- Satya Nadella's past comments about OpenAI are being praised by Silicon Valley types.
- His remarks have resurfaced after Microsoft poached Inflection AI's cofounder to lead its AI push.
Satya Nadella is winning plaudits for comments taking OpenAI down a peg or two.
Silicon Valley types are showering the Microsoft CEO with praise for his remarks in November that Microsoft was "below them, above them, around them" in reference to OpenAI.
Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark, said on X: "This is wild."
Zak Kukoff, a former General Catalyst partner, also weighed in: "I have to give it to Satya. This is such a baller quote."
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas called the quip a "new war slogan."
Nadella's comments came after the OpenAI board fired its CEO, Sam Altman, in November in a shock move.
The ousting was said to make Nadella realize Microsoft couldn't rely solely on OpenAI or be seen to be overly dependent on the ChatGPT maker.
Nadella announced he was recruiting Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, but after a series of dramatic twists, Altman was reinstated as OpenAI CEO days later.
In November, Nadella told New York magazine: "If OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, I don't want any customer of ours to be worried about it quite honestly, because we have all of the rights to continue the innovation."
He added that Microsoft was "self-sufficient" in its artificial-intelligence offerings and had the talent, compute, and data.
"Not just to serve the product, but we can go and just do what we were doing in partnership ourselves," Nadella said.
'Smart move'
The Microsoft CEO's remarks about the ChatGPT maker were mentioned in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI filed earlier this month.
Nadella's comments took on new significance this week after Microsoft tapped the Inflection AI cofounder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its AI efforts.
Tara Water, the chief digital officer at the law firm Ashurst, told Business Insider the appointment was "yet another smart move" by Nadella and Microsoft: "They are investing heavily across the AI ecosystem, and it will be exciting to see how these big bets pay off."
Microsoft didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI made outside normal working hours.