Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding deal to restructure their partnership, paving the way for OpenAI to shift into a conventional for-profit model and potentially go public. Reuters reports: Details on the new commercial arrangements were not disclosed, but the companies said they were working to finalize terms of a definitive agreement. [...] Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and another $10 billion at the beginning of 2023. Under their previous agreement, Microsoft had exclusive rights to sell OpenAI's software tools through its Azure cloud computing platform and had preferred access to the startup's technology.

Microsoft was once designated as OpenAI's sole compute provider, though it lessened its grip this year to allow OpenAI to pursue its own data center project, Stargate, including signing $300 billion worth of long-term contracts with Oracle, as well as another cloud deal with Google. As OpenAI's revenue grows into the billions, it is seeking a more conventional corporate structure and partnerships with additional cloud providers to expand sales and secure the computing capacity needed to meet demand. Microsoft, meanwhile, wants continued access to OpenAI's technology even if OpenAI declares its models have reached humanlike intelligence - a milestone that would end the current partnership under existing terms.

OpenAI said under current terms, its nonprofit arm will receive more than $100 billion -- about 20% of the $500 billion valuation it is seeking in private markets -- making it one of the most well-funded nonprofits, according to a memo from Bret Taylor, chairman of OpenAI's current nonprofit board. The companies did not disclose how much of OpenAI Microsoft will own, nor whether Microsoft will retain exclusive access to OpenAI's latest models and technology. Regulatory hurdles remain for OpenAI, as attorneys general in California and Delaware need to approve OpenAI's new structure. The company hopes to complete the conversion by year's end, or risk losing billions in funding tied to that timeline.

Amid yesterday's news of Oracle's soaring stock, which propelled founder Larry Ellison to the top of the world's richest list, the Wall Street Journal reported that the cloud giant and OpenAI have struck one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed. Under the deal, OpenAI will purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from Oracle over roughly five years, with purchases beginning in 2027.

"This move away from Microsoft was timed with OpenAI's involvement with the Stargate Project, in which OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle have committed to invest $500 billion into domestic data center projects over the next four years," notes TechCrunch.

OpenAI also recently signed a cloud deal with Google. "The deal ... underscores the fact that the two are willing to overlook heavy competition between them to meet the massive computing demands," wrote analyst in Reuter's report.

Oracle shares had their best day since 1992, skyrocketing 36% and adding $244 billion in market value as surging AI-driven cloud demand pushed the company toward a $1 trillion valuation. The surge boosted founder Larry Ellison's fortune by $100 billion, making him the new world's wealthiest person. CNBC reports: The company said Tuesday after the bell that it has $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, up 359% from a year earlier. "This is a very historic kind of print right here from Oracle with this backlog," Ben Reitzes, technology research head at Melius Research, told CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" on Tuesday. "The Street was looking for about $180 billion in RPO and they're talking about a number that is a multiple of that. That is astounding."

Oracle now sees $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2026, with the company calling for the annual sum to reach $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Other analysts were left "blown away" and "in shock." D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria called it "absolutely staggering on CNBC's "Fast Money." Wells Fargo analysts said it was a "momentous confirmation" of the AI trade.

Oracle's cloud revenue projections overshadowed an otherwise lackluster fiscal first-quarter report in which the company missed expectations on the top and bottom lines. The company had earnings of an adjusted $1.47 per share for the quarter, just below the $1.48 per share expected by analysts polled by LSEG. Revenue for the first quarter came in at $14.93 billion, missing the $15.04 billion expected.

An Associated Press investigation based on tens of thousands of leaked documents revealed Tuesday that American technology companies designed and built core components of China's surveillance apparatus over the past 25 years, selling billions of dollars in equipment to Chinese police and government agencies despite warnings about human rights abuses.

IBM partnered with Chinese defense contractor Huadi in 2009 to develop predictive policing systems for the "Golden Shield" project, AP reports, citing classified government blueprints. The technology enabled mass detentions in Xinjiang, where administrators assigned 100-point risk scores to Uyghurs with deductions for growing beards or being aged 15-55. Dell promoted a laptop with "all-race recognition" capabilities on its WeChat account in 2019. Thermo Fisher Scientific marketed DNA kits as "designed" for ethnic minorities including Uyghurs and Tibetans until August 2024.

Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, and VMware sold geographic mapping software, facial recognition systems, and cloud infrastructure to Chinese police through the 2010s. The surveillance network tracks "key persons" whose movements are restricted and monitored, with one estimate suggesting 55,000 to 110,000 people were placed under residential surveillance in the past decade. China now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of the world combined.

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB).

And this week Asay contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital work — CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance — that grassroots volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a grand scale.
Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute.

This isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution," showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point: Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits.

If you care about outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter is not.
There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield resources that community projects can't match."

Asay closes by urging readers to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from brittle infrastructure — cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers — will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.

Last month, Python "reached the highest ranking a programming language ever had in the TIOBE index," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen.

"We thought Python couldn't grow any further, but AI code assistants let Python take yet another step forward." According to recent studies of Stanford University (Yegor Denisov-Blanch), AI code assistants such as Microsoft Copilot, Cursor or Google Gemini Code Assist are 20% more effective if used for popular programming languages. The reason for this is obvious: there is more code for these languages available to train the underlying models. This trend is visible in the TIOBE index as well, where we see a consolidation of languages at the top. Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no AI assistance is available? This is the modern way of saying that you don't want to learn a new language that is hardly documented and/or has too few libraries that can help you.
TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" attempts to calculate the popularity of languages using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. It nows gives Python a 26.14% rating, which TechRepublic notes "is well ahead of the next two programming languages on this month's leaderboard: C++ is at 9.18% and C is 9.03%." But the first top six languages haven't changed since last year...

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript

Since August of 2024 SQL has dropped from its #7 rank down to #12 (meaning Visual Basic and Go each rise up one rank from their position a year ago, into the #7 and #8 positions).

In the last year Perl has risen from the #25 position to #9, beating out Delphi/Oracle Pascal at #10, and Fortran at #11 (last year's #10). TIOBE CEO Jansen "told TechRepublic in an email that many people were asking why Perl was becoming more popular, but he didn't have a definitive answer. He said he double-checked the underlying data and found the increase to be accurate, though the reason for the shift remains unclear."

The Pentagon is poised to cancel two nearly finished Navy and Air Force HR software projects worth over $800 million so new contracts can be awarded to other vendors, including Salesforce, Palantir, and Workday. "The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over," reports Reuters. From the report: In 2019, Accenture said it had won a contract to expand an HR platform to modernize the payroll, absence management, and other HR functions for the Air Force with Oracle software. The project, which includes other vendors and was later expanded to include Space Force, grew to cost $368 million and was scheduled for its first deployment this summer at the Air Force Academy. An April "status update" on the project conducted by the Air Force and obtained by Reuters described the project as "on track," with initial deployment scheduled for June, noting that it would end up saving the Air Force $39 million annually by allowing it to stop using an older system. But on May 30, Darlene Costello, then-Acting assistant Secretary of the Air Force, sent out a memo placing a "strategic pause" on the project for ninety days and calling for the study of alternate technical solutions, according to a copy of the memo seen by Reuters that was previously unreported. Costello, who has since retired, was reacting to pressure from other Air Force officials who wanted to steer a new HR project to SalesForce and Palantir, three sources said. [...] The Air Force said in a statement that it "is committed to reforming acquisition practices, assessing the acquisition workforce, and identifying opportunities to improve major defense acquisition programs."

Space Force, which operates within the Air Force, was set to receive the Air Force's new payroll system in the coming months. But it is also pulling out of the project because officials there want to launch yet another HR platform project to be led by Workday, according to three people familiar with the matter. The service put out a small business tender on May 7 for firms to research HR platform alternatives, with the goal of selecting a company that will recommend Workday as the best option, the people said. Now the Air Force and Space Force "want to start over with vendors that do not meet their requirements, leading to significant duplication and massive costs," said John Weiler, director of the Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council, a government-chartered nonprofit group that makes recommendations to improve federal IT contracting.

