I see we got bored of this.
Just a little tidbit I heard, well enough sourced, thought some of you might enjoy it.
Remember the big story about Microsoft buying Open AI, who are responsible for Chat GPT? Well, it sounded like a good move to me, although, whilst they are currently gaining users quite strongly, and Google are suffering, I think they should be aiming a lot higher than 15% growth in users for Bing.
But the goss is this. The move was quite controversial, as Open AI had, as their name may suggests, been a non-profit organisation. Even if they aren't "open" to any useful extent (they don't release the vital components of the software at all).
Being non-profit, they were relying nearly entirely on donations.
Elon gave them $100m. When they released Chat GPT 3.5 a few months ago, it caused a huge fuss, and users flocked to the service. Elon must have thought his ship had come in. The money was running out really quickly, as they had to hire buildings full of servers so people like me could try out their product. Elon had predicted this, and said they could come back for another BILLION.
Now, Elon is not giving away a billion dollars to anyone. There's little doubt, he was looking to leverage their need for cash, and turn it into control and equity.
But then MS swooped in and trumped him. They could immediately provide the servers to Open AI, so cash was not an issue. Further, they agreed to pay a big old price to purchase the organisation, and get the chance to revamp their entire software lineup with the first generation of user friendly AI tools. They also have loads of experience in tailoring solutions for outside companies, and today we've seen the first batch of web commerce sites annoucing GPT powered functions on their sites.
It's classic Microsoft, the big swoop, timed to perfection. Elon cannot be sicker. He has absolutely no chance of getting his hands on the big prize, the mass market AI search / browser. He can hope Microsoft will sell it to him for use in Tesla's but that is not what he wanted, for sure.
Now it looks like Elon wants that 100m back. And today, Sam Altman (Open AI's key figure) is in the press saying he never took equity in the organisation, which - if true, and true of the rest of the board - means Elon is facing an uphill struggle to get a cent back. He faces a fairly strong possibility of ending up having shelled out $100m to develop Microsoft's killer app for them, getting no return whatsoever.
