Microsoft multi-year, multi-billion partnership with OpenAI This was likely out of fear that Google would dominate the AI race, according to the email.
The heavily redacted emailreleased Tuesday as part of a Justice Department report antitrust case against Googleshows that Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was concerned about the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities compared to those of the search engine giant.
“[A]When I dug deeper into the topic of where all the capability gaps were between Google and us in terms of model training, I became very, very worried,” Scott wrote in a 2019 email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates.
Scott, who is also executive vice president of AI, wrote that he was initially “very dismissive” of efforts by OpenAI, DeepMind (acquired by Google in 2014) and Google Brain to enhance their AI ambitions, but “he has started take things more seriously” after seeing that Microsoft “cannot easily replicate” the natural language processing (NLP) models that companies were building.
“Even though we had a template model, it took us about 6 months to train the model because our infrastructure wasn’t up to the task,” Scott wrote about BERT language model. While Microsoft was figuring out how to train the model, Google, which already had BERT six months before Microsoft’s effort began, “had a year to figure out how to get it into production and move to larger scale, more fascinating models,” he wrote.
Scott added that autofill in Google’s Gmail app is “getting scary good” thanks to BERT-like models that have made Google more competitive.
While Microsoft had “very clever” machine learning people on its various teams, “the core deep learning teams on each of these larger teams are very diminutive” and still had a long way to go before they reached Google’s level, Scott wrote . in an email with the subject “Thoughts on OpenAI.” “[W]We are years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.”
Nadella responded to the email, echoing the words of Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, writing: “A very good email that explains why I want us to do this… and also why we will ensure our infrastructure workers get the job done.”
Neither Microsoft, Google nor OpenAI immediately responded to a request for comment.
In July 2019, Microsoft did first $1 billion investment in OpenAI to support the company’s efforts to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). Through the partnership, OpenAI announced that Microsoft will become its exclusive cloud service provider and that they will jointly develop the AI supercomputing capabilities of Microsoft Azure.