YouSaid · the spoken record

Satya Nadella

lines on the record: 80
first: 2025-11-12
most recent: 2025-11-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That are available to it, right? So, this AI tool that comes in also has not just a raw computer because it's going to be more token efficient to use tools to get stuff done. In fact, I kind of look at it and say our business, which today is an end user tools business, will become So it's kind of a new infrastructure.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely autonomous. So just imagine I work, like, so we should now maybe sort of lay out how I think the future of the company is, right? The future of the company would be... Tools business which I have a computer. I use Excel. And in fact, in the future, I'll even have a co pilot. And that co-pilot will also have agents. That's still me steering everything. And everything is coming back. So that's kind of one world Then the second world is the company just literally provisions a computing resource for an AI agent. And that is working fully autonomously. That fully autonomous agent will have essentially embodied set of those same tools.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tool is the computer. All right, so all I'm saying is I'm building an analyst as essentially an AI agent which happens to come with an a priori knowledge of how to use all of these analytical tools.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't worry about the Excel integration. After all, Excel was built as a tool for analysts. Great. So whoever is this AI that is an analyst should have tools that they can computer.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we will build these whether it's in security, whether it's in knowledge work, whether it's in coding or in science, we will build our own application scaffolding, which will be model forward, right? It won't be a wrapper on a model, but the model will be wrapped into the application.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this, I'll substitute you. I may use you for a while, and so as long as there's competition, there's always a winner-take-all thing, right? If there's one to be one model that is better than everybody else with massive distance, yes, that's a winner take-all. As long as there's going to be competition where there's multiple models, just like hyperscale competition, and there's an open source check, there is enough room here to go build value on top of models. But at Microsoft, the way I look at it and say is we're going to be in the hyperscale business, which will support multiple models. We will have access to open AI models for seven more years, which we will innovate on top of. So royalty, and essentially, I think of ourselves as having a frontier class model that we can use and innovate on with full flexibility. And we'll build our own models with MAI. And so we will always have a model level.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand that. And then so to some degree, that's all being done, not at the UI wrapper level with some prompt, but it's being done in the middle tier by teaching it all the tools of Excel. So I'm giving it even essentially a markdown to teach it the skills of what it means to be a sophisticated Excel user. So it's a weird thing that it goes back a little bit to AI brain, which is you're building not just Excel, you are now business logic in its traditional sense. You're taking the Excel business logic in the traditional sense and wrapping essentially a cognitive layer to it using this model, which knows how to use the tool. So in some sense, Excel will come with an analyst bundled in and with all the tools used. That's the type of stuff that will get built by everybody. So even for the model companies, they will have to compete, right? So if their price stuff high, guess what? If I'm a builder of a tool,”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the interesting thing is, there's no, like when I look at Office 365, let's take even this little thing we built called Excel agent. It's interesting, right? Excel agent is not a UI level wrapper. It's actually a model that is in the middle tier. In this case, because we have all the IP from the GPT family, we are taking that and putting it into the core middle tier of the office system to both teach it what it means to natively understand Excel, everything in it. So it's not just, hey, I just have a pixel level understanding. I have a full understanding of all the native artifacts of Excel, both when I see it, like, because if you think about it, if I'm going to give it some reasoning task, right, I need to even fix the reasoning mistakes I make. And so that means I need to both not just see the pick cells, I need to be able to see, oh, I got that formula wrong and I need to understand.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I think the one thing is perhaps a few years ago people were saying, oh, I can just wrap a model and build a successful company. And that, I think, is probably gotten debunked just because the model capabilities and the tools used in particular.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today is dealing with all the hobbling problems or the jaggedness of this intelligence problems, which you kind of have to. If you win that, then you will vertically integrate yourself into the model just because you will have the liquidity of the data and what have you. And there are enough and more checkpoints that are going to be available. That's the other thing. So structurally, I think there will always be an open source model that will be fairly capable in the world that you could then use”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already, in fact, one of the favorite settings I have in GitHub Copilot is called Auto, right, which will just optimize. In fact, I buy a subscription, the auto one will start picking and optimizing for what I am asking it to do. And it could even be fully autonomous, and it could sort of arbitrage the tokens available across multiple models to go get a task done. So if that is the, that means that If you take that argument, the commodity there will be models and especially with open source models, you can pick a checkpoint and you can take a bunch of your data and you're seeing it, right? I think all of us will start, whether it's from cursor or from Microsoft, you'll start seeing some in-house models even, which will, and then you'll offload most of your tasks to it. So I think that one argument is if you win the scaffolding, which”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great point. I mean, I think that's a great, I mean, for example, I mean, this is where does all the value migrate just to the model, or does the does it get split between the scaffolding and the model and what have you? I think that time will tell, but my fundamental point also is the incentive structure gets clear, which is if you take information, take even coding”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Markets we are competing in are creating more value. And there are multiple winners. So I think that's the stuff. But I take your point that ultimately it all means you have to get competitive. So I watch that every quarter. And so that's why I think what I'm very optimistic that what we are going to do with GitHub HQ or Agent HQ turning GitHub into a place where all these agents come, as I said, we'll have multiple shots on goal on there, right? It need not be that, hey, some of these guys can succeed along with us. And so it doesn't need to be just one winner and one subscription.