CEO Satya Nadella sent an email expressing deep concern about the abilities of a competing company.
Today’s AI environment has roots in fear, jealousy, and strong capitalist drive. Emails uncovered in the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Google, first reported by Business Insider, reveal that Microsoft leaders were worried and jealous of Google’s lead in AI.
This concern prompted the company that created Windows to make an initial investment of a billion dollars in what has become its essential partner, OpenAI.
In a 2019 email thread with many parts hidden, titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent a long email from CTO Kevin Scott to CFO Amy Hood. “Very good email that explains, why I want us to do this … and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute,” Nadella wrote.
Scott wrote that he was “very, very worried” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He says he initially dismissed the company’s “game-playing stunts,” likely referring to Google’s AlphaGo models.
One of them defeated the world Go champion Ke Jie in 2017, which was an impressive achievement then. (Google’s later versions improved on this, eliminating the requirement for human training.)
However, Scott mentions dismissing Google’s advancements in game-playing “was a mistake.” “When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build [natural language] models that we couldn’t easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously,” Scott wrote. “And as I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.”
Scott explains that Microsoft had difficulty replicating Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that interprets the meaning and context of words in sentences.
He attributes this challenge to the infrastructure advancements that Google achieved and Microsoft did not.
“Turns out, just replicating BERT-large wasn’t easy to do for us. Even though we had the template for the model, it took us ~6 months to get the model trained because our infrastructure wasn’t up to the task,” the Microsoft CTO wrote. “Google had BERT for at least six months prior to that, so in the time that it took us to hack together the capability to train a 340M parameter model, they had a year to figure out how to get it into production and to move on to larger scale, more interesting models.”
He also expressed admiration and jealousy for Google’s Gmail auto-complete feature, describing it as “becoming frighteningly effective.” “ multiple years behind the competition in terms of [machine learning] scale.” He commented on the “interesting” growth of OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain.
Scott praised the “very smart” individuals on Microsoft’s machine-learning teams but noted that their aspirations were restrained. “But the core deep learning teams within each of these bigger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been constrained, which means that even as we start to feed them resources, they still have to go through a learning process to scale up,” Scott wrote. “And we are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.”
After Nadella told Hood that Scott’s worries were the reason for their planned investment in OpenAI, Microsoft acted on the CEO’s direction.
In 2019, the company invested a billion dollars in the startup led by Sam Altman, marking the beginning of ongoing significant changes.
Since then, they have invested $13 billion. This technology accomplishes impressive feats but also poses risks to the job market and offers propagandists potent new tools in an era already full of misinformation.
What we think?
I think Microsoft’s big investment in OpenAI will change things a lot. They are trying to catch up to Google because Google is very good at AI.
This could lead to new and better technology. But, it might also make some jobs go away because AI can do things that people used to do. It’s exciting but also a bit worrying because of how powerful AI is becoming.
