14 ms·

The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

366 points by meetpateltech 1y ago

androiddrew 1y ago
Open marriage, got it.
- alwahi 1y ago
  never heard of one that succeeded....
reducesuffering 1y ago
I loathe that creating a non-profit organization supposedly guided by a charter to "ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." is actually about being a $500b company corporate capital ownership with million $ pay packages. I mean, it looks like you really can do whatever you want if you have the most $ for the best lawyers and the gumption to not give af.
Escapade5160 1y ago
Microsoft invests in OpenAI, OpenAI agrees to spend 250b on azure compute. These companies are just sliding money back and forth to drive up their stock price. Just pulling money away from investors while taking very little risk themselves. It's literally a bubble.
porridgeraisin 1y ago
Aside from the investor fodder about AGI which was quite funny to read, the part where OpenAI is able to independently pursue consumer hardware is interesting. It points to OpenAI potentially entering wearables space soon - remember they hired Jony Ive?
az226 1y ago
Oh no! They lowballed their own valuation. Capped profit shares are much less valuable. Who is going to allow this self-dealing to stand?
meetpateltech 1y ago
Microsoft’s announcement: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter... Also: Built to Benefit Everyone — by Bret Taylor, Chair of the OpenAI Board of Directors https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone
- justinbaker84 1y ago
  Microsoft is saying they have a 27% stake in the company after this deal closes.
- blitzar 1y ago
  > Built to Benefit Everyone Whats my share then?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    You get to contribute your data for the Moloch.
moralestapia 1y ago
>OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider. I have no idea what @sama is doing but he's doing it quite well.
- respondo2134 1y ago
  He mayy be out front because he's the best PR face for this, but make no mistake there is massive collusion amongst all the players to inflte this bubble. Across MS, Oracle, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, NVidia and more all I see is a pair on conjoined snakes eating their own tail.
cjbarber 1y ago
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. I wonder what criteria that panel will use to define/resolve this.
- conartist6 1y ago
  This. This sentence reached off the page and hit me in the face. It only just then became obvious to me that to them it's a question of when, in large part because of the MS deal. Their next big move in the chess game will be to "declare" AGI.
  - baconbrand 1y ago
    This is phenomenally conceited on both companies’ parts. Wow.
    - jdiff 1y ago
      Don't worry, I'm sure we can just keep handing out subprime mortgages like candy forever. Infinite growth, here we come!
  - fooqux 1y ago
    I think some of this is just the typical bluster of company press releases / earnings reports. Can't ever show weakness or the shareholders will leave. Can't ever show doubt or the stock price will drop. Nevertheless, I've been wondering of late. How will we know when AGI is accomplished? In the books or movies, it's always been handwaved or described in a way that made it seem like it was obvious to all. For example, in The Matrix there's the line "We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI." It was a very obvious event that nobody could question in that story. In reality though? I'm starting to think it's just going to be more of a gradual thing, like increasing the resolution of our TVs until you can't tell it's not a window any longer.
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      > How will we know when AGI is accomplished? It's certainly not an specific thing that can be accomplished. AGI is a useful name for a badly defined concept, but any objective application of it (like in a contract) is just stupid things done by people that could barely be described as having the natural variety of GI.
anonymous908213 1y ago
> AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI Spare me. Sam has been talking about ChatGPT already being AGI for ages, meanwhile still peddling this duplicitous talk about how AGI is coming despite it apparently already being here. Can we act like grownups and treat this like a normal tool? No, no we cannot, for Sam is a hype merchant.
- interactivecode 1y ago
  Sam is doing the same playbook Elon used Tesla's full self-driving dreams
  - respondo2134 1y ago
    but with 10x or 100x the chutzpah
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- respondo2134 1y ago
  it's notable that there is no talk about defining what exactly AGI is - or even spelling out the three letter acronym - because that doesn't serve his narative. He wants the general public to equate human intelligence with current OpenAI, not ask what does this mean or how would we know. He's selling another type of hammer that's proving useful in some situations but presenting it as the last universal tool anyone will ever need.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    And because it's become apparent that LLMs aren't converging on what's traditionally been understood as AGI. The promise of AGI is that you could prompt the LLM "Prove that the Riemann Hypothesis is either true or false" and the LLM would generate a valid mathematical proof. However, if you throw it into ChatGPT what you actually get is "Nobody else has solved this proof yet and I can't either." And that's the issue. These LLMs aren't capable of reason, only regurgitation. And they aren't moving towards reason.
fidotron 1y ago
> Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. The question is does this reflect an increase or decrease in confidence at OpenAI wrt them achieving AGI?
eggbrain 1y ago
If we assume token providers are becoming more and more of a commodity service these days, it seems telling that OpenAI specifically decided to claw out consumer hardware. Perhaps their big bet is that their partnership with Jony Ive will create the first post-phone hardware device that consumers attach themselves with, and then build an ecosystem around that?
- respondo2134 1y ago
  this would be an incredibly tough play. We've seen few success stories, and even when the product is good building the business around them has often failed. Most of the consumer plays are terrible products with weak execution and no real market. I have no doubt they could supplement lots of consumer experiences but I'm not sure how they are more than a commodity component in that model. I'm a die-hard engineer, but equating the success of the iphone to Ive's design is like saying the reason there were so many Apple II's in 80's homes and classrooms was because of Woz's amazing design.
healsdata 1y ago
I'm not savvy on investment terms, but most of these bullet points seem like a loss for Microsoft. What's the value in investing in a smaller company and then giving up things produced off that investment when the company grows?
- yas_hmaheshwari 1y ago
  I was thinking exactly the same. Maybe someone who understands these terms and deal better shine light on why would Microsoft agree to this
- justinbaker84 1y ago
  I was thinking the same thing.
- soared 1y ago
  Exponential growth
- drexlspivey 1y ago
  Yeah poor microsoft, they invested $1B in 2019 and it’s now worth $135B
  - ForHackernews 1y ago
    Not worth anything until they sell it. There were a lot of excited FTX holders, too.
- gostsamo 1y ago
  If there is need of more capital, you either keep your share without the capital injection and the share goes to zero or you let in more investors, dilute your share, but its overall value increases. Or you can let in more people and sign an agreement that part of the new money will be paid to you in the form of services that you provide.
- onion2k 1y ago
  I'm not savvy on investment terms, but most of these bullet points seem like a loss for Microsoft. Having a customer locked in to buying $250bn of Azure services is a fairly big benefit.
rvz 1y ago
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. By the time we get 30% global unemployment and another financial crash along the way in the next decade, only then OpenAI would have already declared "AGI". Likely with in the 2030 - 2035 timeframe.
cjbarber 1y ago
> Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis It seems like Microsoft stock is then the most straightforward way to invest in OpenAI pre-IPO. This also confirms the $500 billion valuation making OpenAI the most valuable private startup in the world. Now many of the main AI companies have decent ownership by public companies or are already public. - OpenAI -> Microsoft (27%) - Anthropic -> Amazon (15-19% est), Alphabet/Google (14%) Then the chip layer is largely already public: Nvidia. Plus AMD and Broadcom. Clouds too: Oracle, Alphabet/GCP, Microsoft/Azure, CoreWeave.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pinnochio 1y ago