In 2022, the Honolulu-based Nakupuna Companies took over a 2019 project with other firms to integrate the Navy's payroll and personnel systems into one platform using Oracle software and known as "NP2". The project, which has cost about $425 million since 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office, was set to be rolled out earlier this year after receiving a positive review by independent reviewer and consulting firm Guidehouse in January, according to a copy obtained by Reuters. But the head of Navy's human resources, now retired Admiral Rick Cheeseman, sought to cancel the project according to a June 5 memo seen by Reuters, directing another official to "take appropriate contractual actions" to cancel the project. Navy leaders instead mandated yet another assessment of project, according to a memo seen by Reuters, leaving it in limbo, two sources said.

Cheeseman's reason for trying to kill the project was his anger over a decision by DOGE earlier this year to cancel a $171 million contract for data services provider Pantheon Data that essentially duplicated parts of the HR project. In an email obtained by Reuters, he threatened to withhold funding from the Nakupuna-led project unless the Pantheon contract was restored. "I am beyond exasperated with how this happened," Cheeseman wrote in a May 7 email to Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun about the contract cancellation, arguing the Pantheon contract was not "duplicative of any effort." "From where I sit, I'm content taking every dime away from NP2 in order to continue this effort," he added in the email. The pausing of NP2 was "unexpected, especially given that multiple comprehensive reviews validated the technical solution as the fastest and most affordable approach," Nakupuna said in a statement, adding it was disappointed by the change because the project was ready to deploy. The Navy said it "continues to prioritize essential personnel resources in support of efforts to strengthen military readiness through fiscal responsibility and departmental efficiency."

Cisco has donated its AGNTCY initiative to the Linux Foundation, aiming to create an open-standard "Internet of Agents" to allow AI agents from different vendors to collaborate seamlessly. The project is backed by tech giants like Google Cloud, Dell, Oracle and Red Hat. "Without such an interoperable standard, companies have been rushing to build specialized AI agents," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "These work in isolated silos that cannot work and play well with each other. This, in turn, makes them less useful for customers than they could be." From the report: AGNTCY was first open-sourced by Cisco in March 2025 and has since attracted support from over 75 companies. By moving it under the Linux Foundation's neutral governance, the hope is that everyone else will jump on the AGNTCY bandwagon, thus making it an industry-wide standard. The Linux Foundation has a long history of providing common ground for what otherwise might be contentious technology battles. The project provides a complete framework to solve the core challenges of multi-agent collaboration:

- Agent Discovery: An Open Agent Schema Framework (OASF) acts like a "DNS for agents," allowing them to find and understand the capabilities of others.
- Agent Identity: A system for cryptographically verifiable identities ensures agents can prove who they are and perform authorized actions securely across different vendors and organizations.
- Agent Messaging: A protocol named Secure Low-latency Interactive Messaging (SLIM) is designed for the complex, multi-modal communication patterns of agents, with built-in support for human-in-the-loop interaction and quantum-safe security.
- Agent Observability: A specialized monitoring framework provides visibility into complex, multi-agent workflows, which is crucial for debugging probabilistic AI systems.

You may well ask, aren't there other emerging AI agency standards? You're right. There are. These include the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, which was also recently contributed to the Linux Foundation, and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). AGNTCY will help agents using these protocols discover each other and communicate securely. In more detail, it looks like this: AGNTCY enables interoperability and collaboration in three primary ways:

- Discovery: Agents using the A2A protocol and servers using MCP can be listed and found through AGNTCY's directories. This enables different agents to discover each other and understand their functions.
- Messaging: A2A and MCP communications can be transported over SLIM, AGNTCY's messaging protocol designed for secure and efficient agent interaction.
- Observability: The interactions between these different agents and protocols can be monitored using AGNTCY's observability software development kits (SDKs), which increase transparency and help with debugging complex workflows You can view AGNTCY's code and documentary on GitHub.

Microsoft used China-based engineering teams to maintain cloud computing systems for multiple federal departments including Justice, Treasury, and Commerce, extending the practice beyond the Defense Department that the company announced last week it would discontinue. The work occurred within Microsoft's Government Community Cloud, which handles sensitive but unclassified federal information and has been used by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division for criminal and civil investigations, as well as parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education.

