Good morning. Two big M&A-flavored stories dominate today: Microsoft and OpenAI have torn up the AGI clause and ended their exclusive arrangement, and China yanked Meta’s $2B Manus deal off the table — possibly with founders’ families as leverage. Meanwhile, Musk v. Altman finally goes before a jury, and a DeepMind veteran is raising a billion dollars to build AI without any human data at all.
The Microsoft–OpenAI divorce, sort of. Microsoft is giving up its exclusive right to resell OpenAI models in exchange for no longer paying revenue share, per Bloomberg, freeing OpenAI to pursue cloud deals with AWS and Google. The Verge reports the famous AGI clause is dead too, replaced with revenue-share payments capped through 2030 regardless of any technological milestone. TechCrunch adds that OpenAI committed to $250B in Azure purchases and “primary cloud partner” status, which resolves the legal overhang on its $50B Amazon deal.
Why Microsoft folded. The HN discussion is unkind to Satya Nadella, with several commenters noting Microsoft’s effective stake has reportedly slid from 49% to around 2% and asking why the early leverage evaporated. One former corporate restructuring lawyer called the friendly tone of the announcement a tell for “the cash strapped scramble of the end days.” Another commenter flagged that Google may be the real winner: every frontier lab except OpenAI already runs on TPUs, and with the Gen 8 TPU shipping, OpenAI may finally take a look. A separate observer noticed the press release was rewritten mid-day to drop the AGI language and frame things as “simplification.”
China blocks Meta’s Manus acquisition. China’s NDRC ordered Meta and Manus to unwind their roughly $2B deal, CNBC reports, in what looks like a direct strike against the “Singapore-washing” route Chinese-founded startups have used to escape Beijing’s reach. TechCrunch notes about 100 Manus employees have already been absorbed into Meta’s Singapore offices, and the CEO and Chief Scientist are reportedly under exit bans on the mainland. One HN commenter laid out the mechanics bluntly: the founders moved company, IP, and researchers to Singapore, but their wives and parents stayed behind — which is why they came back when summoned. The r/LocalLLaMA thread is mostly amused that Zuckerberg may have been saved from overpaying $2B for what one commenter called a wrapper that “doesn’t even work that well.”
Musk v. Altman goes to trial. Jury selection in Musk’s suit against OpenAI began April 27 in Northern California, with MIT Tech Review noting Musk is seeking $134B in damages and the removal of Altman and Brockman, alleging he was deceived about OpenAI’s nonprofit status when he donated $38M pre-2018. The Verge reports Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers refused to strike jurors who admitted disliking Musk, observing dryly that “many people don’t like him” but Americans can still be impartial. Witness list includes Altman, Brockman, Sutskever, Murati, and Nadella — a rare on-the-record airing of OpenAI’s internal history right as the IPO looms.
David Silver raises $1.1B for human-data-free AI. AlphaZero co-creator David Silver has left DeepMind to start Ineffable Intelligence at a $5.1B valuation, TechCrunch reports, with the goal of building agents that learn purely through reinforcement learning on self-generated experience. Silver is reportedly pledging any personal profits to charity, and pitching the work in Darwin-scale terms. The HN reaction was mostly about the funding climate: at this point a $1B seed for “anything with a hint of AI legitimacy” barely registers as unusual.
A 13B language model that thinks it’s 1930. Talkie is a 13B parameter model trained only on pre-1931 text, co-authored by GPT pioneer Alec Radford, intended both as a novelty and a research tool for measuring how surprised a model is by post-training-cutoff history. The HN thread is full of charming outputs: it predicts India in 2026 will still be a federation under British suzerainty with Calcutta as the capital, and that humans will reach the moon “in six [days]” by some unspecified rapid means. Several commenters note the knowledge skews closer to 1900 than 1930 — it knows Edison and WWI exists if asked, but talks about European politics as if the war hadn’t happened and seems unaware of the Great Depression entirely.
That’s the morning. The Musk trial alone could fill a week of headlines once witnesses start testifying, and we’ll be watching whether Manus’s founders make it back to Singapore.