On April 29, the Wall Street Journal reported thatMicrosoftand OpenAI Despite being the 'best partners in tech', there are a number of cracks in the relationship between the two companies today.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI over the past six years, providing the latter with growth momentum and a cumulative total of more than 500 million users, while OpenAI has also provided Microsoft with top AI models, technology, and even helped triple the latter's stock price, the report noted.
But according to people familiar with the matter, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's development goals are becoming increasingly different, and the two companies are even beginning to propose certain restrictions or new research and development to reduce their dependence on each other:
On the Microsoft side, Nadella previously set his sights on Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of Google's DeepMind, and "packaged" Suleyman and his colleagues at startup Inflection with Microsoft for $650 million. Suleyman then focused on developing a large language model for Microsoft that was designed to rival OpenAI's then state-of-the-art GPT-4 model.
For its part, OpenAI has continued to restrict Microsoft's access to its models in recent years. Meanwhile OpenAI's announcement of the development of models with human-like intelligence threatened Microsoft's hold on OpenAI's power.
The report cites Microsoft's ability to block OpenAI's previously announced "reorganization into an independent, for-profit company," which would expose OpenAI to tens of billions of dollars in losses if the transition fails, but people familiar with the matter have not yet threatened OpenAI with this condition. But according to people familiar with the matter, Microsoft has not yet threatened OpenAI with such a deal, and OpenAI's board of directors may also be able to invoke a clause in the contract that would prevent Microsoft from using its state-of-the-art technology.
In the early days of their partnership, Nadella and Altman were known to message each other regularly to exchange information. Altman would even "dump" his chats with Nadella to speed things up when employees reached a stalemate, and Nadella offered to hire Altman when he was briefly kicked out of OpenAI in 2023. But nowadays, the two men message each other less and less.
Microsoft was also in talks with OpenAI about an ambitious data center project that was put on hold when Altman was briefly ousted.
In January of this year, the heads of the three giants OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announced the joint establishment of a new AI company called "Stargate". The next four years will invest 500 billion dollars, setting off a new round of AI arms race. According to reports, Microsoft's aforementioned data center project is actually very similar to Stargate.