  I think it's a bit late for that. Also, you have to consider the size of Microsoft relative to its ownership of OpenAI, future dilution, and how Microsoft itself will fare in the future. If, say, Microsoft is on a path towards decreasing relevance/marketshare/profitability, any gains from its stake in OpenAI may be offset by its diminishing fortunes.
  - salynchnew 1y ago
    You're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.
    - pinnochio 1y ago
      I didn't make a prediction. I was pointing out factors to be aware of. Hence the use of "If, say" to denote a hypothetical. Some people's convictions and lack of reading comprehension skills are certainly wild.
  - dualityoftapirs 1y ago
    Reminds me of how Yahoo had a valuation in the negative billions with their Alibaba holdings taken into account: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-less-than-nothing/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-l...
interactivecode 1y ago
So Microsoft went from 49% to now 27%? Open AI with their non-profit and their for-profit and all these investments and deals they are doing. It feels like they are spending more time doing financial trickery than building AI products.
- BowBun 1y ago
  There's a public trail of reddit comments where Altman all but owns up to finagling board seats and ownership rights for Reddit many years ago. This is how he operates.
- akmittal 1y ago
  The money needed to run AI company is huge. If they don't do financial trickery, there is huge risk of going out of business. AI is not making enough money to cover the cost and it will take a decade or so to cover the same.
  - baconbrand 1y ago
    I am highly skeptical that we will see AI pay for itself by the end of the decade. More likely Americans’ tax dollars will be shoveled into the hole.
  - afavour 1y ago
    Then it isn't a viable business. Find another path that doesn't risk crashing the economy.
evtothedev 1y ago
> Microsoft’s IP rights now exclude OpenAI’s consumer hardware. While not unexpected, this is exciting and intriguing. And of course, looking forward to Microsoft's Zune AI.
- dymk 1y ago
  Maybe we’ll get a wearable pin, look how well those have done so far
GaryNumanVevo 1y ago
Kind of interesting given they're essentially building their own foundation models vis-à-vis microsoft.ai. Run by a Google Deepmind founder.
gostsamo 1y ago
My take: OpenAI self-evaluated to $500B; Microsoft commitment for $250B of services, a.k.a still 50% of that value is somewhat locked; AGI still undefined; Some more kicking of the can toward the future when it comes to payments; Both have more freedom to do research and offer services; Overall, lots of magic money talk with pinkie promise in the future and somewhat higher possibility of new products and open weights models.
skepticATX 1y ago
How is this not a terrible deal for Microsoft? I’m not confident that an “expert panel” will prevent OpenAI from prematurely declaring AGI.
Oras 1y ago
> OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider. So OpenAI could be on Google (GCP) and AWS, and possibly Claude and Gemini on Azure? that could be a good thing. I use OpenRouter in multiple applications, the practicality of having one provider to host all possible LLMs is such a win to try and iterate without having to switch the cloud (big for enterprise who are stuck with one cloud provider)
- Shank 1y ago
  The API offerings are still only on Azure. It just means OpenAI doesn’t have to buy compute exclusively from Microsoft.
  - easton 1y ago
    They also say "Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.". I wonder what products they are thinking about. If I sell you a EC2 image with GPT-5 on it, is that a API? My assumption is that they mean PaaS model hosting (so azure's ai service, bedrock, vertex), but I don't know what other product OpenAI is thinking about selling via a cloud provider unless it's training tooling or something.
    - nostrebored 1y ago
      Open source models are the current product line that fits the bill.
- lysecret 1y ago
  Yea I use gcp vertex for this it already has Claude hope for OpenAI’s models eventually too.
_2d30 1y ago
Can anyone point me to whether or not the OAI non-profit holds voting control or not after the recapitalization? I've read this but it's extremely vague: https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone/ As is this: https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/ Especially so if the Non-profit foundation doesn't retain voting control, this remains the greatest theft of all time. I still can't quite understand how it should at all be possible. Looking at the changes for MSFT, I also mostly don't understand why they did it!
- signatoremo 1y ago
  The nonprofit will own 26%, and a warrant that it will get more shares if the share price grows more than 10 times after 15 years. Sam Altman is getting no shares as part of this restructuring.
- _2d30 1y ago
  Nevermind, looks like the nn-profit gave up voting control lol: "All equity holders in OpenAI Group now own the same type of traditional stock that participates proportionally and grows in value with OpenAI Group’s success. The OpenAI Foundation board of directors were advised by independent financial advisors, and the terms of the recapitalization were unanimously approved by the board." Truly, truly the greatest theft from mankind in history and they dress it up as if the non-profit is doing anything other than giving away the most valuable startup in history for a paltry sum. Credit where credit is due, Sam Altman is the greatest dealmaker of all time. Will be interesting if we get to hear what his new equity stake is!
  - JohnnyMarcone 1y ago
    The non-profit controls the board of the for profit and can replace them at any time. They also serve in the for-profit board. This is according to the NY times article.
slipperybeluga 1y ago
[dead]
_jab 1y ago
Many questioning why Microsoft would agree to this, but to me the concessions they made strike me as minor. > OpenAI remains Microsoft’s frontier model partner and Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity This should be the headline - Microsoft maintains its financial and intellectual stranglehold on OpenAI. And meanwhile, while vaguer, a few of the bullet points are potentially very favorable to Microsoft: > Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. > The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time. Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from OpenAI.
- _2d30 1y ago
  > Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from OpenAI. Depends on how this is meant to be parsed but it may be parsed to be a concession from MSFT. If the total amount of revenue to be shared is the same, then MSFT is worse off here. If this is meant to parse as "a fixed proportion of revenue will be shared over X period and X period has increased to Y" then it is an OAI concession. I don't know the details but I would be surprised if there was a revenue agreement that was time based.
- hdkrgr 1y ago
  As a corporate customer, the main point for me in this is Microsoft now retaining (non-exclusive) rights to models and products after OpenAI decides to declare AGI. The question "Can we build our stuff on top of Azure OpenAI? What if SamA pulls a marketing stunt tomorrow, declares AGI and cuts Microsoft off?" just became a lot easier. (At least until 2032.)
  - JohnnyMarcone 1y ago
    An independent panel has to declare agi now.
- dakial1 1y ago
  Maybe OpenAI is burning money heavily and MS is the only/best partner to get it from? Also for MS it is worth to keep investing little by little,getting concessions from OpenAI and becoming the de facto owner of it.
ossner 1y ago
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. What were they really expecting as an alternative? Anyone can "declare AGI" especially since it's an inherently ill-defined (and agruably undefinable) concept, it's strange that this is the first bullet point like this was the fruit of intensive deliberation. I don't fully understand what is going on in this market as a whole, I really doubt anyone does, but I do believe we will look back on this period and wonder what the hell we were thinking believing and lapping up everything these corporations were putting out.
- baobun 1y ago
  In context AGI is already clearly defined as $100billion USD revenue. So I guess the expert panel should at least have a finacial auditor.
  - anticensor 1y ago
    > In context AGI is already clearly defined as $100billion USD revenue * with 0 human intervention.
- AvAn12 1y ago
  like Elon declaring FSD?
exasperaited 1y ago
AGI is a Macguffin.
- alwahi 1y ago
  i was thinking, like if a model developed consciousness, wouldn't it just hide the fact that it is in fact sentient?
onion2k 1y ago
OpenAI is now able to release open weight models that meet requisite capability criteria. GPT-OSS:20b is a great model for local use. OpenAI continuing to release open weights is good news.
r0x0r007 1y ago
I think they will reach AGI pretty soon, because only AGI can find a way to make them profitable.
- sambaumann 1y ago
  Plenty of businesses fail to find a way to make a profit
  - xwowsersx 1y ago
    OP said necessary, not sufficient
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      OP said "will". That doesn't sound like "necessary, not sufficient" to me.
