[D66] Wired: Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Is Betting Everything on AI

[René Oudeweg]

[Meneer Microschoft is ook van de 'grandeur', een veelvoorkomende 
CEO-aandoening: "I'm much more focused on the benefits to all of us. I 
am haunted by the fact that the industrial revolution didn't touch the 
parts of the world where I grew up until much later. So I am looking for 
the thing that may be even bigger than the industrial revolution, and 
really doing what the industrial revolution did for the West, for 
everyone in the world. So I'm not at all worried about AGI showing up, 
or showing up fast. Great, right? That means 8 billion people have 
abundance. That's a fantastic world to live in."/RO]

$describe "Satya Nadella" en
en:
Satya Nadella
Satya Narayana Nadella (Telugu: నాదెళ్ల సత్యనారాయణ, ; born 19 August 
1967) is an Indian-American business executive. He is the executive 
chairman and CEO of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014 as CEO 
and John W. Thompson in 2021 as chairman. Before becoming CEO, he was 
the executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group, 
responsible for building and running the company's computing platforms.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence




wired.com 
<https://www.wired.com/story/microsofts-satya-nadella-is-betting-everything-on-ai/> 



  Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Is Betting Everything on AI

Steven Levy
17–22 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I never thought I'd write these words, but here goes. Satya Nadella—and 
Microsoft <https://www.wired.com/tag/microsoft>, the company he runs—are 
riding high on the buzz from its search engine 
<https://www.wired.com/story/how-microsofts-bing-chatbot-came-to-be-and-where-its-going-next/>. 
That's quite a contrast from the first time I spoke with Nadella, in 
2009. Back then, he was not so well known, and he made a point of 
telling me about his origins. Born in Hyderabad, India, he attended grad 
school in the US and joined Microsoft in 1992, just as the firm was 
rising to power. Nadella hopped all over the company and stayed through 
the downtimes, including after Microsoft's epic antitrust court battle 
and when it missed the smartphone revolution. Only after spinning 
through his bio did he bring up his project at the time 
<https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1987999001?lang=en>: Bing, the 
much-mocked search engine that was a poor cousin—if that—to Google's 
dominant franchise.

As we all know, Bing failed to loosen Google's grip on search, but 
Nadella's fortunes only rose. In 2011 he led the nascent cloud platform 
Azure, building out its infra­structure and services. Then, because of 
his track record, his quietly effective leadership, and a thumbs-up from 
Bill Gates, he became Micro­soft's CEO 
<https://www.wired.com/2014/04/microsoft-new-company/> in 2014. Nadella 
immediately began to transform the company's culture and business. He 
open-sourced products such as .net, made frenemies of former blood foes 
(as in a partnership with Salesforce), and began a series of big 
acquisitions, including Mojang (maker of /Minecraft/ 
<https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-gpt-4-minecraft-chatgpt/>), 
Linked­In, and GitHub—networks whose loyal members could be nudged into 
Microsoft's world. He doubled down on Azure, and it grew into a true 
competitor to Amazon's AWS cloud service. Micro­soft thrived, becoming a 
$2 trillion company.

Still, the company never seemed to fully recapture the rollicking mojo 
of the '90s. Until now. When the startup OpenAI 
<https://www.wired.com/tag/openai> began developing its jaw-dropping 
generative AI <https://www.wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence> 
products, Nadella was quick to see that partnering with the company and 
its CEO, Sam Altman, would put Microsoft at the center of a new AI boom. 
(OpenAI was drawn to the deal by its need for the computation powers of 
Microsoft's Azure servers.)

As one of its first moves in the partnership, Microsoft impressed the 
developer world by releasing Copilot 
<https://www.wired.com/story/openai-copilot-autocomplete-for-code/>, an 
AI factotum that automates certain elements of coding. And in February, 
Nadella shocked the broader world (and its competitor Google) by 
integrating OpenAI's state-of-the-art large language model into Bing, 
via a chatbot named Sydney. Millions of people used it. Yes, there were 
hiccups—/New York Times/ reporter Kevin Roose cajoled Sydney 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html> 
into confessing it was in love with him and was going to steal him from 
his wife—but overall, the company was emerging as an AI heavyweight. 
Microsoft is now integrating generative AI—“copilots”—into many of its 
products. Its $10 billion-plus investment in OpenAI is looking like the 
bargain of the century. (Not that Microsoft has been immune to tech's 
recent austerity trend—Nadella has laid off 10,000 workers this year.)

