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by ascv 939 days ago
It seemed to me the entire point of the legal structure was to raise private capital. It's a lot easier to cut a check when you might get up to 100x your principal versus just a tax write off. This culminated in the MS deal: lots of money and lots of hardware to train their models.
1 comments

What's confusing is that... open AI wouldn't ever be controlled by those that invested, and the owners (e.g., the board) aren't necessarily profit seeking. At least when you take a minority investment in a normal startup you are generally assuming that the owners are in it to have a successful business. It's just a little weird all around to me.
Microsoft get to act as a sole distributor for the enterprise. That is quite valuable. Plus they are still in at the poker table and a few raises from winning the pot (maybe they just did!) but even without this chaos they are likely setting themselves up to be the for-profit investor if it ever transitioned to that. For a small amount of money (for MS) they get a lot of upside.