Which letter is Microsoft again? (I always forget.)
Because Microsoft was in no way a leader in AI research when openAI was founded. But the important part here isn't keeping AI work from being dominated by big tech. It's to keep it from being hidden from the public by big tech.
Can you elaborate on the last sentence?
Google and Facebook have long had language models that have been reported to be vastly superior to what was publicly available. The one that a Google engineer claimed was sentient was the most well known example. OpenAI was founded in reaction to these models being hidden away.
OpenAI was founded in 2015, well before those models were created.