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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“Quality data with a stack of RLEs, reinforcement learning environments that allow us to basically systematically hill climb against any objective that we choose. And that's what MAI thinking one is. It's a general purpose fairly neutral thinking model that is pretty good at coding. It's now roughly on par with Opus 4.6, at least on the benchmarks. We haven't deployed it at scale into production, so there's still lots more work to do there. But it's an extremely strong reasoner, 97% on AME, which is the primary measure for its reasoning performance, at least on the benchmarks. It's very good at instruction following and then the goal is basically to make that available to many, many developers and enterprises and allow them to climb on it for their use cases because everybody has a sort of slightly different objective that they have in their company.”
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've made in sort of how we put together our training runs. So our training runs have been incredibly stable, very few crashes, very few restarts. We shared a lot of those graphs to show infrastructure stability and also MFU efficiency. So model flop utilization, which basically shows that we can put a basically state-of-the-art number of flops through each chip for every step in our training run. So I think that this is extremely easy to get wrong and we all hear lots of stories from different labs about how things do go wrong. And it actually is pretty hard to make the very careful and deliberate choices to get things right and take the right approach to make sure we produce high quality models. Because our job and our ambition is to try and build this hill climbing machine. That means the integration of the silicon with the models, with the super high...”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, actually, I mean, I think there's actually quite a lot of differences. The first thing to say is that the way that you curate the data, you start right from the top of the stack, is that we basically have paid for and acquired an extremely high quality, very conservative set of data and extracted a lot of the noisy, distracting, low quality, potentially security risk issues to do with that data. And the methods that you do for that, I think, are actually quite proprietary. We just shared a 109-page, very detailed technical report, which I think was very well received on Twitter, which shares a lot of the details on how we do this. I think the second thing is whilst I think it's important to be quite cautious with architectural choices, and we have been, there are also a number of pretty significant shifts.”
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 back with Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Silliman. This is interesting. You've mentioned now that it's still the same fundamental architecture transformers attention that we've been applying compute to that for 15 years. We're getting these big increases. You are in a fairly unique spot. At Build You announced your first flagship reasoning model, MAI Thinking One, you got to start from scratch. Is there anything you've done differently now after 15 years in architecting and training this model? Or is it just, yep, we're going to collect all the data and run the training run just as we did, and we have more compute now, so it's going to be better.”
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 rate of climbing in the last three years is the thing that I think is most staggering. And so what we're trying to do from this point is extrapolate, okay, what are the fundamental drivers of that climb, compute, data, interaction from real-world users. And those things look set to continue. So I think that I would expect that they apply to many other domains too, not just sort of, I don't know, chat or emotional support and productivity and that kind of thing, but many other domains beyond that to healthcare to live production deployments inside of education, to assistance that are increasingly managing your home, looking at just everything that is in your everyday life, basically to make you kind of more productive.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think if you define chat as an interactive exchange between two parties, one of which in this case is an AI, that broadly satisfies some goal. You're looking to learn the sports score, you're looking for advice on which restaurant to go to, you're looking for coaching and feedback on an essay that you've written, you're looking for suggestions about which job to take next or some tough conversation you're about to have with your manager, you get a response, you go back and forth, you have five or six exchanges, and you find that a useful output, which you might otherwise have to go rely on, an expert friend or even pay a coach. There are, I mean, just objectively empirically speaking, hundreds of millions of people that get that experience every day from these chatbots. So maybe we could quibble over whether that technically represents human level performance. I think it's a fairly reasonable thing to claim. And, you know, I think there's no reason why that isn't going to continue client.”
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 know you spent a lot of time thinking about this, particularly the emotional connection to some of these chatbots. These are products that you have built and deployed. I would draw a pretty big distinction from this thing is really, really good at summarizing my email and task list and providing me a brief about what things to prioritize. And this thing is an emotional coach for somebody undergoing some kind of crisis. Like those are not similar tasks. Those are not similar kinds of intelligence even in people necessarily. I know some people who are very good at making lists and are very bad at emotional support. How do you put that all together in your brain and say, okay, this is broadly human level performance in chat?”
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, I think many people are having long conversations, meaningful conversations with AIs at human level performance. I mean, the quality is exceptionally good. It has very good emotional intelligence. It's broadly very accurate. We've minimized the hallucinations. We don't talk so much about bias anymore. It's grounded in real-world observations. I think by most people's measures, we've got to, you know, human level performance in conversation for quite a wide range of tasks now. You were measured.”
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 other thing to observe is that chat is also a non verifiable space, and yet we've managed to climb that to basically human level performance through interaction with real world usage. That provides a very strong.”
