Second, I meant the OpenAI that signed the initial agreement with Microsoft years ago already had ample resources and funding. In those negotiations, OpenAI would have had little incentive to hand over all their IP regardless of the offer on hand.
Also, it’s standard in many contracts that you can’t actively poach a partner’s employees. That doesn’t mean that if the employees actively reach out to you, you can’t hire them. I saw that at AWS.
If they had so much funding why were they willing to give up 49% of the company to Microsoft? Does that read like a company that could be picky?
OpenAI gave up 49% equity because they thought Microsoft gave a fair valuation and terms, among other possible reasons. OpenAI wanted to scale up their LLM research so they signed the agreement. I don't think OpenAI negotiated from a position of weakness.
And if you think a migration at that scale is “easy” you haven’t been involved with mass migrations. Besides, Microsoft’s enterprise customers aren’t going to jump ship to another cloud provider and follow OpenAI.
Before I was giving anecdotes from n-6 job working at a startup and my n-3 job when I was on the other side of the table as a vendor’s largest customer.
This part of knowing how the cloud industry and migrations work comes from my n-1 job working in the Professional Services Department at AWS when I was involved with large migrations and saw how sticky enterprises were when it came to dealing with Microsoft.
And what does OpenAI have to offer another company with Microsoft already having 49% equity?