The smartest $1 billion investment! "Microsoft made a big profit

Bill Gates has changed.

Since leaving Microsoft, Gates has been appearing in public as a philanthropist. He is committed to using his wealth to fight poverty, disease, and climate change.

So people gradually forget that in the distant 1980s and 1990s, Gates was actually a irritable boss.

Bill Gates testified on Capitol Hill on March 3, 1998. Source: Joe Marquette/AP

At that time, Microsoft employees would describe Gates as a "hot tempered bully": he liked to curse people at meetings, sent emails to employees late at night, and cursed his work as "the stupidest code ever".

What's even more 'perverted' is that he even goes to the company's parking lot on weekends to see who works overtime at the company - this is what he admitted in an interview:

I know everyone's license plate, so I can look at the parking lot and see when they come and leave.

The negative reviews gradually subsided after Gates left Microsoft in 2008. Although he still works as a technical consultant for Microsoft, his focus is no longer on Microsoft.

This situation changed in the following years.

At the invitation of Microsoft's current CEO, Atya Nadella, Gates has become more involved in Microsoft's affairs. On average, he spends 9 hours per quarter in meetings with Microsoft employees, with most of the content centered around Microsoft Office, which has since become artificial intelligence in recent years.

According to people attending the meeting, sometimes employees will "make pilgrimages" to Gates' elegant wooden private office in Kirkland, Washington, and sometimes Gates will come to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond in person.

A former Microsoft manager who had met Gates several times said:

The elderly are either afraid or shrug their shoulders. Newcomers will be very excited about this opportunity.

But over time, people have found that Gates' temper has softened somewhat (although there may still be a tendency towards dominance, it is already a rare occurrence).

When faced with incomprehensible things, he no longer uses sharp sarcastic or negative language.

For example,He still holds a skeptical attitude towards artificial intelligence,But Microsoft still established a partnership with OpenAI in 2019, investing $1 billion in this startup.

According to an interview with insiders at TheInformation, Gates participated in Microsoft's discussion on establishing a partnership with OpenAI. He was "very committed" to examining OpenAI's technology and the startup expressed some skepticism:

Gates expressed doubts about natural language understanding in other environments, as there has been little meaningful progress in this field over the past five years.

Of course, Gates' position at Microsoft is only a consultant, so decisions related to investment and development are not within his scope of authority.

At that time, neither Gates himself, Nadella, nor Microsoft employees involved in this project had thought of it,This investment will become the most significant investment in Microsoft's history and the development of artificial intelligence technology in the future.

At this year's Microsoft Developer Conference Build, Microsoft announced that almost all of its flagship products will be embedded in Copilot, integrating generative AI functionality, and working with OpenAI to create a ChatGPT plugin ecosystem.

At present, OpenAI seems to have become Microsoft's "core competitiveness" in the next decade.

Betting the future of Microsoft, worth 2.5 trillion US dollars, on a startup that once invested only one billion US dollars is a "big gamble".

OpenAI: Non profit "Dream Breaking"

To trace Microsoft's acquisition of OpenAI, we need to start with that critical transformation of this startup.

Most people who have heard of OpenAI know,The initial OpenAI was a non-profit organization.

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On the forum HackerNews, a post pointed out that the profit limit set by OpenAI is 100 times, meaning that only returns exceeding this amount belong to the original OpenAI non-profit entity. This means that,Unless the company grows to the size of FAANG, it is "basically infinite":

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Afterwards, Nadella told Scott Guthrie, the head of Azure,Azure.

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But what frustrates Lee is that compared to Microsoft Research,OpenAI.

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This has been evident in the rise of NewBing - since.

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