>The startup, growing frustrated with its partner, has discussed making antitrust complaints to regulators
Ratting MSFT out to the government doesn't seem like the move of someone with a strong hand.
mrandish 11 hours ago [-]
That sentence made me assume OpenAI leaked this story to WSJ as a negotiating tactic. You're right that leaking this indicates OpenAI's position is weak. The threat to make an antitrust complaint is also strange since 'going nuclear' like that probably wouldn't help OpenAI soon enough to matter. Antitrust action isn't fast. So all it would do is potentially hurt MSFT and prove OpenAI is a risky partner willing to torch one of their largest partner/investors.
nmfisher 10 hours ago [-]
If I see any story about OpenAI, I assume it's an intentional 'leak'. I know all companies spend money on paid PR but OpenAI (and Sam Altman) take it to a completely different level.
benced 13 hours ago [-]
Disagree. This is a natural consequence of government anti-trust becoming less principled (what I mean by that is that the consumer welfare standard is somewhat objective even if you feel it's suboptimal). It's easier for companies to lobby and try and influence the process, particularly when less principled folks are in office.
alexdoesstuff 13 hours ago [-]
The $13bn investment in 2023 was so clearly structured to skirt antitrust concerns that it's unsurprising that that avenue is discussed.
Since then, MSFT has made other regulatory-aggressive investments, and the recent Meta / Scale AI is similarly aggressively designed.
heymijo 13 hours ago [-]
Ah, this sheds light on the silence around the Windsurf acquisition:
OpenAI and Microsoft are at a standoff over the terms of the startup’s $3 billion acquisition of the coding startup Windsurf, the people said. Microsoft currently has access to all of OpenAI’s IP, according to their agreement. It offers its own AI coding product, GitHub Copilot, that competes with OpenAI. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.
aleph_minus_one 12 hours ago [-]
> Microsoft currently has access to all of OpenAI’s IP, according to their agreement. [...] OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.
Why does OpenAI then buy Windsurf if such an agreement is in place?
_--__--__ 12 hours ago [-]
I can't tell if that line came from the unnamed sources or is just the journalist's understanding, but it seems pretty clear to me that OpenAI did not spend $3B for the source code of an IDE. They wanted the employees and customers to kickstart a shift to an enterprise product focus, which doesn't sit well with MSFT (who entered into a partnership with what they believed was a research lab that would supply things they could upsell in github and office365).
frosting1337 12 hours ago [-]
One theory is it's Sam Altman's way of wresting control away from the non-profit through diluting the shares.
It's not like he hasn't done such things before.
browningstreet 11 hours ago [-]
Sama seems disinclined to follow the straight and true. Apparently he can’t get what he wants without re-routing his partner’s buy-in buttons. Could he have founded OpenAI without all this drama? Was there no way to raise the money he needs without all the smoke and mirrors?
I’m a fan of the ChatGPT product but he feels like a David Mamet creation.
ivape 12 hours ago [-]
One way or another an AI company needs to offer coding tools, so something like this was going to happen no matter what.
__loam 10 hours ago [-]
The business leadership at OpenAI seems fantastically naive
kweingar 9 hours ago [-]
Antitrust is the zeitgeist, but it seems that among tech companies, OpenAI is the least interested in competing on the merits.
First they said it was in everyone's interest for them to be released from their nonprofit obligations. Then they argued that AI needed to be regulated—just enough to deter new competition, but not so much that it could affect OAI's plans in any way. Now they want to be released from the Microsoft deal.
Usually with anticompetitive practices you think about abuse of market power. But OpenAI's mindset seems to be that any impediment to them dominating AI is a societal problem that the government needs to fix for them. It's remarkable.
> OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.
Didn't Sam Altman essentially ask the government to abolish intellectual property?
bitpush 12 hours ago [-]
One thing we should all realize is there isnt any principled position in most of these things. If anything, the guiding principle is "does it make money for me" or even "will this make me stronger?"
kazinator 11 hours ago [-]
> there isnt any principled position in most of these things.
There is specific class of grossly unprincipled positions in these things which consists of superpositions: one principle for me, another one for others.
PeterStuer 3 hours ago [-]
Only for himself, not for the rest of us.
bagacrap 10 hours ago [-]
OpenAI keeps positioning itself as a scrappy little innovator, and anything that makes it harder for them to become the next trillion dollar company is anti-competitive. But the amount of funding they've received in proportion to their revenue is truly astounding. If anything is anti-competitive, it's that Softbank, MS, and others have poured billions into this one company in hopes of burying the chances of other startups. If the feds should do anything (which I doubt), it's to ban further investment in OpenAI.
redwood 13 hours ago [-]
Imagine if OpenAI weren't locked into Azure's stack.
