Satya Nadella Talks AI Platform Shift and Platform-Partner-First Model

Thursday - November 16 2023, 16:53 UTC - 1 year ago

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had two surprise appearances at OpenAI's and GitHub's developer conferences last week to give developers access to new AI-based tools. Nadella believes that developers are the key to a new platform shift to natural-language AI tools and that this will lead to a new era of creativity.

In San Francisco last week, everyone’s favorite surprise visitor was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. At OpenAI’s DevDay—the company’s first-ever event for developers building on its platform—Nadella bounded on stage to join OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, blowing the hair back on an already electrified audience. "You guys have built something magic," he gushed. Two days later on another stage, in another venue, at another developers’ conference, Nadella made his second unannounced appearance of the week—this time at GitHub Universe .

There Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s CEO, was showing off a new version of the company’s AI programming tool, Copilot, that can generate computer code from natural language. Nadella was effusive: "I can code again!" he exclaimed. Today, Nadella will be onstage speaking to developers at Microsoft Ignite, where the company is announcing even more AI-based developer tools, including an Azure AI Studio that will let devs choose between model catalogs from not only Microsoft, but also the likes of Meta, OpenAI, and Hugging Face, as well asnew tools for customizing Copilot for Microsoft 365 .

If you get the sense Nadella is obsessed with developers, you’re not wrong. He’s making the rounds to tout all the ways they can use a new generation of AI-powered tools, like GitHub Copilot (Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018) or the new suite of developer tools from OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft has reportedly invested some $13 billion. Last week, Nadella took a 20-minute break from all of his onstage appearances to sit down with MIT Technology Review to talk about (you guessed it) developers .

He repeatedly emphasized Microsoft’s long-standing focus on developers. But he also had a message: The way we create software is fundamentally changing. Nadella believes a platform shift is underway, one that will prove just as significant as the shifts from mainframe to desktop or desktop to mobile. This time, the transition is to natural-language AI tools, some of which he argues will lower the barrier to entry for software development, make existing developers more productive, and ultimately lead to a new era of creativity .

ON THE RELATIONSHIP WITH OPENAI I’ve always felt that Microsoft is a platform-and-partner-first company, and this is not new to us. And so therefore, we both are effectively codependent, right? They depend on us to build the best systems, we depend on them to build the best models, and we go to market together. ON HIS MISSION TO GET IN FRONT OF DEVELOPERS Whenever you have a platform shift, the key thing is to make sure the platform is ubiquitously available for developers to build all kinds of new things .

So to us, the most important task is to make the developer tools, the developer platforms, broadly available. The second thing is for us to also show the light, right? Whether it’s OpenAI building ChatGPT and then innovating on top of it, or us building Copilot and innovating on it. That will give developers an opportunity to distribute their applications. So the most important thing in any platform creation is to get the platform ubiquitously available, and then help developers reach [thier] customers .