Invested by Microsoft $1 billion in OpenAI In 2019, he was „very concerned“ that Google was years ahead in expanding its AI efforts. An internal email titled „Thoughts on OpenAI“ between Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates took place several months ago. Some of the high-level discussions surrounding investment opportunities have come to light. Microsoft reveals partnership.
The email was released Tuesday as part of the U.S. Department of Justice's ongoing antitrust case against Google. business insider report.
„We are several years behind our competitors in terms of the scale of machine learning,“ Scott wrote in an email to Nadella and Gates on June 12, 2019. He details how it took him six months to have Microsoft engineers replicate and train his BERT language model at Google. „Because the infrastructure wasn't up to the task.“
Microsoft impressed by Google's early use of AI
Scott said that when OpenAI and Google DeepMind were competing to see who could „achieve the most impressive gameplay stunts,“ he initially downplayed the companies' AI efforts. This is clearly referring to Google DeepMind. AlphaGo Zero demo. When things moved to a natural language processing model, Scott quickly became even more impressed. “We became very concerned as we tried to understand where the capability gaps were between Google and us when it came to training models,” Scott wrote.
Scott said some of Google's early AI models helped give it a competitive advantage over Bing, and he also praised Gmail's autocomplete feature, which has gotten „terribly better“ in 2019. .
Nadella responded to Scott's thoughts on OpenAI, forwarding them to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, saying this is „why I want to do this.“ Hood is a key member of Microsoft's senior leadership team and is tasked with overseeing the company's financial goals and regularly reining in Microsoft's spending.
The email thread, which you can read below, has been heavily redacted and appears to be a reply to Nadella or Gates.white gate resigned from Microsoft's board of directors In 2020, in the middle of an investigation Adultery He, along with his employees, reportedly still plays a key role in Microsoft's ongoing relationship with OpenAI. Although it is not clear from this internal email who started the discussion about OpenAI in 2019, business insider report Earlier this week, it was revealed that Gates had been meeting regularly with OpenAI since 2016 and helped broker deals.
Microsoft has now invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI and is adding its models to Office apps, the Bing search engine, Edge, and even within the Windows operating system. This allows Microsoft to be seen as a leader in the AI space, rather than a step backwards as feared five years ago. Nadella recently named AI and security as Microsoft's top two areas of focus for 2024 and beyond, suggesting that the rollout of AI capabilities into Microsoft products is not slowing down.