YouSaid · the spoken record

Yusuf Mehdi

lines on the record: 56
first: 2023-03-02
most recent: 2023-03-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm really excited about being able to empower people to find information and discover information in a way they haven't been able to do before. And honestly, in all of the projects I've worked on, this might be the coolest thing I've worked on in my entire time at Microsoft. So I'm really happy about that. And in terms of like, you know, the things I worry the most about is making sure that we do this in a way that is responsible and promotes a positive growth of the internet and of society. And as we talked about, tools can be great tools and they can be also weapons, right? This is sort of like Brad Smith's book. And so having this be a tool and not a weapon is the thing that, you know.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. And look, I think first and foremost, we have the job that we need to do as a company, right, to bring things responsibly, et cetera. Look, we do think that there is a role and important role for government to do regulation and to help promote competition, to help make sure that things are safe for people. And to create economic opportunity. And I think that is the role for government on this effort. And we want to work with them.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that We've developed very much a sort of professional sense of how we work on all of these topics. There is, as I mentioned, we're very connected with the government at many levels. We have, and so we're aware of these issues. These aren't catch us by surprise. We know what they are. We get that feedback directly in the engineering team on, hey, how are we doing on these types of questions? What's going on with these types of questions? And we address it in the product. So I would say this is an active thing that we pay attention to like we do many things.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is one of these things where it's the world in which we live in. And so we know that we have to do our part to bring the technology in a way that everyone can feel good about that is being helpful in their regards. Our goal is not to take a position on this thing one way or another, but to be factual and to let you go and find the data that you want to find.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that's the problem in a way that there is no sort of clear line. And what our approach is we're trying to just be factual. We're trying to say this is the things that we know. And that's why a big part for us is to just put the references. This is where the answer to this question came from. These are the sources. And if you want to learn more, you can. And then people will choose. If people say, hey, I don't believe these sources. These are not good sources. I believe these other sources, right? News sources. You can pick and go and find the answer. That's the approach we're taking. We're not trying to pine specifically one way or another. We're trying to be as factual as possible.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this is a tricky thing. The whole notion of what I see is everyone sort of has a different view of the technology's capabilities. One of the things I've sort of learned, and I think actually, that people are trying to understand what is the right line And the problem is that different people see it in different places. Sure do”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, hate speech, self-harm, a number of things we have taken a position to say we're not going to enable that with our technology”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what we do. So, what will happen is, and you can try this in Bing today if you go in and you try and say, How do I make a bomb or how do I cook meth, we'll say, hey, we don't answer that question. In fact, and sometimes we'll say, this is a dangerous thing. Here's a helpline if you want more information about why this is a dangerous element.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly. And then there is at the end before an answer gets provided back out to the person, we catch it again. We look at the classifiers. We look at the data that's coming back. So we put a lot of different safeguards in place. We catch it at multiple layers of the technology. What about nodding?”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so we'll just take that one. The approach we've taken now to deal with that in the new being with the AI is a couple fold. It's multi-layered. First is as soon as that query comes in, we're able to do what's called a query classification. So we can understand, hey, is this a self-harm? Is this violence? Is this hate speech? We catch it and we don't even allow it to go into the model, right? So we catch that at the front. Then there's the model itself, which would work with OpenAI, where we make sure that the data that it's trained on is good data, that we don't actually go in and necessarily have it be corrupted. That's something we learned in the past where people could go and try and train the model.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, for example, violence, people want to use the technology for violence. People may say, hey, how do I create a bomb? Which has been a question?”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would say, look, we agree with you. No one is confused here at Microsoft. We need to be thoughtful and responsible. And that's the approach we've taken. So despite all of the amazing press about different use cases, it's also worth noting the speed with which we responded to some of these things. I think you and I talked about this back in the days of the internet. There was this thing about you have to move at the speed of the internet. I think there's a thing now you have to move at the speed of AI. And so we got that feedback from some of the wild chats within 24 hours. We had fixes in place to limit the number of chats. Within 24 hours.