Microsoft worried that OpenAI would run into Amazon and ‘shit-talk’ Azure

While OpenAI was busy testing AI-powered gaming bots, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were in the early days of creating an AI partnership. Court documents from the proceedings Musk v. Altman The case has provided a rare look at the connections between Microsoft’s top executives over OpenAI and fears that the AI ​​startup “could go to Amazon” and “shit-talk” Microsoft.

A few days ago OpenAI showed a bot beat a Dota 2 experts in the summer of 2017, Altman responded to Nadella’s congratulatory emails with the idea of ​​a larger collaboration with OpenAI to support the next phase of AI research. OpenAI needed a lot of money to develop Dota 2 project, surpassing the Azure profile it used from Microsoft at the time. “Probably something like $300 million in Azure series pricing” according to Altman. This initially confused some executives within Microsoft.

“To put these figures into perspective, we will be generating significant revenue from the partnership ($500 million+) that would otherwise not have been fully leveraged,” said Jason Zander, then Microsoft’s head of Azure, in an August 2017 email to Nadella.

Altman came up with another idea a few months later to “create a partnership with Xbox for games, and the opportunity to share their technology and IP to increase their support. Dota research,” according to Brett Tanzer, now VP of Azure solutions and ecosystem.” The Xbox team was interested in “exploring integration opportunities,” but was unable to commit to research funding itself.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott discussed the debate over whether to provide OpenAI with Azure data on his research in an email to Nadella in January 2018. Dota the effort would benefit the company, but he was concerned that OpenAI was moving toward Microsoft’s arch-rival.

“I think the other thing to think about here is that we haven’t funded them, and getting them to go to Amazon hard and talk to us about Azure on the way out,” Scott said in his January 2018 email.

After one year, Scott agreed in an email for Nadella and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to have “strongly rejected” AI efforts at OpenAI and Google DeepMind when the companies were competing to see who “could do the best in the game.” Scott became very interested when OpenAI moved to natural language processing models and feared that Microsoft would overtake Google’s AI efforts. A month after Scott’s “opinions on OpenAI” email, Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI.

About seven years ago, the close relationship changed OpenAI is also negotiating its partnership with Microsoft to bring its AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS. The latest changes to the agreement were announced just days after the kind of OpenAI “shit-talk” that Scott worried about. OpenAI he told his staff last month that its partnership with Microsoft “also prevented us from meeting businesses where they are – for many that is (Amazon’s) Bedrock.”