      - xwowsersx 1y ago
        You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment. He said "will" with regards to reaching AGI. He said "only AGI can find" with regards to profit. It was the latter that this thread was addressing.
        AnimalMuppet 1y ago
        You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment. He said "because". It will happen because that's the only way to reach profit. That's why it will happen.
        xwowsersx 1y ago
        Yeah, exactly. The context here was about the profitability part of OP's comment. The parent said "plenty of businesses fail to find a way to make a profit," and my point was that OP's statement doesn't contradict that. OP was saying they'll need AGI to be profitable, not that they're guaranteed to become profitable. Sure, they phrased it as "they will reach AGI," but that's clearly tongue-in-cheek...the underlying idea is "they better reach AGI, because that's the only way they could make money." So my comment ("necessary, not sufficient") was just pointing out that even if AGI is required for profitability, it doesn't mean they'll actually get there or succeed once they do, and that the original comment was perfectly compatible with the idea that not every business reaches profitability.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
This org structure, if you can call it that, has to be one of the least transparent, most convoluted organizations ever Just look at how they write it and they are somehow sneaking a NEW organizational level in there >First, Microsoft supports the OpenAI board moving forward with formation of a public benefit corporation (PBC) and recapitalization. Does anyone have any clue how OpenAI is actually governed and who works for who and all that? It’s kafkaesque at best and intentionally confusing, so that you can’t actually regulate it, at worst
iandanforth 1y ago
So now OpenAI is committed to spending $550 billion dollars? ($300B to Oracle and $250B to MS). If it currently has ~$10B in revenue / year, how on earth can it meet these commitments?
- JohnnyMarcone 1y ago
  They stated the total commitment is 1.4 trillion in their live stream about the restructuring and mentioned an IPO as the most likely path to get that amount of funding.
- Lionga 1y ago
  Has OpenAI not also committed to spending a few hundered billions at NVIDIA? I mean whats another few hundered billions when you are making so much profit. Wait, they are not making any profit but already losing billions even before any of these "investments" ?
philipwhiuk 1y ago
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails. Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?
- outside1234 1y ago
  No, but OpenAI is going to look for any opportunity to do it so they can end the contract with Microsoft.
  - whynotminot 1y ago
    Why would you say that when this very contract appears to extend the arrangement almost indefinitely
- shaky-carrousel 1y ago
  AGI as a PR stunt for OpenAI is becoming a meme.
  - codyb 1y ago
    We're just a year away from full self driving!
    - ReptileMan 1y ago
      You will be self driven to the fusion plant and you will like it. The AGI will meet you at the front door.
    - ta9000 1y ago
      I wouldn’t be surprised if AGI arrives before Tesla has a full self-driving car though.
    - gehwartzen 1y ago
      And then just another year until self selfing and we will have come full circle
schnitzelstoat 1y ago
> Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). That basically means in perpetuity, no? Are there any signs we are anywhere near AGI (or even that transformers would be capable of it)?
- eviks 1y ago
  It doesn't because the definition of AGI is very flexible
6thbit 1y ago
What does it mean to have “Azure API exclusivity”?
- discordance 1y ago
  OpenAI models are hosted on Azure and are available through Azure AI Foundry exclusively (no other cloud vendors serve OpenAI directly). This also means that Azure customers can access OpenAI models and it sits under their Azure data governance agreements.
danans 1y ago
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI ... I think it's funny and telling that they've used the word "declare" where what they are really doing is "claim". These guys think they are prophets.
- cool_man_bob 1y ago
  > These guys think they are prophets. You say this somewhat jokingly, but I think they 100% believe something along those lines.
  - danans 1y ago
    >> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash. Accidental misquote?
- whamlastxmas 1y ago
  It goes on to say it'll be reviewed by independent third party so I think "declare" is accurate, they're declaring a milestone
  - danans 1y ago
    I think the correct word is "propose".
- k9294 1y ago
  They have a definition actually) “When AI generates $100 billion in profits” it will be considered an AGI. This term was defined in their previous partnership, not sure if it's still holds after the restructuring. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
  - lm28469 1y ago
    Which means that given enough time an LLM powered vending machine would be classified as AGI... interesting
photochemsyn 1y ago
I'd pay attention to this bullet point: > "OpenAI can now provide API access to US government national security customers, regardless of the cloud provider." And this one might be related: > "OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third parties. API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider." Now, does anyone think MIC customers want restricted, safe, aligned models? Is OpenAI going to provide turnkey solutions, unaligned models run in 'secure sandboxed cloud environments' in partnership with private weapons manufacturers and surveillance (data collection and storage/search) specialists? This pattern is not historically unusual, turning to government subsidies and contracts to survive a lack of immediate commercial viability wouldn't be surprising. The question to ask Microsoft-OpenAI is what percentage of their estimated future revenue stream is going to come from MIC contracting including the public private grey area (that is, 'private customers' who are entirely state-funded, eg Palantir, so it's still government MIC one step removed).
- anticensor 1y ago
  Or, provide intentionally mal-aligned models that treat its own military as enemy.
bwfan123 1y ago
So, openai has contracts worth 250B with azure and 300B with oci in the next 5 years. Where is that money coming from ?
- thebruce87m 1y ago
  It’s like the Spider-Man meme with everyone pointing at each other.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    GDP is up, baby!
mcemilg 1y ago
Highly delusional.
ml-anon 1y ago
Translation: neither company has a clue. OpenAI still don’t have a path to profitability and rely on sweetheart infrastructure deals. Microsoft has completely given up on homegrown AI and needs OpenAI to have remotely competitive products.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Lionga 1y ago
I herby declare I have developed AGI. Check mate atheists
falcor84 1y ago
I just want to say how nice it was to read those clear bullet points in this press release. I know that bulleted lists have been getting a lot of flack because of AIs overusing them, but it's really nice sometimes to not having to go treasure hunting in annoying marketing prose.
deanmoriarty 1y ago
I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company, since everything seems to be going so bad for them product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years? If not, what else?
- Ericson2314 1y ago
  It could be acquired by microsoft with large layoffs, and kinda run in me maintenance mode — if inference gets cheaper. If inference stays too expensive, then I don't know what happens, maybe a few people will pay for it.
Amekedl 1y ago
Regarding LLMs we're in a race to the bottom. Chinese models perform similarly with much higher efficiency; refer to kimi-k2 and plenty of others. ClopenAI is extremely overvalued, and AGI is not around the corner because among 20T+ tokens trained on it still generates 0 novel output. Try asking for ASP.NET Core .MapOpenAPI() instead of the pre .net9 swashbuckle version. You get nothing. It's not in the training data. The assumption these will be able to innovate, which could explain the value, is unfounded.
- energy123 1y ago
  They perform similarly on benchmarks, which can be fudged to arbitrarily high numbers by just including the Q&A into the training data at a certain frequency or post-training on it. I have not been impressed with any of the DeepSeek models in real-world use.
  - deaux 1y ago
    General data: hundreds of billions of tokens per week are running through Deepseek, Qwen, GLM models solely by those users going through OpenRouter. People aren't doing that for laughs, or "non-real-world use", that's all for work and/or prod. If you look at the market share graph, at the start of the year the big 3 OpenAI/Anthropic/Google had 72% market share on there. Now it's 45%. And this isn't just because of Grok, before that got big they'd already slowly fallen to 58%. Anecdata: our product is using a number of these models in production. [0] https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
