The ascension of an insider CEO can be a bit underwhelming. When Satya Nadella took the helm of Microsoft in 2014, some employees and investors were disappointed. The search committee had spent months sifting through more than 100 potential leaders, looking for someone who could revive the spirit of innovation that had once defined the company.

Along the way, some Wall Street analysts interpreted the fact that no clear external candidate was emerging to indicate that “ an appealing CEO after years of dwindling relevance,” the Wall Street Journal reported. And then, on a frigid January day, they got a 22-year Microsoft veteran as CEO. The response was less than ebullient.

“ fresh perspective or any outside influence,” CNN observed. Few seemed excited, Nadella acknowledged in a 2018 interview. Like everything about Microsoft at the time, it all seemed kind of blah.

Fast-forward a decade and this Microsoft lifer is having his moment. Over the weekend, the OpenAI board’s confusing ouster of CEO Sam Altman into what looks like a total win—instead of their coup, it’s his. Early Monday morning, he announced on X that he had recruited Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new A.

I. unit at Microsoft. We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners.

We look forward to getting to know Emmett… “We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team,” he wrote. “We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success. ” By gaining the most high-profile man in A.

I. —at this particular moment—Microsoft has boltered its in-house A. I.

capabilities, connections, and appeal to future recruits. Come Monday morning, more than 600 of OpenAI’s 770 or so employees had signed a letter not only pushing for the company’s board to resign, but also threatening to jump ship to the new Microsoft subsidiary, according to the Daily Beast. Microsoft simultaneously seems to have shut down the likelihood that Altman would create a new competitor to OpenAI, which could be bad for Microsoft.

Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI, considered the field leader ever since the runaway success of its A. I. –fueled ChatGPT tool, and is one of its primary commercial partners.

Microsoft’s Bing Chat, for example, runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model. Some posited that Nadella was setting Microsoft up to outright buy OpenAI at a total steal of a price. Others suggested that he didn’t need to buy it, because it was acquiring all the pieces to eventually build its own ChatGPT or DALL-E, OpenAI’s transformative image-making tool.

Or even if Microsoft was to maintain its current investor-partner relationship with OpenAI—and use its underlying A. I. models for its own tools—the company now has much more leverage over the terms of that arrangement.

“Satya turned lemons into lemonade, and then some,” Damian Rollison, the director of marketing insights at SOCi, an A. I. –assisted marketing company, told me.

Wow, so in this whole story, Microsoft won?? Microsoft’s board right now Clippy is gonna achieve AGI and gain sentience by Christmas, isn’t it? Either way, come Monday afternoon, Microsoft’s shares . Part of what’s so astounding about what Nadella did is, at least momentarily, he seems to have convinced responsible–A. I.

advocates and venture capitalists alike that he’d done the right thing. About that : We still don’t actually know what prompted the OpenAI board to turn on Altman; initially, it said Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board. ” Theories range from a misunderstanding to a fundamental disagreement about acceptable uses of A.

I. In one hint of the OpenAI board’s position, it offered Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, its newly vacant CEO role. Shear has previously stated that he wants to .

I specifically say I’m in favor of slowing down, which is sort of like pausing except it’s slowing down. If we’re at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to 0. I think we should aim for a 1-2 instead.

What we do know is that Microsoft is more enthusiastic about moving quickly. In March, the company, which is currently worth around $2. 8 trillion, most of its already-downsized .

Ahead of the restructuring, one executive explained that Nadella was eager to “take these most recent OpenAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers’ hands at a very high.