Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough

27:38It's going to be something like in sales and in finance and supply chain. So for an incumbent, I think that this is going to be one of those things where, you know, let's take one of the analogies I like to use is what manufacturers did with lean. I love that because in some sense, if you look at it, lean became a methodology of how one could take an end -to -end process in manufacturing and become more efficient. right? Is that continuous improvement, which is reduce waste and increase value? That's what's going to come to knowledge. This is like lean for knowledge work in particular. And that's going to be the hard work of management teams and individuals by doing knowledge work.

28:14And that's going to take its time. Can I ask you just briefly about that analogy? One of the things leaned at is physically transformed the factory for looks like. It revealed bottlenecks that people didn't realize until you're really paying attention to the processes and workflows. You mentioned briefly how your own workflow has changed as a result of AI's. I'm curious if we can add more color to what would it be like to run a big company when you have these AI agents that are getting smarter and smarter over time? Yeah, it's interesting to ask it. I was been thinking about it. For example, today if I look at it, we are a very email heavy.

28:53So I got into the morning and I'm like, man, like my inbox is full and I'm responding. And so I can't wait for some of these co -pilot agents to kind of automatically populate my drafts so that I can start reviewing and sending. And so that's kind of why. But literally I do feel like I already have in co -pilot, like at least 10 agents, right? I have the which I do at because I query them as sort of different things for different tasks. And I feel like there's a new inbox that's going to get created, which is my millions of agents that I'm working with will have to invoke some exceptions to me, notifications to me, ask for instructions.

29:33So at least what I'm thinking is that there's a new scaffolding, which is the agent manager is going to be that one, like it's not just a chat interface. I kind of need a smarter thing than chat interface to manage all the agents and their dialogue. So that's why I think of this co -pilot as the UI for AI is a big big deal. And each of us is going to have it as, you know, so basically think of it as there is knowledge work and there's a knowledge worker, right? The knowledge work may be done by many many agents, but you still have knowledge work worker who is dealing with all the knowledge workers and that I think is the the interface that one has to be.

30:17I mean, I'm sort of curious about like, you're one of the few people in the world who can say that you have access to 200 ,000. You have this swarm of intelligence around you in the form of Microsoft, the company, and all this employees. And you have to manage that and you have to like, you know, how to interface with that, how to make best use of that. Hopefully more of the world will get to have that experience in the future. I'd be curious about how if you're in box, if that means everybody's in box, look like yours in the morning. Okay, before we get to that, I want to keep asking you more about AI, but we really want to ask you about the big breakthrough in quantum that Microsoft researchers announced.

30:52So can you explain what's going on here? Yeah, this has been, it's another, what I'm a 30 -year journey for us, it's unbelievable. Like I'm the third CEO of Microsoft who's being excited about quantum. I think the fundamental breakthrough here or the vision that we've always had is, you need a physics breakthrough. In order to build a utility scale quantum computer that works. And so we took that path, you know, which was the path of sort of saying, like the one way for having that less noisy or the more reliable qubit is to bet on a physical property that by definition is more reliable and that's kind of what led us to this Myrona zero modes as the thing to go, which was theorized in the 1930s.

31:56And so the question was, can we actually physically fabricate these things, can we actually build them? So the big breakthrough effectively, and I know you talked to Chathen, was that we now finally have existence proof and a physics breakthrough of myorana zero modes in a new phase of matter effectively, right? So this is why I think we like the analogy of thinking of this as the transistor moment of quantum computing where we effectively have a new phase, which is the topological phase where which is more reliable, which means we can even now reliably hide the quantum information and measure it, and then, and we can fabricate it.

32:47And so now that we have it, we feel like with that core foundational fabrication technique out of the way, we can start building a Myrona chip that Myrona one, which I think is going to basically be the first chip that will be capable of a million qubits physical and then on that thousands or thousands of logical qubits are corrected. And then it came on, right? So then you suddenly have now got the ability to build a real utility square quantum computer and that to me is now so much more feasible, right? We've been working because without something like this, you will still be able to achieve milestones, but you'll never be able to build a utility scale computer.