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'm not so sure. So, I mean, coding, obviously, you can verify the correct execution of code. It runs or it crashes. But there's a ton of nuance in that. The quality of the code that gets written really matters. It's extensibility, how reconfigurable it is, how useful it is in practice. So it's not just that a piece of code runs. It's like, how does a model actually use it as a DevOps or an SRE in production to kind of return to that piece of code that it's written and then use it in a practical and useful way? And then, of course, you have to grade the quality of the output that has been produced. Like it may be high quality functioning code, but is it actually the app or the website that you wanted? And there are aesthetic judgments in that. There's commercial judgments in that. So the challenge of internalizing non-verifiable rewards is present in code, even though code is still primarily a verifiable reward signal.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coding is really interesting because it's easily validated, right? You write the code, you ask the computer to run it, it runs or fails. We've seen some of the downsides, certainly around security, right? The downsides are obvious. And we're seeing that this sort of regulatory approach to coding security play out in lots of ways. I probably vibe coded some security disasters on my own phone and computer, and that's maybe that's a risk I'm willing to take. Every other function doesn't seem that easy. I always pick on law because that's my background, but a judge doesn't validate legal writing the way a computer validates code. Like if you get it wrong, the judge can send you to jail, right? That is maybe the worst output validation error that you can probably run into. How do you measure the effectiveness across domains as easily as you can measure the effectiveness encoding? Because this seems to me where the metaphor, the analogy from coding to other domains falls.”
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 so we're basically extrapolating out that more orders of magnitude of compute will enable us to continue to climb in this log linear way inside of other environments. And then it raises the question of are we going to be able to train models that can invent new knowledge, not just sort of extrapolate from existing data that we have, but actually teach us things that we don't know and make new discoveries. And then the second thing is, do they have the capacity to self-improve and accelerate the process of deciding which hypotheses should be set, which ones should be pursued, how to generate training data for each of those, how to factor those into new runs, or even innovate on the actual architecture itself? So I think both of those things need to be true to be able to see this compounding progress. But I think we're going to continue to get massive gains just from applying the next few.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or each incremental increase in data and climbing on benchmarks, whether they're public benchmarks, internal benchmarks, they're targets that we focus on with reinforcement learning environments. And that is a very important observation. Those predictions that I think we're all making, I understand why some people are sort of skeptical of them or raise questions, but they're very grounded in the sort of empirical observations of over a decade of increase in performance of these models. I mean, essentially the same general purpose architecture has seen 12 orders of magnitude, more computation applied, a trillion-fold increase in flops over 15 years. And basically has worked in audio, in image, in text, in code, in many other time series prediction tasks.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are we using different Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, I didn't say it was here, I say it's coming. And I think obviously there's a lot of fluidity around these phrases. But I think what we can clearly see that's happening right now is that there is log linear hill climbing across all modalities. And that means that there is a very direct relationship between each order of magnitude of compute that we apply. Each order of magnitude”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about build. I want to start with super intelligence. You've mentioned it several times now. I was just at Google I.O., Demisabas, who used to be your colleague when you were at Google, ended that keynote by saying that we were in, quote, the foothills of the singularity and that AGI was coming with all the power of Google. You're saying superintelligence is here. Are these all the same things? Are we using different language to describe AGI? Are there differences? How would you define superintelligence in your context versus the singularity in Demeses?”
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, exactly. Thank you. And I think we've taken the approach of separating the role of the manager from the role of the DRI that executes on a specific mission. And I think that's because being a great DRI is exhausting. You know, you're like literally all in 24 hours a day and you're pushing as hard as you possibly can. Being a manager is often about being a coach, offering support, giving guidance, feedback, unblocking all sorts of things, helping with people's career growth. And so I think keeping those separate allows us to rotate DRIs every two or three cycles so that some people can try, you know, sort of different positions and have rotation. And it's a great, very flexible structure that allows us to be pretty nimble, I think.”
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 still operate by the same cycle rhythm. The end of each cycle, we have a one week meetup in person. I'm a real believer in this, even though we're still in in-office culture four days a week. In fact, the week after next, my entire superintelligence team comes together in Boston in person for four days. And that is for all of our retrospectives on how build, when, what we learn, what we didn't get right, what we need to improve. Our planning for the next cycle, which is going to run for eight weeks this time with a one-week meetup afterwards.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very normal. Let me ask you the other Dakota question that I want to get into the announcements that build, and certainly superintelligence. The last time we spoke, you said your framework for making decisions operated on a six-week cycle given how fast AI was moving. That made sense then. Things have settled maybe some things are more in focus. What is your decision-making framework now?”
