After all, that was what he said in September. With top talent now jumping ship, OpenAI’s future is way less certain than it was.
What next for Microsoft?
The tech giant, and its CEO Satya Nadella, appear to have emerged from the crisis because the winners. With Altman, Brockman, and sure many more top people from OpenAI joining its ranks—and even nearly all of the corporate, if today’s open letter from 500 OpenAI employees is to be believed—Microsoft has managed to pay attention its power in AI further. The corporate has essentially the most to achieve from embedding generative AI into its less sexy but very profitable productivity and developer tools.
The massive query stays how mandatory Microsoft will deem its expensive partnership with OpenAI to create cutting-edge tech in the primary place. In a post on X announcing how “extremely excited” he was to have hired Altman and Brockman, Nadella said his company stays “committed” to OpenAI and its product road map.
But let’s be real. In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review, Nadella called the 2 corporations “codependent.” “They rely upon us to construct the perfect systems; we rely upon them to construct the perfect models, and we go to market together,” Nadella told our editor in chief, Mat Honan, last week. If OpenAI’s leadership roulette and talent exodus slows down its product pipeline, or results in AI models less impressive than those it could actually construct itself, Microsoft may have zero problems ditching the startup.
What next for AI?
No person outside the inner circle of Sutskever and the OpenAI board saw this coming—not Microsoft, not other investors, not the tech community as an entire. It has rocked the industry, says Amir Ghavi, a lawyer on the firm Fried Frank, which represents a lot of generative AI corporations, including Stability AI: “As a friend within the industry said, ‘I definitely didn’t have this on my bingo card.’”
It stays to be seen whether Altman and Brockman make something latest at Microsoft or leave to begin a latest company themselves down the road. The pair are two of the best-connected people in VC funding circles, and Altman, especially, is seen by many as among the finest CEOs within the industry. They’ll have big names with deep pockets lining as much as support whatever they need to do next. Who the cash comes from could shape the longer term of AI. Ghavi suggests that potential backers might be anyone from Mohammed bin Salman to Jeff Bezos.