Going Full Send on AI, and the (Positive) Impact of AI on Jobs, with Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Microsoft, the BMS Productivity Cloud and Gaming Company has taken a massive bet on AI. Everyone's paying close attention to its partnership with OpenAI and the technical community has been amazed by its release of some of the first truly useful and broadly deployed AI products such as GitHub Copilot. Its full-on attack on web search with the new LLM-powered Bing Chat is making its incumbent competitors dance.
Today, on No Priors, we're thrilled to speak with Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft and the driving force behind their AI strategy. Kevin's leadership, both at Microsoft and Prior at LinkedIn, Google and AdMob, as a technologist, is especially inspiring to me given his distance traveled from his childhood home in rural central Virginia.
In 2020, he published a book, Reprogramming the American Dream, about making AI service all. Kevin, welcome to No Priors. Thanks so much for joining us.

**Kevin Scott** (0:54)
Thanks for having me, guys.

**Elad Gil** (0:55)
Can you start by sharing with us some of your stories, how does one go from a farming community in Virginia where your parents didn't attend college to CTO of Microsoft?

**Kevin Scott** (1:03)
I don't know. I think it is a very unlikely journey. It's certainly not a thing that I ever could have imagined. I think part of it is I was just super fortunate to be wired like a nerd and growing up when I grew up. So, when I was a teenager in the early 80s, personal computing was happening, and that was the thing that I happened to fixate on.
Even though we were relatively poor, I managed to scrape together enough bucks to get myself a personal computer that I could have and just tinker with all the time. It was a RadioShack color computer too, like one of these things with chiclet keys that you actually connected to a television. Like I had it hooked up to a 13-inch TV and it had a cassette recorder that you stored and loaded your programs on. And it was just the thing that I was obsessed with, and I stayed obsessed with computers from then on. And it was just me trying to find a path at each step where I could work on the most interesting thing that someone was dumb enough to give me permission to go work on.
And again, it's a lot of luck. Like, there's no way you can plan a path from rural Central Virginia to CTO of Microsoft. But I think it does help to have a high level of vision in your head for what it is that you want to do. Like, just knowing what you're aiming for always helps.

**Elad Gil** (2:41)
What was that vision for you, besides like, obsessed with computers, wanted to work on them?

**Kevin Scott** (2:46)
Yeah, I more or less had two of them. So the first vision I had when I was a teenager was I wanted to be a computer science professor. So I just looked at what computer scientists did and thought this is the most amazing stuff I've ever seen. And I went to a science and technology high school, and the way that it worked where I lived is like a really rural area. And so the science and technology, as a governor school, so it was centrally located in each high school in these four or five counties that surrounded the governor school, got to send two students each. And so I was one of the two students that got selected for my high school to go to this thing. And my computer science professor there was this guy, Dr. Tom Morgan.
And I just sort of felt like he'd opened up this entire new world to me. Like it was just thrilling to learn all of this stuff. And I was like, yeah, I want to be like Dr. Morgan.
And a lot of this stuff for me is about who those influential role models have been in your life. And so, as soon as I met Dr. Morgan, I was like, I should just go be a computer science professor. And that was the path I was on until I was about 30 years old, when I was a compiler optimization and computer architecture, programming languages person. And I got pretty disillusioned with what being a computer science professor actually was, relative to what I wanted to do. Like I just wanted to have a lot of impact. And my perception at the time when I was making these decisions was that you can have a lot of impact as a computer science professor. And the impact was actually great, but it wasn't the impact that the system appreciated.