I do wonder if OpenAI is built on a house of cards. They aren’t a nonprofit, aren’t open, and stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material to get started. But, by moving fast and scaling quickly, are they at the Too Big to Fail stage already? The attempted board coup makes me think so.
When people say too big to fail, normally they're referring to companies which if they fail they would bring down other important parts of society's infrastructure (think biggest banks), and so someone (the gov) will last minute change the rules around to ensure they don't fail. The openai fails, absolutely nothing happens other than its shareholder losing their paper money. So no, they're not too big to fail.
Probably Microsoft would hire them to some AI shop, because Microsoft is the one deploying the stuff. But Microsoft has rights to use it and the code, so for them OpenAI is only a research partner.
Maybe research would get slower.