The trial revealed that Microsoft executives collectively disliked OpenAI, investing $1 billion only because they feared OpenAI would go to Amazon

According to Beating Monitoring, the court case against Elon Musk and Altman revealed internal emails from more than ten Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, between 2017 and 2018.
These emails uncovered one thing: before investing a billion dollars, almost no one inside Microsoft believed in this small non-profit laboratory.

After Musk facilitated the connection in 2016, Microsoft offered OpenAI $60 million in Azure cloud services at a significant discount, and OpenAI’s usage was twice as expected. In August 2017, Nadella congratulated OpenAI for winning a game AI competition, and ten days later, Altman responded, requesting $300 million in computing power, calling it “the most impressive achievement in AI history.”

Nadella forwarded the request to four deputies for opinions, receiving a cold response: the AI team “does not see the value of cooperation”; the research team felt their own level was “more advanced”; the PR team was opposed to giving a platform to an organization that promotes “machines defeating humans.” Executive Vice President Jason Zander summarized that Azure could leverage Musk and Altman’s fame for publicity but didn’t want to “lose a lot.”

In January 2018, Nadella again consulted 15 senior executives about OpenAI. He admitted, “I can’t see what research they are doing or how they can benefit us,” but also acknowledged, “Their push for AI exceeds all our internal teams and external partners.” CTO Kevin Scott directly retorted, “I highly doubt AGI will break through soon. They treat us as a bucket of indiscriminate GPUs.”

But Scott immediately pointed out what everyone was truly afraid of: if they stop funding OpenAI, “they might run off to Amazon in anger, and when they leave, they’ll talk trash about Azure everywhere.” Zander agreed, saying the worst-case scenario is that OpenAI switches to AWS, develops something big, and competitors use it. Ultimately, Microsoft told Altman that no internal team was willing to sponsor OpenAI.

About 18 months later, OpenAI established a for-profit subsidiary, and Microsoft invested $1 billion, which was increased to $13 billion over the next four years.

Unfortunately, the worst fear Microsoft had back then eventually came true: in recent months, OpenAI signed a $138 billion cloud service agreement with Amazon, which committed to investing between $15 billion and $50 billion in OpenAI.

Nadella will personally testify in court next Monday.