Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said Google should have been a default winner in the AI space but Microsoft and Open AI’s partnership has helped intensify competition.
In the podcast ‘In Good Company’ hosted by the CEO of Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management, Nicolai Tangen, the Microsoft chief acknowledged Google as a very strong player in artificial intelligence.
“Google's a very competent company and obviously they have both the talent and the compute. They're the vertically integrated player in this. They have everything from data to silicon to models to products and distribution,” Nadella said.
“We will have significant amount of competition, and if anything Microsoft's partnership with Open AI is bringing more competition. Google should have been the default winner. If we partner well and we innovate well, we can bring some competition to them,” he added.
Nadella stressed that Microsoft had been dabbling with AI for a very long time. “The very first thing Microsoft Research did in 1995 when it was formed was some stuff around speech. I think we hired a bunch of the folks from CMU and so we've been at this AI thing in its variety of different forms forever,” he said.
He added that Microsoft decided to partner with Sam Altman’s Open AI because they were using a different approach in the field.
“I'm always looking for partners that we can innovate with and that's what I found in Sam and team. At that time, it was a real shot in the dark. It is not like this is a sure thing. This is the issue with tech, which is long before it's conventional wisdom you have to be all in and hope it works.”
“We backed it long before it was conventional wisdom and here we are. But there's going to be severe amount of competition,” he said referring to Google.
Nadella also gave an insight into how Microsoft will build its AI infrastructure in the next few years.
“I think about this in the fullness of the stack. I want us to have first and foremost the best AI infrastructure. That means when it comes to Azure, whether it's for training whether it's for inference, to have fantastic infrastructure. We'll partner with Nvidia, we'll partner with AMD, we'll have our own silicon, we will have our own system architecture."
"We will take the best system architecture innovation from Jensen [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huan] and Lisa [ AMD Lisa Su] and others who may come along, and make sure Azure is serving the needs of Open AI, serving the needs of Mistral, serving the needs of Phi that we are building right, which is the small language model,” he said.