Microsoft employed "digital escorts" -- U.S.-based personnel who supervised the foreign engineers -- similar to the arrangement it used for Pentagon systems. Following ProPublica's reporting, Microsoft issued a statement indicating it would take "similar steps for all our government customers who use Government Community Cloud to further ensure the security of their data." Competing cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle told ProPublica they do not use China-based support for federal contracts.

The $500 billion Stargate AI project announced by SoftBank and OpenAI at the White House six months ago has failed to complete a single data center deal and sharply scaled back its near-term plans. The venture, which originally pledged to invest $100 billion "immediately," now aims to build one small data center by year-end, likely in Ohio, according to WSJ. SoftBank and OpenAI have disagreed over crucial partnership terms, including site locations.

OpenAI has proceeded independently, signing a deal with Oracle worth more than $30 billion annually starting within three years. That agreement totals 4.5 gigawatts of capacity and would consume power equivalent to more than two Hoover Dams. Combined with a smaller CoreWeave deal, OpenAI has secured nearly as much data center capacity as Stargate promised for this year. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI earlier this year as part of the infrastructure partnership plans.

OpenAI has added Google Cloud as a provider for ChatGPT and its API, expanding beyond Microsoft to address growing demand for computing power. CNBC reports: OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle. The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon's and Microsoft's. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives. The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.

A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73% have been audited in the last three years. From a report: At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor's development and runtime environments.

Oracle introduced a paid subscription for Java in September 2018, and in January 2023, it decided to switch its pricing model to per employee rather than per user, creating a steep price hike for many users. In July 2023, Gartner recorded users experiencing price increases of between two and five times when they switched to the new licensing model.

Two years later, the survey conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research showed only 14% of Oracle Java users intended to stick with the vendor's subscription model.

Oracle has signed a landmark $30 billion annual cloud deal -- nearly triple the size of its current cloud infrastructure business -- with revenue expected to begin in fiscal year 2028. The deal was disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday without the customer being named. Bloomberg reports: "Oracle is off to a strong start" in its fiscal year 2026, Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said in the filing. The company has signed "multiple large cloud services agreements," she said, adding that revenue from Oracle's namesake database that runs on other clouds continues to grow more than 100%.

The $30-billion deal ranks among the largest cloud contracts on record. That revenue alone would represent nearly three times the size of Oracle's current infrastructure business, which totaled $10.3 billion over the past four quarters. A major cloud contract awarded in 2022 from the US Defense Department, that runs through 2028 and could be worth as much as $9 billion, is split among four companies, including Oracle. That award was a shift after an earlier contract worth $10 billion was awarded to Microsoft and was contested in court.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son is envisaging setting up a $1 trillion industrial complex in Arizona that will build robots and artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Son is seeking to team up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co for the project, which is aimed at bringing back high-end tech manufacturing to the U.S. and to create a version of China's vast manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, the report said.

SoftBank officials have spoken with U.S. federal and state government officials to discuss possible tax breaks for companies building factories or otherwise investing in the industrial park, including talks with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the report said. SoftBank is keen to have TSMC involved in the project, codenamed Project Crystal Land, but it is not clear in what capacity, the report said. It is also not clear the Taiwanese company would be interested, it said. TSMC is already building chipmaking factories in the U.S. with a planned investment of $165 billion. Son is also sounding out interest among tech companies including Samsung Electronics, the report said.

The plans are preliminary and feasibility depends on support from the Trump administration and state officials, it said. A commitment of $1 trillion would be double that of the $500 billion "Stargate" project which seeks to build out data centre capacity across the U.S., with funding from SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.

President Trump will extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by another 90 days, marking the third extension since taking office. The extension aims to prevent a TikTok ban while negotiations with potential buyers like Oracle and Project Liberty continue. CNBC reports: "President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure."

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok's U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump's second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark. Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the notice said.

The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

"For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Negotiations are under way between the UAE and OpenAI that may make the company's ChatGPT Plus artificial intelligence chatbot available to all residents free of charge, though a final deal has not been reached.

