Microsoft’s CEO Has a Message: Don’t Let AI Eat the Economy

**Ryan Knutson** (0:05)
If there's one thing that's defined the economy this year, it's this.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
AI increasingly doing work that used to be done by humans.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:15)
You might just call it the year of the AI layoff.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:18)
Somewhere between 30 and 50% of his company's workload is now being handled by AI. Employees knew it was coming, but they didn't know who was gonna be laid off this morning. They got the email, 8,000 of them. Bots instead of people.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:32)
And for a long time, the messages coming from AI leaders have felt kind of dark.

**Sam Altman** (0:37)
I think people are right to be anxious, and I understand it.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:42)
That's Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI.

**Sam Altman** (0:46)
This is not even a technological shift that happens every generation. This is one of the big ones.

**Dario Amadei** (0:51)
It's hard to imagine that there won't be some significant job impact there.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:56)
And that's Dario Amadei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic.

**Dario Amadei** (1:00)
And my worry is that it will be broad, and it will be faster than what we've seen with previous technology.

**Bradley Olson** (1:08)
Dario Amadei predicted a while ago that half of all entry-level jobs could be affected by 2030 And that's like a massive, tectonic, very difficult thing to swallow for a lot of people.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:26)
That's our colleague Brad Olson, a tech editor in San Francisco.

**Bradley Olson** (1:30)
Like, wow, if I have a kid who starts in college, which I do, I have a son who's starting in college, it means that his potential opportunity will be severely limited by AI.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:41)
Altman and Amadei have since walked back these ominous predictions. And Altman is now saying that the job's apocalypse is unlikely. But one powerful tech CEO still thinks there's a problem, and says the industry needs to figure out a path forward that is more beneficial to everyone, not just the biggest AI companies.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, posted an essay on X a few weeks ago. He reads a little like a manifesto. He wrote, quote, there is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries. How would you describe Nadella's post?

**Bradley Olson** (2:22)
When I read it, I was like, oh, this is kind of a big thing here.
Microsoft is kind of taking on OpenAI and Anthropic directly here. They're sort of endorsing a view of the future in which OpenAI and Anthropic are less dominant.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:38)
I mean, Microsoft has been a big player in AI.

**Bradley Olson** (2:40)
Yes.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:40)
But now he's kind of calling people out in the industry.

**Bradley Olson** (2:43)
Absolutely. Very directly calling them out. When I read it, I thought, this is kind of a declaration of war.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:52)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Wednesday, July 1st.
Coming up on the show, did Microsoft CEO just declare war on big AI?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:22)
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**Ryan Knutson** (3:58)
Satya Nadella has been intimately involved in developing the AI industry for years. Microsoft was an early investor in open AI, and right now, it holds a more than 25% stake in the company.
So Nadella's essay criticizing the industry raised eyebrows. To better understand what Nadella was thinking when he wrote it, our colleague Brad got on a video call with him.

**Bradley Olson** (4:19)
Great to see you too, I didn't expect you to be standing.
He was standing up, there was a shelf behind him that looked like it had pictures of his family on it. I asked if it was real or if it was fake.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:30)
Not an AI background.

**Bradley Olson** (4:33)
Is that a background or is that the real office? Because I have an AI background because I never want any bosses to know if I'm in the office or not. So I just made a little joke to him and then he was like, no, it's real.

**Satya Nadella** (4:47)
It's real. It's a real thing.