33:37And so that's why we're excited about it. Amazing. And by the way, I believe this is it right here. That is it. Yes. I forget now. Are we calling it myorana? Yeah, that's right. Myorana one. And I'm glad we named it after that. And this is the, I mean, to think of the fact that we are able to build like something like a million, a qubit quantum computer in a thing of this size is just unbelievable. I mean, that's I think the crux of it, right? Which is unless and until we could do that, you can dream of building a utility scale quantum computer. And you're saying the eventual million qubits will go on a chip size.

34:14That's right. Amazing. So other companies have announced 100 physical qubits, Google's, IBM's, others. When you say and you've announced one, but you're saying that yours is way more scalable in the limit. Yeah. So by the way, the one thing that we have also done is we've taken sort of an approach where we sort of separated our software and our hardware, right? So we're building out our software stack. So we're actually, in fact, we now have with a couple of different with the neutral atom folks, with the ion trap folks. We're also working with others who even have, I think, pretty good approaches, even with photonics and what have you.

34:54So that means there'll be different types of quantum computers. And in fact, we have what, 20, I think the last thing that we announced was 24 logical qubits. So we have also got some fantastic breakthroughs on error correction. And that's what is allowing us even on a neutral atom and an ion trap quantum computers to build these 20 pluss and that I think that'll keep going even. In throughout the year, you'll see us improve that yard state. But we also then said, let's go to the first principles and build our own quantum computer that is betting on the topological qubit. And that's what this breakthrough is about.

35:36Amazing. The million topological qubits, thousands of logical qubits, what is the estimated timeline to scale up to that level? What is the Moore's Law here, if you've got the first transistor, look like. Like we've obviously been working on this for 30 years. I'm glad we now have the physics breakthrough and the fabrication breakdown. I wish we had a quantum computer because by the way, the first thing the quantum computer will allow us to do is build quantum computers because it's going to be so much easier to simulate atom by atom construction of these new quantum gates essentially. But in any case, to me, I think the next real thing is now that we have the fabrication technique, Let us go build that first fault tolerant quantum computer.

36:26And that will be the logical thing. So I would say now I can say, oh, maybe 27, 28, 29, we will be able to actually build this, right? So now that we have this one gate, can I put the thing into an integrated circuit and then actually put these integrated circuits into a real computer? That I think is where the next logical step is. And what do you see as 2728, you've got it working. Is it like a thing you access through the API? Is it something you're using internally for your own research? It's a great question. See, one thing that I've been excited about is even in today's world, right? Because we were, we had this quantum program and we had it, we could say, here's, you know, some APIs to it.

37:10And the breakthrough we had maybe two years ago was to sort of think of this HPC stack and AI stack and quantum together. In fact, if you think about it, AI is like an emulator of the simulator. Quantum is like a simulator of nature. What is quantum going to do? By the way, quantum is not going to replace classical. Quantum is great at what quantum can do. and classical will be also, because you can't, like, I mean, like, to be able to, quantum is going to be fantastic for anything that is not data heavy, but it's got more exploration heavy in terms of the state space, right? So, which is it should be data light, but exponential states that you want to explore.

37:56And, you know, simulation is a great one, chemical physics, what have you, biology. So, one of the things that we've started doing is, really using AI as the emulation engine, but you can then train. So the way I think of it as, if you have AI plus quantum, maybe you'll use quantum to generate synthetic data that then gets used by AI to train better models that know how to model something like chemistry or physics or what have you. And these two things we'll get used together. So even today, that's kind of effectively what we're doing with the combination of HPC and AI. and I hope to replace some of the HPC pieces with quantum computers.

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40:00Is it feasible for you to do that with all the things Microsoft research does? And how do you like the current betcher making that will pay out in 20 years? Does it have to just have to emerge organically through the org? Or are you like how are you keeping track of all this? Yeah, I mean the thing that you know, I feel which was fantastic is what bill sort of when he started MSR back in 95 I guess. Yes, it's like, look, I think in the long history of these curiosity -driven research organizations to just do a research org that is about fundamental research. An MSR over the years has built up that institutional strength.