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're free. You're free to be on your own. Definitely not. No, no, not at all. Look, I mean, obviously, there's a cool, cool headline and fun phrase, but like the reality is we are in partnership with OpenAI for years and years to come. We're running way north of 2030. They still produce the best models in the world. 5.5 is an outstanding model. The codex, the cybersecurity models that are coming through are amazing. And they're powering the majority of what we do. So naturally, that's going to continue. And so I think, you know, that's just the natural course of these sorts of partnerships. I don't think it's anything untoward or surprising. I think OpenAI is very understanding and supportive that. I mean, they've obviously been incredibly fast-growing company, and they understand that we have to pursue our own agenda as well. So it's very normal.”
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. You said self-sufficiency mission, which is a very polite way of saying you want to stand on your own two feet, you want to do your own thing. I'm told there's some controversy inside of Microsoft about a line my colleague Hayden Field wrote in a piece describing build. I'm just going to read this. This is from Hayden. It's a great line. She said, this year's Microsoft build had the vibe of a freshly single divorce posting a thirst trap on Instagram, right? The breakup is completed. It's time to flex. Here's our new model. We're going to stand at our own two feet. You're out there saying you're going to build models at the frontier and compete with the leading labs. Is that the feeling inside of Microsoft that you're free? You're free to be on your own? Definitely.”
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 value of making sure that you own and control your own stack and direct the entire co-design effort end to end for the use cases that are most important to us, which is obviously Agentic coding, our developers, our enterprises. I mean, that clearly pays the dividends that justify the investment that we have to make over the next few 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
“I think we've sort of made the decision the early part of last year, which obviously informed all the contract negotiations, which then all got resolved and signed in October. And it is a significant investment, but we have a long time to make it. I mean, we've already made significant investments in our own self-sufficiency mission, our Maya 200 ship is actually an outstanding chip as one example, right? I mean, we now are able to manufacture and ship a chip that is 30% cheaper than a GB200 inside of our own clusters. And now that we can co-design our own models with it, the MAI thinking one model that we've just released actually delivers 1.4x performance per watt improvement on top of the 30% improvement that you get from running on a Maya 200 once we co-optimize the models for our tasks.”
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, but building a frontier model is very expensive, I'm told. Reliably told this is a very expensive project to set about on. At some point, Amy Hood, the CFO of Microsoft, has to say, yep, you've got the budget. When did that happen? And was that just a text message? Was there a meeting? Tell me about the specifics 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
“Partner with whoever they want. So the initial construct was formed, the contract was formed at a time when the companies were very different in terms of size and scale and balance of needs and stuff. And so I think it made sense for that moment, but then became pretty clear that this is something that we have to be able to own and control ourselves and do right by our own customers. Like I said, I mean, we have an incredible distribution on enterprise, which I think is just completely unrivaled in the world. And so we have to make sure we're building the best things for our customers. And that looks slightly different to a company that has been jointly optimizing both for the consumer with ChatGPT, and also for the enterprise, and also for the fundamental science mission of superintelligence, which includes a whole bunch of different directions, which are overlapping, but could arguably said to be orthogonal to the consumer and the enterprise.”
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, obviously that's Satya's decision and as well as like Amy and Brad, many other people in the company. But I think as with anything, these are slow moving changes in the company as it comes to realize that a direction that we're taking needs a little bit of tweaking and adjustment. And so that was happening way before the sort of November board incident. And I think it just builds up over time as you look at the kind of constellation of different fronts around which we're competing directly increasingly. All the tension that comes from that. But also just knowing that partnerships like that don't last forever. I mean, OpenAI wants to be a trillion dollar public company, has incredible revenues, is growing like crazy. They want to have the freedom to operate and be able to buy compute from all sorts of other places, build their own compute.”
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 want to spend some time on superintelligences right around the corner. I just want to put a pin in it right now because I just want to kind of understand the transition for one more turn here. There's a moment of trial, it's sort of a very funny message from Microsoft CSINDELA. He says, I don't want to be Intel and have OpenAIB Microsoft, which is very funny in the context of Microsoft CEO himself saying I don't want to be the provider and have them be the platform that provides all the value and collects all the value and maybe will be swapped out, right? I don't want ChatP to run on Azure and then OpenAI will go get all the value and then maybe they can swap us out, just as happened with Windows and Intel over time. Is that a realization? Did Nadella come to you? What was that meeting like where he said, okay, openAI has had its sport issues? We need to get back on the frontier and stand at our own two feet. What did that conversation look like and how is that decision made?”
