Microsoft’s OpenAI focus stemmed from Google fears, email suggests

Concerns within Microsoft of being ‘multiple years behind the competition’ may have pushed the tech giant into the investment, which eventually sparked the surge in generative AI witnessed today. A newly revealed email from 2019 suggests Microsoft’s investment into OpenAI began out of concern about Google’s growing dominance in the AI sector at the time. A highly redacted email was recently revealed as part of a US Justice Department antitrust case against Google, Business Insider reports. This email – titled “Thoughts on OpenAI” – shows comments from Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott in June 2019 – a few months before Microsoft invested $1bn into the AI start-up. In the email to Microsoft founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella, Scott commented on OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain – particularly the “scale of their ambition” in various areas. He said that he was initially “highly dismissive” of their work into reinforcement learning – a field of machine learning that helps AI achi