> I am curios about how Microsoft Research team interpreted OpenAI's policy and obtained approval to release competitive models.
Microsoft has separate, privately-contracted, full access to OpenAI models, so the public ToU doesn't apply to Microsoft at all.
(There is a two-party mechanism to get around such terms, since they aren't viral and don't attach to product made with the model: if you are a user subject to the terms of use, you create and distribute a dataset, but don't use it for training a model. Then someone who wants to train a model but who has not subjected themselves to the ToU for the upstream model uses the dataset for training.)
Microsoft has separate, privately-contracted, full access to OpenAI models, so the public ToU doesn't apply to Microsoft at all.
(There is a two-party mechanism to get around such terms, since they aren't viral and don't attach to product made with the model: if you are a user subject to the terms of use, you create and distribute a dataset, but don't use it for training a model. Then someone who wants to train a model but who has not subjected themselves to the ToU for the upstream model uses the dataset for training.)