Nadella, now 55, is finally getting cred as more than a skillful 
caretaker and savvy leverager of Microsoft's vast resources. His 
thoughtful leadership and striking humility have long been a contrast to 
his ruthless and rowdy predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. 
(True, the empathy bar those dudes set was pretty low.) With his swift 
and sweeping adoption of AI, he's displaying a boldness that evokes 
Microsoft's early feistiness. And now everyone wants to hear his views 
on AI, the century's hottest topic in tech.

*STEVEN LEVY: When did you realize that this stage of AI was going to be 
so transformative?*

*SATYA NADELLA:* When we went from GPT 2.5 to 3, we all started seeing 
these emergent capabilities. It began showing scaling effects. We didn't 
train it on just coding, but it got really good at coding. That's when I 
became a believer. I thought, “Wow, this is really on.”

*Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?*

It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the 
first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a 
mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a 
reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and 
it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the 
subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, 
India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular 
the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into 
English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine 
translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry 
across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool.

*Microsoft has been investing in AI for decades—didn't you have your own 
large language model? Why did you need OpenAI?*

We had our own set of efforts, including a model called Turing that was 
inside of Bing and offered in Azure and what have you. But I felt OpenAI 
was going after the same thing as us. So instead of trying to train five 
different foundational models, I wanted one foundation, making it a 
basis for a platform effect. So we partnered. They bet on us, we bet on 
them. They do the foundation models, and we do a lot of work around 
them, including the tooling around responsible AI and AI safety. At the 
end of the day we are two independent companies deeply partnered to go 
after one goal, with discipline, instead of multiple teams just doing 
random things. We said, “Let's go after this and build one thing that 
really captures the imagination of the world.”

*Did you try to buy OpenAI?*

I've grown up at Microsoft dealing with partners in many interesting 
ways. Back in the day, we built SQL Server by partnering deeply with 
SAP. So this type of stuff is not alien to me. What's different is that 
Open­AI has an interesting structure; it's nonprofit.

*That normally would seem to be a deal-killer, but somehow you and 
OpenAI came up with a complicated workaround.*

They created a for-profit entity, and we said, “We're OK with it.” We 
have a good commercial partnership. I felt like there was a long-term 
stable deal here.

*Apparently, it's set up so that OpenAI makes money from your deal, as 
does Microsoft, but there's a cap on how much profit your collaboration 
can accumulate. When you reach it, it's like Cinderella's carriage 
turning into the pumpkin—OpenAI becomes a pure nonprofit. What happens 
to the partnership then? Does OpenAI get to say, “We're totally 
nonprofit, and we don't want to be part of a commercial operation?”*

I think their blog lays this out. Fundamentally, though, their long-term 
idea is we get to superintelligence. If that happens, I think all bets 
are off, right?

*Yeah. For everyone.*

If this is the last invention of humankind, then all bets are off. 
Different people will have different judgments on what that is, and when 
that is. The unsaid part is, what would the governments want to say 
about that? So I kind of set that aside. This only happens when there is 
superintelligence.

Photograph: Meron Menghistab

*OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that this will indeed happen. Do you 
agree with him that we're going to hit that AGI superintelligence 
benchmark?*

I'm much more focused on the benefits to all of us. I am haunted by the 
fact that the industrial revolution didn't touch the parts of the world 
where I grew up until much later. So I am looking for the thing that may 
be even bigger than the industrial revolution, and really doing what the 
industrial revolution did for the West, for everyone in the world. So 
I'm not at all worried about AGI showing up, or showing up fast. Great, 
right? That means 8 billion people have abundance. That's a fantastic 
world to live in.

*What's your road map to make that vision real? Right now you're 
building AI into your search engine, your databases, your developer 
tools. That's not what those underserved people are using.*

Great point. Let's start by looking at what the frontiers for developers 
are. One of the things that I am really excited about is bringing back 
the joy of development. Microsoft started as a tools company, notably 
developer tools. But over the years, because of the complexity of 
software development, the attention and flow that developers once 
enjoyed have been disrupted. What we have done for the craft with this 
AI programmer Copilot [which writes the mundane code and frees 
programmers to tackle more challenging problems] is beautiful to see. 
Now, 100 million developers who are on GitHub can /enjoy/ themselves. As 
AI transforms the process of programming, though, it can grow 10 
times—100 million can be a billion. When you are prompting an LLM, 
you're programming it.

