Of course, but the thing that stands out about MS right now is the company’s willingness to ship, instead of locking things away and begrudgingly releasing teasers of the tech (like Google).
It’s refreshing to me that a behemoth like MS is adopting a startup-like approach to AI
I think it's partially because Microsoft lucked out with openAI and happened to "acquire" the right company for the job while Googles AI Division is still focused on research.
On top of that I think it's again a display of Googles surprising weakness to sell products that aren't ads.
Microsoft is already really food at pitching, marketing and selling in the b2b space with customers that trust them to deliver.
DeepMind invested heavily in pursuing RL as the holy grail for AGI. Which still seems like a plausible approach to me, we're not there yet! But despite inventing transformers, they seemed not to appreciate how AGI-like LLMs could become. And now OpenAI has beaten them to the punch, by actually releasing a product, which is not Google's forté.
It’s refreshing to me that a behemoth like MS is adopting a startup-like approach to AI