By joining Microsoft, they retain access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI. They don't have to start from scratch and ramp up. They can start up right where they left off.
What makes you think it wouldn't change after Sam and Greg join the team? AFAIK the reason Microsoft scaled down their research division (including GPUs) was because they were no where close to OpenAI despite years of investment.
This is like a spacecraft research nonprofit working on faster than light travel promising Boeing 100% of the rights to any of their technology that's sub-light speed. I give even odds that they'll never achieve "AGI," or when it happens it'll be an incremental gain made by simply wiring existing technologies together that'll be obvious to any engineer competent in the field and thus easily duplicated.
The OpenAI nonprofit board does, AIUI. That means OpenAI can, in theory, cut off everything from this day forward (by declaring GPT-5 or whatever as "AGI"), but they can't cut off access to GPT-4.
Your comment got me thinking, it's not just all the current access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI, it's also everything that will come out of OpenAI in the future.
Remember, Microsoft has an exclusive license to all models that come out of OpenAI until they reach the pre-agreed income threshold, which given the current trajectory of OpenAI, will not happen anytime soon.
I wouldn't put it past them. There's never in history been as large and as wilful destruction of value as what we saw this weekend. The lawsuits will be fascinating.
Does the Microsoft deal let Microsoft continue training from e.g. the GPT-4 weights?
I guess at least it gives them access to the OpenAI models to use internally, which they kinda need as their ways of working (Greg especially) will be highly dependent on having them now.
