I don't see the point of anyone acquiring OpenAI - especially not Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, X.ai, all of which have developed the same tech themselves. The real assets are the people, who are leaving ship and potentially hireable. With this much turmoil, its hard to imagine we've seen the last of the high level exits.
Of the companies you've listed, Microsoft's AI products that are actually useful are all based on GPT-4, and the rest of them don't have any models that are truly on par with it.
o1 seems to be a step ahead for certain applications, but before that it seems that Claude Sonnet 3.5 was widely seen as the best model, and no doubt we'll be seeing next models from Anthropic shortly.
For corporate use cost/benefit is a big factor, not necessarily what narrow benchmarks your expensive top model can eke out a win on.
Claude was not the best model for reasoning even vs 4o, and it's quite visible once you start giving it more complex logical puzzles. People seem to like it more mostly because the way it speaks is less forced and robotic, and it's better at creative writing usually, but if you need actual _intelligence_, GPT is still quite a bit ahead of everybody else.
Now I don't think that it's because OpenAI has some kind of secret sauce. It rather seems that it's mostly due to their first mover advantage and access to immense hardware resources thanks to their Microsoft partnership. Nevertheless, whatever the reason their models are superior, that superiority is quantifiable in money.
