MICROSOFT INVESTED IN OPENAI AFTER BEING WORRIED ABOUT GOOGLE'S AI ADVANCEMENT, NEW REPORT SAYS
When Microsoft introduced its AI-powered Bing last year, reports of a code red situation in Google's offices had surfaced. The two tech giants have been locked in a competitive race ever since interest around AI picked up pace after the launch of ChatGPT. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had also said during an interview that they wish to make Google "dance" in the AI race. However, fresh reports suggest that Microsoft was also losing sleep over Google's AI advancement in the emerging technology. Hence, it decided to invest heavily in ChatGPT parent OpenAI.Â
A Business Insider report said that Microsoft realised that Google was moving ahead fast in the field of AI, especially with features like auto-complete in Gmail getting much better.Â
In 2019, Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, sent an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. According to the Business Insider report, Scott sounded "very worried" in the email because he felt that Microsoft was way behind Google when it came to AI technology. He mentioned that Microsoft needed to do a lot of catching up.
When Nadella, the CEO, received the email, he forwarded it to Amy Hood, the chief financial officer. He said that the email showed why investing in OpenAI was necessary.
The email was made public recently because of a legal case the US government is pursuing against Google, claiming that Google has too much control over the search market.
"Turns out, just replicating BERT-large wasn't easy to do for us. Even though we had the template for the model, it took us ~6 months to get the model trained because our infrastructure wasn't up to the task. Google had BERT for at least six months prior to that, so in the time that it took us to hack together the capability to train a 340M parameter model, they had a year to figure out how to get it into production and to move on to larger scale, more interesting models. We are already seeing the results of that work in our competitive analysis of their products. One of the Q&A competitive metrics that we watch just jumped by 10 percentage points on Google Search because of BERT-like models. Their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good," a part of the email read.Â
Microsoft first invested USD 1 billion in OpenAI and this partnership has grown a lot since then. The tech giant has invested billions in Sam Altman's company since then. Microsoft's decision to invest in OpenAI turned out to be a wise move. Since the release of ChatGPT, an AI program by OpenAI, there has been a lot of interest in AI from both the public and investors. Microsoft was able to bring new AI features to its products quickly, which made some people think that Google might be falling behind.Â
When questioned in court last year, Nadella explained that their decision to invest in OpenAI wasn't just about improving Microsoft's search engine. However, the improvements in their search technology have been significant because of this investment.
2024-05-02T09:16:00Z dg43tfdfdgfd