You seem to be very very conveniently ignoring the fact that Microsoft spent 10 billion to basically gain exclusive use of OpenAI's tech... exactly what you're saying Apple, Google, and Meta should be doing.
Microsoft invested $10B after GPT4 came out… their initial investment of $1B might have been for R&D, but their $10B investment was for tech that they knew about.
Isn't Microsoft's $10B investment likely more of a "pay as you go" rented integration of GPT4 into Bing and a few other places rather than a $10B wire transfer into OpenAI's bank account?
Well, the MSFT investment is mostly in the form of cloud services spend/usage credits (vs. actual cash) which of course is one of the most important aspects (and massive expensive item) for OpenAI in developing and productizing their offering, given the nature of generative AI. MSFT has absolutely no secret sauce with Azure. AWS and Google (GCP) have those capabilities as well and can (and do) apply the same investment model. See also the recent AWS/Anthropic engagement.