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 there's sort of no way that long term we could be structurally dependent on a third party for providing that IP for all eternity. And so that's been the transition that obviously was triggered when OpenAI and so on had their board issue, but then as I came in and my team came in, we started building that out. We're on that transition. And I think we're in a great spot because we can take a fairly steady careful long-term optimal position, both for OpenAI, which I think has done incredibly well out of this and for 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
“One of the largest technology companies in the world. We have 493 of the 500 largest companies store and process most of their data on our systems, use Azure, use M365 and Teams. I think people often underappreciate how enormous we are and how big our distribution is in enterprise. And so long, and I do mean over the five, six, seven, ten years, we have to make sure that we're completely sustainable and we're not just a recipient of somebody else's IP that we then slightly modify and adapt and put into production for our products, but we actually have the ability to stand on our own two feet.”
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 OpenAI is led by an incredibly ambitious founding team and Sam himself. And so naturally as they started to get more traction, generate a ton of revenue, they saw opportunities to go full stack. So it wasn't just that they started working on consumer products. Obviously, ChatGBT was incredibly successful. They also started working on their own data centers. They started creating their own chip. There's lots of rumors flowing around about their own consumer hardware devices. They started taking models direct to market through ChatGPT Enterprise. So across the stack, they were kind of broadening way beyond research over the last two, three, four years. And naturally, the same is also true for Microsoft. I mean, I think the partnership's now five or six years old and still has another four or five, six years to run. And likewise, we're...”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you about that evolution specifically. We all just saw the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI and Sam Altman. Microsoft was involved in that trial in the sense that every so often a lawyer from Microsoft would stand up and say, and we weren't around. And someone would say yes, and that was that. But obviously, what came out during that trial, what has been clear during this entire time, is that the original notion was that OpenAI would be a research lab and provide models and that Microsoft would build the products. And Microsoft had expertise in going to market. It had expertise in enterprise. It was trying to regain foothold in consumer in a variety of ways. And that this would be a platform shift and that the research work would be over at OpenAI and the product work would be inside of Microsoft. That's the thing that changed, right? As OpenAI wanted to make more and more consumer products, obviously given your new role and your new focus, Microsoft more and more wants to make its own.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been the plan certainly for the last 18 months. I mean, I think the relationship with OpenAI has gone through lots of ups and downs in many ways. I think it's going to go down as one of the most successful partnerships in history. It's been great for OpenAI and it's been great for Microsoft and all good relationships evolve. And I think this is just the next stage in our evolution.”
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 few things that we announced this week at Build. We have seven new models across all the modalities and so on. So it's been a pretty big shift and I think a long time in the planning and a great relief for us to now be in the game and pursuing the absolute frontier over the next few 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
“Yeah, so I mean, I guess the last 15 to 18 months or so, we've been on this journey to reestablish our relationship with OpenAI. And it's taken a minute. I think it culminated in a new contract that we got done finally in October of last year. And there were lots and lots of different provisions in that, including cement and extending the partnership. But crucially, freeing us up to be able to pursue superintelligence independently, as well as keep buying and licensing their models. So since October, I've been assembling the superintelligence team, building clusters of sufficient scale to train frontier models, you know, hiring a team focused on superintelligence. And so that was quite a big shift for us because it sort of enabled me to focus just on the superintelligence mission. And that has then culminated in”
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'm very excited to talk to you. I think our previous conversation, one of my favorite conversations about AI and how it should make us feel and what it's for that I've had in all the conversations about AI that we've had. There are some big changes at Microsoft, maybe some very important recontextualization about how people feel about AI that I want to talk to you about in particular. And then there's Microsoft Build, the big Microsoft Big Developer Conference, lots of new announcements, lots of big ideas about what computers are for and maybe where they should be that I want to get into. Let's start at the very start. This is some deep decoder stuff that is important to understand before all the rest of it. Since you joined Microsoft, you have restructured how AI works there. Your role has changed. The last time I talked to you, you were in charge of a bunch of consumer products that has been since set aside. You're now training new models. You're on the frontier. Explain how Microsoft AI is structured now and how it's...”
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 welcome to Dakoder. I'm Neil Light Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I'm actually going to keep this intro pretty short. First, if you're watching the video, you can tell that I'm working from the basement of my wife's family farm. But second, and way more importantly, it's a real burner of an episode. Mustafa and I covered everything from his approach to training new models to his deep criticisms of anthropic talking about Claude as though it's conscious. Of course, we also talked about all of the AI announcements Microsoft just made it build, its developer conference, the company's relationship with OpenAI, which is very different than it used to be, and the cultural and political pushback to AI across the country. I really want to know how Mustafa was thinking about it and whether any of the consumer AI products available today are enough to overcome those objections. Like I said, this one's a burr, and Mustafa was down to talk about all of it. Okay, Mustafa Salimit, CEO of Microsoft AI. Here we go.”
2026-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT