Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has had it with the constant hype surrounding AI. During an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's show this week, Nadella offered a reality check, arguing that OpenAI's long-established goal of establishing "artificial general intelligence," (AGI) an ill-defined term that roughly denotes the point at which an AI can best humans on an intellectual level, is nonsense. "Us self-claiming some AGI
Victor Tangermann February 22, 2025 3 min read
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has had it with the constant hype surrounding AI.
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.
“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. OpenAI’s top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail’s pace and requires constant supervision.
So Nadella’s line of thinking is surprisingly down-to-Earth. Besides pushing back against the hype surrounding artificial general intelligence — the realization of which OpenAI has made its number one priority — Nadella is admitting that generative AI simply hasn’t generated much value so far.
As of right now, the economy isn’t showing much sign of acceleration, and certainly not because of an army of AI agents. And whether it’s truly a question of “when” — not “if,” as he claims — remains a hotly debated subject.
There’s a lot of money on the line, with tech companies including Microsoft and OpenAI pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek really tested the resolve of investors earlier this year by demonstrating that its cutting-edge reasoning model, dubbed R1, could keep up with the competition, but at a tiny fraction of the price. The company ended up punching a $1 trillion hole in the industry after triggering a massive selloff.
Then there are nagging technical shortcomings plaguing the current crop of AI tools, from constant “hallucinations” that make it an ill fit for any critical functions to cybersecurity concerns.
Nadella’s podcast appearance could be seen as a way for Microsoft to temper some sky-high expectations, calling for a more rational, real-world approach to measure success.
At the same time, his actions tell a strikingly different story. Microsoft has invested $12 billion in OpenAI and has signed on to president Donald Trump’s $500-billion Stargate project alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
After multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk questioned whether Altman had secured the funds, Nadella appeared to stand entirely behind the initiative.
“All I know is I’m good for my $80 billion,” he told CNBC last month in response to Musk’s accusations.
let’s make another article completely misrepresenting opinions/trajectories and the general state of things, because we know it’ll sell and it will get the ignorant fighting with those who actually have an idea of what’s going on, because they saw in an article that AI was eating the pets.
please seek media sources that actually seek to inform rather than provoke or instigate confusion or division through misrepresentation and disinformation.
these days you can’t even try to fix a category error introduced by the media without getting cussed out and blocked from congregate sites because you ‘support the evil thing’ that the article said was evil, and everyone in the group hates, without even an attempt to understand the context, or what part of the thing is even being discussed.
also, can we talk more about breaking up the big companies so they don’t have a hold on the technology, rather than getting mad at everyone who interacts with modern technology?
legit ss bad feels like fighting rightwing misinformation about migrant workers and trans people.
just make people mad, and teach them that communication is a waste of energy.
we need to learn how to tell who is informing rather than obfuscating, through historicity of accuracy, and consensus with other experts from diverse perspectives. not building tribes upon who agrees with us. and don’t blame experts for not also learning how to apply a novel and virtually impossible level of compression when explaining their complex expertise, when you don’t even want to learn a word or concept. it’s like being asked to describe how cameras work, and then getting called an idiot when some analogy used can be imagined in a less useful context that doesn’t apply 1:1 with the complex subject being summarized.
outside of that, find better sources of information. fuck this communication disabling ragebait.
cause now just having a history of rebuking this garbage gets you dismissed, because a history of interacting with the topic on this platform is a good enough vibe check to just not attempt understanding and interaction.
TLDR: the quality of the articles and conversation on this subject are so generally ill-informed that it hurts, and obviously trying to craft environments of angry engagement rather than informing.
also i wonder if anyone will actually engage with this topic rather than get angry, cuss me out, and not hear a single thing being communicated.