Microsoft Investments IDR 16.2 Trillion At OpenAI In 2019 Worried About AI Progress From Google

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI for "very worried" about Google (photo: dock. microsoft)

JAKARTA - In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion at OpenAI for "very worried" that Google has been more advanced in enhancing its artificial intelligence efforts for several years.

An internal email, entitled "Thinking about OpenAI," between Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, CEO of Satya Nadella, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates revealed several high-level discussions about investment opportunities months before Microsoft announced the partnership.

The email was released on Tuesday, April 30, as part of the ongoing US Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, a Business Insider report.

"We are a few years behind competitions on a machine learning scale," Scott wrote in his email on June 12, 2019 to Nadella and Gates. He explained how it took Microsoft engineers six months to replicate Google's BERT language model and train it "because Microsoft infrastructure is not capable enough."

Scott said initially he underestimated artificial intelligence efforts at OpenAI and Google DeepMind as the companies competed to see who "could achieve the most impressive action in the game" a clear reference to Google's AlphaGo Zero demo DeepMind.

Scott was more impressed when things moved towards a natural language processing model. "When I try to understand where all the gap in capabilities between Google and us for model training, I'm very, very worried," Scott wrote.

According to Scott, some of Google's early AI models helped Google have a competitive advantage against Bing. He even praised the "very good" autocomplete feature in Google's Gmail in 2019.

Nadella responded to Scott's thoughts on OpenAI by forwarding it to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, noting that this is "the reason why I want to do it." Hood is a key member of Microsoft's senior leadership team and is tasked with overseeing company financial targets and regularly keeping Microsoft's expenses under control.

This email thread is highly editor-in-chief and appears to be a reply to Nadella or Gates. Although Gates stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 amid an investigation into his relationship with an employee, he is reportedly still a big part of Microsoft's ongoing relationship with OpenAI.

It's unclear from this internal email who started discussions about OpenAI in 2019, but Business Insider reported earlier this week that Gates had regularly met with OpenAI since 2016 and helped mediate the deal.

Microsoft has now invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, adding its models to the Office app, Bing's search engine, Edge, and even in its Windows operating system.

This has helped Microsoft look more like a leader in artificial intelligence, not falling behind as they worries five years ago. Nadella has also recently made artificial intelligence and security as Microsoft's two main focus areas in 2024 and beyond, signaling that the launch of artificial intelligence features in Microsoft products will not slow down.