Microsoft's billion for OpenAI
Microsoft invested a billion dollars and became OpenAI's exclusive compute provider in exchange for commercialisation rights.
Why it matters
A frontier laboratory stopped being independent: model scale now required capital only a handful of companies have.
This is the moment the bet on scale acquired a financial form. The computation to train a GPT-3-class model cost tens of millions of dollars, beyond any non-profit structure. The consequence runs wider than one deal: frontier research moved to companies, and reproducing a result at a university became impossible.