Victor Tangermann writing for Yahoo Finance with the very enticing headline: Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value

During an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's show this week, Nadella offered a reality check.

"Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me," Nadella told Patel.

Instead, the CEO argued that we should be looking at whether AI is generating real-world value instead of mindlessly running after fantastical ideas like AGI.

To Nadella, the proof is in the pudding. If AI actually has economic potential, he argued, it'll be clear when it starts generating measurable value.

I had this link appear a few times in my social feeds this morning, and it’s cat nip for the “LLMs are evil and worthless” crowd, but something didn’t sit right with me about it. Maybe it’s because I’m coming off looking at so much reporting that attempts to paint energy use in misleading ways that I’m on edge for this sort of thing, but I had to look into this one.

Over my lunch today I went for a run and put on the podcast in question, and listened to the whole thing. For the record, I have no idea who Dwarkesh Patel and I have no idea if he’s a cool cat or a deeply problematic podcaster dude, but he seemed reasonable on this single episode I watched.

I won’t quote a single comment from Nadella since there’s no one quote that knocks out the linked article’s suggestion of what he said, but suffice it to say he absolutely did not “admit” that Ai is generating no value. If anything, he cited large revenue numbers it’s earning today, massively larger numbers he sees coming in just a couple years, and that he’s very excited for what these technologies can do for us. The article goes on to say:

"So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth," he said.

"The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent," he added. "Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

Needless to say, we haven't seen anything like that yet.

But in listening to the podcast, this is wildly out of context and not an admission from Nadella that AI has failed to live up to the hype. This quote is from a conversation about how the world economy is currently growing at about 2%, that he hopes that AI can eventually help unleash productivity gains like we saw in the Industrial Revolution where it grew 10%, and that AI could be a tool to unleash that potential.

Anyway, I know that very often writers don’t get to write their own headlines, so I have no idea who that part is on, but coming back to this piece after hearing the podcast episode myself really gave me a “did we listen to the same thing?” feeling.