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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington on July 15, 2019. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)Image Credits:Microsoft
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In case you were n’t certain how Microsoft felt about AI , CEO Satya Nadella is here to tell you : they wish it . They like it a lot . In the troupe ’s one-year report , he pens a letter to shareholders bigging up AI in every direction . And it ’s not operose to see why : He clearly trust this is the openhanded , perhaps the only forward motion in computing that has truly mattered in over a decade .
Though Microsoft ’s business is sound , you could be forgive for thinking they ’ve been spinning their wheel somewhat . Their bids to get into nomadic , search and hardware have all either stalled or fallen flat , and numerous product experiments have break down to penetrate their respective market .
On the other bridge player , their cloud business is very strong , and they ’ve increasingly form the company and its products around that assumption . But even that winner was beginning to wear thin , for as profitable as it is , there is only so much way for innovation there .
For years they must certainly have kept an eye on the trends , watching to see whether they some newfangled ontogeny or another was worth adopting . Social WWW ? Nah — too much work . physical fitness ? bare to be their base . Blockchain ? pleonastic and risky . Metaverse ? Very funny .
Like a surfer in a calm , Microsoft waited , placid and bobbing . Then the AI wave rose up under them — and they bulge out paddle for high-priced life .
Right place, right time
As Nadella writes in his yearly alphabetic character :
This next generation of AI will remold every software category and every job , including our own . Forty - eight yr after its instauration , Microsoft persist a consequential company because fourth dimension and metre again — from PC / Server , to Web / Internet , to Cloud / Mobile — we have adapted to technological paradigm shifts . Today , we are doing so once again , as we lead this new epoch .
Then follows a twain 12 examples of where AI is being slot into post across all their business organisation units , mathematical product and long - term efforts . This is n’t a by-line for Microsoft — they have really decide that this is the next phase of personal and business calculation .
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And it ’s not merely an enabler , either , like a atomic number 14 advance that shit data centers escape double as efficiently , or a battery that last double as long . It is , so to speak , a transformer :
The long arc of computing has , in many ways , been shaped by the pursuit of increasingly intuitive human - computer interfaces — keyboards , mice , touch filmdom . We believe we have now arrived at the next big step forward — natural language — and will quickly go beyond , to see , pick up , interpret , and make sense of our purpose and the world around us .
you’re able to almost see the lead in his eyes : Imagine being at the psyche of a major technical school fellowship like Microsoft during an Sturm und Drang of this magnitude ! They ’ve dabbled with the idea of go past the black eye and keyboard before , but so far their natural language interfaces ( like Cortana ) and alternative ironware ( like HoloLens ) have not risen past the horizontal surface of parlor trick .
But by either unspoiled circumstances or farsightedness they befall to have backed the breakout leader in natural words AI : OpenAI . Not only does the technology actually calculate like a genuine game - record changer , but the style the cookie crumbled put them in a fair elbow room to give repeated rival Google a black eye . Google , for its part , has been caught flat - footed by the rapid shift to AI , despite having internally make the concepts that enable it . They ’re seek to bounce back , but the company has always struggled to drum up successfully behind a unifying concept , and this sentence may prove no dissimilar .
This alinement between Microsoft and OpenAI is free for both . OpenAI gets a combination investor and customer with effectively bottomless pocket and a sincere desire to integrate AI tools into every niche of its business . Microsoft is spare the sticky necessity of appearing — as it really is — far behind the curve in AI development , because it can simply show the market - top product as its own . Nadella makes no acknowledgment of Microsoft training its own foundation models , though they are likely doing so quietly to hedge against treason , because their efforts pale in comparison to the forward impulse of its partnership .
Imagine if the situation was reverse and it was Google who had made a fortuitous flock with OpenAI , leaving Microsoft out in the frigidity . Microsoft would be even worse off than Google , having to beat to build Master of Laws a fraction as good , and every month they spent trying to catch up saw their competition score another million users .
So it should descend as no surprise that Microsoft is spend enormous amounts of money to beef up their perspective and , to the extent potential , expand and deepen their partnership with OpenAI .
Damn the torpedoes
One perturbing annotation Nadella strike , however , was his characterization of the instant of the two breakthroughs he feels define this era of AI : “ the emergence of a powerful new reasoning railway locomotive . ”
If you are at all familiar with the way this propagation of AI model ferment , you will get laid that they do notreason , any more than a calculatorreasonswhen you ask it to multiply two act .
Of of course , Nadella is not naïve or uninformed on this subject . He knows what he is saying here — that these system perform functions that are in many ways indistinguishable from reason out . Asking a electronic computer to summarize a foresighted text document and possess it do so , or even do so in iambic pentameter , feels wizardly — because until recently , only those with reasoning big businessman could do that .
As it turns out , the patterns of language are predictable enough that some reasoning tasks can be reduced to statistical tasks . This is remarkable enough on its own that we need not engild the lily with sorcerous thinking .
But this speech is indicative of the arguably unearned confidence AI systems have create in angel like Microsoft . They are subject of a great deal , but with only a twosome years of existence , they are still in their infancy . They will grow more capable , yes , but we will also learn their limitations , and perchance only when those limitations have already created serious harms .
As AI ethicists havewarned repeatedly , the risk of AI are not some succeeding apocalypse or theoretical systems give the axe entire industries , but in overconfident and uninformed app of the systems we have now . One chief executive officer with stars in his oculus can do a lot of hurt with AI models that are not inherently up to enough to do it themselves .
The balancing turn Microsoft must pull off is to invest at a pace that put them ahead of their competitors , but not so far that they wind up in a minefield with everyone else see from afar . It ’s the swearword of the trailblazer ( or in this case integrator ) that they should be the first to look new risks , and Microsoft seems ready to fill this role by putting AI to knead in , as far as I can severalise , nearly every single business unit and product where it can conceivably be included .
Where will it find purchase ? Where will it fail miserably ? Where will it attract lawsuits ? Where will it be regulated out of existence ? Satya Nadella does not know , but he and his shareholders are going to find out , by god , one way or another . thing are get exciting again .
