(Bloomberg) — Microsoft’s motivations for making a huge investment and partnership with Open AI lie in Google, according to internal emails released Tuesday as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against the search giant. He says it came from the feeling that he was far behind.
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Kevin Scott, the Windows software maker’s chief technology officer, said he was “very concerned” about the gap in AI model training capabilities between Alphabet’s efforts and Microsoft’s. This was stated in a 2019 message to the CEO. Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. The exchange indicates that the company’s management has privately acknowledged that it lacks the infrastructure and speed of development to keep up with the likes of OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind.
The emails were made public late Tuesday after news organizations including the New York Times and Bloomberg intervened in a landmark antitrust case to push for greater public access. The U.S. Department of Justice argues that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other innovations might have been released years ago if Google hadn’t dominated the search market.
Scott, who is also Microsoft’s executive vice president of artificial intelligence, said Alphabet’s AI advances have improved the competitive metrics for Google’s search products. The Microsoft executive wrote that it was a mistake to dismiss some of its competitors’ early AI efforts.
“We are several years behind our competitors in terms of machine learning scale,” Scott said in an email. Key parts of the message, titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” remain redacted. Nadella said he stood by Scott’s email and forwarded it to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood, explaining “why I should do this.”
Read more: How Microsoft’s $13 billion bet became an AI force
Microsoft has committed more than $13 billion to partnering with and supporting OpenAI, leveraging the startup’s generative AI technology to power its Bing search service, Edge internet browser, and most notably bring its AI Copilot service to Windows. Integrated. Nadella has made the AI race a priority for the company, hiring DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman to run its consumer AI business.
Mr. Nadella answered questions about the emails when he testified at trial last fall.
“As it relates to search, we wanted to use large-scale language models like those developed by OpenAI to ensure we could think about innovation in the search category,” said Nadella. . But he later added, “The investment wasn’t just focused on search.”
Last year, Microsoft and Google refused to release the emails in response to requests from reporters on the grounds that they would reveal sensitive business information. Media companies have called for the documents to be made public, and Judge Amit Mehta last week wrote that they “shed light on Google’s defense of Google and Microsoft’s relative investments in search.” I ordered it to be provided.
Google and the Justice Department are scheduled to make closing arguments in the case on Thursday and Friday. Judge Mehta is expected to issue a ruling later this year.
The case is United States v. Google, 20-cv-3010, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia.
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