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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 a

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.

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.