The tech conglomerate has been working with Scott Altman’s artificial intelligence business since 2019, and Kevin has now revealed Microsoft were banking on the company and its promises of innovation when the two came together.

During an appearance on the ‘Possible’ podcast, he said: “This partnership with OpenAI was like basically a bet saying this particular team at the time also understood that this was a game of scaling, compute and doing incredible things with it in a very disciplined way.”

Last week (30.04.24), Microsoft were forced to make an email thread from 2019 public - shortly before the company announced its had invested $1 billion into OpenAI - by the U.S. Justice Department through its ongoing antitrust case against Google.

In an email sent to the business’ co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella, Kevin admitted he was “very, very worried” about Google’s A.I. potential at the time, and so wanted Microsoft to invest heavily into OpenAI.

The CTO explained he knew the company couldn’t tackle and effectively utilise artificial intelligence on its own, and so wanting to partner with industry-leaders.

He said: “I was like, 'if we work with them, they will push us to build better infrastructure, and we can enable them to do their best work.’”

Currently, Microsoft is working on its own large language model dubbed MAI-1 that is reportedly going to challenge algorithms from Google and Anthropic.

According to The Information, the project is being headed by former Google AI leader Mustafa Suleyman, and the technology will have approximately 500 billion parameters - roughly half of what OpenAI’s GPT-4 has.