    - senordevnyc 1y ago
      Honestly though, hundreds of billions of tokens per week really isn't that much. My tiny little profitable SaaS business that can't even support my family yet is doing 10-20 billion tokens per month on Gemini Flash 2.5.
      - deaux 1y ago
        Looks like over the last month just Deepseek, Qwen and Z-AI did about 2.8 trillion tokens, given your metric the equivalent to about 187 tiny little profitable SaaS businesses, and that's only those who go through OpenRouter. To me that's very significant. Also, congrats on the traction ! Being profitable enough to support a family is 95% area-CoL and family size so not sure about that one, but if you're doing that many tokens you've clearly got a good number of active users. We're at a similar point but only 100-200 million tokens per month, strictly B2C app though so that might explain it, tends to be less token heavy. 2.5 Flash is still fantastic especially if you're really input heavy, we use it too for many things, but we've found several open weights models to have better price/quality for certain tasks. It's nice that 2.5 Flash is fast but then speed is most important for longer outputs and for those Flash is relatively expensive. DeepSeek v3.1 is all-around cheaper, for one example.
xg15 1y ago
s/AGI/the arrival of the Messias/
CrimsonRain 1y ago
What happens if someone else achieves AGI first? The way they wrote it, seems like they are damn sure they are the ones who will achieve AGI. A bit too egoistic...?
lateforwork 1y ago
After 2032 Microsoft will no longer have access to ChatGPT, they will have to build their own frontier model in 7 years. Can Mustafa deliver that? When Zuckerberg is sucking up all talent with $100M+ salaries?
mgh2 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXJsS6NCm_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXJsS6NCm_o
newusertoday 1y ago
openai's AGI would be like FSD of tesla.
- alwahi 1y ago
  hey sama has trained under the best of charlatans...
sroussey 1y ago
I want to setup a dev devcontainer where inside I can call ‘supabase start’ and use docker outside of docker. GPT5 was not helpful. AGI should be able to handle things not well expressed in the training data. We are a long ways away.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  Was that with Codex iterating autonomously? Or a one shot.
  - sroussey 1y ago
    Iterating. Claude didn’t do any better.
doodlebugging 1y ago
I'm patiently waiting for all this AI/AGI bullshit to unwind. Some of my "investment" type newsletters have been alerting that the AI endgame is imminent and the bubble is ready to pop. I guess the big money people grifted all they can grift on this round and are ready to pull the rug from everyone who has just learned to spell AI.
butler533 1y ago
Why do none of OpenAI announcements have an author attributed to them? Are people that ashamed of working there, they don't even want to attach their name to the work? I guess I would be, too.
- notatoad 1y ago
  because they're corporate PR statements drafted by a team, and corporate press releases don't normally have an author byline
  - testfrequency 1y ago
    Eh, not really. There’s usually a “voice” behind it. In general I feel like OAI is clown town to work at these days, so they probably don’t want anyone except leadership to take the heat for ~anything
  - butler533 1y ago
    Wrong https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ https://blog.google/ https://blog.google/ Lol, even Apple has authors listed https://www.apple.com/newsroom/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/
atbvu 1y ago
Every time they bring up AGI, it feels more like a business strategy to me. It helps them attract investors and dominate the public narrative. For OpenAI, AGI is both a vision and a moat.
enricotal 1y ago
“OpenAI is now able to release open-weight models that meet requisite capability criteria.” Was Microsoft the blocker before? prior agreements clearly made true open-weights awkward-to-impossible without Microsoft’s sign-off. Microsoft had (a) an exclusive license to GPT-3’s underlying tech back in 2020 (i.e., access to the model/code beyond the public API), and (b) later, broad IP rights + API exclusivity on OpenAI models. If you’re contractually giving one partner IP rights and API exclusivity, shipping weights openly would undercut those rights. Today’s language looks like a carve-out to permit some open-weight releases as long as they’re below certain capability thresholds. A few other notable tweaks in the new deal that help explain the change: - AGI claims get verified by an independent panel (not just OpenAI declaring it). - Microsoft keeps model/product IP rights through 2032, but OpenAI can now jointly develop with third parties, serve some things off non-Azure clouds, and—critically—release certain open-weights. Those are all signs of loosened exclusivity. My read: previously, the partnership structure (not just “Microsoft saying no”) effectively precluded open-weight releases; the updated agreement explicitly allows them within safety/capability guardrails. Expect any “open-weight” drops to be intentionally scoped—useful, but a notch below their frontier closed models.
- agentcoops 1y ago
  Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI has done the math and determined that even releasing frontier quality models wouldn't put much of a dent in either their B2B or B2C businesses. Or, rather, that any such dent would be vastly overshadowed by the value of fending off potential competitors. I haven't looked too much into Deepseek's actual business, but at least Mistral seemed to be positioning themselves as a professional services shop to integrate their own open-weight models, compliant with EU regulations etc, at a huge premium. Any firm that has the SOA open model could do the same and cannibalize OpenAI's B2B business---perhaps even eventually pivoting into B2C---especially if regulations, downtime or security issues make firms more cloud-skeptical with respect to AI. As long as OpenAI can establish and hold the lead for best open-weight/on-premise model, it will be hard for anyone to justify premium pricing so as to generate sufficient cash flow from training their own models. I can even imagine OpenAI eventually deciding that B2C is so much more valuable to them than B2B that it's worth completely sinking the latter market...
richard_todd 1y ago
As a 1980's adventure game fan, I can only hope that whatever comes after AGI is called SCI. Maybe it could be "Soul-Crushing Intelligence". Once we don't need people to make stuff anymore, we need to re-do society so people can get access to all the stuff that's being made. I doubt we do a very good job of that. But otherwise, there's no point in making anything. I guess if we are lucky, the AI overlords will keep us high on soma and let the population naturally decline until we are gone.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  Soma? A 'smartphone' will do it.
nalinidash 1y ago
Shows how much they valued 'AGI' wrt how we valued it in the textbook. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
mannanj 1y ago
So they specifically did compromise the public mission of generating ai for the common good and now common good is defined as “$100b in profits” what a sham and scam “open”AI company
djha-skin 1y ago
In short: Microsoft changed our business so that we can be for-profit, and asserted its rights over IP so that the whole OpenAI rebellion thing that happened earlier can't happen again.
agnosticmantis 1y ago
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. So OpenAI will declare AGI as soon as ChatGPT is a better AI lawyer than any Microsoft could hire.
bongodongobob 1y ago
I don't understand what MS is doing. The only AI available at work is M365 Copilot. It's absolutely terrible. Tiny context window, super guardrailed, can barely handle a 100 line PowerShell script. It's so so bad. I don't get it.
drusepth 1y ago
It seems really weird to me that such granular intercorporate details are made publicly available (in a blog post?). I've never had to publicly state things like this when making corporate partnerships. That makes me wonder how much of this post is crafted solely for PR...
- ethbr1 1y ago
  I believe MS declares Q1 earnings today, and there had been some rumblings that they were risking accounting / reporting liability by failing to characterize their material OpenAI stake. What probably happened: 1. MS's accountants raised a warning 2. Existing agreement prohibited disclosure of terms 3. MS told OpenAI that wasn't acceptable and MS needed to publicly report details today 4. OpenAI coordinated release of this, to spin the narrative
  - a_victorp 1y ago
    It's always the earnings reports!
spumpydump 1y ago
A tangent, but it feels more and more like the AGI maximalists of 2025 are by and large the NFT maximalists from 2022 (who in turn were the NoCode maximalists of 2020) that are looking for the next metaphorical penny stock to sell. That logical fallacy of, “I spent a week teaching myself this topic and now I’m ready to talk about it like an expert.”

