next go at this anyway.
- paganel 3y ago
  And that will help MS how, exactly? Also, "hiring the best lawyers in the world" is similar to the "nine women can't give birth to one baby in one month", that is, from a certain point on both sides can "hire the best lawyers in the world", or pretty much close to it, an order of magnitude (or two or three, like MS has over whoever will stand behind the OpenAI's board members in helping them with money) bigger scale doesn't necessarily guarantee the expected outcome.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    People have a lot of magical thinking about how the legal system works when they haven’t experienced it first hand. If one company could sue another smaller company out of business at will, there would only be one company. It does happen that companies go bankrupt fighting invalid lawsuits, no doubt, but it’s rare and it’s almost never a company that just built the most talked about product of the decade and raised an 11 digit war chest.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  > forcing them to spend all of their funding until they are forced to sell assets to cover costs It will be hilarious if they sold all their IP to Google or Amazon. But it's more likely in such a case, they will just open source / toss into public domain all their IP, shut their doors, and start a new non-profit which MS has no good reason to sue.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    It’s more likely that Microsoft won’t sue at all because OpenAI hasn’t done anything to cause them to (when have you ever heard of a company suing another company over a change of leadership?) and it’s just some silly HN speculation that makes no sense. Or that if Microsoft did sue (perhaps because something that happens in the near future violates their contracts) OpenAi just spends like 1% of their cash on legal fees. $100 million in legal fees is not an existential risk to companies who recently raised $10b.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  They have tens of billions of dollars they raised. Microsoft can’t make them spend even 10% of that on legal fees. Also why would Microsoft do that? That just isn’t how the legal system works. You can sue a small business into bankruptcy because a few million in legal fees is enough.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago

> If the board wants to turn the company into some fantasy AGI foundation and cease work on their LLMs Depends on the contract. If the contract says nothing about OpenAI having to work on LLMs ... then there is nothing MS can do if they stopped all LLM work and worked on something else.

theonemind 3y ago

> If the board wants to turn the company into some fantasy AGI foundation https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter I think that's basically literally their charter?