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Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership was born from Google envy
It turns out the lay of today’s AI landscape can be traced back to fear, jealousy and intense capitalist ambition. Emails revealed in the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google show Microsoft executives expressing alarm and envy over Google’s AI lead.
In a heavily redacted 2019 email thread titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella forwards a lengthy message from CTO Kevin Scott to CFO Amy Hood. Scott recounts how Microsoft struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of words in a sentence. He also admired and envied Google’s Gmail auto-complete capabilities, saying it was “getting scarily good.” He commented that Microsoft was “multiple years behind the competition in terms of [machine learning] scale.” He commented on the “interesting” growth of OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain.
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