Microsoft is not just any huge, lumbering company, though. It has probably the
best history of research of any pure software company (leaving aside IBM etc): Microsoft Research funded Haskell behind the scenes for years, they had a quantum computing unit
in 2006, and already in 2018 were beating the field in AI patents and research:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/01/06/micros...
Believing that OpenAI is MSFT's sole move in the AI space would be a serious error.