Asking because, reading the tea leaves from the outside, until ChatGPT came along, MSFT (via Bill Gates) seemed to heavily favor symbolic AI approaches. I suspect this may be partly why they were falling so far behind Google in the AI race, which could leverage its data dominance with large neural networks.

So based on the current AI boom, MSFT may have been chasing a losing strategy with symbolic AI, but if they were all-in on NN, they were on the right track.