‘We’re years behind our competitors in machine learning scale,’ emails show Microsoft execs worried about rival Google’s AI growth, which motivated them to invest in OpenAI

What you need to know

• The 2019 emails between Microsoft executives Bill Gates, Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott have been released as part of an ongoing antitrust investigation.

• The emails raised concerns that Microsoft’s AI is “years behind” its main rival Google.

• After these emails were sent, Microsoft invested in OpenAI, which helped it improve its own AI solutions.

• Today, Microsoft Copilot, powered by AI, is integrated with various Microsoft programs to provide AI support in various ways.

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Given Microsoft’s current focus on artificial intelligence (AI), it’s strange to think of a time when the company wasn’t in such a good place. But information has recently emerged that helps explain why the tech company struck a deal with OpenAI in 2019.

As part of an ongoing antitrust investigation, heavily redacted emails sent between Microsoft executives in 2019 were recently unearthed. The subject of the emails was concerns that Microsoft’s AI development was lagging behind that of one of its biggest competitors, Google.

Specifically, CTO Kevin Scott wrote to CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates to discuss Microsoft’s current AI position. The email discussed concerns that Microsoft’s machine learning (ML) development is “years behind the competition.”

“We have very smart ML people in Bind, in the vision team, and in the speech team. But the core deep learning teams in each of those larger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been limited, which means that even as we start to give them resources, they still have to go through a learning curve to grow. And in terms of ML scale, we are years behind the competition.” – Kevin Scott, email, June 12, 2019

Scott also mentioned that he initially didn’t pay much attention to AI, but realized that was a bad move since Microsoft’s rivals were making a lot of progress in this area.

It’s clear that Microsoft executives took the news seriously. Later that year, Microsoft struck a deal with OpenAI in 2019, which has helped the company a lot in the AI ​​space since then. As of today Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI (Thanks, The Verge .) You probably already know this, but to reiterate, OpenAI has been able to create a number of AI tools, including the popular chatbot, ChatGPT, and the upcoming generative text-to-video model, Sora.

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It’s interesting that Microsoft felt it had to do something to increase its position in AI and made a very good move to maintain its competitive position. We’ve seen how much AI programs like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and others have gained popularity over the past few years. AI will continue to evolve and become more integrated into everyday programs as time goes on, so Microsoft made a smart move by striking a deal with OpenAI in 2019.

Today, Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, can generate text responses to prompts, as well as generate images (via DALL-E 3). It’s available in a variety of Microsoft programs and services. Not to mention, it’s been integrated with Bing search to provide faster, more useful search results.

Since sending those emails in 2019, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has officially stepped down from the company. But he’s still involved. After all, he helped start the company when he was 20 years old (in 1975). It’s his life’s work, and it’s a wildly successful company. So it makes sense that he’d still be contributing in some way, even if the 68-year-old retiree has scaled back his focus.