In the past decade Google has acquired 5 Artificial Intelligence companies, including DeepMind. They hired folks like Geoffrey Hinton by acquiring his company in order to have him lead Google Brain. This is just the nature of how these companies build their talent.
Investing in a company and/or integrating with its technology is not the same as acquiring it. For example, it's quite clear that AI is a major part of Google's strategy from the personnel that they have working on it (e.g. Jeff Dean) to the actual results they deliver, both in research and products. These come directly from their full time employees, not partners or investments. Microsoft is not particularly noteworthy in the field.
> For example, it's quite clear that AI is a major part of Google's strategy from the personnel that they have working on it (e.g. Jeff Dean) to the actual results they deliver
That makes the 1B investment Microsoft made... a minor part of their strategy?
> Microsoft is not particularly noteworthy in the field.
Browse reddit.com/r/bing for a bit. There's a clear reason why Google has been slow-walking release of its better LLM on one hand, while continuously releasing ML-based improvements across their entire product suite on the other.
