I've been thinking more recently, do you think that an OpenAi-Apple merger will happen this cycle as it did with AOL-TimeWarner in the past? The thought being that an aging gatekeeper attempts to merge with an up-and-coming company when they feel it's too late to be relevant only for there to be another paradigm shift that obsoletes that decision. Though that is very much speculation.
That would be wild: a cash furnace merges with a pile of cash. I had forgotten just how late in the dot-com bubble AOL/TW happened. I think it's far more likely that Microsoft lets OpenAI hang, then pillages the corpse, while Apple goes on to boringly make giant piles of money from hardware.
MS was sizing them up a short time ago, I would imagine it'd be something strange like laying everyone off then hiring them again, or moving the IP to a child corporation Firefox-style
I actually think it's smart of Apple to play it safe, considering all the hype and insanity around LLM's. Also, OpenAI's valuation is not grounded in actual revenue so I doubt it's a good deal to buy them right now. Don't they have something like >400 P/E?
