The employees haven't left yet. Business continuity is easier to achieve if the employment arrangements don't have to change.
MSFT don't have OpenAI's IP. They have an exclusive right to some of it, but there's presumably a bunch that's not accessible to them. Again, business continuity is easier if they can just grab all of that and keep everything running as normal.
You could say that if you "believed" you could build it from scratch. It doesn't mean they actually own the existing IP although rubes thinking about buying MSFT may think so.
It appears they have an exclusive, irrevocable license to the existing IP. They have the GPT-4 weights, and the legal right to use them however they see fit. That's the deal with the devil OpenAI made.
> It appears they have an exclusive, irrevocable license to the existing IP.
Appears from what? I've seen this stated several times, usually citing nothing and occasionally citing a Nadella statement from which it would be a very tenuous inference.
The right to continue innovation doesn’t mean they have perpetual rights to the underlying IP. For example, they may be able to use it for a limited period, or for certain purposes.
But Satya made it crystal clear that in the event that OpenAI stopped all development tomorrow, Microsoft would be able to pick up from where they stopped. That requires full access to all of the IP.
Whether it's perpetual is irrelevant because at the point at which Microsoft pulled the trigger it would effectively be like a fork. Any IP from that point is new and owned by Microsoft.
