Normally, I'd say that probably they hold a lot of power in their agreements. But in this case? Sure, they've been providing hosting and resources, but I'm sure there are at least 5 other companies that could and would provide the same if they had the opportunity, just to be associated with OpenAI.

Don’t underestimate the length of time and magnitude of investment from MSFT. They spent years solving the technical problems that arise when trying to train these models. They are currently the only corporation who knows how to host OpenAI-scale training. They are literally building data centers for OpenAI according to OpenAI’s whims. This is not an insurmountable lead but it could take years for others to catch up, or a dramatic change in GPU hardware/transformer architecture. They laid off 10s of thousands to “pay” for all of this (not in terms of dollars necessarily but in terms of messaging and public strategy).

They get to pretend to have huge cloud usage - a huge chunk Azure comes from OpenAI - which they count as another massive gain in a different division in the company.

Their stock is probably up $250B because of this investment...

The idea they're getting screwed is interesting.

Microsoft is a lot of things - stupid and incompetent are neither of those things.

They want to have their cake and eat it, too.