40:40So when I even think about capital allocation or budget, so what have you, you kind of sort of first put the chips in and say, hey, look, here is MSR's budget. it. And we got to go out at each year knowing that some, you know, most of these bets are not going to pay off in any finite time frame. It may be the sixth C or Microsoft will benefit from it. And that's, I think, you know, that's kind of a tech that is, I think, a given. The real thing that I think about is when the time has come for something like quantum or a new model or what have you. Can you capitalize? So as an incumbent, like if you sort of look at history of tech, it's not that people would didn't invest.

41:28It is like you need to have a culture that knows how to take an innovation and scale it. That's the hard part, quite frankly for CEOs and management teams, which is kind of like fascinating, right? Which is it's as much about good judgment and it's about good culture. And sometimes you've gotten it right, sometimes you've gotten it wrong, right? I mean, I can tell you the thousand projects from MSR that we should have probably led with, but we didn't. And I always ask myself, why? And it's because we were not able to get enough sort of conviction and that complete thought of how to not only take the innovation but make it into a useful product with a business model that we can then go to market with.

42:22Like that's the job of CEO's and management teams is not to just be excited about any one thing but to be able to actually execute on a complete thing. And that's easier said than not. When you mentioned the possibility of six, where I guess three subsequent to use a Microsoft, if each of them increases the market cap by an order of magnitude, by the time you've got the next breakthrough, you'll be like the world economy or something. Remember, the world is going to be growing. That's right, that's right. So we'll be fine. Let's dig into the other breakthrough you've just made. And it's amazing that you have both of them coming out the same day in your gaming world models.

42:57I'd love you, you can tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so I think we're going to call it muse as what I learned, is there going to be the model of this world action or human action model. And this is very cool. See, one of the things that obviously, Dali and Sora have been unbelievable and what they've been able to do in terms of generated models. And so one thing that we wanted to go after was using game play data, can you actually generate games that are both consistent and then have the ability to generate the diversity of what that game represents and then are persistent to use the mods, right?

43:36So so that's what this is and so they were able to work with one of our game studios and this is the other publication in nature and the cool thing is what I'm excited about is bringing and so we're going to have a catalog of games soon that we will start sort of using these models or we're going to train these models to generate and then start playing them. And in fact you know when Phil Spencer first showed it to me where you know he had an Xbox controller and this model basically took the input and generated the output based on the input and it was consistent with the game. And that to me is a massive, massive, you know, moment of, wow, it's kind of like, you know, for the first time we saw chat GPT complete sentences or Dolly draw or Sora, this is kind of one such moment.

44:30Yeah, and it only I only got a chance to see some of the videos in the real time demo this morning with your leader researcher Katya on this. And only once I talked to her, that it really hit me, how incredible this is, in the sense that we've used AI in the past to model agents and just using that same technique to model the world around the agent and give this consistent real time. We'll superimpose videos of what this looks like atop this podcast so people can get a chance to see it for themselves. I guess it'll be out by then so they can also watch it there. This in itself is incredible. You, through your Spanish CEO, have invested tens hundreds of billions of dollars in building up Microsoft gaming and acquiring IP and in retrospect, if you can just emerge every all of this data into one big model that can give you this experience of visiting and going through multiple worlds at the same time, and if this is a direction gaming is headed, seems like a pretty good investment we have made.

45:29Did you have any premonition about this or good coincidence? No, I mean, I would say that we invested in gaming to build models. We invested quite frankly. I want to, here's an interesting thing about our history. We built our first game before we built Windows. Right. Flight Simulator was a Microsoft product long before we even built Windows. So gaming has got a long history at the company and we want to be in gaming for gaming sake. And that's I always start by I hate to be in businesses where there means to some other end they have to be ends on to themselves. And then yes, we're not a co -glamour at we are a company where we have to bring all these assets together and be better owners off by adding value.

46:14Right. So for example, cloud gaming is a natural thing for us to invest in because that'll just expand the time and expand the ability for people to play games everywhere. same thing with AI and gaming. Be definitely the thing that it can be helpful and maybe changing. It's kind of like the CGI moment even for gaming long term and it's great as the biggest world's largest publisher. This would be helpful but at the same time, we're going to produce great quality games. I mean, you can't be a gaming publisher without sort of first and foremost being focused on that. But the fact that this data asset is going to be interesting, not just in gaming context, but it's going to be a general action model and a world model.

