No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:30:46 · Sarah Guo, swyx
[00:30:46] S1: Music to the ears of CEOs and VCs that are, like, a little dangerous and a lot [00:30:51] S2: of Golden age for idea people. [00:30:52] S1: Idea people. Yeah. With a lot of agency. If you take that idea of personal agency and you just zoom it out to the organizational context. My partner Mike Murnal, who actually started his career at Microsoft, just wrote an essay where one of the big takeaways is it's an age where you can be much more ambitious and you need to be given the pace of the environment and how quickly actually users and companies are open to adopting new technologies. How do you think about I feel silly asking this of somebody running a trillion dollar plus company already, but how do you think about how Microsoft can be more ambitious now?
00:31:28 · Satya Nadella, Elad Gil
[00:31:28] S0: It's a great question. I think the thing in these type of transitions is to have a conceptual model of how work can change to go after outcomes that you could hardly imagine previously. Right? In fact, Kevin Scott has this nice line, right, which is when you can make the impossible like, when you're making hard things easier, that's sort of one point of leverage. But true ambition is about making the impossible possible. So now the thing that is missing a little bit in all of our organizations is what is that new conceptual model of what can we build? What was impossible and what can we build? And I'll give you one example of this, right? Which is I take great inspiration from sort of the people who were managing the Azure network. And they came to the this is from even last year. You know, we were scaling. You saw that I I talked about sort of how we built in the last fifteen months more Azure capacity than we built in the first fifteen years. I mean, it's crazy. Wild. [00:32:42] S3: Yeah.
00:32:42 · Elad Gil, Satya Nadella, Sarah Guo
[00:32:42] S3: Yeah. [00:32:42] S0: Right? It's pretty wild. And it's the same team. So they saw that and they said, Bob, this just ain't gonna work if we don't reconceptualize our work. So they built essentially, they said, our job is not to do Azure networking. Our job is to build the agentic system that does Azure networking. Right? These are the folks managing the 500 plus fiber operators managing the van, right, all over. And fiber operations ultimately is a physical operation. Things get caught, things get, you know, have to be repaired. You know, we have fancy words called DevOps and so on. Basically, emails are coming in, and you gotta go respond to them, take care of it. So they built this agentic system. They even have a character for it. It's called Miles, and it sort of does all this stuff. Right? They started sort of screaming for more tokens and so on. And so they were saying, look. We don't need headcount. We need tokens in order to be able to manage our operation. That reconceptualization of what their work is. Right? They've they basically took their work and made it meta. Right? That meta work is now their new work. [00:33:49] S1: Mhmm.
00:33:49 · Sarah Guo, Satya Nadella, swyx, Elad Gil
[00:33:49] S1: Mhmm. [00:33:49] S0: Right? In the eighties, if somebody had come to us and said, 4,000,000,000 people are gonna get up in the morning and start typing, my model would have been, we need 4,000,000,000 typists, but we're not doing typing. We're doing knowledge work. So that to me, I think, is it, right, which is whether it's Microsoft or whether it's any organization, is to give ourselves permission to do new types of metacognition, meta work using these new tools to change the outputs that matter, and then really make the impossible possible. So completing that dot or the the connective tissue across those, I think, is where a lot of the enterprise value will get created. [00:34:29] S2: Should we talk about data centers? [00:34:31] S3: Yeah. Please ask. [00:34:32] S2: Oh, okay. Well, we this leads nicely into the data center build out. I always think just I'm just impressed with the sheer scale of the build out from Microsoft, but also everyone else that this is redefining what it means to be a hyperscaler. And I just feel like that that that is had unprecedented scale on finances, on the way you run the company, but also the communities that are that are impacted. Let's just talk a bit more about what you're seeing on the ground, like, when you visit your
00:34:59 · Satya Nadella
[00:34:59] S0: Yeah. I think there are two aspects of it. Obviously, the the build out is extraordinary. You know, nothing like this has happened, and it's great to be one of the participants in it. But you brought up the other part, right? I think at this point, it's clear that unless we as an industry are very principled about ensuring that the benefits of all the stuff we're talking about are felt in real ways at the community level. Right? Because this is not just campaign, right? It has to be real where people are saying, Look, this is not changing the prices on energy for me. In fact, if anything, it's bringing down prices because long term, there's gonna be a better grid. There's gonna be more energy. Water consumption is in fact not sort of In fact, water is being replenished, right? You gotta really educate folks on truly what's happening, the closed loop systems we are building. We have to invest in the training, the jobs, the tax base. In fact, the least talked about stuff is the amount of jobs that get created during construction, after construction. What's the tax base that's there in the community? And all this has to be real. And and if that is the case, then we will have permission. If it is not, we won't have permission. It's as simple as that, right, which is we we I think we have to take it as an industry pretty seriously. I think it's good for communities to be skeptical, ask the hard question, for us to do the hard work, earn that. But at the end of the day, if this if we can really be the I've always felt like in human history, if you use a lot of energy, but also create a lot of value for society, the story has been fantastic. If you don't do that, it's not been that great. And this time around, I'm a firm believer that ultimately, if you do have a token economy that drives productivity, that drives economic growth, that drives broad spread participation, better health outcomes, then I think we'll be in a great place. And that's at least what we all have to be focused on.
00:37:13 · swyx, Satya Nadella, Elad Gil
[00:37:13] S2: Yeah. It makes me think actually that with all these initiatives that you're doing, it might be easier to see ROI in the communities first before in enterprise. [00:37:21] S0: I mean, I think both sides. In fact, it comes back together. It has to be the people in the communities are going to be employed, are going to be participants in the real economy, right? That's, I think, the question is like, if the broad economy is doing well and the communities are doing well, the dots get connected. It's sort of the market forces are such that we will connect the dots. And that, I think, is it. Like, you ought to be able to see the evidence. You can't be about any one company, but it has to be broad economic growth and broad, you know, community permission. [00:37:56] S3: Yeah. Guess that's what I wanna talk about. What are most optimistic about currently or what have you most updated your personal models on regarding societal impact of AI? [00:38:05] S0: So you're saying what's the [00:38:07] S2: What did you update it most on in terms of societal impact of AI? Yeah.