In a recent interview, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, was seen betting on how transformative artificial intelligence (AI) is. He advocated the significant bet the company placed on injecting AI and transformer models into every platform it offered. Nadella had quite a distinct take on the capabilities of AI, and he shared these thoughts in his interview with WIRED. In the opening of his interview with Nadella for WIRED, Steven Levy posed a query that helped put Microsoft’s decision to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, even though it has been around in various forms for years, into perspective.
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When asked about the company’s realisation concerning the present stage of such transformative AI, Nadella responded, “When we went from GPT 2.5 to 3, we all started seeing these emergent capabilities. It began showing scaling effects. We didn’t train it on just coding, but it got really good at coding. That’s when I became a believer. I thought, “Wow, this is really on.”
While Nadella seemed impressed by what the chatbot was achieving, it was not until it stood out on one of his personal goals that he was beyond impressed. Steven Levy posed the questions about that one eureka moment that pushed Satya Nadella to go all in in the AI arena. Perhaps it was a childhood desire that the AI bot fulfilled that led to further developments.
“There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it’s achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it does not have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry,” said the CEO of Microsoft. Nadella expressed that while growing up in Hyderabad, he dreamed of being able to read Persian poetry. He specifically had the desire to be able to read Rumi’s work, which was translated into Urdu and later into English. However, with the latest version of ChatGPT, this aching gap has been somewhat filled. “GPT-4 did it in one shot. It was not just machine translation but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that’s pretty cool,” Nadella remarked.
Recently, OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, launched GPT-4, which shows a significant transition from GPT 3.5 to 3. It stands to offer an idea as to how long Microsoft and the industry have experimented with transformer-model AI.
Levy further questioned Microsoft’s decision to partner as opposed to developing and owning the complete stack of Turing, the large language model (LLM) that the business had been experimenting with for more than ten years. Instead of attempting to educate five core models, Microsoft recognised an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a single platform effect, as Nadella puts it. In collaborating with OpenAI, Microsoft would manage tools and take on the duty of ensuring AI was secure and compliant, while the latter could keep working on its ostensibly more sophisticated models. “Let’s pursue this and create something that really catches the world’s attention.”
Levy also mentions Microsoft’s hurry to step into the market with generative AI and the early mishap that led to the “Sydney scandal,” in which journalists were able to catch out Bing Chat within the first 100 hours the technology was made available to the general public. After asking how AI has specifically altered his job, specifically email triage using Copilot in Outlook, Levy concluded the interview by asking Nadella whether his stay will be marred by the company’s AI transition.
Satya Nadella expressed, “It’s up to folks like you and others to say what I’ll be remembered for. But, oh God, I’m excited about this. Microsoft is 48 years old. I don’t know of many companies that age that are relevant not because they did something in the ’80s or the ’90s or the 2000s but because they did something in the last couple of years. As long as we do that, we have a right to exist. And when we don’t, we should not be viewed as any great company.”
