TechCrunch Host
speaker
5,755 appearances
109 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 17 Aug
TechCrunch Host’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 109 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 23.
Appearances
He added, any firm that does not have this control, I will claim, will not remain a firm because you've essentially outsourced your thinking.
In short, companies without their own models or without a layer of AI infrastructure known as AI gateways to separate their prompts from the model itself will be in trouble, according to Nadella.
He specifically wants companies to stop relying on AI Labs' built-in coding tools, known as harnesses.
By keeping the harness separate from the model and the context and memory separate from the model, you absolutely can use multiple models for what they're great at.
At the same time, Nadella said, any one model can go away and you can still continue to be in control of your own destiny.
Mind you, Microsoft is an investor in the two largest AI labs, Anthropic and OpenAI.
Coding agents are a particularly popular way for enterprises to use AI models, and by all accounts are earning the model makers gobs of money.
And yet, Nadella is telling enterprises not to rely too heavily on them.
Microsoft, naturally, would benefit from that warning as its cloud business is now also selling the kind of alternative infrastructure that he's recommending.
Despite the obvious self-serving fear tactic,
He's not wrong.
Enterprises are increasingly realizing that they need many model options, particularly cheaper options, and are turning to open-weight models, models whose underlying code is publicly available, that they can fine-tune and run on their own hardware.
That, in turn, means they will also need ways to manage multiple models, as well as coding agents that are not tied to a specific model provider.
But Nadella's observation is not just about runaway budgets.
He anticipates that once a company has outsourced its thinking to a model, there's little to stop the AI lab from, eventually, offering a competing service of its own.
This risk grows as enterprises adopt AI agents and give them access to the innards of the company.
It's the kind of warning that the startup industry has been shuddering about for years.
What's to stop model makers from wiping out startups by copying and competing with them?
In May, for example, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offers to invest in every Y Combinator startup in its latest cohort by offering them AI credits, seed investor Jason Calacanis issued a similar buyer beware posting.
If you take these tokens, there is a non-zero chance that OpenAI will study exactly what your startup is doing, copy your idea,
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