Special Report: POV Friday with Shannon Lietz - OpenAI and Microsoft: Win, Lose, or Draw?

Hi, this is Shannon Leitz from San Diego, California.

With all the brouhaha going on with Sam Altman and OpenAI, there's a lot to unpack and digest. A few things for all of us. When OpenAI, not yet a year ago, released its ChatGPT to the world, a fabulous capability if you ask me, it was pretty obvious at the time that they were chasing adoption and velocity as a brand new organization entering into the market.

I say that because most folks know that there's sort of a chase for go to market. When doing so, I don't know that anybody, maybe Sam Altman could have known, but I don't know that anybody would have predicted 100 million folks adopting ChatGPT as quickly as they did.

At the time, there was a clear understanding that resilience was sort of left behind, and the company knew about some of the errors associated with its technology and believed that it could fix it in time.

Along the way, we've also seen Microsoft throw in billions of dollars in investment and the world is actually at an awe. From my perspective, analyzing the win, lose, or draw of this situation, it's pretty clear to me that we're at a current place in time where everyone's at a draw.

What will happen to our beloved ChatGPT? How will that actually turn out in the end? And add a draw, who stands to win? Who stands to lose in this situation?

It's pretty clear that when Microsoft brought on billions of dollars of investment, and OpenAI moved to Azure to be able to support its technology, that the clear winner that's going to come out of this is going to be Microsoft in the end.

That means that who loses in this is going to be ultimately OpenAI, its workers, and it's customers. You know, yesterday, only yesterday, even just logging into ChatGPT, there was a huge outage, a spike, if you look at down detector. This tells me that resilience truly is the fuel of a durable company that underpins the technology that we all love and care about deeply.

So if you're out there and you're trying to figure out how you're going to deal with this, if your company is born on ChatGPT or OpenAI technology, it's really important to start thinking about how you're going to find a resilient, adoptable, high velocity technology with lower errors. And that ultimately, the ones that are out there right now, that are being born to compete with OpenAI, they probably have a little bit more time, as they well know.

This is Shannon Leitz, reporting on the Win, Lose, or Draw.