Microsoft Concern Over Google's Lead Drove OpenAI Investment (yahoo.com) 10
Microsoft'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 as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case against the search giant. Bloomberg: The Windows software maker's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was "very, very worried" when he looked at the AI model-training capability gap between Alphabet's efforts and Microsoft's, he wrote in a 2019 message to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. The exchange shows how the company's top executives privately acknowledged they lacked the infrastructure and development speed to catch up to the likes of OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.
[...] Scott, who also serves as executive vice president of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, observed that Google's search product had improved on competitive metrics because of the Alphabet company's advancements in AI. The Microsoft executive wrote that he made a mistake by dismissing some of the earlier AI efforts of its competitors. "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale," Scott said in the email. Significant portions of the message, titled 'Thoughts on OpenAI,' remain redacted. Nadella endorsed Scott's email, forwarding it to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and saying it explains "why I want us to do this."
[...] Scott, who also serves as executive vice president of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, observed that Google's search product had improved on competitive metrics because of the Alphabet company's advancements in AI. The Microsoft executive wrote that he made a mistake by dismissing some of the earlier AI efforts of its competitors. "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale," Scott said in the email. Significant portions of the message, titled 'Thoughts on OpenAI,' remain redacted. Nadella endorsed Scott's email, forwarding it to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and saying it explains "why I want us to do this."
That is not why Microsoft is behind (Score:3)
But things like their massive insecure cloud and OS are. They have build a gigantic house of cards that makes them tons of money, but it can collapse any time and several times very nearly did. It is unlikely they can fix that. Their last efforts in that direction did not last long and they were back to their usual crap pretty fast. The same will happen this time. The sooner MS dies, the better for everybody.
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Re:That is not why Microsoft is behind (Score:4, Informative)
You should have a look at this: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/def... [cisa.gov]
If you maintain your statement after that, then you are simply an idiot.
Nobody else is even _remotly_ as insecure and as overall crappy as Microsoft and Azure. They still do not even know how they got attacked, because they do not keep logs for critical security functions for that long. The one path they think (!) the attackers may have gotten in requires them to have screwed up _everything_.
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This article is specifically about AI, not cloud in general, or search. As the summary points out, MS felt they were behind Google's DeepMind AI development.
Microsoft certainly is behind Google in search, but certainly NOT behind Google in cloud hosting, their market share is double that of Google, and they are catching up to AWS. https://wire19.com/amazon-micr... [wire19.com]
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That's from 2022, though. In it, you've got Amazon at 34%, Microsoft at 21%, and Google at 11%. By 2023Q4 (https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/), you've got Amazon at 31%, Microsoft at 24%, and Google still at 11%.
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And in both years, Microsoft is way ahead of Google.
Sure, I guess (Score:2)
The thing Google has is that other big companies adopt GDrive and FOSS tech components as their standard tools instead of developing their own. This leads to a (arguably dangerous) dependency on Google.
Microsoft used to fulfill this role, but Google, Apple, FOSS, and internally-developed dependencies have largely replaced Microsoft's "tasteless" ecosystem. Microsoft enterprise offerings are still used at traditional and antiquated businesses in large enough numbers to make a reasonable profit, but not Goog
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Smart move, it worked (Score:2)
Yes, MS was *way* behind on AI development. Clearly, their investment in OpenAI was a smash hit, allowing them to leapfrog Google and everybody else. Google, and especially Apple, were caught flat-footed. Google has a lot of work to do to catch up, and Apple has barely started.