Sam Altman greets Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) The launch of the AI lab that would redefine Microsoft caught the tech giant by surprise. “Did we get called to participate?” Satya Nadella wrote to his team on Dec. 12, 2015, hours after OpenAI announced its founding. “AWS seems to have sneaked in there.” Nadella had been Microsoft CEO for less than two years. Azure, the company’s cloud platform, was five years old and ch...