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it goes back a little bit. There's no birthright here that we should have any confidence other than to say, hey, we should go innovate. And knowing the lucky break we have in some sense is that this category is going to be a lot bigger than anything we had high share in. Let me say it that way, right? In some sense, you could say, man, we kind of had high share in VS Code. We had high share in the repos with GitHub. And that was a good market. But the point is even having a decent share in what is a much more expansive market, right? I mean, you could say we had a high share in client-server server computing. We have much lower share than that in hyperscale. But is it a much bigger business by orders of magnitude? So at least there's existence proof that Microsoft's been okay, even if our share position has not been as strong as it was, as long as the”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be able to use multiple agents, I want to be able to then digest the output of the multiple agents. I want to be able to then keep a handle on my repo. So it says some kind of a heads up display that needs to be built. And then for me to quickly steer and triage what the coding agents have generated. That to me between VS Code, GitHub, and all of these new primitives we will build as mission control. I think with a control plane observability, I mean, think about everyone who is going to deploy all this. We'll require a whole host of observability of what agent did what at what time to what code base. And at the end of the day, your point is well taken, which is we better be competitive and innovate. And if we don't, yes, we'll get toppled. But I like the chart, at least as long as we're on the top, even with competition.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we'll have many, many structural shots These are powerful, lovely things because they kind of are all built around your repo. So we want to extend that last week at GitHub Universe. That's kind of what we did, right? So we sent agent HQ was the conceptual thing that we said we were going to build out. This is where, for example, you have a thing called mission control and you go to mission control and now I can fire off sometimes I describe it as the cable TV of all these AI agents because I'll have essentially packaged into one subscription codex, Claude, cognition stuff, anyone's agents, grok, all of them will be there. So I get one package and then I can literally go issue a task, steer them. So they will all be working in their independent branches. I can monitor them. So I literally have, because I think that's going to be one of the biggest places of innovation, right? Because right now I want”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even in the last quarter, we just finished, we did our quarterly announcement, I think we grew from 20 to 26 million subs. So I feel good about our sub growth and where the direction of travel on that is. But the more interesting thing that has happened is, guess where all the repos of all these other guys who are generating lots and lots of code go to, they go to GitHub. So GitHub is at an all-time high in terms of repo creation, PRs, everything. So in some sense, we want to keep that open, by the way. That means we want to have that, right? Because we don't want to conflate that with our own growth, right? Interestingly enough, we are getting one developer joining GitHub a second or something that is the stat, I think, and then 80% of them just fall into some GitHub co-pilot workflow just because there are. And by the way, many of these things will even use some of our code review agents, which are by default on just because you can use it.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I kind of want to keep myself open minded about. I mean, we're going to have tough competition. I think that's your point, which is I think is a great one. But man, like I'm glad we have, we parlayed what we had into this. And now we have to compete. And so in the compete side,”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I love this chart. You know, I love this chart for so many reasons. One is we're still on the top. Second is all these companies that are listed here are all companies that have been born in the last four or five years. That to me is the best sign, right? Which is if you have new competitors, new existential problems when you say, man, who's it? Now, Claude's going to kill you. Cursor is going to kill you. It's not Borland, right? So thank God. That means we are in the right direction. But this is it, right? The fact that we went from nothing to this scale is the market expansion. So this is like the cloud-like stuff. Fundamentally, this category of coding and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest categories. It is a software factory category. In fact, it may be bigger than knowledge work.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that sort of dropped in the cloud because nobody had to go by. In fact, it was working capital. I mean, basically, it was cash flow out, right? And so it expanded the market massively. So this AI thing will be that, right? So if you take coding, what we built with GitHub and VS Code in over whatever decades, suddenly the coding assistant is that big in one year. And so that, I think, is what's going to happen as well, which is the market expands massively.