The new models and data would stay at OpenAI. You can have thousands of researchers and compute, but if you don’t have “it”, you are behind (ask Google).
In Microsoft he still has access to the models, and that’s all he needs to execute his ideas.
> most of the current OpenAI staff would follow him
Source please? This just keeps getting repeated but there’s extremely limited public support and neither Sam’s nor the board’s decisions indicate he has a whole lot of leverage.
I think the only edge cases are for executives of companies, and even then it's pretty limited, but I imagine this could be one of the examples. IANAL though - it's just from what I've seen discussed elsewhere.