More than 100 customers are considering switching to Anthropic, Microsoft and Google

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1. Competitors are looking for opportunities to take advantage of OpenAI's upheaval to entice their customers to switch to the portal.

2. Morgan Stanley, a major customer of OpenAI, is always exploring ways to reduce its dependence on the company's technology.

3. Microsoft is trying to convince OpenAI customers to switch to Azure.

Tencent Technology News reported on November 21 that on Monday, local time in the United States, after board member and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever expressed regret for participating in the firing of CEO Sam Altman, people have more and more questions about the future of OpenAI. At the same time, OpenAI's customers are looking for exit opportunities, which indicates a possible outflow of the company's business, which in turn will lead to OpenAI's decline.

Over the weekend, more than 100 OpenAI customers contacted OpenAI's rival Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent months, the startup has raised billions of dollars from Amazon and Google. At the same time, others reached out to Google Cloud and Cohere, another competitor to OpenAI. In addition, many OpenAI customers are also considering turning to Microsoft's Azure service, which provides copies of OpenAI models and other models.

However, according to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI investors are still hopeful that Altman will eventually return to OpenAI.

Flagship customers have long had "different hearts"

Even before Altman was fired, OpenAI's flagship customer Morgan Stanley planned to move more AI software to Microsoft's Azure cloud, which hosts OpenAI's ChatGPT, a person familiar with the matter, said. Morgan Stanley also maintained regular contact with Anthropic until Altman was ousted, according to two sources with knowledge of the company's thinking.

OpenAI's ongoing crisis has put more pressure on the Wall Street company to keep it open to other AI service providers, people familiar with the matter said. Morgan Stanley is one of OpenAI's earliest and most important enterprise customers, and this relationship was mainly built by Altman.

Just as customers are considering switching to other services, OpenAI's workforce is in a state of panic. Most of OpenAI's more than 700 employees signed a letter on Monday, including Sutzcaifer, senior product owner Mira Murati and co-founder John Schulman. The letter threatens that if the board of directors does not reinstate Altman, they will resign and join Microsoft.

Many companies in technology, finance, and other industries tied their AI product roadmaps to OpenAI's technology vision, so when the startup's leadership crisis erupted, they were deeply uneasy. According to people familiar with the matter, many are particularly concerned that OpenAI's board of directors does not seem to care about the startup's commercial interests, including those of its customers or shareholders, and is more concerned with the nonprofit mission of prioritizing "technological security" rather than advancing rapid technological advancements.

While some OpenAI customers have been in talks with other AI startups before, recent discussions have focused on Altman's dismissal and the potential impact that could have on their business. Financial companies are particularly concerned about the potential to hurt their business if Altman is ousted over possible data privacy concerns, according to people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft, which has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI in exchange for using its technology, will be the main beneficiary of this turmoil. Microsoft is already selling copies of the OpenAI model on its Azure cloud service, a product that competes directly with OpenAI. Microsoft salespeople have been trying to convince OpenAI's existing customers to switch to Azure products in recent months, citing more security and compliance guarantees, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is reported that Morgan Stanley signed an agreement with Microsoft last month to use its Azure OpenAI service. Morgan Stanley's partnership with OpenAI dates back to 2021, when OpenAI began building a customized copy of its GPT-4 model, which was trained on Morgan Stanley's proprietary market intelligence data to create specialized chatbots that could quickly answer money managers' questions with factual information about the market. OpenAI has previously cited Morgan Stanley as a prime example of its success, showing how its technology can help a large, established company run its business.

Competitors look for opportunities

At a time when OpenAI is undergoing upheaval, its competitors are looking for ways to reap the benefits. Last Friday afternoon, when OpenAI announced the firing of Altman, employees at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Anthropic began discussing how to win the business of OpenAI's largest customer. Anthropic previously received billions of dollars in investment from AWS.

AWS has set up a dedicated team to work with Anthropic and respond to inquiries from OpenAI customers. Over the weekend, AWS and Anthropic discussed how to market their services to OpenAI's customers, including Snap, Morgan Stanley and Wall Street trading firm Jane Street. At least one AWS salesperson suggested that the companies were pressuring OpenAI customers to act quickly. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and Amazon did not immediately comment.

Smaller OpenAI customers are also starting to look for other options. Rabi Gupta, CEO and co-founder of EvaBot, a San Francisco-based sales AI startup, is testing new AI tools with OpenAI on behalf of major clients, including companies with multibillion-dollar revenues. He has already started exploring alternatives and will begin to diversify beyond the platform.

"We were very anxious and not sure what was going to happen," Gupta said. The company has reached out to Anthropic to request access and plans to experiment with open-source models such as Google Bard and Meta's Llama 2. The entrepreneur uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to analyze unstructured data, such as research reports and earnings call transcripts, looking for information to improve the effectiveness of his sales prospect forecasts.

OpenAI's upheaval has prompted Gupta to rethink the way he builds his business, including not relying on a single technology platform. "Previously, it wasn't our top priority," he said. Our whole idea is to get revenue, get customers, and then focus on training our own large language models]. But now, training our own large language models is becoming a priority. ”

Waseem Daher, the chief executive of Pilot, another customer bookkeeping startup, said over the weekend that there were long-standing questions about the impact of Altman and Brockman (OpenAI's co-founder, former president and chairman) leaving OpenAI, but that it had not yet had an immediate impact on his business. Pilot uses OpenAI technology to help clients with accounting and financial statements.

"It's dramatic and it's having a real impact," Dach said. However, the drama of the incident is the dominant factor at the moment. From a practical impact perspective, its application programming interface remains accessible. (Text/Golden Deer)