“Microsoft Is Happy Being the Co-Pilot on the OpenAI Rocket Ship: There Are Benefits and Risks to Outsourcing the Development of a Technology As Crucial As AI”, Max Chafkin, Dina Bass2023-12-01 (OA)⁠:

…Soon enough, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his deputies helped engineer a dramatic counter-coup, restoring Sam Altman to his job and securing the ouster of the board members who were least aligned with Microsoft’s interests. This move both calmed the stock market and reset the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship on terms that appear to be much friendlier to Nadella. “He was playing 3-dimensional consultative chess”, says Sheila Gulati, a longtime Microsoft manager who’s now a managing director at Tola Capital, a venture capital firm. On Nov. 29, OpenAI announced that Microsoft would join the board as a nonvoting observer.

…Altman often bragged that this board—on which Microsoft didn’t have a seat—would shut down OpenAI if its corporate expansion ever got out of hand. During an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year, he joked about “this internet meme that I carry around a button to blow explosive bolts into the data center.” The meme was false, he said, but the general sentiment behind it was true. OpenAI’s board would gladly ignore Microsoft’s wishes in a disagreement over AI safety.

…The result allows Microsoft to more or less go back to business as usual: aggressively adding AI assistants, which Microsoft calls Copilots, to all its software offerings. The effort has been so comprehensive that at times it’s taken on a comic quality. At Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Ignite, which was wrapping up as the coup started, the company unveiled something called Copilot Studio, a program that lets customers make their own AI assistants. Of course, this program comes with its own AI assistant, a Copilot Studio co-pilot.

These AI assistants don’t come cheap. Any business that wants one for Word and Excel, for example, will pay an additional $30 per user per month, roughly doubling what a typical corporate customer pays for Microsoft’s office suite. At the same time, free and open-source AI assistants are widely available. Microsoft is banking on customers being willing to pay for the productivity gains from Copilot and the convenience of having it baked into such a wide array of software.

“It’s going to show up across all your experiences”, says Rajesh Jha, the executive vice president who oversees the product teams the office suite, Windows, and search. Microsoft, he continues, wants to “be the Copilot company.” In a way, the product name is apt. Microsoft is betting its future on an uncertain technology, even though it’s not clear who—Nadella or OpenAI’s board—has the controls.