Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in today’s interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin talked a lot about the direction of artificial intelligence technology and Microsoft’s role in it. as well as whether humans can control it or not.
On the extent to which technology has touched people’s lives, Nadella said sorkin that “AI is ready at scale. Every news feed, every social media feeds, search (as we knew it before Chat plus search), it’s all AI.”
As for whether the technology is moving fast, he said, “So I think we’re now moving from the AI era of autonomous control to the era of co-pilot. Well, if so then it is. growing fast, but moving in the right direction.”
Emphasizing that technology innovators have full control, Nadella added: “Things are evolving rapidly as humans take more control. Humans are in the loop instead of out of the loop.”
With so many experts expressing their opinions on whether AI will slow down or simply stop working on it all together, Nadella said: “I feel that it is more important to leverage this technology, its promise and productivity.”
Regarding Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claim that Microsoft is now in ‘direct control’ of OpenAI, which was founded as a non-profit, Nadella said, “That’s not really accurate. OpenAI is very grounded in their mission and is controlled by a non-profit board. We have an uncontrollable interest in it. We have a great commercial partnership and honestly, I’m very comfortable partnering with a most profitable company whose mission is to fundamentally pursue this very powerful technology.”
Regarding AI tuning, Nadella said, “That would be good for companies. We don’t have to wait for regulations.” He added that what is going on is good and the regulators know what they are doing.
When Sorkin asked if a small player could win today in AI, Nadella said it wasn’t “because Microsoft and Alphabet will be the only games in town.”
