🌎 In this week’s edition of As the AI World Turns, we find Microsoft wrapping its tentacles around another AI startup, this time essentially squeezing the life out of it.
Yes, Microsoft is now the proud owner of most of the staff from Inflection, including its co-founders (one of which previously founded DeepMind).
And, yes, that’s the same Inflection that raised $1.3B from investors nary 8 months ago, Microsoft among them. (Did you know Will.i.am invested during their first round of funding? I had missed that fun fact and stumbled upon it while doing some research this week.)
And, yes, I just used the word ‘nary’ which is apparently so old that Google Docs marked it as an error and I had to ping Perplexity - not ChatGPT, because it could lie - to make sure I wasn’t making it up.
But I digress.
Back to Microsoft.
And back to its CEO Satya Nadella, specifically.
Because in another epic display of strategic genius (and audacity?) he seems to have commissioned some smart corporate lawyers to draft up a purchase in a way that makes it look, well, not like a purchase (at least in the eyes of the law 😬).
In this highly atypical deal, Microsoft is entering into a $650M “licensing agreement” with the remains of Inflection for its technology, a sum The Information reported could soon be flipped to investors to help make them whole.
Regulators are certainly sniffing around this deal as well as Microsoft’s “investments” into OpenAI and Mistral.
But so far, the octopus, aka Eye of Sauron, wins.
He has rendered me speechless, hence, no word bubbles in this week's comic.
Comments