Satya Nadella Argues AI's True Value Will Come When It Finds Killer App Akin To Email or Excel 43
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues that AI's success should be measured by its impact on economic growth rather than achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), emphasizing that true progress will come when AI finds a transformative application akin to email or Excel. The Register reports: "Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking," the chief executive said during an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's YouTube show this month. Nadella thinks a better benchmark for AI's success should be its ability to boost a country's gross domestic product. "When we say: 'Oh, this is like the industrial revolution,' let's have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10 percent, seven percent for the developed world. Inflation adjusted, growing at five percent, that's the real marker."
Nadella suggested that growth hasn't eventuated because it's going to take time before folks understand how to use AI effectively, assuming they find a use for it -- just as it took some years for the personal computer to find its feet. "Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets. Faxes went around, somebody then got those faxes and then did an inter-office memo that then went around, and people entered numbers, and then ultimately a forecast came out maybe just in time for the next quarter," Nadella explained. "Then somebody said: 'Hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast.' The entire forecasting business process changed because the work artifact and the workflow changed. That is what needs to happen with AI being introduced into knowledge work," the CEO said. [...]
"Don't conflate knowledge worker with knowledge work," he said. "The knowledge work of today could probably be automated, [but] who said my life's goal is to triage my email?" Instead, he argues AI agents will allow workers to focus on higher-value tasks. Whether this is actually how it'll play out, or whether enterprises will take this as an opportunity to reduce costs by cutting staff remains to be seen. ... "Today, you cannot deploy these intelligences unless and until there's someone indemnifying it as a human," he said.
Nadella suggested that growth hasn't eventuated because it's going to take time before folks understand how to use AI effectively, assuming they find a use for it -- just as it took some years for the personal computer to find its feet. "Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets. Faxes went around, somebody then got those faxes and then did an inter-office memo that then went around, and people entered numbers, and then ultimately a forecast came out maybe just in time for the next quarter," Nadella explained. "Then somebody said: 'Hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast.' The entire forecasting business process changed because the work artifact and the workflow changed. That is what needs to happen with AI being introduced into knowledge work," the CEO said. [...]
"Don't conflate knowledge worker with knowledge work," he said. "The knowledge work of today could probably be automated, [but] who said my life's goal is to triage my email?" Instead, he argues AI agents will allow workers to focus on higher-value tasks. Whether this is actually how it'll play out, or whether enterprises will take this as an opportunity to reduce costs by cutting staff remains to be seen. ... "Today, you cannot deploy these intelligences unless and until there's someone indemnifying it as a human," he said.
Its killer app... (Score:1)
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And I never received your five bullets.
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Probably the usual suspects - if they haven't already bankrupted themselves out of business - like Computer Associates, Symantec, etc.
Not supposed to say it out loud (Score:3)
This sounds like an admission that generative models in their current form are overhyped - not the transformative panacea they're sold as. I don't think he was supposed to admit that publicly...
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I suspect this is a reaction to DeepSeek disrupting all of the existing AI business models.
I worked for Microsoft less than a year ago, in a department nowhere even remotely close to AI, and at that time our regular engineering surveys from leadership had additional questions whether we were finding ways to educate ourselves on AI and incorporate AI into our business. Entire orgs were basically being graded on their successful incorporation of AI. It was seen as that mission-critical to the company. To hear
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Re: Not supposed to say it out loud (Score:2)
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It's already useful. Future elites, current university students are now around 90% using it for their work. So they already found useful for it to do.
The issue is integrating it further, and who gets integration right. For example, researching things on the internet with AI search agent is amazing. Instead of spending hours searching and collating the internet, you can just get a general summary in about 15-20 seconds. Massive productivity boon, but you need to understand that refining this data further int
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So now we just need an AI that can do the professor / TA's job, and we can just sic the AI's on each other and start up the diploma printing press!
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But where was the 10% growth due to Excel and email?
It's already known. (Score:1)
The "killer app" for AI is already obvious because it's literal killer app. AI makes it much easier to kill people, even if it's mistaken on the identity of the target, it will make it easier to kill people and for people to justify killing unrelated individuals. The DoD is just itching for it to get good enough to make squads of unstoppable death machines that will relentlessly kill people they deem an enemy.
The killer app is killing.
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Yeah, like with the Lavender software or the demonic "daddy's home" system Israel uses to wipe out wholrle families. Palantir is also hard at work on the perfection of automating killing, and Alex Karp can't figure out why anyone even has a problem with this technology being used on anyone, let alone civilians. These billionaires are sociopaths
AI already has a killer app (Score:2)
Your job.
