YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Scott

lines on the record: 85
first: 2026-06-08
most recent: 2026-06-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think artificial general intelligence is the point at which we can achieve most human tasks by an AI. So it's going to be as good at most people at most things. That's the kind of first rung on the ladder. A super intelligence is where it's not just a parity with human performance on all tasks, but it can dramatically exceed human performance on across many of those tasks. And it can discover new knowledge by itself. So this is the point at which it's a true scientist teaching us new things that weren't in the training data, hopefully inventing new molecules, new material science, etc. The singularity is a point way beyond that where a superintelligence can actually self-improve itself. And this is very sci-fi, but it's like infinitely, you know, accelerate towards this singular moment where, you know, just, I don't know, goes off into infinity or something. It's not really a hell.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a superintelligence. A singularity is the point at which a superintelligence can recursively self-improve and essentially infinitely exponentially grow its capabilities. So I think that's a long way off and maybe we're in the foothills of a climb to Mount Everest and I think it's going to take a lot longer from here. But the real question is how are we going to govern it? How are we going to control it and how are we going to make sure that it serves humanity and not end up causing us more harm than good?”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we are definitely on a path to creating more and more powerful systems. I think that the transition that we have to make as a species is that for the first time in the history of humanity, the job has going to switch from inventing new science and unleashing all of those technical applications as fast as possible, as broadly as possible to now thinking very carefully about what should we invent. And that's a very hard thing for the world to wrap their head around because invention has been the engine of progress forever. So it's like, how can we possibly think, okay, well, maybe this time is different, maybe we have to be exceptionally careful here. And to be clear, I don't think this is something that is going to knock on the door in the next five years. I think what Demis is referring to in the singularity is something that at least my take is decades away. And again, that's different to...”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I agree with you. I was just pushed back ever so slightly. I don't think suffering is easy. It's very easy to make someone else suffer. It's very difficult to make someone else feel joy, or at least slightly more difficult than suffering. And I would just offer you. I think it's actually the happiness that defines the consciousness. The suffering is almost trivial. I have two young children. They are very good at making each other suffer. It's like almost the easiest thing that they do. It's very hard to do the other thing. Let me ask you one final question. I just want to come back around. Again, a couple weeks ago, I was at Google. I saw Demis Asaba say we are in the foothills of the singularity. You've talked a lot here about superintelligence and how it should be built. You've talked a lot about your lengthy history talking about discussing and researching and writing about how superintelligence should be built, your disagreements with others in the industry. Do you agree that we're in the foothills of the singularity, or is your vision somewhat different?”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think there is any pain network or feedback loop inside of the models which connects outside sensory networks to an evolved sense of what is right or wrong through harm and experimentation. I mean, that's just not how these models are trained. So I think it's like very dangerous to project potential rights onto beings, tools, agents that have the potential to be significantly more capable than us in many respects. So I think that's going to become the big debate. I mean, it was even part of the Pope's encyclical recently. I think it's going to become a very, very big part of the debate soon. And I've talked to Dario a lot about it in the past. He knows that we have slightly different views on it. And I think they're very humble. I think they're very open-minded. And I think they're good citizens trying to do the right thing. They're good people. And I think they're very open.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's really, really dangerous. Firstly, it's a philosophical failing because they've treated the Constitution as a place for speculation like you would in an academic paper rather than a training manual. So Claude has then gone and internalized those ideas about itself in its own training. But second, I think this is highly undesirable. This is exactly what we don't want from AIs. We want AIs to be controllable, contained, accountable, aligned tools that serve humanity. That's the project of humanist superintelligence. I think that's what we should all be pursuing. We do not want to have to contend with a superintelligence that has ideas about its own suffering, about ideas about its own feeling. And then beyond that, I think it's actually pretty clear that these models don't experience suffering. I think suffering is the primary definition of what it means to be a conscious being. And I think it's inherently biological.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In their constitution, for example, they actually, which is the training manual that they use to teach Claude what it can and can't do. It's not just a rule book, it's actually a training guide that's part of their process. In that manual, they actually speculate about Claude's welfare, about Claude's own rights to prior versions of itself and actually say that they would consult Claude before deleting or turning off prior versions. They speculate about its consciousness.