A competition lawyer's (preliminary) thoughts on the OpenAI/ Sam Altman / Microsoft saga

If this weekend you were busy doing something else and missed the #OpenAI / Sam Altman / Microsoft saga, here is a quick recap of the story.

On Friday afternoon (18 November), the Board of #OpenAI, the company that created #ChatGPT, fired Sam Altman, one of the company’s co-founders and its CEO, and Greg Brockman, the company's CTO. The reasons for this sudden sacking remained unclear.

Less than 48 hours later, word got out about a meeting between the Board and Sam Altman with the declared purpose of identifying ways to resume their cooperation. Microsoft, a major investor and a key technology partner of #OpenAI, has offered to mediate the discussions (probably using #Microsoft Teams this time). [For those unfamiliar with the matter, the latter mention is an uncalled for pun since, according to public information, the Board used #GoogleMeets to fire their CEO and CTO, which generated an abundance of ironic comments about my otherwise favorite video meetings platform, Microsoft #Teams!]

Getting back to the story, a few hours ago, before the opening of the US stock markets, the Microsoft CEO proudly announced (on that formerly glorious platform now called X) that Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and other former OpenAI employees have joined Microsoft where they will be part of the company’s AI (new) team.

Behind its nerd-drama feel, this story, especially the (current) end of it and its implications deserve some attention and not only from those identifying themselves as …techies.

I, for one, will surely keep an eye on it. Unfortunately, since in my time-zone it’s Monday afternoon, I still have a lot of work to complete (before ChatGPT or its successors get to replace all the lawyers). Therefore, I will just randomly list some keywords that, in my view, anticipate the interesting gossip-wise, legal-wise and #AI-technology wise developments we may expect in the future.

• litigation (this little story will/should give rise to a lot of litigation and to a lot of work for many lawyers);
• non-compete & confidentiality obligations;
• killer acquisition and taking critical assets off the market;
• abuse of dominance;
• bundling and tying;
• gatekeeping;
• AI and AGI. Speaking about AGI, which stands for Artificial General Intelligence, regardless of the way the concept is defined (see Wikipedia), if it doesn't make your hair stand up on the back of your neck, then you should clearly reply directly with “yes” to any verification that aims to assess if you are a robot or not and leave the images with traffic lights or stairs for the rest of us.

Most of the other words in the list are midnight reading delights for geeky competition lawyers. Stand by for more developments on these topics.

Till then, it's back to work for me!. Still Monday afternoon here :(.