- According to Todd McKinnon, CEO of cybersecurity company Okta, Microsoft is outsourcing virtually all of its top artificial intelligence research and development (R&D) to OpenAI.
- McKinnon told CNBC that he sees Google’s AI research and development efforts as more organic, adding that the internet giant pioneered much of the research that led to today’s generative AI.
- McKinnon added that there was a risk that Microsoft’s AI position would be reduced to a consultancy role.
LONDON — Microsoft is outsourcing the development of all of its best artificial intelligence tools and software to OpenAI, in a move that could be a boon for arch rival Google, according to one tech company’s CEO.
Todd McKinnon, CEO of identity security company Okta, told CNBC on Friday that Google is “probably doing its best to avoid having to outsource research and development” as it seeks to protect its position in search.
He noted that the so-called transformers that power today’s generative AI technology “all came from Google.”
Transformers are deep learning models that learn context and learn meaning by tracking relationships in continuous data such as words.
“This all came out of Google and DeepMind and research,” McKinnon said. “So the breakthrough was the Google research, the Transformer, which is the algorithm that all these LLMs use. [large language models] We are using it to make these big advances happen.”
Microsoft as an AI “consultant”
McKinnon added that Microsoft’s AI role is at risk of being reduced to “consultancy.” CNBC reached out to Microsoft for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
This comes as technology from OpenAI, the developer of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, is embedded into some of the company’s flagship products, including its generative AI chatbot, Copilot, and PCs equipped with generative AI software.
Microsoft has reportedly poured billions into OpenAI, bringing its total investment to date to $13 billion. In January 2023, the tech giant said the investment would “accelerate breakthroughs in AI and ensure their benefits are shared more broadly around the world.”
“It’s so weird,” McKinnon told CNBC. “Imagine working at Microsoft. OpenAI is building all this exciting stuff over there. It’s like Microsoft is turning into a consulting firm.”
Still, Google has some hurdles to overcome before it can achieve commercial success with its AI investments.
Microsoft’s investment and partnership with OpenAI has made it the de facto leader in advancing the underlying AI models.As internet users increasingly turn to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to fulfill their search needs, concerns have been raised that this could undermine Google’s position in search.
Meanwhile, Google’s own AI efforts have been plagued by a number of highly public missteps.
Last year, when Google launched its Gemini AI chatbot (then called Bard), an ad on social media site X showed the bot giving incorrect answers to users’ questions. More recently, the product, now known as Google Gemini, began generating non-historical images from history prompts.
Google has since stopped offering its Gemini image generation tool for portraits and has not yet reinstated it while it investigates how to fix the problem.
It takes a huge investment to be successful
MacKinnon noted that AI is a rare technology area that emerged not as an organic investment in a new product cycle, as was the case with PCs and cloud computing, but with significant backing from large technology companies.
“This is different from other generations of technology like the personal computer, where the biggest companies in the world didn’t necessarily dominate, because the personal computer was truly disruptive, almost in a toy sense,” McKinnon said.
“There are no new AI models that are toys. The only reason OpenAI was able to make it work is because they did the great research and development they needed – they raised $10 billion from Microsoft to run their models. It was a $10 billion investment, not a disruptive one.”
He added that big tech companies’ huge investments in AI were raising competitive concerns.
McKinnon sees the “biggest risk” for the cybersecurity industry going forward is that AI-related issues, such as disinformation caused by the digital giants, “stifle technological progress.”
“potential [for] “Artificial intelligence is incredibly important,” he said, but added, “I expect we’ll see significant changes in regulation, ensuring that only the biggest and most powerful companies have control over AI.”
