Email reveals Microsoft was mighty worried about Google gaining ground in AI

The US Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google has revealed inside information that hints at Google’s dominance in the AI landscape in the last decade. According to emails made public, Microsoft was very, very worried about the progress Google had made in AI.

First shared by Business Insider, the email, titled Thoughts on OpenAI, sent by Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, and Bill Gates, highlighted how the company was several years behind the competition in terms of ML (Machine Learning) scale.

While most parts of the email were redacted, the sections made public clearly expressed Microsoft’s fear of losing to Google in the race for AI dominance. In the email, Scott cited the example of auto-fill in Gmail. He said,

Their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good.

Talking about OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain, Scott shared how he was earlier dismissive about their efforts but soon realized how Microsoft fared compared to them when NLP (Natural Language Processing) models were first developed,

When all these programs were doing was competing with one another to see which RL system could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, I has highly dismissive of their efforts. That was a mistake. When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build NLP models that we couldn’t easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously. And as I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.

Scott sent the email on June 12, 2019, and Microsoft and OpenAI announced an exclusive partnership on July 22, 2019. This can’t be a coincidence!

While it’s possible that talks for a partnership might have been underway at the time, given Bill Gates’ control over Microsoft and his relations with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, we can’t ignore the fact that Microsoft was concerned about the developments in the space, and it not playing a significant part.

But, that seems like ancient history now!

In the last few years, Microsoft has heavily invested in OpenAI, integrated AI-powered solutions into native products, such as Copilot in Windows, introduced image creation capabilities, and brought AI into manufacturing.

This push has delivered results, with Microsoft Azure emerging as an alternative against AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Google Cloud, Bing reaching 140 million daily active users, and other native products witnessing increased adoption.

Microsoft presently is the biggest player in the AI landscape, with all major tech giants far behind. And given its continued efforts, the picture is not going to change soon.

Who do you think will dominate the AI landscape in the future, Microsoft or Google? Share with our readers in the comments section.