For Google – whose entire business is tied up in that one search box – it is a very different equation. Any reduction of consumer confidence in their search engine is an existential threat to the company. Changes have to be rolled out slowly and with an immense amount of deliberation and testing.
Microsoft would be stuck in the same dilemma if, say, someone came up up with a futuristic-looking disruption in the spreadsheet space and Google Sheets was quick to adapt to it.
I feel like they basically are. It’s probably been close to a decade and Google’s online collaborative features in their office suite is far and above what Microsoft has managed to cobble together.
Edit: Azure ML launched in 2015.
I have to give them credit, but the other side of the equation is that though they react quickly, they tend to duct-tape feature and products together. I'm thinking of how office went online yet has always lacked cohesion. Or how teams competes with zoom/slack/etc, yet is frustrating to work with.
Continuing to call themselves "OpenAI" is disingenuous and frankly ridiculous at this point.
On the other hand, if they ended up chooses a different route, go patented everything and starts suing, then maybe it's better off for them to remove "Open" in their title just to make things more clear.
I guess their current pricing is designed to attract new users to bring use cases/ideas to them, which would be a field where their the imagination is lacking.
I’m sure some staff has left over the years to move into more attractive roles that offered a generous package compared to what they were making at OpenAI - but that’s ultimately just how these situations sometimes end up.
OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit.
As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the right time, that they hit a gold mine with that investment as ChatGPT took off, but otherwise this would have been just one of their many investments that disappeared into the ether.
The most surprising thing to me is how hard and fast Microsoft pivoted once they realized they had a golden goose on their hands, with the Bing / Edge and other integrations they are doing. Never though I would see them move that fast, kudos.