Court documents and email evidence made public on Tuesday revealed that as early as 2016, Elon Musk advised OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman to choose Microsoft over Amazon.com as a cloud computing partner. In the emails, Musk bluntly stated that he considered Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to be "a bit too clever by half" and had a more favorable impression of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, although he also expressed dissatisfaction with Microsoft's marketing department. In his reply, Altman indicated that Amazon.com was "jerking us around" on the terms of cooperation, especially regarding marketing commitments, and pointed out that their product was not technically impressive to begin with. This early advice foreshadowed subsequent developments. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, later increasing its total investment to $13 billion, marking a milestone partnership. According to the agreement, Microsoft will receive a share of OpenAI's revenue until 2030 or until the company develops human-level artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, Amazon.com turned to investing in Anthropic, a competitor of OpenAI. However, Amazon.com is currently still negotiating a potential $10 billion deal with OpenAI, which involves OpenAI's use of Amazon.com's artificial intelligence chips. Additionally, Nadella revealed in his testimony that following Altman's ouster by the board in 2023, tech giants like Google and Meta swiftly moved to try and recruit core members of OpenAI's team.
The Talent War During an Executive Crisis Nadella's testimony, also made public on Tuesday, shed light on the fierce competition for OpenAI's core talent that erupted across the tech industry following Altman's sudden dismissal in late 2023. One of Nadella's key objectives at the time was to "ensure they don't set up a new, competing AI lab." Nadella disclosed that Google co-founder Sergey Brin directly contacted OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. He stated, "Altman and Brockman were getting calls from pretty much everybody, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and in some cases even Elon Musk." According to text message records read during the proceedings, then-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati wrote after Altman's ouster, "Nadella said he's calming Sam down, hoping he doesn't do something highly competitive," such as starting a new AI company. In fact, just two days after Altman was fired, Nadella had already formally extended an offer to him and Brockman to join Microsoft.
