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The Satya Nadella I interviewed last week for Future Proof at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., was a very different version of the CEO I saw there in 2023, who wanted to make Google “dance.” Back then, generative AI was the exciting (and scary) new thing, and without Microsoft’s investment in compute, OpenAI wouldn’t have been able to build ChatGPT, and the industry’s trajectory might have been very different. We’re now four years on from the launch of ChatGPT and, outside of software development, AI’s impact on the world has been incremental, not exponential. And Microsoft is less about making competitors dance than it is about getting down to the nitty-gritty of making AI work predictably and reliably — Nadella has gone back to being the CEO of a company that is building a sturdy dance floor. “We, as an industry, have to wake up to this,” Nadella said. “It’s not about the shiny object and FOMO.” Wall Street is happy with the strategy. Microsoft’s stock is up 27% over the past six months and it’s valued at close to $4 trillion. But will it outpace the frontier labs and Nvidia in the long run? Nadella calls the frontier labs “magical businesses,” but points to Microsoft’s remarkable 51-year history. “I look at them and say, hey, this is not an industry where your initial success means anything,” he said.
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