Microsoft plays these games all the time. They raid startups and accumulate all the IP and talent for themselves. It often involves a leveraged buyout, but if the company has an internal fight and their darling CEO takes most of the top talent with him, and MS owns a 49% stake in the victim company in question, swooping the CEO and all the top talent is a great way to start driving the price down on any leftover IP/talent left at OpenAI they might be interested in. They just sabotage the company until it collapses then they offer a “fair price”
Basically, if you look at MS’s history with founders and startups, you’d have to be either a complete idiot, or really hurting and in a very emotional place (come on, the board stabbed him in the back and tried to get rid of him like he was an incompetent middle manager, they even tried to do it on a Friday like he was some clerk) to think Microsoft’s offer isn’t just a ploy to grab up all your IP and talent, and that once you’ve helped them get all your top researchers, you’ll have any independence or ability to do anything other than be a cog in Microsoft’s machine.
Just because Altman’s a human who is able to be manipulated by a big, evil corporation with an infamous track record for manipulating people like him doesn’t make him an “idiot,” it makes him a human being. What are you, a Vulcan?
Microsoft plays these games all the time. They raid startups and accumulate all the IP and talent for themselves. It often involves a leveraged buyout, but if the company has an internal fight and their darling CEO takes most of the top talent with him, and MS owns a 49% stake in the
victimcompany in question, swooping the CEO and all the top talent is a great way to start driving the price down on any leftover IP/talent left at OpenAI they might be interested in. They just sabotage the company until it collapses then they offer a “fair price”Basically, if you look at MS’s history with founders and startups, you’d have to be either a complete idiot, or really hurting and in a very emotional place (come on, the board stabbed him in the back and tried to get rid of him like he was an incompetent middle manager, they even tried to do it on a Friday like he was some clerk) to think Microsoft’s offer isn’t just a ploy to grab up all your IP and talent, and that once you’ve helped them get all your top researchers, you’ll have any independence or ability to do anything other than be a cog in Microsoft’s machine.
Just because Altman’s a human who is able to be manipulated by a big, evil corporation with an infamous track record for manipulating people like him doesn’t make him an “idiot,” it makes him a human being. What are you, a Vulcan?