This should surprise no one. In March, I noted that the two companies “seem more like frenemies than BFFs.” I pointed out that Altman and OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap openly tried to woo enterprises away from Microsoft’s Copilot and toward OpenAI’s Enterprise ChatGPT. Reuters reported that Altman and Lightcap courted more than 300 corporate executives in New York, San Francisco, and London, dissing Microsoft by saying enterprises would be able to work directly with the people who built genAI technology rather than getting it second-hand from Microsoft.
Nadella had previously taken aim at OpenAI, saying, “If OpenAI disappeared tomorrow…, we have all the IP rights and all the capability. We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. We are below them, above them, around them.”
Going from bad to worse
Since then, things have only gotten worse. There are plenty of reasons they’re fighting, but the biggest reason is — you guessed it — money.