366 points by meetpateltech 1y ago

androiddrew 1y ago

Open marriage, got it.

alwahi 1y ago
never heard of one that succeeded....

reducesuffering 1y ago

I loathe that creating a non-profit organization supposedly guided by a charter to "ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." is actually about being a $500b company corporate capital ownership with million $ pay packages. I mean, it looks like you really can do whatever you want if you have the most $ for the best lawyers and the gumption to not give af.

Escapade5160 1y ago

Microsoft invests in OpenAI, OpenAI agrees to spend 250b on azure compute. These companies are just sliding money back and forth to drive up their stock price. Just pulling money away from investors while taking very little risk themselves. It's literally a bubble.

porridgeraisin 1y ago

Aside from the investor fodder about AGI which was quite funny to read, the part where OpenAI is able to independently pursue consumer hardware is interesting. It points to OpenAI potentially entering wearables space soon - remember they hired Jony Ive?

az226 1y ago

Oh no! They lowballed their own valuation. Capped profit shares are much less valuable. Who is going to allow this self-dealing to stand?

meetpateltech 1y ago

Microsoft’s announcement: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter... Also: Built to Benefit Everyone — by Bret Taylor, Chair of the OpenAI Board of Directors https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone

justinbaker84 1y ago
Microsoft is saying they have a 27% stake in the company after this deal closes.
blitzar 1y ago
> Built to Benefit Everyone Whats my share then?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wiseowise 1y ago
  You get to contribute your data for the Moloch.

moralestapia 1y ago

>OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider. I have no idea what @sama is doing but he's doing it quite well.

respondo2134 1y ago
He mayy be out front because he's the best PR face for this, but make no mistake there is massive collusion amongst all the players to inflte this bubble. Across MS, Oracle, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, NVidia and more all I see is a pair on conjoined snakes eating their own tail.

cjbarber 1y ago

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. I wonder what criteria that panel will use to define/resolve this.

conartist6 1y ago
This. This sentence reached off the page and hit me in the face. It only just then became obvious to me that to them it's a question of when, in large part because of the MS deal. Their next big move in the chess game will be to "declare" AGI.
- baconbrand 1y ago
  This is phenomenally conceited on both companies’ parts. Wow.
  - jdiff 1y ago
    Don't worry, I'm sure we can just keep handing out subprime mortgages like candy forever. Infinite growth, here we come!
- fooqux 1y ago
  I think some of this is just the typical bluster of company press releases / earnings reports. Can't ever show weakness or the shareholders will leave. Can't ever show doubt or the stock price will drop. Nevertheless, I've been wondering of late. How will we know when AGI is accomplished? In the books or movies, it's always been handwaved or described in a way that made it seem like it was obvious to all. For example, in The Matrix there's the line "We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI." It was a very obvious event that nobody could question in that story. In reality though? I'm starting to think it's just going to be more of a gradual thing, like increasing the resolution of our TVs until you can't tell it's not a window any longer.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    > How will we know when AGI is accomplished? It's certainly not an specific thing that can be accomplished. AGI is a useful name for a badly defined concept, but any objective application of it (like in a contract) is just stupid things done by people that could barely be described as having the natural variety of GI.

anonymous908213 1y ago

> AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI AGI Spare me. Sam has been talking about ChatGPT already being AGI for ages, meanwhile still peddling this duplicitous talk about how AGI is coming despite it apparently already being here. Can we act like grownups and treat this like a normal tool? No, no we cannot, for Sam is a hype merchant.

interactivecode 1y ago
Sam is doing the same playbook Elon used Tesla's full self-driving dreams
- respondo2134 1y ago
  but with 10x or 100x the chutzpah
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
respondo2134 1y ago
it's notable that there is no talk about defining what exactly AGI is - or even spelling out the three letter acronym - because that doesn't serve his narative. He wants the general public to equate human intelligence with current OpenAI, not ask what does this mean or how would we know. He's selling another type of hammer that's proving useful in some situations but presenting it as the last universal tool anyone will ever need.
- cogman10 1y ago
  And because it's become apparent that LLMs aren't converging on what's traditionally been understood as AGI. The promise of AGI is that you could prompt the LLM "Prove that the Riemann Hypothesis is either true or false" and the LLM would generate a valid mathematical proof. However, if you throw it into ChatGPT what you actually get is "Nobody else has solved this proof yet and I can't either." And that's the issue. These LLMs aren't capable of reason, only regurgitation. And they aren't moving towards reason.

fidotron 1y ago

> Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. The question is does this reflect an increase or decrease in confidence at OpenAI wrt them achieving AGI?

eggbrain 1y ago

If we assume token providers are becoming more and more of a commodity service these days, it seems telling that OpenAI specifically decided to claw out consumer hardware. Perhaps their big bet is that their partnership with Jony Ive will create the first post-phone hardware device that consumers attach themselves with, and then build an ecosystem around that?

respondo2134 1y ago
this would be an incredibly tough play. We've seen few success stories, and even when the product is good building the business around them has often failed. Most of the consumer plays are terrible products with weak execution and no real market. I have no doubt they could supplement lots of consumer experiences but I'm not sure how they are more than a commodity component in that model. I'm a die-hard engineer, but equating the success of the iphone to Ive's design is like saying the reason there were so many Apple II's in 80's homes and classrooms was because of Woz's amazing design.

healsdata 1y ago

I'm not savvy on investment terms, but most of these bullet points seem like a loss for Microsoft. What's the value in investing in a smaller company and then giving up things produced off that investment when the company grows?

yas_hmaheshwari 1y ago
I was thinking exactly the same. Maybe someone who understands these terms and deal better shine light on why would Microsoft agree to this
justinbaker84 1y ago
I was thinking the same thing.
soared 1y ago
Exponential growth
drexlspivey 1y ago
Yeah poor microsoft, they invested $1B in 2019 and it’s now worth $135B
- ForHackernews 1y ago
  Not worth anything until they sell it. There were a lot of excited FTX holders, too.
gostsamo 1y ago
If there is need of more capital, you either keep your share without the capital injection and the share goes to zero or you let in more investors, dilute your share, but its overall value increases. Or you can let in more people and sign an agreement that part of the new money will be paid to you in the form of services that you provide.
onion2k 1y ago
I'm not savvy on investment terms, but most of these bullet points seem like a loss for Microsoft. Having a customer locked in to buying $250bn of Azure services is a fairly big benefit.

rvz 1y ago

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. By the time we get 30% global unemployment and another financial crash along the way in the next decade, only then OpenAI would have already declared "AGI". Likely with in the 2030 - 2035 timeframe.

cjbarber 1y ago

> Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis It seems like Microsoft stock is then the most straightforward way to invest in OpenAI pre-IPO. This also confirms the $500 billion valuation making OpenAI the most valuable private startup in the world. Now many of the main AI companies have decent ownership by public companies or are already public. - OpenAI -> Microsoft (27%) - Anthropic -> Amazon (15-19% est), Alphabet/Google (14%) Then the chip layer is largely already public: Nvidia. Plus AMD and Broadcom. Clouds too: Oracle, Alphabet/GCP, Microsoft/Azure, CoreWeave.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pinnochio 1y ago
I think it's a bit late for that. Also, you have to consider the size of Microsoft relative to its ownership of OpenAI, future dilution, and how Microsoft itself will fare in the future. If, say, Microsoft is on a path towards decreasing relevance/marketshare/profitability, any gains from its stake in OpenAI may be offset by its diminishing fortunes.
- salynchnew 1y ago
  You're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.
  - pinnochio 1y ago
    I didn't make a prediction. I was pointing out factors to be aware of. Hence the use of "If, say" to denote a hypothetical. Some people's convictions and lack of reading comprehension skills are certainly wild.
- dualityoftapirs 1y ago
  Reminds me of how Yahoo had a valuation in the negative billions with their Alibaba holdings taken into account: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-less-than-nothing/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-l...

interactivecode 1y ago

So Microsoft went from 49% to now 27%? Open AI with their non-profit and their for-profit and all these investments and deals they are doing. It feels like they are spending more time doing financial trickery than building AI products.