46:55It's fantastic. I mean, I think about gaming data as perhaps what YouTube is perhaps to Google, gaming data is to Microsoft. And so therefore, I'm excited about that. Yeah. And then sorry, that's what I meant. And just sense of like you can have one unified experience across many different kinds of games. How does this fit into the other, separate from AI? The other things that Microsoft has worked on in the past, like mixed reality, maybe giving smaller games to a chance to build these AAA action games. And just like five, 10 years from now, what kinds of ways could you do like this? I've thought about these three things as sort of the cornerstones, right?

47:32Of an interesting way, even I got a five, six, seven years ago, is when I said like the three big bets that we want to place is AI, quantum, and mixed reality. And I still believe in them, right? because in some sense, what are the big problems to be solved presence? That's the dream of mixed reality, which is, you know, can you create real presence? Like you and I doing a podcast like this, I think we're still like it's proving out to be the heart of one of those challenges quite honestly. I thought it was going to be more solvable. It's tougher perhaps just because of the social side of it, right, which is wearing things and so on.

48:15We're excited about in fact what we're going to do with Adrenal and Palmer now with even how they'll take forward the iWass program and because that's a fantastic use case. And so we'll continue on that front. But also the 2D surfaces, it turns out things like teams, right, thanks to Penn the pandemic. We've really gotten like the ability to create essentially presents through even 2D. And that I think will continue. That's one secular piece. The quantum we talked about and the AI is the other one. So these are the three things that I look and say, how do you bring these things together, ultimately not as tech for tech sake, but solving some of the fundamental things that we as humans want in our life and more we want them in our economy driving our productivity.

49:04And so if we can somehow get that right, then I think we would have really made progress. Yeah. When you write your next book, you got to have some explanation of why those three pieces all came together around the same time, right? Like, there's no intrinsic reason you would think quantum AI should happen in 2028 and 2025 and so forth. That's right. I mean, but at some level, I kind of look at and say the simple model I have is, hey, is there a systems breakthrough? And to me, the systems breakthrough is the quantum thing. Is there a business logic breakthrough? That's kind of like AI to me, which is like, can I, can the logic tier be fundamentally reasoned differently?

49:40And you know, instead of, you know, imperatively writing code, can you have a learning system? And that's sort of the AI one. And then the UI side of it is presence. Yeah. Going back to the eye for a second. So in your 2017 book, 2019, you invest in OpenAI very early. 2017 is even earlier. And you stay in your book. One might also say that we're birthing a new species. One whose intelligence may have no upper limits. Now, super early, of course, to be talking about this in 2017, we've so far been talking in sort of like a granular fashion about agents and office, co -pilot and catbacks and so of worth, but you just zoom out and consider this statement you've made and you think about like you as somebody as a hyper -scaler, as the person doing research in these models as well, providing training in friends research for building a new species.

50:32Like in the grand scheme of things, how do you think about this? Do you think we're headed towards super human intelligence in your time at CL? I think even Mustafa uses that term, in fact, he uses that term more recently around what of this new species.

50:48Where I come at it is, you definitely need trust. Like I think the one thing that before we kind of claim it is something as big as a species, the fundamental thing that I think that we've got to get right is that there is real trust, whether it's personal or societal level trust that's big did. That's the hard problem. Because I think the biggest rate limiter to the power here will be how does our legal call it infrastructure? We're talking about all the compute infrastructure. How does the legal infrastructure evolve to deal with this? Like entire world is constructed with things like humans owning property, having rights and being liable.

51:43Like that's the fundamental thing that one has to sort of first say, okay, what does that mean for anything that now humans are using as tools? And if humans are going to delegate more authority to these things, then how does that structure evolve? Like until that really gets resolved, I think just talking about sort of the tech capability, I don't think is going to happen. As in like we won't be able to deploy these kinds of intelligences until we figure out how to do it. Because at the end of the day, there is no way like today you cannot deploy these intelligences unless and until there's someone indemnifying it as a human.

