Microsoft is also a very large investor in OpenAI and a recent investor in Mistral, another LLM startup. The “$650 million” license fee is essentially a way to circumvent the growing hostility in Washington DC towards “big tech” companies buying “startups.” *This isn’t technically an acquisition, but it is a good way to get all its benefits.* If the DoJ had any real desire to do something meaningful, it would go after Microsoft. Otherwise, we are going to see this innovative technique become very common in Silicon Valley. Smaller public companies have been using this structure regularly for their “acquisitions”.
Om Malik in Microsoft’s Brazen AI Inflection