Microsoft’s billion-dollar OpenAI investment was trigged by Google fears, emails reveal
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 because it was “very worried” that Google was years ahead in scaling up its AI efforts. An internal email, titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” between Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates reveals some of the high-level discussions around an investment opportunity in the months before Microsoft revealed the partnership.
The email was released on Tuesday as part of the ongoing US Justice Department antitrust case against Google, Business Insider reports.
“We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale,” Scott writes in his June 12th, 2019, email to Nadella and Gates. He details how it took six months for Microsoft engineers to...