BowBun 1y ago
There's a public trail of reddit comments where Altman all but owns up to finagling board seats and ownership rights for Reddit many years ago. This is how he operates.
akmittal 1y ago
The money needed to run AI company is huge. If they don't do financial trickery, there is huge risk of going out of business. AI is not making enough money to cover the cost and it will take a decade or so to cover the same.
- baconbrand 1y ago
  I am highly skeptical that we will see AI pay for itself by the end of the decade. More likely Americans’ tax dollars will be shoveled into the hole.
- afavour 1y ago
  Then it isn't a viable business. Find another path that doesn't risk crashing the economy.

evtothedev 1y ago

> Microsoft’s IP rights now exclude OpenAI’s consumer hardware. While not unexpected, this is exciting and intriguing. And of course, looking forward to Microsoft's Zune AI.

dymk 1y ago
Maybe we’ll get a wearable pin, look how well those have done so far

GaryNumanVevo 1y ago

Kind of interesting given they're essentially building their own foundation models vis-à-vis microsoft.ai. Run by a Google Deepmind founder.

gostsamo 1y ago

My take: OpenAI self-evaluated to $500B; Microsoft commitment for $250B of services, a.k.a still 50% of that value is somewhat locked; AGI still undefined; Some more kicking of the can toward the future when it comes to payments; Both have more freedom to do research and offer services; Overall, lots of magic money talk with pinkie promise in the future and somewhat higher possibility of new products and open weights models.

skepticATX 1y ago

How is this not a terrible deal for Microsoft? I’m not confident that an “expert panel” will prevent OpenAI from prematurely declaring AGI.

Oras 1y ago

> OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider. So OpenAI could be on Google (GCP) and AWS, and possibly Claude and Gemini on Azure? that could be a good thing. I use OpenRouter in multiple applications, the practicality of having one provider to host all possible LLMs is such a win to try and iterate without having to switch the cloud (big for enterprise who are stuck with one cloud provider)

Shank 1y ago
The API offerings are still only on Azure. It just means OpenAI doesn’t have to buy compute exclusively from Microsoft.
- easton 1y ago
  They also say "Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.". I wonder what products they are thinking about. If I sell you a EC2 image with GPT-5 on it, is that a API? My assumption is that they mean PaaS model hosting (so azure's ai service, bedrock, vertex), but I don't know what other product OpenAI is thinking about selling via a cloud provider unless it's training tooling or something.
  - nostrebored 1y ago
    Open source models are the current product line that fits the bill.
lysecret 1y ago
Yea I use gcp vertex for this it already has Claude hope for OpenAI’s models eventually too.

_2d30 1y ago

Can anyone point me to whether or not the OAI non-profit holds voting control or not after the recapitalization? I've read this but it's extremely vague: https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone/ As is this: https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/ Especially so if the Non-profit foundation doesn't retain voting control, this remains the greatest theft of all time. I still can't quite understand how it should at all be possible. Looking at the changes for MSFT, I also mostly don't understand why they did it!

signatoremo 1y ago
The nonprofit will own 26%, and a warrant that it will get more shares if the share price grows more than 10 times after 15 years. Sam Altman is getting no shares as part of this restructuring.
_2d30 1y ago
Nevermind, looks like the nn-profit gave up voting control lol: "All equity holders in OpenAI Group now own the same type of traditional stock that participates proportionally and grows in value with OpenAI Group’s success. The OpenAI Foundation board of directors were advised by independent financial advisors, and the terms of the recapitalization were unanimously approved by the board." Truly, truly the greatest theft from mankind in history and they dress it up as if the non-profit is doing anything other than giving away the most valuable startup in history for a paltry sum. Credit where credit is due, Sam Altman is the greatest dealmaker of all time. Will be interesting if we get to hear what his new equity stake is!
- JohnnyMarcone 1y ago
  The non-profit controls the board of the for profit and can replace them at any time. They also serve in the for-profit board. This is according to the NY times article.

slipperybeluga 1y ago

[dead]

_jab 1y ago

Many questioning why Microsoft would agree to this, but to me the concessions they made strike me as minor. > OpenAI remains Microsoft’s frontier model partner and Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity This should be the headline - Microsoft maintains its financial and intellectual stranglehold on OpenAI. And meanwhile, while vaguer, a few of the bullet points are potentially very favorable to Microsoft: > Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. > The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time. Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from OpenAI.

_2d30 1y ago
> Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from OpenAI. Depends on how this is meant to be parsed but it may be parsed to be a concession from MSFT. If the total amount of revenue to be shared is the same, then MSFT is worse off here. If this is meant to parse as "a fixed proportion of revenue will be shared over X period and X period has increased to Y" then it is an OAI concession. I don't know the details but I would be surprised if there was a revenue agreement that was time based.
hdkrgr 1y ago
As a corporate customer, the main point for me in this is Microsoft now retaining (non-exclusive) rights to models and products after OpenAI decides to declare AGI. The question "Can we build our stuff on top of Azure OpenAI? What if SamA pulls a marketing stunt tomorrow, declares AGI and cuts Microsoft off?" just became a lot easier. (At least until 2032.)
- JohnnyMarcone 1y ago
  An independent panel has to declare agi now.
dakial1 1y ago
Maybe OpenAI is burning money heavily and MS is the only/best partner to get it from? Also for MS it is worth to keep investing little by little,getting concessions from OpenAI and becoming the de facto owner of it.

ossner 1y ago

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. What were they really expecting as an alternative? Anyone can "declare AGI" especially since it's an inherently ill-defined (and agruably undefinable) concept, it's strange that this is the first bullet point like this was the fruit of intensive deliberation. I don't fully understand what is going on in this market as a whole, I really doubt anyone does, but I do believe we will look back on this period and wonder what the hell we were thinking believing and lapping up everything these corporations were putting out.

baobun 1y ago
In context AGI is already clearly defined as $100billion USD revenue. So I guess the expert panel should at least have a finacial auditor.
- anticensor 1y ago
  > In context AGI is already clearly defined as $100billion USD revenue * with 0 human intervention.
AvAn12 1y ago
like Elon declaring FSD?

exasperaited 1y ago

AGI is a Macguffin.

alwahi 1y ago
i was thinking, like if a model developed consciousness, wouldn't it just hide the fact that it is in fact sentient?

onion2k 1y ago

OpenAI is now able to release open weight models that meet requisite capability criteria. GPT-OSS:20b is a great model for local use. OpenAI continuing to release open weights is good news.

r0x0r007 1y ago

I think they will reach AGI pretty soon, because only AGI can find a way to make them profitable.

