Microsoft's investment in OpenAI may be due to concerns about Google's AI progress

Source: contribution
2024-05-06 11:07:02

Kevin Scott, chief technology officer, Satya Nadella, chief executive officer, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft mail , revealing some high-level discussions around investment opportunities in the months before Microsoft disclosed the partnership.

This email was published last Tuesday as part of Google's antitrust case being tried by the US Department of Justice. The content of the email shows that Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 due to concerns about Google's leading trend in the field of artificial intelligence.

Scott wrote in his email to Nadella and Gates on June 12, 2019: "In terms of machine learning scale, we are many years behind our competitors". It also described in detail how Microsoft engineers spent six months copying Google's BERT language model and training it, "because our infrastructure is not competent for this task".

He said that he initially ignored the artificial intelligence work of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, because at that time the two companies were competing to see who could "achieve the most impressive game stunts" - this obviously refers to the AlphaGo Zero demonstration of Google DeepMind. But the natural language processing model that followed soon left a deep impression on him.

Scott wrote, "I was very, very worried when I learned about the gap between Google and our capabilities in model training.". He believed that some of Google's early AI models helped it to gain an advantage in the competition with Bing, and even praised the auto completion function in Google's Gmail in 2019.

When responding to Scott's idea on OpenAI, Nadella forwarded the relevant content to Amy Hood, Microsoft's CFO, and pointed out that this is "the reason why I want to do this". Hood is an important member of Microsoft's senior leadership team, responsible for monitoring the company's financial goals and regularly controlling Microsoft's spending.

Although Gates withdrew from the Microsoft Board of Directors in 2020 for some reason, it is said that he is still an important member of the continuous partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI. Business Insider reported that Gates has been meeting with OpenAI regularly since 2016 and helped facilitate the transaction.

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