Asia Tech Wire (Aug 8) -- Intel had a chance to buy about 15% of OpenAI for $1 billion in cash seven years ago, according to Reuters.

At that time, OpenAI was still a fledgling nonprofit research organization.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said that executives from the two companies discussed various possibilities over the course of several months in 2017 and 2018, but Intel ultimately decided to pass on the deal.

Part of the reason was that then-Intel CEO Bob Swan thought generative AI models would be difficult to bring to market in the short term and would struggle to recoup costs quickly.