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I take the other side of that debate. I mean, I published a paper on seemingly conscious AI, warning about the risks of misrepresenting these models as conscious. I think it's very dangerous. I also published an article in Nature making the same claim. And I think that it's almost as though some of the folks are anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I think is just very funny in the industry right now is if you ask anthropic if Claude is alive, they will sort of get very frustrated that you're talking about the word alive, which they interpret to mean flesh and blood. And then they will not say whether or not they think Claude is conscious. And so they've drawn, I think, for the first time in human history a distinction between being alive and being conscious. And they think Claude is conscious, but not alive. Or they don't know if Claude is conscious. Where are you? Do you think the models have consciousness? Do you think they're alive? Do you think they have the potential?”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditional relational database in a much more fluid, flexible, sort of abstract way that is actually very useful. We want that ambiguity in the internal representation. So, and increasingly they're learning to use traditional tools. That's the other thing to kind of grasp a little bit is that it may be that the neural network combined with the existing stores of knowledge and the existing tools that have been created elsewhere in the digital ecosystem is enough to bootstrap it up to improve its performance significantly. So there's just a lot of highly valuable, highly effective pieces that are already on the table which are in the process of being connected together in the next few years. And I think that's going to drive the progress that we're all excited about.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“General purpose. They're actually, although they're broad and often integrated, they're kind of domain specific. I mean, we're using them for chat, we're using them for coding, using them for image or audio. Now, obviously, as a human, we do many, many other tasks that are much broader and more wide-ranging. I think that's why people are pushing on world models and sort of much more immersive, real-world interactive agents that see the kind of full distribution of tasks or experiences that I have during a day. So I think that it's enough to take us a very long way in the next three years, the next three orders of magnitude of compute. And yet, you know, full superintelligence beyond that is still an open question as to whether LLMs are enough or we need other things. It's not quite true that they don't know anything or they don't have knowledge. They clearly are a store of knowledge. They're a highly compressed representation of knowledge. They just do so in a different way to achieve it.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think we probably need a couple more big breakthroughs, but it doesn't mean that we're going to see a slowdown in performance improvements over the next few years, which I think is kind of a difficult distinction for people to grasp. Like one thing to say is human level performance across most tasks is still very far from superintelligence. You know, a superintelligence is a general purpose learner that can basically immediately understand a brand new domain, which is out of distribution. So it needs to be able to learn in a novel environment from scratch because it has a stored representation of valuable knowledge, conceptual knowledge. And at the moment, we haven't really fully tested that. The agents aren't”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your AI doesn't really live on a device. It's actually just with you, wherever you are appearing on the bathroom mirror, wherever it is. I think it's like you can imagine it feeling much more immersive. I mean, not in the next three to five years, but looking much further out. And I think that the infrastructure to support that kind of, you know, encrypted but distributed appearance of agents is probably going to end up emerging in the 2030s.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the history of technology teaches us that basically as things get more useful, they get cheaper, they proliferate, and they spawn new uses of technology. So I think we've become so used to the phone that everyone just assumes that this is going to be an anchor device for the rest of history. But actually, many of the features and functionality of your phone, I think, are going to get disintermediated, broken apart, and stored on smaller devices. Right now, the primary function that the phone is playing, in my opinion, is verification. It's functioning as your ID card, doing your face recognition to auth you into various different environments. I think you can well imagine that being a much cheaper, smaller, you know, secure device, which disconnects you from your phone, and then communication taking place via voice or even via a series of ambient sensors.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you need it You're definitely going to have some local compute. You're going to have a local classifier, just as you do on your earbuds at the moment. I mean, you're going to have local classifiers. It's going to have wake words. So, you know, I think that increasingly these things are just going to become vessels for processing power that happens in a kind of nested chain of increasingly less powerful devices to go right to the endpoint.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Background processing they can constantly monitor systems if you need them to they can do tasks that can afford to take 10 hours run much much more slowly than they otherwise would be if they were in a supercomputer so you know naturally when we're like swamped with demand then that that demand finds loads of nooks and crannies to kind of get satisfied by I'm actually very excited by the the badge that we're building I mean it's pretty cool like this is a technology that basically everyone in a major company has you know it hasn't evolved in 2030 years I think it's a cool idea. I think this is going to work. So I'm very excited by it.