Microsoft's Multi-year, multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI Emails indicate this is likely due to fears that Google will dominate the AI race.
of heavily edited emailannounced Tuesday as part of the Department of Justice. Antitrust lawsuit against Googleindicates that Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was concerned about the company's artificial intelligence capabilities compared to the search engine giant.
“[A]”We did a deep dive to try to understand where the capability gaps were between Google and us when it came to training models, and it became very concerning,” Scott said in 2019, when he was appointed to Microsoft's top management team. They wrote in an email to head Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates.
Scott, who is also executive vice president of AI, said he was initially “very negative” about efforts by OpenAI, DeepMind (acquired by Google in 2014) and Google Brain to expand their AI ambitions, but “started to embrace them. “It was,” he wrote. Things got even more serious when Microsoft saw that the natural language processing (NLP) models it was building “couldn't be easily replicated.”
“Although we had model templates, it took up to six months to train the models because our infrastructure was not up to the task,” Scott writes. BERT language model. During the time it took for Microsoft to figure out how to train the model, Google, which had already deployed BERT six months before Microsoft's effort began, was able to “put it into production and… “It took us a year to figure out how to move it to a larger scale. Interesting model,” he wrote.
Scott added that autocomplete in Google's Gmail app is “terrifyingly good” thanks to models like BERT that give Google a competitive edge.
Microsoft had “very smart” employees dedicated to machine learning in various teams, but “the deep learning teams at the core of each of these large teams were very small” and were not at Google's level. There was still a long way to go before scaling up, Scott wrote. The email had the subject line “Thoughts on OpenAI.” “[W]We are several years behind our competitors in terms of ML scale. ”
Nadella responded to the email, imitating Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood, writing: “It's a really good email explaining why we need to do this and why we're going to make sure our infrastructure guys do it.”
Neither Microsoft, Google nor OpenAI immediately responded to requests for comment.
In July 2019, Microsoft First investment of $1 billion in OpenAI To support the company's efforts to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). Through the partnership, OpenAI said Microsoft will be its exclusive cloud provider and the two companies will jointly develop AI supercomputing capabilities in Microsoft Azure.