No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:09:38 · Elad Gil
[00:09:38] S3: I think you raised a really interesting point, which is there's the actual agent that's doing the code, then there's a harness around it. And that's the environment, that's the context, that's everything you're setting up as a developer around actually a coding agent. What is the harness for the enterprise? Is there an equivalent concept for broader productivity work, or how do you think about that concept sort of generalized?
00:09:56 · Satya Nadella
[00:09:56] S0: That's right. So, in some sense, you kind of want the harness to define the models, data, and the tools, and so that you have a loop across those three. And so, what we are trying to, first of all, make sure is each of our products that we build, right, whether it's GitHub Copilot or the security copilot, the stuff we showed with Emdash, or even the discovery for science, it doesn't matter. All of them are multimodal harnesses with tools access so that you can do this progressive disclosure of tools even so that they're token efficient. And then you're feeding it with very rich context. Because that's sort of the other hard lesson we have learned in the last two years is, oh my God, the amount of work you need to do to prep the context layer such that your plan can execute in the most efficient way is where the magic is. So we have, in our case, we have the GitHub harness, which essentially we're using across all our products. It's available in Foundry. And we're open, like you can use your Lama harness, whatever, or you can use any open harness or any harness of yours and train with your tools and multiple models and your context. And so that's the pitch. Because right now, a lot of dialogue is, hey, if I train the harness plus tools and the model together, you get evals. And what we are proving out is, and the best example of that, is what we did with Emdash, right? Because when it launched, it found bugs or vulnerabilities that were not found by mythos. And so there is existence proof, I would claim, that you can have a multimodal harness that can, in fact, be more performant in the real world.
00:11:48 · Sarah Guo
[00:11:48] S1: So premise behind the training at the independent Frontier Labs is really, you know, we're gonna have these models, We'll have an API business and we'll support enterprises and startups, but a first party product, be it productivity or code or search drives the majority of revenue. That's a different value equation than you're describing, I think, with the Microsoft ecosystem. If if that's the case, tell me if it's the case, because obviously you have first party products and you have enablement products. What is the role of the develop like, what's gonna be hard and the set of skills and the value capture the developer has in that world?
00:12:23 · Satya Nadella
[00:12:23] S0: Yeah. So I think that there's always gonna be the case that someone who is super successful as a platform builder can also have first party products. It was true with Windows. It was true with the SaaS side and the cloud side as well with us and others and so on. But the thing that is, is it should not be a limiter to other people achieving that same success, Right? That, I think, is the core difference, which is the network effects this time around, around intelligence are such because they learn from data and not really lots of data. It's just a few samples that you have to see to understand what's novel about something. So that's why the game becomes how to protect. So that's why I would say every company having private evals may be the biggest IP. Right? I think about it. Like, what's that private eval that you can then use even a frontier model to hill climb on and not leak the traces? Maybe one of the biggest drivers of IP. Like so in other words, another asset test is you have an eval that's private. You're using model A. Can you switch it to model B and, know, climb up? If you can, then you're in control. If you can't, you're not in control. And that's where even the harness decision becomes super important. Right? So therefore, having an open harness, letting all models come in, having your evals, your context, your tools help you hill climb, I think, is the skills that an AI native startup needs, a SaaS company needs, or every enterprise needs.
00:14:07 · swyx, Satya Nadella
[00:14:07] S2: Yeah. I think in a very real way, you are Microsoft historically, as an operating systems company and then become a cloud company, maybe, like, the third act is that you're a harness or eval's company, whatever whatever the the sort of conglomerate of concepts that you wanna put together. And I think, like, enabling every company to have, like, frontier intelligence or what what I forget the the exact term that you use is the is the mission. Right? [00:14:32] S0: That's it. [00:14:33] S2: That is that is the platform promise that you build with us. You will get your intelligence for your data.
00:14:33 · swyx, Satya Nadella
[00:14:33] S2: That is that is the platform promise that you build with us. You will get your intelligence for your data. [00:14:39] S0: That's right. That to to me, that is the like, if there was one tagline for this entire developer conference is, can everybody operate at the frontier with their frontier intelligence? Right? To me, that is so important because otherwise, I don't know how you achieve stable equilibrium, right? Which is how do I then go and say, well, my company is going to have a terminal value because I now know how to continuously compound on top of what's a platform that gets better. Right? So when, like, Windows obviously came out, Adobe built, Autodesk built, or even, like, take what Jensen said. We built DX and he built, you know, CUDA on top of it. Right? I mean, I always say to Jensen, god, I got the shorn head of that. Right? I wish we had recognized it. But, nevertheless, but that idea that you can build a platform layer that someone else can then extend out and build their own intelligence layer in this case, I think, is everything. Right? Without it, why have a developer conference? I can just come and have you all sort of just worship at the altar of one model. Yeah. But that's not a developer conference. [00:15:50] S2: Backstage, we you had a discussion about what is IP or what is the the value in a company. It used to be the length of human experience at a company, and now it's this other thing, which is the evals, the experience in sort of applying agents to the company. He I just want you to, like, flesh it out a bit, Marcus.