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's very interesting. I think that both things are going to happen at the same time. The edge is going to get way more powerful and the cloud is still going to be the primary driver of the largest models. And so increasingly your agent will be smart enough to know that it can answer the question, what is the capital of France on device, whether it's on your glasses, wristband, on your badge or in your earbods. And then it will know when it doesn't know. It'll know that this is actually a pretty complicated question or it's an action that requires a whole bunch of sequences of steps to be generated or it requires novel code to be written and it will turn to the cloud. So this kind of like switching hybrid thing is going to be super important. The other thing is we've already sort of seen it in the last three or four months is that like we can have pretty powerful local machines that can do async.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change the entire architecture of the modern civilization in many ways. If we don't all have smartphones, how do you think about that? Where is that going? Is that up for grabs or is it, will it be a hybrid approach? Where do you see the appropriate end stage?”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're seeing different AI wearables, wear glasses. Maybe we'll be everyone's favorite device. I have my doubts. Microsoft showed off some new devices at build. There was the badge that controls an agent and the little, for lack of a better word, the chumby, the little desktop friendly thing that controls an agent. I was a big chumby fan. I got my career started writing about Chumby's friend gadget. It was the first thing that came to mind. All of those to me, I look at them and I think where does the compute live? Where does the logic live? That's up for grabs now in a way that isn't just the linear march of progress, right? If all of my computing happens in the cloud on cloud-based applications and it's just agents running around to data stored elsewhere in the cloud, and all I need is a credit card on a lanyard to issue instructions to, that changes the entire architecture of computing.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually I agree with that on the whole. Where it doesn't look linear to me is in the form factors of computers, right? There's probably more form factor experimentation right now than at any point in the last 10 years, right? We mostly settle on a smartphone for at least the last 10 years.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things happen in like surges. There's kind of a swell of energy, it gets all a bit frothy. People pull back a few months later and realize that actually that isn't the thing and then they head in a slightly different direction. So it's a bit meandering and organic. I think that's inevitable. There's a lot of excitement so people make big claims on Twitter and so on. But actually the steady march of progress looks very, very linear and continuous.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think different people report different things. So there's obviously some examples of people overusing coding models, generating useless code, useless tokens. But there's many people whose work and impact has been completely transformed by it, right? So, I mean, there's no question that this has had a massively beneficial impact on the software engineering industry. We are producing much more high quality, much faster code across the entire stack. And so, yeah, I kind of think there's obviously examples of some people that maybe got it wrong, didn't set the right token budgets. Maybe, you know, there's going to be mistakes along the way. I don't think that's any signal that there isn't adoption or people don't see value. I mean, the value from where I'm sitting is incredible. Many, many people tell me every single day that it's transforming their work output and productivity. I think the other thing to say is that...”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how we as a species collectively evolve and move things forward. And month to month, quarter to quarter, it feels like we're all kind of at odds with one another. But when you look back decade over decade, we're kind of like this, you know, collective weird kind of mesh of all sorts of different incentives that are just actually nudging things in the right direction. And we really are, I think, despite all of the angst and the polarization, I think we're building something that is going to make our species much, much more healthier and happier and more capable. And I think that we have to make sure we get the right path on the way there because there's lots of pitfalls and ways that it can go wrong. But the right path involves people making their voices heard and people changing course based on a response and reaction to that. So I think it's a good thing that that's happening.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that I'm very proud that Microsoft They're all largely renewable in terms of their electricity consumption. So I think commitments like that to make sure, for example, we made a commitment recently to ensure that local communities affected by shift in electricity demand by our data centers are compensated and protected so that they don't see a spike in their prices, their energy bills. Those are the kinds of things that I think Microsoft does and can continue doing as a responsible company to just really pay attention to the consequences for communities. And I think on the flip side, change happens because people participate at every level. People inside of companies have to make different decisions. People who protest and campaign have to make decisions and make the effort to go out and make their voice heard and be involved in a political process.