Sam Altman is treated as some sort of AI pioneer, which is extremely overblown by the media. The guy is not an AI researcher / engineer or anything and is just a figurehead. The current Generative AI revolution was started by Google and an Indian named ashish vaswani in his seminal paper " Attention is all you need," where he introduced transformers. Even at OpenAI, there are plenty of capable people like IIya who can drive the company forward and can do a much better job.
As for Microsoft, MSR was once the pioneer in AI research (Especially Computer Vision), but now is a shell of its former shelf. Most of the original engineers and researchers have moved to better places like Nvidia, Google Brain, or FAIR because Satya gutted the research spending and paid them peanuts. Now, Sam is apparently hired by Satya to lead AI initiatives at MS, which is ironic because it was self-inflicted by Satya in the first place. There is no way this will work out