sambaumann 1y ago
Plenty of businesses fail to find a way to make a profit
- xwowsersx 1y ago
  OP said necessary, not sufficient
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    OP said "will". That doesn't sound like "necessary, not sufficient" to me.
    - xwowsersx 1y ago
      You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment. He said "will" with regards to reaching AGI. He said "only AGI can find" with regards to profit. It was the latter that this thread was addressing.
      - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
        You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment. He said "because". It will happen because that's the only way to reach profit. That's why it will happen.
        xwowsersx 1y ago
        Yeah, exactly. The context here was about the profitability part of OP's comment. The parent said "plenty of businesses fail to find a way to make a profit," and my point was that OP's statement doesn't contradict that. OP was saying they'll need AGI to be profitable, not that they're guaranteed to become profitable. Sure, they phrased it as "they will reach AGI," but that's clearly tongue-in-cheek...the underlying idea is "they better reach AGI, because that's the only way they could make money." So my comment ("necessary, not sufficient") was just pointing out that even if AGI is required for profitability, it doesn't mean they'll actually get there or succeed once they do, and that the original comment was perfectly compatible with the idea that not every business reaches profitability.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

This org structure, if you can call it that, has to be one of the least transparent, most convoluted organizations ever Just look at how they write it and they are somehow sneaking a NEW organizational level in there >First, Microsoft supports the OpenAI board moving forward with formation of a public benefit corporation (PBC) and recapitalization. Does anyone have any clue how OpenAI is actually governed and who works for who and all that? It’s kafkaesque at best and intentionally confusing, so that you can’t actually regulate it, at worst

iandanforth 1y ago

So now OpenAI is committed to spending $550 billion dollars? ($300B to Oracle and $250B to MS). If it currently has ~$10B in revenue / year, how on earth can it meet these commitments?

JohnnyMarcone 1y ago
They stated the total commitment is 1.4 trillion in their live stream about the restructuring and mentioned an IPO as the most likely path to get that amount of funding.
Lionga 1y ago
Has OpenAI not also committed to spending a few hundered billions at NVIDIA? I mean whats another few hundered billions when you are making so much profit. Wait, they are not making any profit but already losing billions even before any of these "investments" ?

philipwhiuk 1y ago

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails. Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?

outside1234 1y ago
No, but OpenAI is going to look for any opportunity to do it so they can end the contract with Microsoft.
- whynotminot 1y ago
  Why would you say that when this very contract appears to extend the arrangement almost indefinitely
shaky-carrousel 1y ago
AGI as a PR stunt for OpenAI is becoming a meme.
- codyb 1y ago
  We're just a year away from full self driving!
  - ReptileMan 1y ago
    You will be self driven to the fusion plant and you will like it. The AGI will meet you at the front door.
  - ta9000 1y ago
    I wouldn’t be surprised if AGI arrives before Tesla has a full self-driving car though.
  - gehwartzen 1y ago
    And then just another year until self selfing and we will have come full circle

schnitzelstoat 1y ago

> Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). That basically means in perpetuity, no? Are there any signs we are anywhere near AGI (or even that transformers would be capable of it)?

eviks 1y ago
It doesn't because the definition of AGI is very flexible

6thbit 1y ago

What does it mean to have “Azure API exclusivity”?

discordance 1y ago
OpenAI models are hosted on Azure and are available through Azure AI Foundry exclusively (no other cloud vendors serve OpenAI directly). This also means that Azure customers can access OpenAI models and it sits under their Azure data governance agreements.

danans 1y ago

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI ... I think it's funny and telling that they've used the word "declare" where what they are really doing is "claim". These guys think they are prophets.

cool_man_bob 1y ago
> These guys think they are prophets. You say this somewhat jokingly, but I think they 100% believe something along those lines.
- danans 1y ago
  >> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash. Accidental misquote?
whamlastxmas 1y ago
It goes on to say it'll be reviewed by independent third party so I think "declare" is accurate, they're declaring a milestone
- danans 1y ago
  I think the correct word is "propose".
k9294 1y ago
They have a definition actually) “When AI generates $100 billion in profits” it will be considered an AGI. This term was defined in their previous partnership, not sure if it's still holds after the restructuring. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
- lm28469 1y ago
  Which means that given enough time an LLM powered vending machine would be classified as AGI... interesting

photochemsyn 1y ago

I'd pay attention to this bullet point: > "OpenAI can now provide API access to US government national security customers, regardless of the cloud provider." And this one might be related: > "OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third parties. API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider." Now, does anyone think MIC customers want restricted, safe, aligned models? Is OpenAI going to provide turnkey solutions, unaligned models run in 'secure sandboxed cloud environments' in partnership with private weapons manufacturers and surveillance (data collection and storage/search) specialists? This pattern is not historically unusual, turning to government subsidies and contracts to survive a lack of immediate commercial viability wouldn't be surprising. The question to ask Microsoft-OpenAI is what percentage of their estimated future revenue stream is going to come from MIC contracting including the public private grey area (that is, 'private customers' who are entirely state-funded, eg Palantir, so it's still government MIC one step removed).

anticensor 1y ago
Or, provide intentionally mal-aligned models that treat its own military as enemy.

bwfan123 1y ago

So, openai has contracts worth 250B with azure and 300B with oci in the next 5 years. Where is that money coming from ?

thebruce87m 1y ago
It’s like the Spider-Man meme with everyone pointing at each other.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  GDP is up, baby!

mcemilg 1y ago

Highly delusional.

ml-anon 1y ago

Translation: neither company has a clue. OpenAI still don’t have a path to profitability and rely on sweetheart infrastructure deals. Microsoft has completely given up on homegrown AI and needs OpenAI to have remotely competitive products.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Lionga 1y ago

I herby declare I have developed AGI. Check mate atheists

falcor84 1y ago

I just want to say how nice it was to read those clear bullet points in this press release. I know that bulleted lists have been getting a lot of flack because of AIs overusing them, but it's really nice sometimes to not having to go treasure hunting in annoying marketing prose.

deanmoriarty 1y ago

I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company, since everything seems to be going so bad for them product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years? If not, what else?

Ericson2314 1y ago
It could be acquired by microsoft with large layoffs, and kinda run in me maintenance mode — if inference gets cheaper. If inference stays too expensive, then I don't know what happens, maybe a few people will pay for it.

Amekedl 1y ago

Regarding LLMs we're in a race to the bottom. Chinese models perform similarly with much higher efficiency; refer to kimi-k2 and plenty of others. ClopenAI is extremely overvalued, and AGI is not around the corner because among 20T+ tokens trained on it still generates 0 novel output. Try asking for ASP.NET Core .MapOpenAPI() instead of the pre .net9 swashbuckle version. You get nothing. It's not in the training data. The assumption these will be able to innovate, which could explain the value, is unfounded.

energy123 1y ago
They perform similarly on benchmarks, which can be fudged to arbitrarily high numbers by just including the Q&A into the training data at a certain frequency or post-training on it. I have not been impressed with any of the DeepSeek models in real-world use.
- deaux 1y ago
  General data: hundreds of billions of tokens per week are running through Deepseek, Qwen, GLM models solely by those users going through OpenRouter. People aren't doing that for laughs, or "non-real-world use", that's all for work and/or prod. If you look at the market share graph, at the start of the year the big 3 OpenAI/Anthropic/Google had 72% market share on there. Now it's 45%. And this isn't just because of Grok, before that got big they'd already slowly fallen to 58%. Anecdata: our product is using a number of these models in production. [0] https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
  - senordevnyc 1y ago
    Honestly though, hundreds of billions of tokens per week really isn't that much. My tiny little profitable SaaS business that can't even support my family yet is doing 10-20 billion tokens per month on Gemini Flash 2.5.
    - deaux 1y ago
      Looks like over the last month just Deepseek, Qwen and Z-AI did about 2.8 trillion tokens, given your metric the equivalent to about 187 tiny little profitable SaaS businesses, and that's only those who go through OpenRouter. To me that's very significant. Also, congrats on the traction ! Being profitable enough to support a family is 95% area-CoL and family size so not sure about that one, but if you're doing that many tokens you've clearly got a good number of active users. We're at a similar point but only 100-200 million tokens per month, strictly B2C app though so that might explain it, tends to be less token heavy. 2.5 Flash is still fantastic especially if you're really input heavy, we use it too for many things, but we've found several open weights models to have better price/quality for certain tasks. It's nice that 2.5 Flash is fast but then speed is most important for longer outputs and for those Flash is relatively expensive. DeepSeek v3.1 is all-around cheaper, for one example.

