Microsoft, like all public companies, has to file all kinds of reports to comply with all sorts of laws and report to all kinds of entities.

The vast majority of it is industry-standard bulls**t, written in legalese, but if you read between the lines, you can sometimes detect a real sardonic tone.

In one of the latest reports, an SEC filing, Microsoft described OpenAI, which has received billions of dollars of funding from Microsoft as both a 'strategic partner' and 'competition'.

Now, that's odd.

You would assume that one think would automatically exclude the other but, clearly, that's not the case.

In the filing, Microsoft apparently mentioned the word 'partner' over 70 times, and it included OpenAI in the list of companies with which Microsoft has 'strategic partnerships'.

But in different sections of the same filing, Microsoft also described OpenAI as its rival.

This is hardly surprising, and it is further proof that corporate English combined with legalese creates a whole new language no really understands.

The image for this story was created using Perplexity