MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - Newly unearthed email exchanges between Microsoft
CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates revealed that
Microsoft (MSFT) was worried about Alphabet, Inc.-owned (GOOG) Google's progress
in artificial intelligence, prompting the former to make billions of investment
in OpenAI.

The email released as part of the ongoing US Justice Department antitrust case
against Google, showed that Microsoft officials were 'very worried' about
Google's progress and touted 'auto-complete in Gmail' as 'scarily good.'

In emails titled 'Thoughts on OpenAI', Scott wrote that, 'We are multiple years
behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale.' He further said that
Microsoft engineers took six months to build a duplicate model of Google's BERT
due to lack of infrastructure.

The 2019 email exchanges noted that OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain's AI were
'interesting' and had a competitive edge against Microsoft.

Scott further wrote that initially he was dismissive about OpenAI and Google's
AI progress, but later regretted it.

Scott's emails about OpenAI were later forwarded by Nadella to Microsoft CFO Amy
Hood, highlighting it as 'why I want to do this.'

According to Business Insider, the email thread was heavily redacted and seemed
to be a reply to Nadella or Gates, who stepped down from the company in 2020 due
to misconduct allegations, but played a major role in brokering the deal with
OpenAI.

The Redmond-based company joined hands with OpenAI in 2019 with an initial
investment of $1 billion, and currently has more than $13 billion investment in
the AI startup. OpenAI helped the technology company to outrun Google in the AI
race by , which pumping artificial intelligence feature in Microsoft's office
apps, Edge and Windows operating system.



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