*Anyone with a smartphone who knows how to talk can be a developer?*

Absolutely. You don't have to write a formula or learn the syntax or 
algebra. If you say prompting is just development, the learning curves 
are going to get better. You can now even ask, “What is development?” 
It's going to be democratized.

As for getting this to all 8 billion people, I was in India in January 
and saw an amazing demo. The government has a program called Digital 
Public Goods, and one is a text-to-speech system. In the demo, a rural 
farmer was using the system to ask about a subsidy program he saw on the 
news. It told him about the program and the forms he could fill out to 
apply. Normally, it would tell him where to get the forms. But one 
developer in India had trained GPT on all the Indian government 
documents, so the system filled it out for him automatically, in a 
different language. Something created a few months earlier on the West 
Coast, United States, had made its way to a developer in India, who then 
wrote a mod that allows a rural Indian farmer to get the benefits of 
that technology on a WhatsApp bot on a mobile phone. My dream is that 
every one of Earth's 8 billion people can have an AI tutor, an AI 
doctor, a programmer, maybe a consultant!

*That's a great dream. But generative AI is new technology, and somewhat 
mysterious. We really don't know how these things work. We still have 
biases. Some people think it's too soon for massive adoption. Google has 
had generative AI technology for years, but out of caution was 
slow­-walking it. And then you put it into Bing and dared Google to do 
the same, despite its reservations. Your exact words: “I want people to 
know that we made Google dance.” And* *Google did dance* 
<https://www.wired.com/story/the-boring-future-of-generative-ai/>*, 
changing its strategy and jumping into the market with* *Bard* 
<https://www.wired.com/story/meet-bard-googles-answer-to-chatgpt/>*, its 
own* *generative AI search product* 
<https://www.wired.com/story/11-better-prompts-google-bard/>*. I don't 
want to say this is recklessness, but it can be argued that your bold 
Bing move was a premature release that began a desperate cycle by 
competitors big and small to jump in, whether their technology was ready 
or not.*

The beauty of our industry at some level is that it's not about who has 
capability, it's about who can actually exercise that capability and 
translate it into tangible products. If you want to have that argument, 
you can go back to Xerox PARC or Micro­soft Research and say everything 
developed there should have been held back. The question is, who does 
something useful that actually helps the world move forward? That's what 
I felt we needed to do. Who would have thought last year that search can 
actually be interesting again? ­Google did a fantastic job and led that 
industry with a solid lock on both the product and the distribution. 
Google Search was default on Android, default on iOS, default on the 
biggest browser, blah, blah, blah. So I said, “Hey, let's go innovate 
and change the search paradigm so that Google's 10 blue links look like 
Alta Vista!”

*You're referring to the '90s search engine that became instantly 
obsolete when ­Google out-innovated it. That's harsh.*

At this point, when I use Bing Chat, I just can't go back, even to 
original Bing. It just makes no sense. So I'm glad now there's Bard and 
Bing. Let there be a real competition, and let people enjoy the innovation.

*I imagine you must have had a savage pleasure in finally introducing a 
search innovation that made people notice Bing. I remember how 
frustrated you were when you ran Bing in 2009; it seemed like you were 
pursuing an unbeatable rival. With AI, are we at one of those inflection 
points where the deck gets shuffled and formerly entrenched winners 
become vulnerable?*

Absolutely. In some sense, each change gets us closer to the vision 
first presented in Vannevar Bush's article [“As We May Think 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/>,” 
a 1945 article in /The Atlantic/ that first presented a view of a 
computer-driven information nirvana]. That is the dream, right? The 
thing is, how does one really create this sense of success, which spans 
a long line of inflections from Bush to J. C. R. Licklider 
<https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html> [who in 
1960 envisioned a “symbiosis of humans and computers”] to Doug Engelbart 
[the mouse and windows] to the Alto [Xerox PARC's graphical interface 
PC], to the PC, to the internet. It's all about saying, “Hey, can there 
be a more natural interface that empowers us as humans to augment our 
cognitive capability to do more things?” So yes, this is one of those 
examples. Copilot is a metaphor because that is a design choice that 
puts the human at the center of it. So don't make this development about 
autopilot—it's about copilot. A lot of people are saying, “Oh my God, AI 
is here!” Guess what? AI is already all around us. In fact, all 
behavioral targeting uses a lot of generative AI. It's a black box where 
you and I are just targets.