52:20That's a thing to your point. That's one of the reasons why I think about like even the most powerful AI is essentially working with some delegated authority from some human. You can sort of say, well, that's all alignment this that and the other. And that's why I think you have to sort of really get these alignments to actually work and be verifiable in some way. But I just don't think that you can deploy intelligences that are out. So for example, this AI takeoff problem, maybe a real problem. But before it is a real problem, the real problem will be in the courts. Because the courts, I mean, no society is going to allow for some human to say AI did that.

52:59Yes. Well, there's a lot of societies in the world. And I wonder if any one of them might not have a legal system that might be more amenable. And if you can't have a takeoff, then you might worry. Like it doesn't have to happen in America, right? Even if the... You're legally... Yeah, it's a good one, but even like... It's sort of like even if in any... One thing that we I think we think that no society cares about it, right? They can be rogue actors. I'm not saying they won't be rogue actors. I mean, they're cyber criminals and rogue states. They're going to be there. But to think that sort of the human society at large doesn't care about it is also not going to be true, right?

53:35So I think we all will care, right? We do we know how to deal with rogue states and rogue actors today. The world doesn't sit around Right. And say we'll tolerate that. So therefore, you know, that's why I'm glad that we have a world order in which even such anyone who is a rogue actor in a rogue state has consequences. But if you have this picture where you could have 10 % economic growth, it really I think depends on actually getting something like AGI working, because tens of trillions of dollars of value, that sounds closer to like human wages or 60 trillion dollars of the economy, getting that magnitude, you just have to automate labor or supplement labor in a very significant way.

54:20If that is possible and once you figure out the legal ramifications for it, it seems quite plausible even within your tenure, that we figure that out. Are you thinking about superhuman intelligence like the biggest thing you do in your career or is this or? Yeah, by the way, you bring up another one. I mean, I know David Order and others have talked a lot about this, which is at 60 % of labor. Like what I think the other question that needs to happen is let's at least talk about our democratic societies. I think that in order to have a stable social structure and democracy's function, you just can't have a return on capital and no return on labor.

54:56You can talk about it, but that 60 % has to be something that has to be re -value. In my own simple way, not maybe, Colin Naive, we'll start valuing different types of human labor. What is today considered high value human labor may be commodity. They may be new things that we will value, including that sort of person who comes to me and helps me with my physical therapy or whatever. It's like whatever is going to be the case that we value. But ultimately, if we don't have return on labor and there's meaning in work and dignity in work and all of that, that's an honor the rate limiter to any of these things being deployed.

55:45On the alignment side, so two years ago you guys released Sydney Bing. And just to be clear, I think given the level of capabilities at the time, I think it was like sort of like a charming and daring, kind of funny example of misalignment. But that was because at the time, you're just like chatbots, they can go think for 30 seconds and and give you some funny slash inappropriate response back. But if you think about that kind of system that can like, I think to a New York Times report to try to get him to like leave his wife or something, if you think about that going forward and you have these agents that are for hours, weeks, months, going forward just like autonomous swarms of AGI's who could be in similar ways misaligned and just screwing stuff up, maybe coordinating with each other.

56:35Just what's your plan going forward to like when you get the big one, you get it right? Yeah, that is correct. And so that's one of the reasons why I think we us, when we even allocate compute, let's allocate compute for what is that alignment challenge? And then more importantly, what is the runtime environment in which you are really going to be able to monitor these things? the observability around it. Like that's by the way, we do deal with a lot of these things today in the classical side of things as well, like cyber. We just don't write software and then just let it go. Do you have software and then you monitor it?

57:13You monitor it for cyber attacks, you monitor it for fault injections and what have you. So therefore, I think we will have to build enough software engineering around the deployment side of these. And then inside the model itself, what's the alignment? And these are all, some of them are real science problems, some of them are real engineering problems, and then we will have to tackle it. And by the way, that also means that, like, take our own liability in all of this. So that's why I'm more interested in deploying these things in where, you know, you can actually govern what the scope of these things is and the scale of these things is.

57:52So you just can't unleash something out there in the world that creates harm because the social permission for that is not going to be there. Yeah. What is when you really get the agents that can like really just do weeks worth of tasks for you, what is like the sort of like minimum assurance you want before you can let like a random fortune of 500. I think like when I use something like deep research even. The minimum assurance I think we want is before we especially have physical embodiment of it, that I think is kind of one of those thresholds we across. That might be one place. Then the other one is, for example, the permissions of the runtime environment in which this is operating.

