Five charts to start your day

Last week was a turbulent one for AI. Is the future of AI a foregone conclusion?

Good morning. I hope you had a great weekend.

Last week was a turbulent one for AI. OpenAI found itself in a leadership crisis. The company’s non-profit board fired CEO Sam Altman.

Luckily, all was resolved before Thanksgiving. Sam’s back and he is still in charge. But what an earth happened? There has been a lot of head scratching, especially on the relationship that Microsoft has with OpenAI.

That's what today's first chart is all about. Microsoft has invested a whopping $13 billion into OpenAI, and yet they still remain a minority investor. They have no sway on the board, nor did they have any prior knowledge that the CEO would be fired.

As you can see below that $13 billion provided by Microsoft accounts for up to nearly half of all the investment made to date in OpenAI.

Source: Financial Times

Microsoft's role of course extended far beyond a financial backing; it was the exclusive provider of computing power for OpenAI's technologies. This collaboration has integrated OpenAI's capabilities into various Microsoft products, potentially boosting Microsoft's revenues significantly, especially through its Azure cloud services.

This was something that I hadn't fully appreciated before. Although Microsoft had no influence on the board of the company, it could at an instance pull the plug on the Microsoft infrastructure that OpenAI relies on.

Coming up:

• Nvidia biggest revenue generator is its data centres

• Argentina’s sovereign bonds have crumpled

• Amazon’s workforce is bigger than ever in the run up to Christmas

• Turkeys are twice a size than they used to be in 1929

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