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I definitely think fundamental research is fun, I think it's unfortunate that people are so focused on quarterly profits that they think Microsoft shouldn't be investing in fundamental research. And are deriding it as "cool" as if that were a bad thing.

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That's not how any of this is sold though. Google did a lot of fundamental research quite publicly in this space for many years, and people were generally quite favourable of this and didn't ask to see insane revenue from it (yet). But Microsoft is not doing that, not even by proxy of funding OpenAI. They are selling it as the greatest business thing ever, so where are the numbers to back that?

Not to mention also shoving it into every product even without a solid reason or use case for it. Microsoft has been making AI the focal point of everything they do recently. Google spend years investing in fundamental research into AI while not making it the focal point of everything they did.

You can invest in a fundamental research without investing in a company creating tons of weird circular financial deals.

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