OpenAI wants to eat Microsoft’s toast with its own GitHub

The relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft has gone through better times. And when their technological alliance began, it was one of the first examples that indicated to us that all this AI was going to last for a long time. And here we find ourselves, in a much more delicate and powerful panorama in equal measure. However, now this alliance is going through one of its most tense moments, and the culprit has names and surnames: OpenAI would be developing its own code hosting platform, rivaling GitHub, which belongs to Microsoft. We tell you all the details.

Why does this matter? GitHub is one of Microsoft’s crown jewels in the technology ecosystem. If OpenAI continues with this project, it would be attacking one of the most strategic businesses of its main partner and investor, the same company that has injected billions of dollars in its growth since 2019. And over the last two years, their relationship has gone from being symbiotic to being, on certain fronts, directly competitive.

What exactly happened. According to account The Information, several OpenAI engineers would have been fed up with the constant GitHub service outages in recent months. So they decided to consider building their own alternative. As the medium shares, the project is still in the initial phase, so it could take months to see the light (if it ever does), but the medium assures that the possibility of selling it as a product to OpenAI clients is already being considered. At the moment no company has confirmed or denied it.

Renegotiations. The crazy idea of ​​​​building your own GitHub arrives in full renegotiation of the terms of that same alliance that they forged a few years ago, a process that, according to the Wall Street Journalhas become extremely tense. As the media reports, OpenAI wants to reduce dependence on Microsoft in computing and distribution, and is also trying close the acquisition of Windsurfthe AI ​​startup from which Google also got involved to keep a good part of the talent.

The problem: Microsoft has access to all of OpenAI’s intellectual property under the current agreement, and OpenAI doesn’t want that to include the purchase of Windsurf. Microsoft, for its part, offers its own AI programming tool, GitHub Copilotwhich competes directly with what OpenAI is trying to build.

Media fight. According to the WSJseveral OpenAI executives have gone so far as to internally debate what they describe as a “nuclear option”: publicly accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior and seeking a federal regulatory review of the contract. That is, take the fight to the legal and media arena. That this possibility is on the table says a lot about the level to which the conflict has reached.

Both companies have also been fighting for some time over the percentage of participation that Microsoft would have in the new for-profit entity which OpenAI wants to become. OpenAI has until the end of the year to complete that transformation or lose $20 billion in funding it had committed to.

How we got here. Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019 with 1 billion dollars. In exchange, it gained the exclusive right to sell OpenAI’s tools through its Azure cloud and preferential access to its technology. For years, it was a sweetheart deal for the two: Microsoft positioned itself as a leader in enterprise AI and OpenAI got the infrastructure and money to grow.

But now the market has changed a lot, and what was a relationship of mutual dependence has become a race in which the two compete on almost the same fronts: consumer chatbots, productivity tools with AI, solutions for companies, etc. For now, both companies maintain the official speech of optimism about their ability to continue building together. But the cracks are increasingly difficult to cover.

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