It seems the lay of right this moment’s AI panorama may be traced again to — what are you aware — concern, jealousy and intense capitalist ambition. Emails revealed within the Division of Justice’s antitrust case towards Google, first reported by Enterprise Insider, present Microsoft executives expressing alarm and envy over Google’s AI lead. That spurred an urgency that led to the Home windows maker’s preliminary billion-dollar funding in its now-indispensable associate, OpenAI.
In a closely redacted 2019 e-mail thread titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella forwards a prolonged message from CTO Kevin Scott to CFO Amy Hood. “Very good email that explains, why I want us to do this … and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute,” Nadella wrote.
Scott wrote that he was “very, very worried” about Google’s quickly rising AI capabilities. He says he initially dismissed the corporate’s “game-playing stunts,” possible referring to Google’s AlphaGo fashions. Certainly one of them beat Go world champion Ke Jie in 2017, a exceptional feat on the time. (Google’s later fashions surpassed that one, dropping the necessity for human coaching altogether.)
However Scott says dismissing Google’s game-playing progress “was a mistake.” “When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build [natural language] models that we couldn’t easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously,” Scott wrote. “And as I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.”
Scott recounts how Microsoft struggled to repeat Google’s BERT-large, an AI mannequin that deciphers the which means and context of phrases in a sentence. Scott pinned the blame on infrastructure leaps its rival had made — and that Microsoft hadn’t.
“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,” the Microsoft CTO wrote. “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.”
He additionally admired and envied Google’s Gmail auto-complete capabilities, saying it was “getting scarily good.” He commented that Microsoft was “multiple years behind the competition in terms of [machine learning] scale.” He commented on the “interesting” development of OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Mind.
Scott touted Microsoft’s “very smart” individuals on its machine-learning groups however stated their ambitions have been curbed. “But the core deep learning teams within each of these bigger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been constrained, which means that even as we start to feed them resources, they still have to go through a learning process to scale up,” Scott wrote. “And we are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.”
After prompting Hood that Scott’s considerations have been “why I want us to do this,” which means put money into OpenAI, the corporate made good on its CEO’s needs. Microsoft invested a billion {dollars} within the Sam Altman-led startup in 2019, and the remainder is a quickly altering historical past. (It’s now invested $13 billion.) It’s a expertise that does some unbelievable issues however threatens to intestine the labor market and provides propagandists their strongest instruments thus far in what was already an age of rampant disinformation.
