Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Bill Gates warned him that investing in OpenAI would be like setting $1 billion on fire (www.businessinsider.com)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recounted that when he pushed for the company’s first $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019—even then a nonprofit—cofounder Bill Gates warned it might be “like burning” the cash. What started as a risky bet has since grown into over $13 billion in Microsoft backing and a 27% stake in OpenAI’s newly restructured for-profit arm (OpenAI Group PBC), now overseen by the OpenAI Foundation and valued at roughly $135 billion. OpenAI’s consumer breakout came with ChatGPT (1 million users in five days) and later scale to more than 800 million weekly users, turning that early wager into a strategic cornerstone for Microsoft and a major market driver. For the AI/ML community this story underlines how high-risk, high-capital bets by hyperscalers can rapidly accelerate research-to-product pipelines. Microsoft’s funding and partnership model helped bankroll compute, productization, and commercialization of large language models (LLMs), influencing deployment timelines and ecosystem adoption. The corporate stake and OpenAI’s shift toward a public benefit corporation raise governance and incentive questions: who steers model priorities, how compute and data access are allocated, and how profit motives interact with safety and public-interest commitments. The episode illustrates the central role of deep-pocketed industry partners in scaling frontier AI research into global platforms.