They don’t need to start over. Have you been following the open source model progression the last 5-6 months? Those LLMs have made crazy progress in such a short span of time. They can easily take one of those existing models and improve upon them or at least borrow as much as needed. And I also find it hard to believe that Microsoft hasn’t been secretly developing their own model(s) at all.

I agree that losing their original egg is definitely a setback, but for all we know this fresh start with Microsoft may allow them to try some new and better ideas they couldn’t afford to do at ChatGPT due to the sunk investment costs they had in their original tool.

Anywho, time will tell!