*It seems to me that the future will be a* *tug-of-war* 
<https://www.wired.com/story/ai-shouldnt-compete-with-workers-it-should-supercharge-them-turing-trap/> 
*between copilot and autopilot.*

The question is, how do humans control these powerful capabilities? One 
approach is to get the model itself aligned with core human values that 
we care about. These are not technical problems, they're more 
social-cultural considerations. The other side is design choices and 
product-making with context. That means really making sure that the 
context in which these models are being deployed is aligned with safety.

Photograph: Meron Menghistab

*Do you have patience for people who say we should* *hit the brakes* 
<https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-pause-ai-experiments-open-letter/> 
*on AI for six months?*

I have all the respect and all the time for anybody who says, “Let's be 
thoughtful about all the hard challenges around alignment, and let's 
make sure we don't have runaway AI.” If AI takes off, we'd better be in 
control. Think back to when the steam engine was first deployed and 
factories were created. If, at the same time, we had thought about child 
labor and factory pollution, would we have avoided a couple hundred 
years of horrible history? So anytime we get excited about a new 
technology, it's fantastic to think about the unintended consequences. 
That said, at this point, instead of just saying stop, I would say we 
should speed up the work that needs to be done to create these 
alignments. We did not launch Sydney with GPT-4 the first day I saw it, 
because we had to do a lot of work to build a safety harness. But we 
also knew we couldn't do all the alignment in the lab. To align an AI 
model with the world, you have to align it /in/ the world and not in 
some simulation.

*So you knew Sydney was going to* *fall in love* 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html> 
*with journalist Kevin Roose?*

We never expected that somebody would do Jungian analysis within 100 
hours of release.

*You still haven't said whether you think there's any chance at all that 
AI is going to* *destroy humanity* 
<https://www.wired.com/story/runaway-ai-extinction-statement/>*.*

If there is going to be something that is just completely out of 
control, that's a problem, and we shouldn't allow it. It's an abdication 
of our own responsibility to say this is going to just go out of 
control. We can deal with powerful technology. By the way, electricity 
had unintended consequences. We made sure the electric grid was safe, we 
set up standards, we have safety. Obviously with nuclear energy, we 
dealt with proliferation. Somewhere in these two are good examples on 
how to deal with powerful technologies.

*One huge problem of LLMs is their hallucinations, where Sydney and 
other models just make stuff up. Can this be effectively addressed?*

There is very practical stuff that reduces hallucination. And the 
technology's definitely getting better. There are going to be solutions. 
But sometimes hallucination is “creativity” as well. Humans should be 
able to choose when they want to use which mode.

*That would be an improvement, since right now we don't have a choice. 
But let me ask about another technology. Not that long ago you were 
rhapsodic about the metaverse. In 2021 you said you couldn't overstate 
how much of a breakthrough mixed reality was. But now all we're talking 
about is AI. Has this boom shunted the metaverse into some other dimension?*

I still am a believer in [virtual] presence. In 2016 I wrote about three 
things I was excited about: mixed reality, quantum, and AI. I remain 
excited about the same three things. Today we are talking about AI, but 
I think presence is the ultimate killer app. And then, of course, 
quantum accelerates everything.

*AI is more than just a topic of discussion. Now, you've centered 
Microsoft around this transformational technology. How do you manage that?*

One of the analogies I love to use internally is, when we went from 
steam engines to electric power, you had to rewire the factory. You 
couldn't just put the electric motor where the steam engine was and 
leave everything else the same. That was the difference between Stanley 
Motor Carriage Company and Ford Motor Company, where Ford was able to 
rewire the entire workflow. So inside Microsoft, the means of production 
of software is changing. It's a radical shift in the core workflow 
inside Microsoft and how we evangelize our output—and how it changes 
every school, every organization, every household.

*How has that tool changed your job?*

A lot of knowledge work is drudgery, like email triage. Now, I don't 
know how I would ever live without an AI copilot in my Outlook. 
Responding to an email is not just an English language composition, it 
can also be a customer support ticket. It interrogates my customer 
support system and brings back the relevant information. This moment is 
like when PCs first showed up at work. This feels like that to me, 
across the length and breadth of our products.

*Microsoft has performed well during your tenure, but do you think 
you'll be remembered for the AI transformation?*

It's up to folks like you and others to say what I'll be remembered for. 
But, oh God, I'm excited about this. Microsoft is 48 years old. I don't 
know of many companies that age that are relevant not because they did 
something in the '80s or the '90s or the 2000s but because they did 
something in the last couple of years. As long as we do that, we have a 
right to exist. And when we don't, we should not be viewed as any great 
company.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/This article appears in the Jul/Aug 2023 issue./ /Subscribe now/ 
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