An agreement involving ChatGPT Plus would be part of the recently announced Stargate UAE infrastructure plan to create an AI hub in Abu Dhabi, according to a source familiar with the country's AI strategy. Abu Dhabi's AI company G42 has partnered with OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia to set up Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt computing cluster that will operate in the newly established 5GW UAE -- US AI Campus.

Richard Speed writes via The Register: It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere -- and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++. Originally called "Oak," Java was designed in the early 1990s by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Initially aimed at digital devices, its focus soon shifted to another platform that was pretty new at the time -- the World Wide Web.

The language, which has some similarities to C and C++, usually compiles to a bytecode that can, in theory, run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The intention was to allow programmers to Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) although subtle differences in JVM implementations meant that dream didn't always play out in reality. This reporter once worked with a witty colleague who described the system as Write Once Test Everywhere, as yet another unexpected wrinkle in a JVM caused their application to behave unpredictably. However, the language soon became wildly popular, rapidly becoming the backbone of many enterprises. [...]

However, the platform's ubiquity has meant that alternatives exist to Oracle Java, and the language's popularity is undiminished by so-called "predatory licensing tactics." Over 30 years, Java has moved from an upstart new language to something enterprises have come to depend on. Yes, it may not have the shiny baubles demanded by the AI applications of today, but it continues to be the foundation for much of today's modern software development. A thriving ecosystem and a vast community of enthusiasts mean that Java remains more than relevant as it heads into its fourth decade.

OpenAI is currently in "a tough negotiation" with Microsoft, the Financial Times reports, citing "one person close to OpenAI."

On the road to building artificial general intelligence, OpenAI hopes to unlock new funding (and launch a future IPO), according to the article, which says both sides are at work "rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation...."

Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to protect its access to OpenAI's cutting-edge AI models... [Microsoft] is a key holdout to the $260bn start-up's plans to undergo a corporate restructuring that moves the group further away from its roots as a non-profit with a mission to develop AI to "benefit humanity". A critical issue in the deliberations is how much equity in the restructured group Microsoft will receive in exchange for the more than $13bn it has invested in OpenAI to date.

According to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations, the pair are also revising the terms of a wider contract, first drafted when Microsoft first invested $1bn into OpenAI in 2019. The contract currently runs to 2030 and covers what access Microsoft has to OpenAI's intellectual property such as models and products, as well as a revenue share from product sales. Three people with direct knowledge of the talks said Microsoft is offering to give up some of its equity stake in OpenAI's new for-profit business in exchange for accessing new technology developed beyond the 2030 cut off...

Industry insiders said a failure of OpenAI's new plan to make its business arm a public benefits corporation could prove a critical blow. That would hit OpenAI's ability to raise more cash, achieve a future float, and obtain the financial resources to take on Big Tech rivals such as Google. That has left OpenAI's future at the mercy of investors, such as Microsoft, who want to ensure they gain the benefit of its enormous growth, said Dorothy Lund, professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Lund says OpenAI's need for investors' money means they "need to keep them happy." But there also appears to be tension from how OpenAI competes with Microsoft (like targeting its potential enterprise customers with AI products). And the article notes that OpenAI also turned to Oracle (and SoftBank) for its massive AI infrastructure project Stargate. One senior Microsoft employee complained that OpenAI "says to Microsoft, 'give us money and compute and stay out of the way: be happy to be on the ride with us'. So naturally this leads to tensions. To be honest, that is a bad partner attitude, it shows arrogance."

The article's conclusion? Negotiating new deal is "critical to OpenAI's restructuring efforts and could dictate the future of a company..."

The Open Document Format reached its 20th anniversary on May 1, marking two decades since OASIS approved the XML-based standard originally developed by Sun Microsystems from StarOffice code. Even as the format has seen adoption by several governments including the UK, India, and Brazil, plus organizations like NATO, Microsoft Office's proprietary formats remain the de facto standard.

Microsoft countered ODF by developing Office Open XML, eventually getting it standardized through Ecma International. "ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech," said Eliane Domingos, Chair of the Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice -- a fork created after Oracle acquired Sun.