As I understand it: No. Microsoft has licensed GPT and they use that to offer it as a service via Azure. As far as I’m aware this gets you the same guarantees around tenancy and control that you’d get from any other internal Azure service.
Should anyone feel 100% comfortable betting on a company that has only been (really) commercially engaged in the last 4 years? Whose success (albeit explosive) could only be seen in the last 18 months?
If we are going to rank the concerns around openai announcements from the past 2 weeks, I'd bet the more concerning one was the initial firing decision.
I wasn't comfortable before the announcement. You can't "rely" on it. You need a fallback - either another AI, or using it in such a way that it is progressive enhancement.
Well, for starters, we all know that while realistically it's not unusual for a company to have a mission-critical person, it is very undesirable. So much so everybody must pretend that this is just unacceptable and surely isn't about their company. Here, we kinda saw the opposite being manifested. More convincingly than I've ever seen.
Second, I simply don't understand what just fucking happened. This whole story doesn't make sense to me. If I was an OpenAI employee, after receiving this nonsense "excited about the future" statement, I would feel just exhausted, and while maybe not resigning on the spot, it surely wouldn't make me more excited about continuing working there. But based on the whole "500 OpenAI employees" thing I must assume that the average sentiment in the company must be somewhat different at the moment. Maybe they even truly feel re-united. Sort of.
Obviously, I don't mean anything good be all that. What happens if Altman is hit by a bus tomorrow? Will OpenAI survive that? I don't even know what makes him special, but it seems we've just seen a most clear demonstration possible, that it wouldn't. This isn't a healthy company.
That said, all that would worry me much more, if I was an investor. In fact, I'd consider this a show-stopper. As a customer? It doesn't make me more reassured, but even if Altman is irreplaceable, I don't feel like OpenAI is irreplaceable, so as long as it doesn't just suddenly shut down — sure, why not. Well, not more comfortable, of course, but whatever.
“Investors” are supposed to consider their money a donation. Of course the 100x cap is generous so it is kinda an investment. And the coup reveals a higher chance that this will morph towards for-profit as that is where the power seems to be, let alone the money.
If you are uncomfortable with OAI you could always get the same from Azure. They're a bit behind on the latest, but they support gpt4 and function calling, which is all that really matters now, imo.
