Sam Altman is treated as some sort of AI pioneer, which is extremely overblown by the media. The guy is not an AI researcher / engineer or anything and is just a figurehead. The current Generative AI revolution was started by Google and an Indian named ashish vaswani in his seminal paper " Attention is all you need," where he introduced transformers. Even at OpenAI, there are plenty of capable people like IIya who can drive the company forward and can do a much better job.
As for Microsoft, MSR was once the pioneer in AI research (Especially Computer Vision), but now is a shell of its former shelf. Most of the original engineers and researchers have moved to better places like Nvidia, Google Brain, or FAIR because Satya gutted the research spending and paid them peanuts. Now, Sam is apparently hired by Satya to lead AI initiatives at MS, which is ironic because it was self-inflicted by Satya in the first place. There is no way this will work out
If you are familiar with Fast RCNN or Mask RCNN, you would have probably heard of Kaiming He, etc, who were once part of MSR. There were many such teams in MSR that had great reputations with a lot of renowned researchers. Satya Nadella slashed the research budgets and made it a sh*thole by hiring plenty of undeserving candidates. You might have heard of MS favoring one gender and had a very lax hiring/promotion bar for them, which is absolutely true. Some of these people were even become managers with situations becoming crazy like people with bachelor's degree managing multiple researchers with PhDs. Most of those researchers got extremely frustrated and had a mass exodus - eg kaiming joining FAIR, others startup. If not for Satya messing up the MSR with his short-term thinking, they would have continued to be a top place, and there would be no need for 10B $ investments in OpenAI, etc. These MBA CEOs are a clueless bunch, they have no long-term thinking and destroyed many once top companies such as Intel. Check technical CEOs like Jensen Huang (Nvidia) or Lisa (AMD), they have a great long-term vision which is the difference between them and their competitors
Microsoft running monopoly in AI, I guess it’s over for google 👀 Satya 🐐
They won it all