Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat down with Axel Springer's CEO Mathias Döpfner to discuss AI and the partnership of Microsoft and OpenAI.
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00:00 Jeff Bezos once famously said, "One day, Amazon is going to be bankrupt."
00:04 Were you worried that Microsoft could also go bankrupt?
00:07 You know, look, for sure, there is no guarantees.
00:11 I think at the end of the day, a business is only good and should exist in the world
00:17 if it's doing useful things for the world.
00:19 Yes, it's answerable to its shareholders.
00:22 It has to be profitable.
00:23 It has to create innovation.
00:25 But at the end of the day, it is performing a societal need.
00:29 And so to me, that's kind of what will keep us, whether going or irrelevant,
00:34 is all dependent on whether we wake up tomorrow and produce things that the world needs more of.
00:39 How long are you going to remain CEO of the company?
00:43 And what are your goals beyond business, beyond Microsoft?
00:47 That's like a disclosure event, isn't it?
00:49 It depends on your answer.
00:50 I never dreamt that one day, you know, people ask me,
00:54 "Hey, did you someday think that you'll be CEO of Microsoft?"
00:57 I said, "God, I'm glad I got a job at Microsoft and I held it this long."
01:02 Is China going to win the AI arms race?
01:07 Look, I mean, the interesting thing is, you know,
01:12 if you had asked two years ago, three years ago, where the world was,
01:17 I think everyone was talking about how China may be ahead or what have you.
01:20 And now I think everyone thinks the US is ahead.
01:23 I feel inherently the approach that we are taking,
01:28 whether it's in the United States or in Europe, the AI Act in Europe,
01:31 these are the ways to go about it.
01:33 You do it in the open, you do it with real responsibility to the broader society.
01:39 This is not about one company or one country.
01:41 These are foundational technologies that are going to have real impact.
01:44 And so therefore, I think I'll give us a much better chance of being able to
01:51 build technology that can be deployed with trust more broadly around the world.
01:56 In that context, one of your biggest recent coups may play a role.
01:59 That was the early investment into open AI.
02:02 And with JetGPT, BingChat, you really have challenged your biggest competitor,
02:10 Google, if I may say so.
02:11 So could you share with us a little bit the story?
02:15 When did you meet Sam Altman first time and how did this whole deal develop?
02:20 Yeah, I mean, I've known Sam a long time.
02:22 In fact, I met him first when he was just dropping out from school to start his first startup back
02:28 in 2007 or 2008, I think is the first time I met him.
02:32 And then 2018 is when Sam sort of talked about their need for compute
02:39 to build at that time, GPT-25 and 3.
02:43 And so we were, you know, said, let's give it a go.
02:45 And that's where the investment came.
02:48 And then my confidence really went up when we went from GPT-25 to 3.
02:55 But more importantly, when we built the first product, GitHub Copilot.
02:58 And it has the potential to change user habits big time.
03:01 It may even have the potential to disrupt search completely.
03:05 You once said, I want to see Google dance.
03:07 Is Google dancing now?
03:08 Look, I mean, I call it the over-exuberance of somebody who has 3% share versus somebody
03:15 who has 97% share.
03:18 But that's the humbleness of a 2.5 billion market cap company.
03:22 But that said, we are very excited about the potential here.
03:27 If you say the 70 years of computing was always about searching for what's the most natural
03:33 user interface.
03:34 Finally, we have something that you, the computers that can understand you.
03:38 It can basically, it's multi-modal.
03:40 That is, it can be text or speech or image or video in and out.
03:45 It can be multi-turn.
03:46 It can be as many turns of the conversation.
03:48 And it can be multi-domain.
03:50 I can speak about German history or I can speak about solar energy and both of them,
03:55 you know, it'll understand.
03:56 So the ability to have that type of a user interface with a new type of reasoning engine,
04:01 right?
04:01 That's the other thing, which is you have essentially a neural reasoning engine to put
04:06 on top of all the data you've collected.
04:08 And so these two things are going to change every software category.
04:11 Elon Musk said AI is more dangerous than nukes.
04:16 Do you share that?
04:17 Look, if we lose, I think the thing that he's referencing, which is I think a good thing
04:25 for people to worry about is if there is a very powerful new technology that we lose
04:30 control of, then that's a problem.
04:32 I think the thought experiment is what if you had something which is an AI that is self-improving
04:38 with no human intervention, what will it decide to do is the existential question.
04:43 And I look at it and say, look, there's lots of steps along the way.
04:46 I mean, you could have said cars could be just driving around and or planes could be
04:51 flying around without FAA or what have you.
04:53 And we've figured out as human beings how to use very powerful technology with lots
04:58 of rules, lots of regulations and loft a lot of safety standards.
05:01 Be very mindful as people who are early in producing technology, not to sort of wait
05:06 for the unintended consequences to be sprung on the world, but to think about it at design
05:12 time.
05:13 But that said, let us also not abdicate our ability to control this.
05:16 Yeah, one of the smartest brains of AI developments, Mustafa Suleiman, is convinced that AI is
05:23 particularly strong with emotion.
05:26 We tend to think we always want to set limits.
05:29 We want to say AI cannot be creative.
05:31 AI cannot be cannot develop a sense of humor.
05:37 AI has no emotion.
05:38 These things, AI is particularly strong in emotion.
05:42 How do you see that?
05:42 And I mean, look, I mean, it trains and it learns and it's consistent, which is you can
05:48 say that about AI.
05:50 You can't say that about us humans.
05:51 So you would say AI is better in faking emotions than human beings.
05:55 You make you're making a good point.
05:56 I mean, that is the issue.
05:57 The point that is the ethical issue is when we're dealing with it, it's about, yes, it's
06:04 being empathetic.
06:05 But is it manipulating or is it being empathetic to be helpful?
06:09 AI is very efficient, very smart, knows everything, has emotions, has a sense of humor.
06:14 What is left for human beings or which form of intelligence should we focus?
06:20 Look, I think I think some of the core things that we value today, like critical thinking,
06:26 will be as relevant, if not more like everybody.
06:29 Every time we've thought, you know, had a new tool that had some superpower, we've always
06:34 come to question what do we do?
06:36 In fact, you know, the famous quote, which actually is from, you know, Steve Jobs had
06:43 said that when he talked about PCs and the computers first as bicycles of the mind, I
06:49 think we now have a steam engine for the mind that we have got an upgrade.
06:53 And the question is, what can we do with the steam engine of the mind?
06:56 And so one of the things I recently was reading is a professor sort of gave the output to
07:02 students and said, come back and submit your prompts.
07:05 And I thought that that's a beautiful inversion, right?
07:07 I mean, it just shows that human creativity and human learning is still going to be very
07:13 much in the case because this is still a tool.
07:15 OK, two more prompts.
07:16 Will human beings serve the machines or will the machines serve human beings?
07:22 We will have to ensure that the machines serve the human beings and human interest.
07:27 On the other hand, we thought we cannot let you go without anything.
07:31 So it needs a little trophy.
07:32 Thank you so much.
07:39 There you go.
07:41 Is there really a degree of humor, emotion, creativity?
07:46 Let's check it out.
07:48 We asked Bing Chat a prompt.
07:51 [BING CHAT PROMPT]
07:57 Ladies and gentlemen, humans and their favorite devices.
08:00 Greetings.
08:01 I am your friendly neighborhood AI here to pay tribute to the wizard behind the digital
08:06 curtain.
08:07 None other than Satya Nadella, the coding conjurer at the helm of Microsoft.
08:13 Now, before you start wondering...