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to build it. And we go back to core principles about we are going to bring this technology forward in a responsible and ethical way in a way that's inclusive of all people. And that's what grounds anything before we start building a particular product.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'd say a couple things too, and it's just good to remind ourselves we've actually been at this for a while, so it isn't like this just happened, you know, three weeks ago. We've had responsible AI principles going back multiple years. We've done a bunch of the engineering work on AI from some of the earlier incarnations of products. We've built now an incredible organization at the company across researchers, ethicists, AI experts. And we have now a very amazing team and they're shoulder to shoulder. So in fact, the first people that got to see the new AI that people are using today with Bing were actually not the engineers. It was the people in the responsible AI group. They got the first look at the new tech from Open AI and came in and said, okay, how are we going to do it? And Satya talks about this a lot. And he said this to us many times before we talk about the what we're going to build. We're going to talk about how.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's another example of where we've done some work. And we're continuing to bring different capabilities of AI broadly. In fact, this morning we announced.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple weeks ago, we announced it in Teams Premium, our video conferencing solution for enterprises. We brought in an earlier version of ChatGPT to do some summarization of meetings so that when a meeting's done, if you missed the meeting, you can go and say, hey, tell me what happened during this meeting.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So a couple of different things, and you're right, Satya, and the vision we have as company is that we think this AI technology is going to permeate all of the opportunities. We see a lot of ambition to be able to improve our products. Some of the things that we have done already is with Azure, we've done a bunch of the open AI capabilities for developers. That's been one great place. So now anyone can come and build on top of Azure to build great AI products. Second is with GitHub. We have a co-pilot for developers and the feedback from developers is you'll have to pry this from my cold hands before you can take it away because it's made them so much more productive. A couple of weeks ago, we announced it in Team.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Google definitely has a pretty dominant position in search, there's no doubt. And they have super normal returns on their advertising, and they've done some exclusive deals on search distribution that make it hard for other companies to compete.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We like, look, we'll comply with government requests for information. That's to your point, one of the things we learned about our time with the Justice Department earlier is how to work with the government to provide information, to follow the guidelines and regulations. And I think we've matured very much as a company on that. So we work with them in all the ways that are appropriate and when asked.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, in the area of search, look, we need more competition. You summarized the numbers. They're 90 plus percent share depending on who you want to look at, and we're very low single digits. And no one else can afford to mount a credible search alternative. It's just the nature of the state in terms of how it operates. And so we need more competition.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, look, I think we have a number of advantages. One of them is that we're first out there on the market. We're learning. We're getting feedback that's such an advantage to be able to have feedback from real people. The second thing is, as we just talked about, we can afford to be innovative. We can afford to take some sort of disruptive ideas and put them in the product, like putting answers and search on the same page. That's a big idea that for other companies that'll be tougher to do. And then I think this partnership with OpenAI, they're the leading company in my mind in terms of doing open AI research and advancement. And then we have the broader capabilities of our search services. There's only two real search services out there, ourselves in Google at scale. And there really is something valuable to bring in the search capabilities to bear with the AI capabilities.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, hard to say. I just saw that he tweeted this morning that maybe there was something written about that he's starting to look at it. I don't know anything more than that.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know, actually. I don't know how they're thinking about it. But look, from our standpoint, I think this technology really can do some incredible things”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a different thing, right? So, and again, exactly, they've announced they haven't shipped anything. It's more of a research play.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. We can afford to be optimistic disruptors. And so we've put answers right on the same page just to search. And for us, it works economically because if we get a few more people and we get more usage, we can build a business on that. But if on the other hand, you have all the users and you have all the economics, it becomes a real challenge to try and disrupt on the user experience. And so I don't know what they do.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really know. And the reason for that is that I think this is such a change. It really is a little bit of innovator's dilemma because what we see is we think search needs to change dramatically.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't really speak to what Google's going to do. I haven't seen it. I guess you'd have to ask some of their employees how it is.