Concerned about Google’s lead in the AI race, Microsoft made a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019. An internal email with title ‘Thoughts on OpenAI,’ exchanged among Microsoft’s higher echelons including CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates, reveals their discussions around this financial move in the lead-up to the public announcement of their collaboration.
This email was announced on Tuesday amid the unfolding antitrust lawsuit lodged by the US Justice Department against Google. According to Business Insider reports, “We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale,” Scott stated in his email dated June 12th, 2019, addressed to Nadella and Gates.
He elaborated on the six-month period it required for Microsoft engineers to duplicate Google’s BERT language model and to adequately train it, attributing the delay to our infrastructure being insufficient for the task”
Mr. Scott shares that he initially brushed off the AI initiatives by OpenAI and Google DeepMind, witnessing their rivalry over who could pull off the most astounding game-playing feat – a nod towards Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero showcases. However, his stance shifted to admiration as their focus shifted towards the development of natural language processing models.
Diving deeper to gauge the competitive edge between Google and themselves in model training, Mr. Scott confesses, “As I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried,” he penned with an air of revelation.
Scott acknowledged that some of Google’s pioneer AI models provided it with a competitive edge over Bing, and he even lauded Google’s autocomplete functionalities in Gmail, which were “becoming alarmingly proficient” back in 2019.
Nadella feedback Scott’s sentiments on OpenAI by passing his message along to Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood, emphasizing that this underpins his enthusiasm for the initiative. Hood, an integral part of Microsoft’s executive team, is responsible for directing the company’s financial ambitions and constantly regulating Microsoft’s expenditures.
Based on the email shown below, there seems to be a response directed at either Nadella or Gates. Despite Gates’ departure from Microsoft’s board of directors in 2020 during an inquiry into a personal relationship with a staff member, he is rumored to maintain significant involvement in Microsoft’s sustained partnership with OpenAI.
The precise originator of the 2019 OpenAI discourse within this internal correspondence remains unknown, yet Business Insider has disclosed this week that Gates had been in consistent contact with OpenAI since 2016, playing a pivotal role in orchestrating the collaboration.
When invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft has incorporated its technology into the Office suite, the Bing search engine, the Edge browser, and even within the Windows OS. This strategic investment has positioned Microsoft at the forefront of AI, counteracting the decline it once anticipated half a decade ago.
In a strategic move, Nadella has placed AI and security at the forefront of Microsoft’s priorities for the year 2024 and beyond, signaling a continued and robust integration of AI functionalities across Microsoft’s product lineup.
