Fear of Google Pushed Microsoft to OpenAI Partnership

Recently released evidence in the U.S. antitrust case against Google explains why Microsoft partnered with OpenAI instead of going it alone and pursuing its in-house AI initiatives. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott—who later spearheaded the Microsoft/OpenAI partnership—saw how far ahead Google was with its AI models and knew the software giant needed help.

“We have very smart ML [machine learning] people in Bing, in the vision team, and in the speech team,” Mr. Scott writes in a heavily redacted email from June 2019 to CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. “But the core deep learning teams within each of these bigger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been constrained, which means that even as we start to feed them resources, they still have to go through a learning process to scale up. We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.”

This email, called “Thoughts on OpenAI,” puts OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain—the latter two of which are/were Google initiatives—on equal footing. And it serves as an opening salvo in what eventually led to the Microsoft partnership with OpenAI.

“The scale of their ambition is driving everything from datacenter design to compute silicon to networks and distributed systems architecture to numerical optimizers, compilers, programming frameworks, and the high level abstractions that model developers have at their disposal,” he explains, essentially predicting Microsoft’s future path while admitting he was initially dismissive of this work. But that changed. “As I dug in to try to understand where all the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.”

According to the small bits of the email that aren’t redacted, the issue is both scale and time to scale. On the outside, we can all see how quickly AI is evolving and changing the world, but this speed makes it exponentially harder to catch up with competitors when you’re starting from behind. At that moment, Scott said that Microsoft was 6 months behind Google in creating an alternative to the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language model. And even at that time, Google was already realizing the benefits from these advances, like the “scarily good” auto-complete in Gmail.

In other words, this email is a call to arms. And while it’s unclear whether this was the first of Scott’s pushes to get Microsoft to embrace AI, it does serve to cement his reputation for being the impetus for the current advances. Most specifically, just getting Microsoft and OpenAI in the same room so they could explore the possibilities that led us to today.

Mr. Nadella forwarded this email to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, noting, “I want us to do this,” presumably referring to some redacted strategy in the Scott email.