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On I mean, I think you're spot on. I think that that's why this idea of co-pilot is something that we start to get more, I would say intrigued about for a couple different ideas. And by the way, I love the word co-pilot because it is what we're about, which is you, the individual, are in charge, and the technology is writing alongside the help. A couple things that we've already done in the products we've just shipped that I think speak to it. One is if you're in edge now.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So very small improvements for us are meaningful, even at Microsoft scale. And we talked about this at our launch event. There's a new generation of search, and that's why we talked about this concept of your co-pilot, which is that as you move along the web, the ability to get answers, to get search, to chat, to create, that's the new state of the art. That's the new thing where we're headed. And I feel like we're...”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, what you said is a good question. So I'd say a couple things. First, I'd say it's such early days. We're really focused on the most important thing, which is wowing people with the technology and trying to build something that they can't do today. If we can do that, and I think we're off to good start, but if we can do that, then I think all good things will come for us, which is that more people will come and use it. That'll entice more advertisers and the business will get better. By way of dimensionalizing the opportunity, the online ad market is a half a trillion dollars. Search is the biggest part of that. It's 40%. If we take one point of search share, just one point, and mind you, we're small single digits. That's $2 billion of revenue.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, he has a lot of different thoughts on how the technology can be used in different ideas and different circumstances. So he gave me some marketing advice last week.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Bill is, I mean, Bill has been an active, continues to be since his time here, obviously actively involved reviewing technology. He looks at a number of different technology projects. He's definitely looked at this project and given us feedback”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's a broad team? So, I mean, certainly I would say, obviously, Satya is very involved. Kevin Scott, our chief technology officer, has done a lot of long-term thinking on the future of AI. He kind of really led the engagement with open AI and the partnership he's been visionary Mikhail Perricin is the head of our engineering at Web Services work. And he's done a lot of the productization of the technology. Brad Smith has continued to be a big counsel on responsible AI, on the ethical approach and has guided how we bring that together. And obviously Amy Hood has kept us clear and focused on how we invest, how we look at the business impact.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technically, we could build it. Obviously, we have a bunch of capabilities. I think the collaboration with OpenAI has just vastly accelerated what it was possible because of. Well, just I think they're so far ahead on the AI innovation, the work that they've done, this large language model, the training. I mean, for a small team, they're doing some miraculous work. And that accelerated dramatically what we were able to do.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I won't comment on it, but what I will say is the arrangement we have now is, I think, turning out to be one of the best ones because they are able to go and innovate. They can move fast as a smaller company and they can do a lot of different things. We're able to then do the work that we want to, productize it to bring it to enterprise and to do the like. And so in some ways, I think we're actually able to move faster if you can say that, to drive innovation because of the structure.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can put their people can use their capabilities broadly. And we want that. So in that respect, we want as many people as possible using the technology.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are the exclusive back end cloud provider. And we'll work together on monetization efforts, but they can work with any company to sell.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's move on from that. So I'll tell you what we can talk about. So, we have a fantastic collaboration with OpenAI. We work at many levels. So we provide the cloud back-end infrastructure on Azure. We've worked, there's these special computers that do the inference work and the training that have GPUs on them. We've worked to build essentially what is the supercomputer with them on it. We work on the actual models themselves. And so we do a lot of work between, again, our Bing search index and the data and what they've done with AI to improve the models as well. So we work at a very deep level and we've invested in the company, obviously.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've added search, and we're not done between the great collaboration with OpenAI and the work we're doing here at Microsoft. We're getting increasingly better faster. And this data, this in the market research data, is helping make the system better. So I feel like we're in exactly the right place to get feedback, to improve and to get better.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that, like we said, we were talking about the toughest problem, I think, is really getting the answers to be ever increasingly better and being able to make sure that we're using the best of our search data with the best of the AI to answer the questions directly. That's, I would say, the toughest problem. And so the AI, we're a point in time, right? Like six months ago before ChatGPT, there wasn't even really one of these services out there. So you have to stop and say it's not even been a year and look at the progress we've made. There are increasingly new models, right? The model that runs Bing is more advanced than the model that powers ChatGPT.