Musk v. Altman Evidence Shows What Microsoft Executives Thought of OpenAI
Key takeaways
- Microsoft worried that not providing support could push OpenAI into the arms of Amazon, the world’s dominant cloud computing provider at the time.
- Elon Musk’s attorneys introduced the emails to show Microsoft’s evolving relationship with OpenAI.
- The email chain kicked off on August 11, 2017 with Nadella reaching out to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to congratulate the lab on winning a video game competition using AI to mimic a human player.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Open AI’s relationship with Microsoft, its longtime investor and cloud partner, has grown increasingly complicated over the years as the Chat GPT-maker has grown into a behemoth competitor.
But Microsoft executives had reservations about sending additional funding to Open AI as far back as 2018 when it was just a small nonprofit research lab, according to emails between more than a dozen Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, shown in a federal court on Thursday during the Musk v. Altman trial.
The emails show how Microsoft, at the time, wavered over what has since been held up as one of the most successful corporate partnerships in tech history. Several Microsoft executives said in the emails their visits to OpenAI did not indicate any imminent breakthroughs in developing artificial general intelligence. In 2017, much of OpenAI’s work was focused on building AI systems that could play video games, which showed early signs of success. But OpenAI needed five times more computing power than it had originally secured from Microsoft to continue the project.