Microsoft committed $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 because it was “very worried” Google was years ahead in AI scaling.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates discussed an investment potential in an internal email headed “Thoughts on OpenAI,” months before Microsoft announced the relationship.
The email was published Tuesday as part of the US Justice Department antitrust action against Google, Business Insider reports.
“We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale,” Scott wrote to Nadella and Gates on June 12, 2019.
He says Microsoft developers required six months to replicate and train Google's BERT language model “because our infrastructure wasn't up to the task.”
Scott was skeptical of OpenAI and Google DeepMind's AI initiatives when they competed to “could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt”—a reference to AlphaGo Zero.
Scott claimed Google's early AI models gave it an edge over Bing, and he lauded Gmail's “getting scarily good” autocomplete features in 2019.
Nadella sent Scott's OpenAI comments to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, saying “why I want to do this.” Hood, one of Microsoft's top executives, manages the company's finances and spending.
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