Microsoft was ‘very, very worried’ about Google and OpenAI in 2019

Back then, chief technology officer Kevin Scott sent a four-page email to CEO Satya Nadella and cofounder Bill Gates with the subject line “thoughts on OpenAI,” which outlined his fears that Microsoft was falling drastically behind in the AI race. At the time, ChatGPT was still more than four years away from being released to the public. But even then, Scott realized OpenAI and Google had made extraordinary steps forward in their work on AI. 

“The thing that’s interesting about what OpenAI and DeepMInd and Google Brain are doing is the scale of their ambition,” Scott wrote. 

The email, which is heavily redacted, came to light as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation into Google and was first reported by Business Insider.  

That same year, Microsoft would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the very company Scott cited in his email. Eventually the tech giant would go on to invest at least another $10 billion into the startup, which is credited for popularizing AI chatbots for everyday use with the launch of ChatGPT. The two companies are now intertwined. Microsoft brings its vast resources, the need for which Scott outlines in his email, while OpenAI brings its cutting-edge AI expertise that had so preoccupied the Microsoft executive. 

In his email, Scott says he miscalculated what exactly Google and OpenAI were trying to accomplish with their AI work. At the time, DeepMind, a startup owned by Google, was trying to build an AI system that could play the Chinese board game Go, which Scott seems to be referencing. 

“I was highly dismissive of that,” Scott wrote. “That was a mistake.”

Scott marveled at how Google and OpenAI had built an entire infrastructure around their AI push. In the email, he said he was surprised Google and OpenAI had designed data centers, sourced silicon chips, and built programming frameworks to enable all their work, according to the email. 

“When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build NLP [natural language processing] models that we couldn’t easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously,” Scott told Gates and Nadella. 

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

The advent of AI has made many of those resources in extremely high demand. AI requires extraordinary…