58:39You may want guarantees that it's sandboxed, it is not going and out of that sandbox. I mean, we already have like web search and you know, we already have the out of the sandbox now. But even the web, what it does with web search and what it writes, something like, for example, like to your point about like if he's just going to write a lunch or code in order to do some computation, where is that code deployed and is that code if ephemeral for just creating that output versus just going and springing that code out into the world. Those are things that you could in the action space actually go control.

59:21Yeah. And separate from the safety issues as you think about your own product suite. And you think about like, if you do have AI's as powerful, at some point it's not just like co -pilot in the example you mentioned about how you're prepping for this podcast. So it's a little more similar to like how you actually delegate work or work to your colleagues. What does it look like given your current suite to add that in? And I mean, you know, there's one question about whether LLMs get commodified by other things. I wonder if these like databases or canvases or Excel sheets or whatever, if the LLM is your main gate point into accessing all these things, is it possible that the LLMs commodify office?

1:00:01Yeah, I mean, it's possible to see it's an interesting one, right? I think the way I think about the first phase, at least of it would be, can the LLM help me do my knowledge work using all of these tools or canvases more effectively? Like one of the best demos that I've seen is a doctor getting ready for a tumour board workflow. So she's going in to a tumour board meeting and so one of the first things she uses co -pilot for is to create an agenda for the meeting because the LLM helps reason about all the cases which are in some SharePoint site and says, hey, these cases obviously you know a tumour board meeting is a high stakes meeting where you want to be mindful of the differences in cases so that you can then allocate the right time, right?

1:00:55So even that reasoning task of creating an agenda that knows even how to split time. Super. So I use the LLM to do that. Then I go into the meeting, I'm in a team's call with all my colleagues. Guess what? I'm focused on the actual case versus taking notes because you now have this AI co -pilot doing a full transcription of all of this. And just basically an intelligent is not just a transcript, but it's a think of it as the database entry of what is in the meeting that is recallable for all time, right? So that's, then she comes out of the meeting, having sort of discussed the case and not been distracted by note -taking, and she's a teaching doctor.

1:01:36She wants to go and prep for her class. And so she takes, and she goes into co -pilot and says, hey, take my tumor board meeting and then create a PowerPoint slide deck out of it so that I can talk to my students about it. Like so that's the type. So the UI and the scaffolding that I have are canvases that are now getting populated using LLMs. And the workflow itself is being reshaped. Knowledge work is getting done. Like here's an interesting thing, right? If somebody is like one of the ways I think about it is, if someone came to me in the late 80s and said, you're going to have a million documents on your desk.

1:02:17I don't know, we were gonna say, what the heck is that? I mean, I literally sort of thought, oh, there's going to be literally a million physical copies of things on my desk. Except we do have a million spreadsheets, it a million documents, and they're all there. And so I think that's kind of what's going to happen with even agents. So there will be a UI layer. To me, office is not just about the office of today. It's the UI layer for knowledge work. It'll evolve as the workflows evolve. That's what we want to build. I do think the SaaS applications that exist today, right? These crud applications are going to fundamentally be changed because the business logic will go more into this agentic tier.

1:02:58In fact, one of the other cool things today in my co -pilot experiences when I say, hey, I'm getting ready for a meeting with a customer, I just go and say, give me all the notes for it that I should know. And it pulls from my CRM database, it pulls from my Microsoft Graph, creates a composite that essentially artifact and that means and then it applies even logic on it, right? And that to me is going to transform the SaaS applications as we know of it today, big way. So SaaS as an industry might be worth hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars a year, depending on how you count. If really that can just get collapsed by AI, like is a next step up in your next decade that 10Xing the market cap of Microsoft again.

1:03:42Like because you know, if you're like really talking much trillions of dollars. I think it also will create a lot of value. So in the SaaS, you remember, one of the big issues was, one thing that we don't pay as much attention to perhaps is the amount of IT backlog there is in the world, right? So one of the ways is these code gen things plus the fact that I can interrogate all of my SaaS applications using agents and get more utility will be the greatest explosion. of apps, they'll be called agents so that you can for every vertical in every industry or in every category, we're suddenly going to have the ability to be serviced.

