Microsoft internal email "leaked": Investing billions in OpenAI in 2019 because it was far behind Google
Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer said in an email: "As I delved deeper into trying to understand the gap in model training capabilities between Google and us, I became very, very concerned."
Author: Li Xiaoyin
Source: HardAI
Internal email leaked Microsoft's "original intention" of investing in OpenAI.
According to media reports, on Tuesday local time, the US Department of Justice, in the process of advancing the antitrust case against Google, released an internal email sent in June 2019 titled "Thoughts on OpenAI" within Microsoft.
The email was sent by Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott to Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. Just a month after the email was sent, Microsoft officially announced becoming the "preferred commercialization partner" with OpenAI and invested $1 billion in the latter.
Scott wrote in the email:
"We are years behind our competitors in machine learning scale."
Scott also detailed in the email how Microsoft engineers spent six months replicating Google's BERT language model and training it, ultimately stating: our infrastructure is not up to the task.
Initially skeptical of OpenAI and Google's AI efforts, Scott expressed in the email that these companies were competing to achieve the most impressive gameplay stunts—some analysis pointed to Google DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero demonstration.
However, when it came to natural language processing models, Scott wrote:
"As I delved into understanding the gap in model training capabilities between Google and us, I became very, very concerned."
Scott mentioned that some of Google's early AI models helped it gain a competitive advantage over Bing in their competition, even praising Google's auto-complete feature in Gmail in 2019, which he found "very impressive."
Nadella responded to Scott's thoughts on OpenAI, forwarding it to Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood, and noted "this is why I want to do this."
In addition, despite Bill Gates resigning from Microsoft's board in 2020, he remains an important part of Microsoft's ongoing relationship with OpenAI. Since 2016, Gates has been regularly meeting with OpenAI and has been instrumental in facilitating this deal.
As of now, Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and has integrated its models into Office applications, Bing search engine, Edge, and even its Windows operating system. Thanks to its investment and support for OpenAI, Microsoft is now considered a frontrunner in the AI competition