A court case that puts Google in the dock brought to light an email exchanged between Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates, co-founder of the company, and the then technology manager, Kevin Scott. In this communication, an investment opportunity was discussed at a high level, which, months later, came to fruition with the investment of one billion dollars in OpenAI.
It is also in this email that those responsible admitted that they were far behind the competition, when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, which ends up justifying the large investment in this partnership. “We’re several years behind the competition in terms of machine learning,” admits Scott, later explaining that it took Microsoft engineers six months to replicate Google’s BERT language model.
Scott also admits that he was initially skeptical about this industry, but that “as I dug deeper into where the differences in capabilities were between Google and us for model training, I became very, very concerned,” quotes the The Verge.
Satya Nadella forwarded Scott’s email to Amy Hood, the finance manager who is part of the company’s senior leadership team, explaining that it was for these reasons that he wanted to make the investment.
The communication revealed in court and which has now become public is heavily censored, but it can be seen that it is an exchange of messages between high-level executives and that it also involves Gates, who, despite being officially away from Microsoft, is very involved in connection with OpenAI and will have even helped to complete the deal.
Microsoft has already invested more than 13 billion dollars in OpenAI and is now integrating its technology into Office applications, the Bing search engine, the Edge browser and even Windows itself. Since then, Nadella has already assumed that AI and security are his two areas of focus for this year, which shows that the pace of new developments is not likely to slow down in the near future.
Tags: Exam Microsoft accelerated investment OpenAI due fear Google
