Nadella feared Microsoft would become ‘the next IBM.’ The trial reveals how much he paid to make sure it didn’t.

TL;DR

Satya Nadella testified in the Musk v. Altman trial that he feared Microsoft would become “the next IBM,” revealing that the $13B OpenAI investment was a survival bet backed by a $92B return projection, not a commitment to the nonprofit mission.

Satya Nadella told a federal jury on Monday that he feared Microsoft would become “the next IBM” while OpenAI became the next Microsoft. The admission, drawn from an April 2022 internal email presented by Elon Musk’s lead attorney, reveals the strategic anxiety that drove the largest corporate investment in artificial intelligence history. Microsoft did not put 13 billion dollars into OpenAI because it believed in a nonprofit mission to develop safe AI for the benefit of humanity. It invested because its CEO believed the company would become irrelevant if it did not.

A January 2023 memo from Microsoft president Brad Smith to the company’s board, also...

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