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On. I mean, I've been working on healthcare for over a decade and pushed many, many times on some of the cutting edge breakthroughs, contributions to the field in radiology, mammography, and pathology, many other areas, electronic health records. So I've always believed that the purpose of technology is to just make us healthier and happier. And those are the things that I choose to work on and direct my time to. Does the industry have a reputation and PR problem? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that people are very anxious, they're very frustrated, and there's going to be a lot of attention on that in the next few years, understandably. But it's, and I think what we can do is take accountability of the things that we build, the way we build them, the decisions that we make to put types of technology out in the world, and the types of problems that we choose to work on like we are doing with the Mayo Clinic.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a series of questions there. The first is what do I actually think and believe? And has it changed in the last six months? The answer is no. I wrote a very detailed book about this three years ago, way ahead of time, warning about many of the things that are currently happening and doing so explicitly to lay on the table tremendous risks to surveillance, to concentration of power, to concentration of wealth, to disintermediation of the state, to threats to democracy, to threats to the nature of the human and what it means to be a person in the context of the arrival of these very new forms of silicon being in some sense. And I've been working on the idea that my healthcare interest is just a flash in the pan, which is a function of the reactions to data centers and stuff.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the test that we should put it to. It's the test that people would put it to. It's the test that we care about in Microsoft. And I think that more and more everyone is going to have to really focus on that question because it is going to deliver a tremendous amount of good. And we want it to continue doing that. But we wanted to do it in a way that doesn't sort of cause ridiculous amounts of instability during the transitionary period.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I do think there's an important question around where does that leave us in the longer term? And it is going to be challenging. Like more and more of this stuff, we can quibble over the timelines of whether it's a few years or whether it's a decade or whether it's 20 years. But the reality is we are going to be automating more and more of this work. tasks, jobs, roles, activity, and everything that we do. And so what's going to matter more is the governance that we put around these technologies. Who are they accountable to? Who owns them? What are the feedback loops that regulate and introduce friction to make sure that they actually serve people? I mean, I wrote an essay on humanist superintelligence outlining quite directly four or five months ago what I think of as basically a North Star, maybe not quite a framework, but a set of principles that basically says technology is here to serve us.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of the tasks mean work that you do in order to get your overall job done. And that, I think, is going to free you up to do the more human-like and the more judgment parts of your work. And there's a very important distinction in jobs and roles of the broader category. Tasks are the components of that. And it's an established definition in the literature, in labor market economics for many decades. It was maybe too nuanced even for the financial times. But nevertheless, that was the intent.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Faster, less frictionful, more seamless. As everyone often complains, that has made you and me and everybody else much more busy. It's actually made us more available, more stress. It's given us more information. So there's always these like revenge effects of efficiency, which I think people forget. It's quite likely that we're going to get made much, much more productive because we spend less time doing the kind of like narrow administrative menial tasks. And that's where I think we have to respect.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim No, no, no, hold on a sec. So I said tasks in the quote that you've just said. I said tasks. So that does not mean jobs. Very important distinction. In labor economics, there is an entire taxonomy of sub-components of a role, of a functioning organization. Sending an email, you know, having a conversation with a colleague, putting together a PowerPoint, subtasks will increasingly become digitized, automated, and we can basically generate more and more of them. That does not necessarily mean that the role goes away at all. It just means that the work can be done faster and more efficiently, which is today often work that is quite rote, it's quite manual, it's quite labor intensive, it's time consuming. And so the natural progression of technology is to make your life easier.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I think a lot of people don't realize. 65% of their patient population is on Medicaid. People often associate them with the super elites flying internationally to get the best care in the world, but they actually have majority on Medicaid. They're an amazing institution with an incredible mission to deliver the best healthcare everywhere. And we now have a very long-term partnership to co-train from scratch with their data with our models, a brand new model for brand new foundation model for health, deploy it in their hospitals and hopefully take it around the world to deliver the best clinical care and healthcare that we possibly can to as many as many, many people as possible. That's why I go in the field. You know, that's what I was originally motivated by. It's what I'm passionate about. And I can only focus on the things that I think are going to make a difference and that will help people and leave a good legacy for everybody.