1:04:27So there's going to be a lot of value. I think you can't stay still, like which is you can't say the old thing of, oh, I schematized some narrow business process and I have a UI in the browser and that's my thing. That ain't going to be the case. you have to sort of go up stack and say, what's the task that I have to participate in? And so you will want to be able to take your SaaS application and make it a fantastic agent that participates in a multi -agent world. And as long as you can do that, then I think you can even increase the value. Can I ask you about your, some questions about your time in Microsoft?

1:05:01Yeah. Is being a company man underrated. So you've spent most of your career at Microsoft and look, you could say like, maybe one of the reasons you've been able to ask so much value as you've seen the culture and the history and the technology and have all this context by rising up to the ranks. Should more companies be run by people who have this level of context? That's a great question. I mean, I've not thought about it that way. But yeah, I mean, I have sort of, you know, through my whatever 34 years now of Microsoft, it has basically been that each year I felt more excited about being at Microsoft was thinking that I was going to be a little bit more.

1:05:38that, oh, I'm a company person, or what have you, right? I mean, that is not like, I didn't go in there and saying it is about, and I think that's seriously even for anybody joining Microsoft. That means it's not like they're joining Microsoft as long as they feel that they can use this as a platform for their both economic return, but also a sense of purpose and a sense of mission that they can accomplish by using us as a platform, right? So therefore, that's the contract. So I think, yes, companies can, you know, have to create a culture that allows people to come in and become company people like me.

1:06:15And Microsoft got it more right than wrong, at least in my case. And I hope that remains the case. How do you, like, the six CEO that you're talking about that will get to use the researcher starting now? What are you doing to retain the future Satsangadella so that they're in a position to become the future leaders? Yeah, it's kind of fascinating. This is our 50th year and I think a lot about it, right? And the way to think about, you know, I think longevity is not a goal, relevance is. And so I think the thing that I have to do and all 200 ,000 of us have to do every day is are we doing things that are useful and relevant for the world as we see it evolving, not just today but tomorrow.

1:07:01Like we have to basically, you know, and we live in an industry where there's franchise value, right? So that's the other hard part, which is if you take the R &D budget that we will spend this year is all about what is it's all speculation on what's going to happen five years from now. And so you got to basically go in with that attitude that saying, look, we're doing things that we think are going to be relevant. And so that's what you got to focus on. And then know that there's a badding average and you're not going to get, you have to have high tolerance for failure. That's the other thing, which I think is, unlike you have to be able to sort of take enough shots on goal to be able to say, okay, we will make it to the other side as a company.

1:07:48And that's what makes it tricky in this industry. I mean, speaking of, you just mentioned that you're what two months away from your 50th anniversary, as of Microsoft's founding, if you look at the top 10 companies by market cap or top five, depending on how you count Saudi Ramco. Basically everybody else, but Microsoft is younger than Microsoft. It's a really interesting observation about why the most successful companies often are quite young. The average Fortune 500 company will last 10, 15 years. What has Microsoft done to remain relevant for this many years? How do you keep refounding? That is, I love that even read half -man users that love that refounding thing.

1:08:30I think that's the mindset. Like I mean, people talk about founder mode and I sort of, I think for us, Mayor Mortal CEOs and others, it's more like, hey, the re -found the mode. And I think that it's to be able to see things again in a fresh way, I think is the key to me. And so, you know, to your question, can we culturally create an environment where refounding becomes a habit thing, right? Which is, like every day we come in and say, yeah, we feel we have that stake in this place to be able to change the core assumptions of what it is that we do and how we relate to the world around us. And do we give ourselves permission?

1:09:16I think many times companies feel over constrained by either business model or what have you. And you just have to unconstraint yourself. If you did leave Microsoft, four companies would just start. Company, I would start. Man. That's where the company, man and my nieces, I'll never leave Microsoft. I think that if I were thinking of doing something, I think picking a domain that has, when I look at the dream of tech, we always have said technologies about the biggest greatest democratizing for. I feel like finally we have that ability, if you sort of say those tokens per dollar per watt is sort of what we can generate, I would love to find like some domain in which that can be applied where it is so underserved.

