Microsoft made a major investment of $1 billion for the artificial intelligence company OpenAI in 2019. It turned out that the basis of this major investment of the company was a great concern about Google’s artificial intelligence studies. What revealed the concern in question were emails sent under the title “Thoughts on OpenAI” between Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, CEO Satya Nadella and technology chief Kevin Scott.
The emails in question were published as part of the ongoing antitrust case between the US Department of Justice and Google.
“We are several years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale,” reads an email sent by Kevin Scott on June 12, 2019. Microsoft’s technology chief states that it took six months for the company’s engineers to copy and train Google’s BERT language model, and that the company’s infrastructure is not suitable for the job.
Scott states that he initially underestimated the artificial intelligence efforts of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, but he was also impressed with the emergence of natural language models and says: “I was very, very worried trying to understand where all the skill gaps were between Google and us regarding model training.”
Scott said some of Google’s early AI models helped it gain a competitive advantage over Bing, and even noted that Google’s autocomplete features in Gmail “got scary good” in 2019. Nadella conveyed Scott’s thoughts about OpenAI to the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, in a note: “This is why I want to do this.”
Although Bill Gates left the Microsoft board in 2020 due to an investigation into his relationship with an employee, it is stated that he is still a big part of Microsoft’s ongoing relationship with OpenAI. It is unknown who started the OpenAI discussion in the 2019 email chain. However, according to Business Insider, Gates has been meeting regularly with OpenAI since 2016 and helped broker the deal.
Microsoft invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI
Microsoft has invested more than 13 billion for OpenAI so far. It has added the company’s models to Office applications, the Bing search engine, Edge, and even the Windows operating system. Thus, contrary to its fears in 2019, Microsoft did not fall behind in the field of artificial intelligence and took a leading role. CEO Sarya Nadella recently identified Microsoft’s top two focus areas in 2024 and beyond as artificial intelligence and security, signaling that the rollout of AI features in Microsoft products will not slow down.
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