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Microsoft made its first $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019.
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The company invested more than $13 billion in the maker of ChatGPT.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Bill Gates was initially wary of investing in OpenAI.
Microsoft’s early investments in OpenAI may seem like a no-brainer today, but Satya Nadella says the company and its founder, Bill Gates, saw the decision as a risk back then.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, less than four years after it was founded. Since then, the company has invested more than $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker.
But getting that first investment deal across the finish line wasn’t so simple, Nadella said in an interview with “TPBN,” a technology-focused YouTube show, on Tuesday.
“Even at Microsoft, you have to get board approval to just throw away a billion dollars,” Nadella said. “But I have to say it wasn’t that difficult to convince anyone that this is an important area and it’s going to be risky.”
“In hindsight, who would have thought? I didn’t put in a billion dollars saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be a hundred times,'” he continued.
Nadella told TBPN that Gates was also cautious when he wanted to invest in OpenAI in 2019.
“Remember, this was a nonprofit and I think Bill even said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to burn this billion dollars,'” Nadella said.
“We had a little bit of a high risk tolerance and said we wanted to give it a try,” he added.
Representatives for Nadella and Gates at Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
OpenAI has come a long way since Microsoft made its first bet.
The AI ​​startup became a household name in November 2022 after it released an initial demo of ChatGPT. The chatbot went viral on social networks and added one million users in five days.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said at the company’s annual DevDay conference on October 6 that “more than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week.”
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it had completed its restructuring. Its nonprofit arm, OpenAI Foundation, will now oversee a new public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group PBC. With the changes, Microsoft has a 27% stake, valued at about $135 billion, in OpenAI’s for-profit business.
Microsoft shares are up almost 29% so far this year.
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