Microsoft's investment in OpenAI was driven by concerns about Google's lead in AI, according to emails released as part of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google.
In a 2019 email chain titled "Thoughts on OpenAI," Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott told CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates that Google's AI capabilities, such as Gmail's autocomplete, were "getting scarily good."
Scott warned that Microsoft was several years behind its rivals in machine learning. He worried about the AI initiatives of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain, which would spur innovation in areas ranging from data center design to programming frameworks.
Although Microsoft has "very smart ML people" working on the Bing, Vision, and Speech teams, "their ambitions have also been constrained," leaving Microsoft "multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale."
Microsoft ignored AI for too long
"When all these programs were doing was competing with one another to see which RL system could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, I has highly dismissive of their efforts," Scott wrote. "That was a mistake."
Scott pointed out that it took Microsoft around six months to reproduce Google's BERT language model, while Google had already progressed to "larger scale, more interesting models."
He cited a ten percentage point increase in Google Search performance and enhancements to Gmail's autocomplete as proof of Google's AI advancements.
Nadella replied that it was a "very good email that explains, why I want us to do this," likely referring to an investment in OpenAI. He included Microsoft CFO Amy Hood in his reply.
The emails were released Tuesday as part of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Google. Microsoft's initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI in July 2019 has grown into a multibillion-dollar partnership. The agreement has allowed Microsoft to rapidly integrate OpenAI technologies like GPT-4 into products like Bing and Office, and introduce new offerings like Copilot.
