The War of the AI Roses
In the 1989 film The War of the Roses,1 a seemingly picture-perfect marriage between Oliver Rose (Michael Douglas) and Barbara Rose (Kathleen Turner) deteriorates over time to the point where disagreements turn into sabotage as neither side will agree to move out of their shared mansion. They keep living together, but it's increasingly an absurd situation. That's where my mind went when reading the latest about the drama between Microsoft and OpenAI.
Publicly, both sides continue to put out statements that everything is fine, so as to try to deflect such reporting. But they read as half-hearted attempts at best. There is just too much smoke coming out of the kitchen for there to be no source of heat.
I started writing about this friction back in March, around the Inflection acquisition hackquisition, which even back then clearly felt like a hedge of sorts – albeit an expensive one – against what had happened with the brief ouster of Sam Altman at OpenAI. By May, a tension felt palpable even to us outsiders. And a series of events in the intervening months has seemingly made things even more awkward. From boardroom drama to personnel challenges to sales rivalries to more Microsoft hedging – while that initial hedge started to produce fruits of its own...