They are funded mostly by Microsoft, and dependent on them for compute (which is what this funding is mostly buying), but I'd hardly characterize that as meaning they are "Microsoft in a trenchcoat". It's not normal to identify startups as being their "VC in a trenchcoat", even if they are dependent on the money for growth.
Satya Nadella during the OpenAI leadership fiasco: “We have all of the rights to continue the innovation, not just to serve the product, but we can, you know, go and just do what we were doing in partnership ourselves. And so we have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything.”
Doesn’t sound like a startup-investor relationship to me!
Sure, but that's just saying that Microsoft as investor has some rights to the underlying tech. There are limits to this though, which we may fairly soon be nearing. I believe the agreement says that Microsoft's rights to the tech (model + weights? training data? -- not sure how specific it is) end once AGI is achieved, however that is evaluated.
But again, this is not to say that OpenAI is "Microsoft in a trenchcoat". Microsoft don't have developers at OpenAI, weren't behind the tech in any way, etc. Their $10B investment bought them some short-term insurance in limited rights to the tech. It is what is is.
“We have everything” is not “some underlying rights to the tech.” I dunno what the angle is on minimizing here, but I’ll take the head of Microsoft at his word vs. more strained explanations about why this isn’t the case.
It's also explicitly mentioned in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. Much as Musk wants to claim that OpenAI is a subsidiary of Microsoft, even he has to admit that if in fact OpenAI develop AGI then Microsoft won't have any IP rights to it!
The context for Nadella's "We have everything" (without of course elaborating on what "everything" referred to) is him trying to calm investors who were just reading headlines about OpenAI imploding in reaction to the board having fired Altman, etc. Nadella wasn't lying - he was just being coy about what "everything" meant, wanting to reassure investors that their $10B investment in OpenAI had not just gone up in smoke.
OpenAI has not and will likely never develop AGI, so this is akin to saying “Microsoft doesn’t own OpenAI because they have a clause in their contract that’s says they stop owning it when leprechauns exist.” Musk is trying to argue leprechauns exist because he’s mad he got outmaneuvered by Altman, which I imagine will go as well as you’d expect that argument to go in a court of law.