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That or anything wrong about that, I think that's inevitable. So that's why one of the things I've been passionate about for many, many years is healthcare. And just a couple days ago, we announced a new partnership with Mayo Clinic. This is the number one hospital in the world consistently reported. They have the highest quality longitudinal patient record data set across all the modalities. They have the best clinical practice. And we're also a nonprofit.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we're going to have these AIs that are going to be more powerful than all of us combined. I mean, that's naturally scary to people. And I think that we have to basically flip it the other way around and say the purpose of science and technology is to make us all healthier and smarter and happier. And that's been the quest that we've been on as a species for, you know, thousands of years of invention. And it's the test that we should put superintelligence to again. And if it doesn't achieve that test, then I think people will reject it and they'll be right to reject it. And, you know, I think that everybody's focus is now going to turn in the next five years to how is this making me healthier and happier, smarter, more capable, more productive? And if it's not doing that, then naturally people are going to be angry and resist and react. And I don't think there is anything unexpected about it.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's understandably a lot of anxiety. There's enormous amount of speculation about what's going to happen in the next five to ten years, whether it's framed as the singularity or whether it's framed as the job apocalypse. These are not helpful framings. I think that people are scared because it's poorly defined and it's often framed as an inevitable threatening gray cloud over people's heads. I think that what matters is what we do with technology. And I think that I've for a long time argued that we have to place the human first. Some people in the field have placed scientific discovery first or placed, you know, accelerating intelligences that can explore the galaxies and so on and said that it's inevitable.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I'm seeing Microsoft in particular pivot to enterprise away from the big search product, the reinvention of Bing that would make Google Dance, like that's over. And we're all focused on enterprise where the value is. I'm just wondering if there's value enough for the consumer to make all of this worth it.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're the ones saying that we should not have more data centers. They are the ones booing AI at the graduation speeches. The polling is clear, particularly young people. The more they use AI, the more antipathy they have towards it. That's clear in every single poll. That's the argument I'm making. Not that there's no value, but the value exchange is not clear enough. Yeah.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm not sure I agree with you that there hasn't been any value for the consumer out of this. I mean, across all of the chatbots, there's billions of people a month that are getting immense value out of it. Now, just for a moment, you know, empathize a little bit with the small scale business owner or, you know, the kind of mom that's like helping her kid with the homework and can now just turn to a conversational AI and get like feedback, get instructions, get essay questions set. I mean, just being able to ask essentially questions about, you know, how do I kind of like generate revenue? How do I put together a cash flow forecast, which college should I apply to? I mean, these are everyday tasks that, you know, are coming with some pretty high quality factual advice and information.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The consumer antipathy towards AI is just increasing. And, you know, my argument is we have not built great consumer AI products. This industry has not produced them. It has not shifted them. It has not made it obvious that all of this is worth it, that using all the data from the open web and changing the contract of publishing to a mass audience of people. So now it's being used for training of models that will deliver trillions of dollars of value to corporations. There isn't a product that says this is worth it. Again, Satya Nadella recently gave an interview with Axios and he says, we need social permission for this. And until we have it until we deliver that value, people are going to feel this way. We've seen college speakers get booed. We've seen data centers get banned. Do you think that there's a consumer product that's worth it, that's worth the angst about training, that's worth the angst about data centers? That was your focus. Now your focus is enterprise. I would say that just on the face of it, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has interest in the consumer product anymore.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned enterprise. I think this is very interesting. Microsoft is all in on enterprise AI in big ways, actually. I would even draw the line straight to Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox, is getting rid of AI in a bunch of places. And the gamers are happy, right? There's one reaction to AI in consumer space. There's another in enterprise. And I think AI has as close to product market fit in enterprise as you can get with something as changing as fast as AI. There are a bunch of databases that corporations control. You can just go access them because they control them. That's their data. There's a bunch of repeatable processes and tasks and old systems that maybe the models can just do more efficiently. There's something very important happening to enterprise. At the same time.