1:10:16That's where healthcare, education, public service, by the way, the other place is public service. I would argue that your public sector would be in another place where if you take those domains, which are the undiserved places where my life as a citizen of this country or a member of this society or anywhere, what would I be better off if somehow all these abundance translated into better healthcare, better education in better public sector, institutions serving me as citizens, that would be a place. One thing I'm not sure about hearing your answers on different questions is whether you think EGI is a thing in the sense of like will there be a thing which automates all at least like starting with all cognitive labor like anything that anybody can do on a computer.

1:11:01See this is where I my problem with the definitions of how people talk about it is cognitive labor is not a static thing right like there is cognitive labor today. If I have an inbox that is managing all my agents, is that new cognitive labor? And so today's cognitive labor may be automated. What about what is the new cognitive labor that gets created? Both of those things have to be thought off, right? Which is the shifting. So that's why I think this distinction at least in my head I make is, Don't conflate knowledge worker with knowledge work. The knowledge work of today could probably be automated.

1:11:47Who said my life's goal is to triage my email, right? Let an AI agent triage my email. But after having triage my email, give me a higher level cognitive labor task of, hey, these are the three drafts I really want you to review. That's a different abstraction. But will AI ever get to the second thing? May. But as soon as it gets to that second thing, there will be a third thing, right? So this is where I think why are we sort of thinking somehow that we have dealt with tools that have changed what is cognitive labor in history? Why are we worried that all cognitive labor goes away? I mean, I'm sure you've heard these examples before, but the idea that like horses can still be good for certain things, there are certain terrains you can't take a car on, but the idea that like you're gonna see horses around the street that are gonna employ millions of horses, it's just like it's not happening, right?

1:12:41And then the idea is could a similar thing happen with humans. But in one very narrow dimension, right? It's only 200 years of history of humans where we have valued some narrow sort of things called cognitive labor as we understand it. Let's just, let's take something like chemistry, right? If this thing like quantum plus AI really helped us sort of do a lot of novel material science and so on. Yeah, that's fantastic to have novel material science being done by it. Does that really somehow take away from sort of all the other things that humans can do? So why can't we exist in a world where there are powerful cognitive machines knowing that our cognitive agency is not being taken away?

1:13:30I'll ask this question not about you, but in a different scenario. So maybe you can answer it with without embarrassment. The suppose on the Microsoft board, could you ever see adding an AI to the board? Could it ever have the sort of like judgment and context and holistic understanding to be a useful advisor? It's like we added like I mean, just it's a great example. Like one of the things we added was this facilitator agent in teams. The goal that reached in the early stages of it is he can't that facilitator agent with long term memory, not just on the context of the meeting, but with context of projects that I'm working on and the team and what have you, be a great facilitator, right?

1:14:12I would love even in a board meeting, right? Where it's easy to get distracted. After all, board members come once a quarter and they're trying to digest what the heck is happening with a complex company like Microsoft. I think a facilitator agent that actually helped to human beings, all stay on topic, focus on the issues that matter. That's fantastic. That's literally having, to your point about even going back to your previous question, having something that has infinite memory, and then that can even help us, after all, what is that Herbert Simon thing? Because we are all bounded rationality.

1:14:49right? So if the bounded rationality of humans can actually be sort of dealt with because there is a cognitive amplifier outside, that's great. Speaking of the materials and chemistry stuff, I think you said recently that you want in the next 250 years of progress in those fields to happen in the next 25 years. Now, when I think of what's going to be possible in the next 250 years, I'm thinking like space travel and space elevators and immortality and cure all diseases. Next 25 years, you think? I think one of the reasons why I brought that up was I love that thing of, hey look, you know, the industrial revolution, if you say, was the 250 year, right?

1:15:31I mean, if you sort of even take this entire change on from a carbon -based system to something different, then that means you have to fundamentally reinvent all the, what has happened with chemistry over the world in 50 years. And that's where I hope we have this quantum computer. This quantum computer helps us get to new materials and then we can fabricate those new materials that help us with all of the challenges we have on this planet. And then I'm all for interplanetary travel. Amazing. Satya, thank you so much for your time. This was wonderful. This was wonderful. Thanks.