Robots have a killer app too. (Score:2)
You.
I watched the interview (Score:2)
He honestly explained his viewpoint as a CEO
CEOs care about money, and his answer makes perfect sense for a CEO
Researchers have a different opinion
I suspect that since we can't yet precisely define AGI, researchers will argue about it for a long time
First time for everything (Score:2)
Is this the first time that "killer app" could literally mean app that kills? Would be enormously popular in certain contexts. For the rest of us maybe not so much.
intelligence finds its own killer app (Score:2)
If AI were intelligent, much less super intelligent and reasoning, it would find its own killer app. In fact, intelligence itself is a killer app. This is an open admission that AI is just some techniques not well understood.
Next killer app (Score:1)
When It Finds Killer App ... (Score:2)
Satya Nadella Argues AI's True Value Will Come When It Finds Killer App Akin To Email or Excel
Considering that AI is supposed to be able to solve anything from building a better mousetrap to 'solving' climate change and faster then light travel within our lifetimes I find myself wondering why these people are out and about with a 800 million candle WWII searchlights looking for an "AI Killer App"?? If all that I have heard the AI leadership say about it then we should not be able to move without stepping on an AI Killer App.
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I asked ChatGPT what the likelyhood is that AI investments would be one of the worst financial disasters of all time. It said 0%. Absolute certainty in what I believe a mathematical impossibility. A friend asked deepseek and grok, they both said 5%. I assume that grok asked deepseek.
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What is the likelihood that you're a permabear?
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finding stuff (Score:2)
Computers did not find email or spreadsheets. In the same way, AI will not find a "killer app", a "killer app" might happen but not because a concept "found" it.
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Excel was never the killer app (Score:2)
The killer app was Visicalc, not Excel.
Excel just copied it.
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That's what he means, Microsoft needs someone to make a killer app so they can copy it. That's been Microsoft's MO for every product they have.
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None of these companies are your friend or anyone else's friends. Unless you are a major, major shareholder. And no your puny little 401K does not make you a major shareholder. It makes you a useful place to offload bad stocks onto
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Excel is killer because it's better, although it's not so much better as it used to be and the interface is really getting to be terrible. It still is the performance king of spreadsheets, which is counterintuitive, and my other go-to (LibreOffice Calc) doesn't have live pivot tables which is frustrating as hell, it makes adjusting them to be what I want takes literally twice as long. But on the other hand, hitting ^Z in the active window doesn't undo stuff in other Excel windows, which is what I had happen
Hasn't it been around long enough (Score:1)
Reminds me of something I read a while ago that I wish I could source. It was something along the lines of if a piece of tech hasn't been picked up in a decade since it came out, it is pretty much a dead end.
Spend a trillion dollars a year- (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s the scattergun approach (Score:2)
So until we find a killer app for AI, they will just thoughtlessly shove it into every program and service gat they can, then increase the cost of those programs and services because the user has to pay for something that they never asked for, nor have a compelling reason to use. I refer to the recent increase in the Microsoft 365 plan costs being rolled out to the extent that a year’s subscription to the personal plan is almost the same as buying the standalone Office suite.
Oops (Score:2)
Search (Score:2)
The killer app for LLMs is search. Not search competing with Google, but search on personal things you care about and probably have behind a VPN.
That's here already but not in app form and not in a way that will sell new hardware like Visicalc (which I'm sure is what Satya meant!).
Personal recommendation systems tuned to you instead of dinosaur ad execs?
Productivity Paradox (Score:2)
When PCs were introduced to businesses in the 80s and 90s we didn't see productivity improvements, on an economy wide level.
It seems super weird and backwards, hence it's referred to as the "productivity paradox".
Worse, the introduction of the internet to most businesses in the 2000s actually corresponds with a productivity slowdown, where it increased at a lower level than normal.
As the introduction of PCs didn't trigger economic growth and the introduction of the internet retarded economic growth it is am
Microsoft CEO can't spell Lotus or WordPerfect (Score:2)
Automated authoritarianism (Score:2)
Snitches are unreliable, spies eat and need sleep and cost a paycheck. But robot cameras do not blink, take bribes or form unions. And false positives are a feature in systems like this - they keep people afraid, and if someone important gets caught you just wink at that.
In the US, the "internet driver's license" that was talked about 20 years ago is coming via "save the children from porn" ID verification. That makes it much easier to automate