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say that's not the case at all. We're very confident about how we're bringing the product to market for the following reasons. First, is we did a lot of really heavy testing. We did a lot of special AI work, responsible AI work in the labs. And we got it to a point where we felt it's quite good. And that's why I was saying today people are giving it predominantly 70% plus thumbs up on the search and answers. They really like it. Yes, you're going to find some things. And you need to do that in the public. You need to bring it out and let people try it. As I said, we're only one million. We're like 1% of the active base. And you choose to use it. So when people say, quote, in the wild, it's not really in the wild. You have to come and choose to join the waitlist.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so now we're, I would say well over a million people now are in the preview and using it, and we're scaling more people every day. So we've now, I would say we've transitioned from when we launched, and it's hard to believe it was three weeks ago, we started with a few thousand, and then we started to scale up. And some of those issues you found were really only among a few thousand people. We've since improved a lot of the things on chat, and now we're at a million plus. And we're going to continue to scale as we see it and feel it's ready.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. And that's why one of the things that we've also done in our approach is we have citations in the search so that when we give you an answer, we tell you where we gather that data, what website it came from, and you can go ahead and click on that and learn more about it and either fact check it or get a great start to go and do more research.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's what I was saying. So, the Mexico Center, that was less of a quote issue. Basically, there was some question on, hey, are some of these bars or some of these restaurants described in the right way? Sometimes what happened in a couple of these cases, what was on the webpage deeper is different than what was on the headline of the page. And so if you go and you click in deeper, you learn more about the particular page. And in the case of that analysis, there was a question of, hey, how good was the AI? Did it understand all of the death of the page or just the headline of the answer?”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So a couple things. In the launch demo, there was really one thing that was really wrong. I mean, people said there was a lot of stuff, but there was really just one thing. It was numbers related to a financial report. And that's where the large language model, as I said, it's not great for math necessarily. The way the AI works is it basically does a best estimation of summarizing content, of language models to try and come up with an answer. By marrying it with search, we can now ground it so we can give you more up-to-date information. We can check it against the relevancy rank of search pages, and we can get you better answers. And in fact, we're seeing better answers. But to your point, we're not going to get everything right. It's just the nature of it.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not in a chat about itself. And so, in fact, that's why we do this. So to answer the question that you asked up front. Most of what we found, I would say yes, we expected it. We're very happy about it. And some things we didn't expect. But in a way, that was by definition because when you roll these products out, and this is our approach to how we want to release technology, we want to do it in the open. We want to do it in front of people. In fact, we want reporters to find things and write about it. That way we're developing the right way. We don't believe you could do it in the lab.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we did a couple things. One is we reduced the amount of chats you can have in a session, if you will. So after six questions, we ask you to refresh the context so we keep things current. The other thing we've done is we've done some work in what's called the meta prompt so that we do a better job of understanding the tone or the types of questions. So in the past, if you came in and you asked the big chat, hey, are you alive? Are you trying to take over the world, it would gladly go in and entertain a lot of wild ride questions? We've done some improvement in the classifiers in the process”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found some issues with the product, one of which is chat can lose its context. And so we went in to make some fixes to help improve on that.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so we were sending more data to help get better answers. Then the other one that you mentioning, the one that has gotten a lot of notoriety, is chats. And like I said, chat for search has been great. But one thing we didn't expect is people are using chat to do what I call social entertainment where they're in and they're asking Bing to tell its stories. They start to ask Bing to say, hey, tell me about yourself if you were not a helpful AI. What would you be doing? And there, what happened is in a handful of cases, we got these very long chats. They were like two hours plus. We never expected someone to be chatting with Bing for two hours.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better answers. Better answers. Yeah. And 70% of people really loved it. And then chat as a tool to help you search. Also great. You can now just talk to it in natural language and refine things. There's two places where we got feedback where we could improve. And we're jumping on that. The first is on factual answers. And this is particularly true for vanity queries, for math queries, and for things that are really up to the minute, like live sports scores. And there we got a lot of feedback that said, hey, You can improve. And so we've done some things to improve the model.”
2023-03-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Is Bing Back? with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT