Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Microsoft’s big AI push is all about acquiring talent, avoiding antitrust | TechCrunch Minute”.
We have to talk about Microsoft and AI because the company is Wheeling and dealing and looking to ensure that it doesn’t miss the AI wave like a dead mobile. Do you remember zoom and Windows, Vista and the era when Microsoft was more a technology punchline than Leading Light? Well, how the times have changed today, Microsoft is known in part for its Mega deal with open AI that bought it 49 % of the company’s for-profit business. Now why didn’t Microsoft just buy the whole thing? A couple of reasons One open AI may not have sold, and two Microsoft may not have been willing to pay the Takeover premium that it needed. However, there’s more than just money of foot when it comes to Microsoft and different AI projects, there’s also the Spectre of antitrust. Now Microsoft bought as much of open ai’s for-profit arm as it could without actually taking ownership and open AI, probably liked that setup, because it kept them in control, but it also worked really well for Microsoft. Why? Well, there’s far far far less regulatory oversight of minority Investments than takeovers, if Microsoft had wanted to buy open, AI Regulators from around the world might have called foul so buying, as much of it could without engendering that risk well sounds like the better move and all That brings us to the most recent news this week, Microsoft hired the two principles from a startup called inflection AI, which it had previously invested in now. As part of this deal, other folks from inflection are heading over to Microsoft. So here we have a startup that maybe didn’t work out quite as expected, shedding staff to a major company. What’S the big deal well, traditionally, if you want to buy a founding team and most of a company’s staff, you have to acquire the company outright.
So that way, its shareholders can make at least some of their money back, but not in this case now. Why well antitrust again so Microsoft didn’t buy the company and is instead setting up a new org inside of itself for its new staff and having one of inflections former bosses leaded for Microsoft. This is a coup. It gets the people it wanted, including a former founder over at deepmind, and Regulators don’t get mad, at least in theory, we’ll have to see now elsewhere. In the realm of Microsoft and AI, open ai’s, GPT 5 model, the latest and greatest from the company. We all know is reported to be prepping for a summer era launch, that’s not that far away, and I wonder which company is going to be all over it. Could it be Microsoft, probably, and as one last data point here, Microsoft is holding a big surface. Hardware event today, which is expected to have a you guessed it AI Focus, .