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Server to cloud. One of the questions we used to ask ourselves is oh my god, if all we did was just basically move the same users who were using, let's call it, our office licenses and our servers at that time, office servers, right, to the cloud. And we had COGS. This is going to basically not only shrink our margins, but will be fundamentally a nonprofit in a less profitable company. Except what happened was that move to the cloud expanded the market like crazy. Right, I mean, we sold a few servers in India, didn't sell much, whereas in the cloud, suddenly everybody in India also could afford fractionally buying servers. The IT cost, I mean, in fact, the biggest thing I had not realized, for example, was the amount of money people were spending buying storage underneath SharePoint. In fact, EMC's biggest segment may have been storage servers for SharePoint.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too is if you look at all the coding subscriptions, that's kind of what they are, right? And they kind of have the pro tier, the standard tier, and what have you. And so I think that's how the pricing will, you know, and the margin structures will get tiered. The interesting thing is having at Microsoft, the good news for us is we kind of are in that business all across all those meters. In fact, as a portfolio level, we pretty much have consumption, subscriptions to all of the other consumer levers as well. And then I think time will tell which of these models make sense in what categories. One thing on the SaaS side, since you brought up, which I think a lot about is take Office 365 or Microsoft 365, I mean, man, having a low ARPU is great because here's an interesting thing, right? During the transition from”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think this is a great question because, in some sense, the business models themselves, I think the levers are going to remain similar, which is if I look at the menu of models starting from like, say, consumer all the way, right, there will be some ad unit, there will be some transaction, there will be some device gross margin for somebody who builds an AI device. There will be subscriptions, consumer and enterprise, and then there will be consumption, right? So I still think that that's kind of how those are all the meters. To your point, what is a subscription? Up to now, people like subscriptions because they can budget for them, right? They are essentially entitlements to some consumption rights that come encapsulated in a subscription. So that, I think, is what, in some sense, it becomes a pricing decision. So how much consumption is you are entitled?”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firm going to look like? What's productivity going to look like? And that to me is where, again, if the industrial revolution created. After whatever, 70 years of diffusion is when you started seeing the economic growth, right? It took, that's the other thing to remember is even if the tech is diffusing fast this time around for true economic growth to appear, it has to sort of diffuse to a point where the work, the work artifact and the workflow has to change. And so that's kind of one place where I think the change management required for a corporation to truly change I think is something we shouldn't discount. So I think going forward, do humans and the tokens they produce get higher leverage, whether it's the Dwarkesh or the Dylan tokens of the future. I mean, think about the amount of technology. Would you be able to run semi-analysis on this podcast without technology? No chance, right? I mean, the scale that you've been able to achieve, no chance. So the question is, what's that scale? Is it going to be 10x?”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think In some senses, this goes back a ban to essentially what's the economic growth picture going to really look like”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has as a metaphor for what AI is, right? He's a tutoring award winner out of CMU. And he's always, and he had this even pre-AGI, but he had this metaphor of AI should either be a guardian angel or a cognitive amplifier. I love that. It's a simple way to think about what this is. Ultimately, what is its human utility? It is going to be a cognitive amplifier. And a guardian angel. And so if I sort of view it that way, I view it as a tool. But then you can also go very mystical about it and say, well, this is more than a tool. It does all these things which only humans did so far. But that has been the case with many technologies in the past. Only humans did a lot of things. And then we add tools that did them. Have to”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I start with the excitement that I also feel for maybe after the Industrial Revolution, this is the biggest thing. And so therefore I start with that premise. But at the same time, I'm a little grounded in the fact that this is still early innings. We've built some very useful things. We're seeing some great properties. These scaling laws seem to be working. And I'm optimistic that they'll continue to work, right? Some of it is, it does require real science breakthroughs, but it's also a lot of engineering and what have you. But that said, I also sort of take the view that even what has been happening in the last 70 years of computing has also been a march that has helped us move with, as I said, I like one of the things that Raj ready.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This coupling from the model architecture to what is the physical plan that's optimized. And it's also scary in that sense, which is, hey, there's going to be a new chip that will come out, which obviously, I mean, you take Viraubin Ultra. I mean, that's going to have power density that's going to be so different. But with cooling requirements that are going to be so different, right? So you kind of don't want to just build all to one spec. So that goes back a little bit to I think the dialogue we'll have, which is you want to be scaling in time. As opposed to scale once and then be stuck with it”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally, you can see the model parallelism and the data parallelism. It's kind of built for essentially the training jobs, the pods, the super pods across this campus, and then with the van, you can go to the Wisconsin data center and literally run a training job with all of them getting aggregated.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal is to be able to kind of aggregate these flops for a large training job and then put these things together across sites. And the reality is you use it for training and then you'll use it for DataGen, you'll use it for inference in all sort of ways. It's not like it's going to be used only for one workload forever.”
2025-11-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source