I totally agree it’s also like the move where Microsoft is at least supporting Linux on their systems and cloud as not a backup but to just close you into their ecosystem . Honestly I could see Microsoft buying Huggingface.
Step 1: Get the industry leaders to be purchasable via Azure. Step 2: Slowly build your own clone and start stealing user share even though your offering is still worse.
> Nadella [in December 2022] abruptly cut off Lee midsentence, demanding to know how OpenAI had managed to surpass the capabilities of the AI project Microsoft’s 1,500-person research team had been working on for decades. “OpenAI built this with 250 people,” Nadella said, according to Lee, who is executive vice president and head of Microsoft Research. “Why do we have Microsoft Research at all?”
> At the same time, even as the company began weaving OpenAI into the fabric of Microsoft’s products, Nadella decided not to abort Microsoft’s own research efforts in AI. During the tense exchange at the December meeting between the Microsoft CEO and Lee, other executives spoke up to defend the work of Microsoft’s researchers, including Mikhail Parakhin, who oversees Microsoft’s Bing search and Edge browser groups, Lee said. After grilling Lee in the meeting, Nadella called him privately, thanking him for the work Microsoft Research had done to understand and implement OpenAI’s work in a way that passed muster for corporate customers. Nadella said he saw Lee’s group as a “secret weapon.”
While this is entirely speculation, it's easy to imagine that there are many levels of PR magic going on here, to share a quote that on the surface feels "leaked" and "explosive" but, among investors and clients who read beyond the (very good) paywall, actually shores up a narrative that Microsoft has a capability that significantly augments OpenAI's, and allows the existence of MSR to become headline news without even needing a product release.
The Mistral deal feels like yet another step in this direction. Microsoft is not afraid of seeming "messy" in the press as long as it can control the narrative around its value-add to customers in the context of its partnerships. By contrast, the rest of FAANG's more consumer-facing positioning makes it a lot harder for them to maneuver in a similar way.
The answer to that is till Google released the Attention is All You Need paper in 2017 there were no breakthroughs allowing models as we have now to be built, OpenAI being a small and nible team picked up on which direction the wind is blowing with LLMs and quickly brought a product to market whilst MS just did what corps do - move slowly (same for Google etc).