Google's AI Drive Prompted Microsoft To Invest In OpenAI

(RTTNews) - Newly unearthed email exchanges between Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates revealed that Microsoft (MSFT) was worried about Alphabet, Inc.-owned (GOOG) Google's progress in artificial intelligence, prompting the former to make billions of investment in OpenAI.

The email released as part of the ongoing US Justice Department antitrust case against Google, showed that Microsoft officials were "very worried" about Google's progress and touted "auto-complete in Gmail" as "scarily good."

In emails titled "Thoughts on OpenAI", Scott wrote that, "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale." He further said that Microsoft engineers took six months to build a duplicate model of Google's BERT due to lack of infrastructure.

The 2019 email exchanges noted that OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain's AI were "interesting" and had a competitive edge against Microsoft.

Scott further wrote that initially he was dismissive about OpenAI and Google's AI progress, but later regretted it.

Scott's emails about OpenAI were later forwarded by Nadella to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, highlighting it as "why I want to do this."

According to Business Insider, the email thread was heavily redacted and seemed to be a reply to Nadella or Gates, who stepped down from the company in 2020 due to misconduct allegations, but played a major role in brokering the deal with OpenAI.

The Redmond-based company joined hands with OpenAI in 2019 with an initial investment of $1 billion, and currently has more than $13 billion investment in the AI startup. OpenAI helped the technology company to outrun Google in the AI race by , which pumping artificial intelligence feature in Microsoft's office apps, Edge and Windows operating system.