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Greetings. I'm Ed Zitron and this is your weekly Better Offline monologue.

Better Offline.

Earlier this week, a story came out in the Wall Street Journal that tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft are, and I quote, reaching a boiling point.

Why? Well, let's give you some background. As Open AI tries to convert part of itself into a for-profit entity, all very annoying, but it would still be controlled by the non-profit board.

It faces one big obstacle. It's deal with Microsoft.

Back in 2019, Microsoft invested a billion dollars into OpenAI,

and as part of that deal, OpenAI agreed to let Microsoft have full access and rights to its pre-AGI intellectual property,

which means all of their intellectual property,

along with their research and the exclusive right to sell OpenAI's models to their customers.

Microsoft also, as a result of the deal, owns 49% of the future profits of OpenAI,

and offers, or offered, it's unclear how these terms are these days,

discounted rates on Azure for OpenAI, Microsoft's

cloud compute service, so OpenAI would pay less than other customers to host their services.

I should also be clear that this deal means that Microsoft has almost complete control over

OpenAI's future, and without their blessing, OpenAI cannot complete its conversion to a for-profit entity.

In the event that that conversion fails, SoftBank is able to pay the size of their investment

in Open AI down to a mere $20 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, as opposed to the

$40 billion that Open AI, well, needs. In simpler terms, OpenAI has got $10 billion so far from SoftBank, and if they don't become a

for-profit entity by the end of 2025, they only get another $10 billion rather than the $30 billion

...