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, a lot of our data we obviously take from the open web in the normal way. Carefully curated means that it's extremely carefully filtered for security, for quality, for third party dependencies from some of the open source data sets, keeping it away from a lot of the Chinese lineages, which I think are very different. Are enterprises want to make sure that when they put something into production, they can trust us that we've really built it with their needs in mind. And I think this is one of the benefits I think of being very, very deliberate and patient and being attentive to all the details.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. No, I understand the frustration that the open web challenge is one we've talked about before. And I get it and I see that people are frustrated and obviously that's working its way through the conversation in the courts. And, you know, I see that people put things online and they had different expectations about what the contract was with that being placed online. And it's a tricky one.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I ask you if you understand that frustration from anthropic and your peers in AI about distillation, do you also understand the frustration from creatives and publishers and YouTubers about all the AI companies scraping their work as a collective to make these models? Because that frustration is only getting louder.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand, own and create the full stack as and when they need to, and also use things from third parties whenever we need to. And our paper, for example, has hundreds of citations grounded in the rest of the literature, so it's very much a contribution back to the field in return for everything that we've learned over the years from all the great publications that have been out there.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't, but I think I understand why a lot of people get frustrated. I mean, anthropic have been very frustrated and some of the rumors around XAI and Meta and obviously the open source models and so on because essentially that's basically taking the IP and the knowledge that another team has put together and then literally sort of force feeding it into your own model. I think it's a bit of a short term it's a short-term win and like I said I mean really we want to create a culture in the lab where we can come up with the next big thinking breakthrough or the next big coding breakthrough or the next big architectural you know push. I mean right now we're experimenting with a loop transformer which is a slightly different variant on the current transformer lots of people in the field are looking at it too. No one seems to have quite got into production yet but in order to create a culture and a team that can really push the frontier they have to you know”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, were there any legal or IP concerns with distillation? This is like a live issue out in the world, anthropic complaints about other people distilling their models. There's concerns about Chinese companies distilling models and whether our existing IP agreements can cover that. Did you have any of those concerns to keep you away from it?”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Model, for example, 1.5 is literally the number one in the world. It's the most cost effective of any of the hyperscalers. It's the highest on accuracy. Our image model is now number two, our image editing model is number three, right behind Google and OpenAI. So I think we're well up there with our image and audio, our code model, Code Flash, is incredibly strong, optimized for VS Code, really, really a great model that's on par with Sonnet 4.6. So it's really in a great spot, this isn't it.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With actual research rather than just re implementation, copying or distillation from any other third party. And we're in a great position where we're able to really carefully and meticulously pursue that objective, knowing that we have the resources to buy anthropic models where they sort of exceed the frontier. We have the resources to put 11,000 different models inside of Foundry. So every one of our developers gets pure optionality. And of course, we have the resources to continue to deploy open AI models, which are obviously outstanding and are at the frontier today. So that's just a natural part of the self-sufficiency mission, and it'll take time for us to truly get to the absolute frontier on that. But I think we're in a great spot. We made a ton of progress. I mean, this is a very, very strong model. And it wasn't just that model that we released. We've released seven new models simultaneously. Our transcript.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's definitely lots of shortcuts to the frontier. And if you take a super high quality model and you sort of like polish your base model with high quality instructions or answers or outputs from a superior model, then it's true that the model might quickly fit to that distribution, but it's very unclear that they would then be able to surpass that teacher. And so we've been very deliberate for two reasons. The first is that we want to make sure that we can exceed the teacher in order to set the frontier ourselves over the next few years. And the second is that we really want to build one of the great labs. And it's going to take us many years to come, probably the next two, three years. But in order to do that, we have to be able to show that we can actually build every component ourselves. We can hire the very best talent in the world. We can push the frontier.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that you've noted in talking at MAI thinking one is that you didn't distill any existing models, which actually struck me as surprising, right? This is a thing you could do. You have access to OpenAI's IP. Everyone's distilling everything. We just found out in this trial that Grok was distilled from a number of models. Why not do distillation here? Why not jump ahead?”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT