As OpenAI's largest investor, with a 49 percent stake, Microsoft had hoped to repair the situation – after all, it has plowed more than $10 billion into the compute-hungry lab, and injected the upstart's family of content-generating, conversation-driven neural networks into all corners of the MSFT empire, from Azure and Bing to Windows and GitHub, under the Copilot brand.

We can't imagine Redmond being left totally high and dry if OpenAI imploded, though it's obvious the tech giant needs the lab's whiz-kids to continue their research and development work one way or another, and that Microsoft would like some stability brought to this cluster-fsck.

The mega-corp had to do something – and it managed to revive its stock, and even pushed it higher, by having CEO Satya Nadella boast on Monday that Altman and Brockman will join the enterprise IT giant to lead an AI research arm (and presumably keep that GPT tech flowing into Microsoft 365 etc.)

The OpenAI board made CTO Mira Murati interim CEO, and after she reportedly indicated her support for Altman to return, the directors on Sunday instead installed former Twitch boss Emmett Shear as chief exec.

Because who will Microsoft favor: an external business that may hold back on releasing state-of-the-art technology over safety concerns, or an internal team that promises to be bolder and faster in its execution to unleash more powerful models?

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