Posted by helsinkiandrew 1 day ago
https://openai.com/index/next-phase-of-microsoft-partnership...
Microsoft Corp. will no longer pay revenue to OpenAI and said its partnership with the leading artificial intelligence firm will not be exclusive going forward.
That might help fix some of the bugs in Teams... :)
Bear in mind that MSFT have rights to OpenAI IP (as well as owning ~30% of them). The only reason they were giving revenue share was in return for exclusivity.
If they wanted named exclusivity rather than general exclusivity, we would charge a somewhat smaller amount for each competitor they wanted exclusivity from. They could give up exclusivity at any time.
That was precisely how we structured our deal with Azure, back in 2014-2016 or so.
> Starting April 20, 2026, new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, and student plans are temporarily paused.
From: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/billing-...
I think this is good for OpenAI. They're no longer stuck with just Microsoft. It was an advantage that Anthropic can work with anyone they like but OpenAI couldn't.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deepseek-r1-is-now-av...
AFAICT they are just hedging their bets left and right still. Also feels like they are winning in the sense that despite pretty much all those products being roughly equivalent... they are still running on their cloud, Azure. So even though they seem unable to capture IP anymore, they are still managing to get paid for managing the infrastructure.
We have no idea what it means to be the "primary cloud provider" and have the products made available "first on Azure". Does MSFT have new models exclusively for days, weeks, months, or years?
Both facts and more details from the agreement are quite frankly highly relevant to judge whether this is a net positive, negative or neutral for MSFT. It's unbelievable that the SEC doesn't force MSFT to publish at least an economic summary of the deal.
> And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it’s true, that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And OpenAI’s new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for their capped return and said “bye” and went back to running OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign, carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity’s problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And capitalism came to an end.
3 years ago a Foundation model seemed like a feature of a hyper scaler, now hyper scalers look like part of the supply chain.