Microsoft’s concerns over Google’s lead drove investment in OpenAI

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 as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against the search giant.

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 Inc.’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.