You're making the assumption that the technical folks won't follow him, and that's a pretty ridiculous bet at this point unless you've got some more data you're just not sharing.
Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.
So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?
The only technically person who matters here, the one who came from deepmind and who is the worlds top AI researcher, is sure as hell not going to follow him since heβs the reason Sam is gone.
You're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about, clearly people aren't going to leave and follow Sam instead of Ilya. Nobody at all... just 550 of 700 employees, nothing to see here.
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
Out of the gate the technical folks at OA had to be perfectly fine with Microsoft as a company given they knew all of the tech they were building was going to be utilized by MS carte blanche.
So now that their OA equity is staring down the barrel of being worthless, what's stopping them from getting a potentially slightly lower but still significant payday from MS directly?