Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was recently interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel. In the hour-long session, the executive discussed the tech giant’s recent quantum breakthrough, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—a type of artificial intelligence that aims to perform any intellectual task that a human can do. Unlike narrow AI, which is designed to perform specific tasks, AGI would possess the flexibility and adaptability of human intelligence), and more.
Right off the bat, Nadella revealed that Microsoft is “very email heavy.” As such, he receives a handful of emails he must respond to.
He painted a picture of a future where Copilot agents can automatically scheme through the email and populate drafts for his perusal. This could alleviate mundane tasks while simultaneously saving time, as they’d only need to review and send the AI-generated drafts.
Nadella foresees the development of an agent manager, where users can manage all the agents and their dialogue via a unified user interface.
That’s why I think of this Copilot, as the UI for AI, is a big, big deal. Each of us is going to have it. So basically, think of it as: there is knowledge work, and there’s a knowledge worker. The knowledge work may be done by many, many agents, but you still have a knowledge worker who is dealing with all the knowledge workers. And that, I think, is the interface that one has to build.
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella on superhuman intelligence and legal barriers
“Do you think we’re headed towards superhuman intelligence in your time as CEO?” asked Patel. While referencing Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s use of superhuman intelligence, Nadella indicated that we’d need to establish trust with the “new species” first.
According to the Microsoft CEO:
“Before we claim it is something as big as a species, the fundamental thing that we’ve got to get right is that there is real trust, whether it’s personal or societal level trust, that’s baked in. That’s the hard problem.”
The executive admitted that the legal approach to the ever-evolving AI landscape could be the “biggest rate limiter.” He indicated that this would become more apparent as AI tools gain broad adoption and humans delegate more authority to them.
As AI agents scale greater heights and seemingly take on complex tasks, Satya Nadella says there’s a threshold they need to meet before being allowed to run a Fortune 500 company.
The permissions of the runtime environment in which this is operating. You may want guarantees that it’s sandboxed, it is not going out of that sandbox.
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella’s thoughts and beliefs on AGI
The Microsoft CEO blatantly indicated that he had a problem with how people loosely defined AGI. This comes after news of Microsoft’s AGI definition was revealed via its multi-billion partnership deal with OpenAI.
According to the fine print, OpenAI will only achieve AGI after developing a sophisticated AI system capable of generating up to $100 billion in profit.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated:
“That’s why I make this distinction, at least in my head: Don’t conflate knowledge worker with knowledge work. The knowledge work of today could probably be automated. Who said my life’s goal is to triage my email? Let an AI agent triage my email.”
Delving deeper into the AGI discussion, Nadella claimed that AGI milestones don’t necessarily dictate AI progressions. “Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me,” the executive added.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted the company’s broader plans to double down on building compute infrastructure to help train the next big model. This is after OpenAI unveiled its $500 billion Stargate project to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States for its AI advances.
