>- Microsoft strengthened its power despite not appearing involved in the drama
Depending on what you mean by "the drama", Microsoft was very clearly involved. They don't appear to have been in the loop prior to Altman's firing, but they literally offered jobs to everyone who left in solidarity with same. Do we really think things like that were not intended to change people's minds?
I’d go further than just saying “they were involved” —- by offering jobs to everyone who wanted to come with Altman, they were effectively offering to acquire OpenAI, which is worth ~$100B, for (checks notes) zero dollars.
+ according to the rumors on Bloomberg.com / CNBC:
The investment is refundable and has high priority: Microsoft has a priority to receive 75% of the profit generated until the 10B USD have been paid back
+ (checks notes) in addition (!) OpenAI has to spend back the money in Microsoft Cloud Services (where Microsoft takes a cut as well).
If the existing packages are worth more than MSFT pay AI researchers (they are, by a lot) then it’s not acquiring OAI for $0. Plausibly it could cost in the $B to buy put every single equity holder, at a $80B+ valuation.
That's a good callout. I was reading over it and confused who this person was and why they were summarizing but yeah they might've just told ChatGPT to summarize the events of what happened.
>but they literally offered jobs to everyone who left in solidarity with same
Offering people jobs is neither illegal nor immoral, no? And wasn't HN also firmly on the side of abolishing non-competes and non-soliciting from employment contracts to facilitate freedom of employment movement and increase industry wages in the process?
Well then, there's your freedom of employment in action. Why be unhappy about it? I don't get it.
I'm pretty sure there's a middle ground between recruiters for Microsoft should be banned from approaching other companies' staff to fill roles and Microsoft should be able to dictate decisions made by other companies' boards by publicly announcing that unless they change track it will attempt to hire every single one of their employees to newly created roles.
Funnily enough a bit like there's a middle ground between Microsoft should not be allowed to create browsers or have license agreements and Microsoft should be allowed to dictate bundling decisions made by hardware vendors to control access to the Internet
It's not freedom of employment when funnily enough those jobs aren't actually available to any AI researchers not working for an organisation Microsoft is trying to control.
Depending on what you mean by "the drama", Microsoft was very clearly involved. They don't appear to have been in the loop prior to Altman's firing, but they literally offered jobs to everyone who left in solidarity with same. Do we really think things like that were not intended to change people's minds?