Mashable: Satya Nadella says there’s plenty of room for competition in AI.

Elon Musk may be a visionary, but he’s not always right. That’s what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella implied in an interview aired Tuesday, where he disputed Musk’s allegation that Microsoft was effectively in control of OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker.

In a recent CNBC interview, the Tesla boss claimed that he was the main reason OpenAI existed and that he had a big say in its name and hiring. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the board in 2018, had claimed that Microsoft’s $1 billion investment in the startup gave it undue influence over its direction and mission. He also expressed concerns about the potential dangers of AI and advocated for slowing down its development.

But Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella begs to differ. He told that Musk’s statements were “factually incorrect” and that Microsoft had no control over OpenAI’s mission or governance. He said he respected Musk, but he was mistaken. He also praised OpenAI’s commercial partnership with Microsoft, which allows the AI company to use Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure.

The Microsoft CEO further pushed back on both claims and went further in saying that small players very much have a chance to compete against large firms like his and Alphabet’s Google in the AI space.

OpenAI is independent and mission-driven. Nadella said that OpenAI was “very grounded in their mission of being controlled by a nonprofit board” and that Microsoft had a “non-controlling interest” and a “great commercial partnership” with it.

AI is not a winner-takes-all game. Nadella said that the ability of smaller companies to break into AI would “depend on product-market fit” and that it was not guaranteed that Microsoft and Google would be “the only two games in town”. He cited search as an example of how AI has sparked fresh competition in a space dominated by Google’s engine, mentioning Bing and ChatGPT as rising competitors. He also said that there were “lots of other folks who have entered the search market” and that this should be celebrated.