"Thoughts on OpenAI"
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Microsoft CTO: "Thoughts on OpenAI"
From: Kevin Scott
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2019 7:16:11 AM
To: Satya Nadella; Bill Gates
Subject: Re: Thoughts on OpenAI
[Redacted] The thing that's interesting about what Open Al and Deep Mind and Google Brain are doing is the scale of their ambition, and how that ambition is driving everything from datacenter design to compute silicon to networks and distributed systems architectures to numerical optimizers, compilers, programming frameworks, and the high level abstractions that model developers have at their disposal. When all these programs were doing was competing with one another to see which RL system could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, I has highly dismissive of their efforts. That was a mistake. When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build NLP models that we couldn't easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously. 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.
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. 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. We are already seeing the results of that work in our competitive analysis of their products. One of the Q&A competitive metrics that we watch just jumped by 10 percentage points on Google Search because of BERT-like models. Their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good.
[Redacted] We have very smart ML people in Bing, in the vision team, and in the speech team. 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. And we are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale. [Redacted]
From: Satya Nadella
To: Kevin Scott
CC: Amy Hood
Sent: 6/12/2019 6:02:47 PM
Subject: RE: Thoughts on OpenAI
Very good email that explains, why I want us to do this... and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute.
Amy - fyi
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
[This document is from U.S. v. Google (2024).]
Further reading from Leah Nylen and Shirin Ghaffary for Bloomberg (April 30, 2024): “Microsoft Corp.’s motivation for investing heavily and partnering with OpenAI came from a sense of falling badly behind Google, according to an internal email released Tuesday … The email was released late Tuesday after media organizations including the New York Times and Bloomberg intervened in the landmark antitrust suit to push for greater public access. … Significant portions of the message, titled ‘Thoughts on OpenAI,’ remain redacted.”
Further reading from Charles Duhigg for The New Yorker (December 1, 2023): “If Scott wanted Microsoft to lead the A.I. revolution, he’d have to help the company surpass Google... So he began looking at various startups, and one of them stood out: OpenAI.”
Previously: Sam Altman emails Elon Musk (June 24, 2015)
Jeff Bezos emails Amazon exec
From: Jeff Bezos
Sent: 2/29/2020 10:15:23 AM
To: Mike Hopkins
Subject: Re: [Redacted]
Thanks Mike. Are you on signal messaging app? (Better way to communicate with me.)
[This document is from FTC v. Amazon (2024).]
Further reading from Leah Nylen for Bloomberg (April 25, 2024): “Top Amazon executives including founder Jeff Bezos and Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy destroyed text messages discussing business, the Federal Trade Commission alleged, erasing evidence the agency could have used in its antitrust case against the retail giant.”
Thanks for reading!
-Internal Tech Emails