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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Well, Casey, we've got a special treat on the show this week. We are going to be playing some excerpt and snippets and featured conversations from Hard Fork Live.
That's right, Kevin. We just had the second installment of our annual live show. It was an incredible time, and we're so excited to share highlights of it with our listeners.
Yes, exactly. It was so great to hang out with listeners and also welcome some very special guests. We'll be bringing those conversations to our listeners and viewers in this feed over the next two weeks. Today, we're going to share three conversations with you. The first is with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Satya Nadella share about AI's impact on Microsoft?
To me, that's what we are up to, right? So to me, we had our developer conference last week. It was all about, hey, can we build a platform and the tools where every enterprise in every country can operate at the frontier? To me, that's the question. To be saying, hey, my model does this, but the economy is growing at 2%.
means this is not going to end well, unless we sort of really get to a place where the economy is inflecting in terms of its economic growth and its broad spread because the frontier benefits are. That's what happened in electricity and every other technology, which was a general purpose technology.
Let me ask about one of the platform shifts that you signaled at Build last week when you announced Project Solara. You said it would be agent-first hardware, next-generation set of devices that would have agents running them. Tell us a little bit more about what that looks like. Can you give us an example of maybe what a Project Solara is?
Casey, we did at Build, which were interesting. One was we took the PC itself. In fact, Jensen had done it the previous night at Computex where he talked about the picture. One of my favorite pictures was Jensen with the desktops, the laptops, and he obviously had the RTX chip, which is a new SoC with essentially a petaflop of compute right on their PC.
So that is about new functionality coming to the old form factor. So think about what I describe as unmetered intelligence. So the fact that you can have a Windows computer that can run a trillion parameter model locally, I think is going to be very needed if you're going to ever have agents running 24 by seven.
But then the question it sets up is, in a world where we have these models and these agents that are long running, can I have like a badge, right? If I'm a nurse in a hospital and I'm walking from station to station, can I just take out this device which can scan, which can input, which can take my speech output and turn it into a prompt?
That is what I think an agent-first device looks like, right? So it's sort of really a new, the centrality of the phone I think is still going to be there for a lot of apps that we use. But in agent world, you kind of have that ambient intelligence that is like a sense of field that then works with your models. And so that's what our goal is, to invent the new form factors that are not beholden
to the old form factors for this functionality.
It's super interesting, and I want to hear a lot more about it. We have many more questions about AI, but I wanted to ask about one more device that has been in the news today, which is the Xbox. The leaders of the Xbox division put out a memo today saying that we should expect a hard reset of Xbox coming soon.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Microsoft face in the AI ecosystem?
It's a political economy. A democracy controls ultimately what happens in a market and then technology sort of tries to disrupt the two and then you keep sort of the checks and balances. That's magical. It's one of the most unbelievable social constructs ever to emerge in the world, right? Think about sort of, you know, it became the model.
And we now need that same model to be redefined for this age, but it'll work because it worked the last time. And so therefore, I think us reminding ourselves that the balance, the checks that each one has on the other is what I think we have to aspire for, whether it's in San Francisco, whether it's in Washington, D.C., or quite frankly, anywhere else.
Maybe just as a last question, I'm still trying to hone in on what I think Kevin might call how AGI-pilled you are. There's a sense in Silicon Valley that it really is different this time and that the jagged frontier is going to keep advancing forever and all of a sudden the little tasks that AI can automate today are going to convert into full jobs. How much do you buy that story?
Look, I buy that anything where the loops can be closed, right? Like coding. In fact, AI research is sort of possible to close. I think we have now got sufficient, I'd say, evidence of that. But is that enough? I don't think so. And when I think about You know, people talk about how verifiable is this task.
And in the messy real world of even knowledge work, just saying I'm going to look at the traces of human activity is enough to close the loop? I don't think so. That, I think, is the challenge, which is when I am in a meeting, I say things, I note things, I may observe things, but what I do with it is not a trace today that I can RLE my way in, right?
And that to me is where we're selling short what is, I would say, unverifiable part of the human capital. And so to me, that's where, so I believe the advances keep happening. I still am in the more in the world of, hey, this is platforms tools, very powerful, very disruptive. I have a lot of sort of, I'd say, you know, humility to say a lot of things will change.
But at the end of the day, so was electricity. So were a lot of other you know, steam when it first came out and what have you. And so I'm not sort of sitting there and thinking this is the last technology we ever will invent. I don't buy that. I kind of feel like, yeah, this is in the pantheon of all technologies, a big step up. But I do think that, you know, there will be more to come.
Very good.
Well, Satya Nadella, thanks so much for joining us. Please give Satya a hand.
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Chapter 4: How is Microsoft planning to innovate its Xbox business model?
Yeah. I would say in the 90s, we didn't anticipate that spying on everybody would become the number one business model of the internet.
It's very profitable.
It turns out. And it also has created this problem with the five big tech giants that control the vast majority of people's experience online. And these two things together have really forced us to... We don't make common cause with the tech giants anymore at the level that we used to because they used to stand up for their users and increasingly they're adversarial to their users.
So what I tell all the tech companies is, look, if you stand with your users, we will stand with you. And if you stand against your users, we're going to be the first in line. And sadly, that second part has become bigger now. than I think it should. But it's dragged us into these places where we're adversarial against the tech giants because they're not standing with users.
I mean, I remember, you know, Kevin and I started covering tech around the same time. And I remember, you know, whenever, you know, you guys would put out a statement that, you know, like Google, Facebook, like Amazon were putting out statements, like you guys were marching in lockstep. You just said that that united front is now broken. When did you first notice those cracks start to appear?
I mean, it depends on the topic, right? You know, the early fights, EFF was involved a lot in trying to make copyright balanced in the digital age. And we worked a lot with the companies on this because they wanted to give you the ability to make your own media and rip, mix and burn those kinds of things. And we would stand with them.
But I think, again, as surveillance became the business model, as they became, you know, less interested in empowering their users and more interested in their surveilling their users, we've separated. And now, you know, we stand up for things like, you know, the Section 230, the idea that you know, nobody would host anybody else's speech if they were responsible for it.
So users need intermediaries to be able to speak. We've seen the tech companies roll over and support all of these exceptions, FOSTA, SESTA, and other things. And they're not even standing up for their own rights anymore. So it's really topic by topic and issue by issue.
But I would say that in the last 10 years, it's less and less of the time that we end up standing with them because they don't stand with the users.
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