A lot of people seem to think multi-cloud is an unrealistic dream. But using best in class primitives that are available in each cloud is not an unreasonable thing to do.
neilv 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, and OpenAI has enough financial resources to do a bespoke abstraction layer with multiple provider-specific performant implementations.
Regardless of whether they bring in the Kubernetes complexity.
(Internal codename: Goober Yetis.)
piva00 4 hours ago [-]
Why would they create a bespoke abstraction layer instead of just relying on k8s?
There is only pain on the path of recreating it, it will end up almost as complex as k8s and it will be hell to hire and train for. Best to just use something battle-tested that works with a large pool of people trained for it, even better: their own LLM has gobbled up all the content possible about k8s to help their engineers. K8s complexity came to be for reasons discovered during growing the stack which anyone doing a bespoke similar system might run into, and it's pretty modular since you can pick-and-choose the parts you actually need for your cluster.
Wasting manpower to recreate a bespoke Kubernetes doesn't sound great for a company burning billions per quarter, it's just more waste.
All organizations that are reasonably large and for which cloud costs is a large portion of expenses have an abstraction layer to switch between providers. Otherwise it’s impossible to negotiate better deals, you can’t play multiple cloud providers against each other for a better rate.
bionhoward 13 hours ago [-]
imagine these companies making antitrust complaints against one another while both companies have explicitly anticompetitive legal terms that mean users can’t fine tune ai on data they “own”
kmeisthax 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
16 hours ago [-]
neepi 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
labrador 12 hours ago [-]
When did our industry not behave this way? In the 80's IBM was the predator, in the 90's it was Microsoft. It's actually refreshing to have 4 or 5 major players vying for dominance. Last century, it was 1 major player against the rest of us.
labrador 10 hours ago [-]
It the 70's it was AT&T (Ma Bell) against the rest of us
voidhorse 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah. The software industry very quickly forgot what made it hyper successful in the first place: developing solutions that people actually wanted and that made their lives more convenient. You didn't have to advertise too much since these products naturally go viral because, surprise surprise, when you make something good people let other people know how good it is.
Now the industry has been reduced to desperately trying to brute force crap that nobody wants.
aleph_minus_one 12 hours ago [-]
> You didn't have to advertise too much since these products naturally go viral
Are you really sure about this? ;-)
davesque 12 hours ago [-]
Lol, yep. Very honest and relatable take, actually.
rawgabbit 15 hours ago [-]
Open AI and Microsoft now offer competing tools.
Microsoft wants access to all of Open AI's intellectual property; this partnership won't end well.
Ratting MSFT out to the government doesn't seem like the move of someone with a strong hand.
Since then, MSFT has made other regulatory-aggressive investments, and the recent Meta / Scale AI is similarly aggressively designed.
OpenAI and Microsoft are at a standoff over the terms of the startup’s $3 billion acquisition of the coding startup Windsurf, the people said. Microsoft currently has access to all of OpenAI’s IP, according to their agreement. It offers its own AI coding product, GitHub Copilot, that competes with OpenAI. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.
Why does OpenAI then buy Windsurf if such an agreement is in place?
It's not like he hasn't done such things before.
I’m a fan of the ChatGPT product but he feels like a David Mamet creation.
First they said it was in everyone's interest for them to be released from their nonprofit obligations. Then they argued that AI needed to be regulated—just enough to deter new competition, but not so much that it could affect OAI's plans in any way. Now they want to be released from the Microsoft deal.
Usually with anticompetitive practices you think about abuse of market power. But OpenAI's mindset seems to be that any impediment to them dominating AI is a societal problem that the government needs to fix for them. It's remarkable.
IIRC when Microsoft invested in OpenAI, it was supposed to use Azure only.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-is-renting-gpu-power...
Didn't Sam Altman essentially ask the government to abolish intellectual property?
There is specific class of grossly unprincipled positions in these things which consists of superpositions: one principle for me, another one for others.
A lot of people seem to think multi-cloud is an unrealistic dream. But using best in class primitives that are available in each cloud is not an unreasonable thing to do.
Regardless of whether they bring in the Kubernetes complexity.
(Internal codename: Goober Yetis.)
There is only pain on the path of recreating it, it will end up almost as complex as k8s and it will be hell to hire and train for. Best to just use something battle-tested that works with a large pool of people trained for it, even better: their own LLM has gobbled up all the content possible about k8s to help their engineers. K8s complexity came to be for reasons discovered during growing the stack which anyone doing a bespoke similar system might run into, and it's pretty modular since you can pick-and-choose the parts you actually need for your cluster.
Wasting manpower to recreate a bespoke Kubernetes doesn't sound great for a company burning billions per quarter, it's just more waste.
Now the industry has been reduced to desperately trying to brute force crap that nobody wants.
Are you really sure about this? ;-)
Microsoft wants access to all of Open AI's intellectual property; this partnership won't end well.