Microsoft Emails Reveal 2018 Skepticism About OpenAI

Court materials in the case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman have revealed emails from Microsoft executives: in 2018 they were skeptical of OpenAI, but at the same time feared losing the company to Amazon.

What the emails showed

Microsoft's 2018 emails reveal mixed feelings about OpenAI. Senior executives openly voiced doubts about Altman's strategy and the potential of language models. But the same correspondence shows a risk that worried them even more: if Microsoft walked away from the collaboration, Amazon could snap up the growing project and become the main beneficiary of the AI revolution.

This dilemma, between skepticism and fear of loss, shaped the company's later tactics. The emails expose the internal contradictions of a large tech giant facing uncertainty.

The 2018 context: why they doubted

At the time, OpenAI did not look like an obvious bet. The company had existed for only three years and had no clear commercial products. Sam Altman had led the organization for less than four years, and his vision of the AI future did not inspire enthusiasm in every corner of the tech industry. Mass interest in language models would come only with the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

By 2018 the competitive landscape looked very different:

• Amazon had already established itself in the cloud and AI through AWS
• Google was actively developing TensorFlow and building its AI research team
• Facebook was investing in its own neural network projects
• Microsoft held a timid position in the AI race, despite its investments in Cortana
• The success of new technologies was hard to predict in advance

In this context, Microsoft's doubts sound logical: a startup without a proven business model, high operating costs, a market that was not ready. But the emails show that the managers who did not believe in OpenAI feared something even more: that a competitor would build a monopoly.

From skepticism to investment

The paradox: despite the written doubts, Microsoft did not wind down its work with OpenAI. Instead, it gradually expanded its presence. A $1 billion investment followed in 2019, then a series of new rounds. In 2023, Microsoft announced investments of more than $10 billion in developing the partnership with OpenAI.

The strategy worked brilliantly. Today Copilot is built into Microsoft's entire office ecosystem, Azure OpenAI Service has become a powerful competitive advantage, and Altman and his team have reimagined what large language models can do. What looked risky in 2018 has become the most successful AI bet in history.

What this means

The story of Microsoft and OpenAI is a lesson about the difference between prudence and intuition. The internal skepticism was reasonable: the vast majority of startups fail. But the strategy of "invest so as not to lose" proved wiser. The simple takeaway for other companies: sometimes you have to act against your own doubts if the risk of losing out outweighs the conviction that a project will fail.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.