This is what's so brilliant about the Microsoft "partnership". OpenAI gets the Microsoft enterprise legitimacy, meanwhile Microsoft can build interfaces on top of ChatGPT that they can swap out later for whatever they want when it suits them
I think this is good for Microsoft, but less good for OpenAI.
Microsoft owns the customer relationship, owns the product experience, and in many ways owns the productionisation of a model into a useful feature. They also happen to own the datacenter side as well.
Because Microsoft is the whole wrapper around OpenAI, they can also negotiate. If they think they can get a better price from Anthropic, Google (in theory), or their own internally created models, then they can pressure OpenAI to reduce prices.
OpenAI doesn't get Microsoft's enterprise legitimacy, Microsoft keep that. OpenAI just gets preferential treatment as a supplier.
On the way up the hype curve it's the folks selling shovels that make all the money, but in a market of mature productionisation at scale, it's those closest to customers who make the money.
$10B of compute credits on a capped profit deal that they can break as soon as they get AGI (i.e. the $10T invention) seems pretty favorable to OpenAI.
danpalmer|1 year ago
Microsoft owns the customer relationship, owns the product experience, and in many ways owns the productionisation of a model into a useful feature. They also happen to own the datacenter side as well.
Because Microsoft is the whole wrapper around OpenAI, they can also negotiate. If they think they can get a better price from Anthropic, Google (in theory), or their own internally created models, then they can pressure OpenAI to reduce prices.
OpenAI doesn't get Microsoft's enterprise legitimacy, Microsoft keep that. OpenAI just gets preferential treatment as a supplier.
On the way up the hype curve it's the folks selling shovels that make all the money, but in a market of mature productionisation at scale, it's those closest to customers who make the money.
theptip|1 year ago