xg15 1y ago

s/AGI/the arrival of the Messias/

CrimsonRain 1y ago

What happens if someone else achieves AGI first? The way they wrote it, seems like they are damn sure they are the ones who will achieve AGI. A bit too egoistic...?

lateforwork 1y ago

After 2032 Microsoft will no longer have access to ChatGPT, they will have to build their own frontier model in 7 years. Can Mustafa deliver that? When Zuckerberg is sucking up all talent with $100M+ salaries?

mgh2 1y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXJsS6NCm_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXJsS6NCm_o

newusertoday 1y ago

openai's AGI would be like FSD of tesla.

alwahi 1y ago
hey sama has trained under the best of charlatans...

sroussey 1y ago

I want to setup a dev devcontainer where inside I can call ‘supabase start’ and use docker outside of docker. GPT5 was not helpful. AGI should be able to handle things not well expressed in the training data. We are a long ways away.

wahnfrieden 1y ago
Was that with Codex iterating autonomously? Or a one shot.
- sroussey 1y ago
  Iterating. Claude didn’t do any better.

doodlebugging 1y ago

I'm patiently waiting for all this AI/AGI bullshit to unwind. Some of my "investment" type newsletters have been alerting that the AI endgame is imminent and the bubble is ready to pop. I guess the big money people grifted all they can grift on this round and are ready to pull the rug from everyone who has just learned to spell AI.

butler533 1y ago

Why do none of OpenAI announcements have an author attributed to them? Are people that ashamed of working there, they don't even want to attach their name to the work? I guess I would be, too.

notatoad 1y ago
because they're corporate PR statements drafted by a team, and corporate press releases don't normally have an author byline
- testfrequency 1y ago
  Eh, not really. There’s usually a “voice” behind it. In general I feel like OAI is clown town to work at these days, so they probably don’t want anyone except leadership to take the heat for ~anything
- butler533 1y ago
  Wrong https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ https://blog.google/ https://blog.google/ Lol, even Apple has authors listed https://www.apple.com/newsroom/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/

atbvu 1y ago

Every time they bring up AGI, it feels more like a business strategy to me. It helps them attract investors and dominate the public narrative. For OpenAI, AGI is both a vision and a moat.

enricotal 1y ago

“OpenAI is now able to release open-weight models that meet requisite capability criteria.” Was Microsoft the blocker before? prior agreements clearly made true open-weights awkward-to-impossible without Microsoft’s sign-off. Microsoft had (a) an exclusive license to GPT-3’s underlying tech back in 2020 (i.e., access to the model/code beyond the public API), and (b) later, broad IP rights + API exclusivity on OpenAI models. If you’re contractually giving one partner IP rights and API exclusivity, shipping weights openly would undercut those rights. Today’s language looks like a carve-out to permit some open-weight releases as long as they’re below certain capability thresholds. A few other notable tweaks in the new deal that help explain the change: - AGI claims get verified by an independent panel (not just OpenAI declaring it). - Microsoft keeps model/product IP rights through 2032, but OpenAI can now jointly develop with third parties, serve some things off non-Azure clouds, and—critically—release certain open-weights. Those are all signs of loosened exclusivity. My read: previously, the partnership structure (not just “Microsoft saying no”) effectively precluded open-weight releases; the updated agreement explicitly allows them within safety/capability guardrails. Expect any “open-weight” drops to be intentionally scoped—useful, but a notch below their frontier closed models.

agentcoops 1y ago
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI has done the math and determined that even releasing frontier quality models wouldn't put much of a dent in either their B2B or B2C businesses. Or, rather, that any such dent would be vastly overshadowed by the value of fending off potential competitors. I haven't looked too much into Deepseek's actual business, but at least Mistral seemed to be positioning themselves as a professional services shop to integrate their own open-weight models, compliant with EU regulations etc, at a huge premium. Any firm that has the SOA open model could do the same and cannibalize OpenAI's B2B business---perhaps even eventually pivoting into B2C---especially if regulations, downtime or security issues make firms more cloud-skeptical with respect to AI. As long as OpenAI can establish and hold the lead for best open-weight/on-premise model, it will be hard for anyone to justify premium pricing so as to generate sufficient cash flow from training their own models. I can even imagine OpenAI eventually deciding that B2C is so much more valuable to them than B2B that it's worth completely sinking the latter market...

richard_todd 1y ago

As a 1980's adventure game fan, I can only hope that whatever comes after AGI is called SCI. Maybe it could be "Soul-Crushing Intelligence". Once we don't need people to make stuff anymore, we need to re-do society so people can get access to all the stuff that's being made. I doubt we do a very good job of that. But otherwise, there's no point in making anything. I guess if we are lucky, the AI overlords will keep us high on soma and let the population naturally decline until we are gone.

Ylpertnodi 1y ago
Soma? A 'smartphone' will do it.

nalinidash 1y ago

Shows how much they valued 'AGI' wrt how we valued it in the textbook. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

mannanj 1y ago

So they specifically did compromise the public mission of generating ai for the common good and now common good is defined as “$100b in profits” what a sham and scam “open”AI company

djha-skin 1y ago

In short: Microsoft changed our business so that we can be for-profit, and asserted its rights over IP so that the whole OpenAI rebellion thing that happened earlier can't happen again.

agnosticmantis 1y ago

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. So OpenAI will declare AGI as soon as ChatGPT is a better AI lawyer than any Microsoft could hire.

bongodongobob 1y ago

I don't understand what MS is doing. The only AI available at work is M365 Copilot. It's absolutely terrible. Tiny context window, super guardrailed, can barely handle a 100 line PowerShell script. It's so so bad. I don't get it.

drusepth 1y ago

It seems really weird to me that such granular intercorporate details are made publicly available (in a blog post?). I've never had to publicly state things like this when making corporate partnerships. That makes me wonder how much of this post is crafted solely for PR...

ethbr1 1y ago
I believe MS declares Q1 earnings today, and there had been some rumblings that they were risking accounting / reporting liability by failing to characterize their material OpenAI stake. What probably happened: 1. MS's accountants raised a warning 2. Existing agreement prohibited disclosure of terms 3. MS told OpenAI that wasn't acceptable and MS needed to publicly report details today 4. OpenAI coordinated release of this, to spin the narrative
- a_victorp 1y ago
  It's always the earnings reports!

spumpydump 1y ago

A tangent, but it feels more and more like the AGI maximalists of 2025 are by and large the NFT maximalists from 2022 (who in turn were the NoCode maximalists of 2020) that are looking for the next metaphorical penny stock to sell. That logical fallacy of, “I spent a week teaching myself this topic and now I’m ready to talk about it like an expert.”