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.

Just a few days ago, news came that OpenAI is tapping Google Cloud for access to more compute resources: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/openai-taps...

IIRC when Microsoft invested in OpenAI, it was supposed to use Azure only.

>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.

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.

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”

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.

> 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?

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.

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.