After more than a year of increasingly bitter relations, the one-time bromance between Microsoft and OpenAI is all over except for the shouting — the companies have agreed to a vague framework for their impending divorce.
Who got the better of the deal? To find out, we need to revisit the history of their partnership, then examine the possible terms of the breakup.
The Microsoft-OpenAI relationship soured largely thanks to what in the tech world takes the place of the language of love — money. Starting in 2019, Microsoft began showering the startup OpenAI with $13 billion in investments. In return, Microsoft got a piece of the company, though details about how much were never clear. Microsoft was also given the exclusive right to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT in whatever way it wanted. That allowed Microsoft to quickly jumpstart its generative AI (genAI) offerings by using it as the brains for its genAI-based Copilot tool.
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