Steven Sinofsky on AI PCs, NVIDIA, and the Future of Computing

**Steven Sinofsky** (0:00)
Having lived through like a half dozen component shortage things, you just sort of wait them out, and you just let some local Macs or local men determine the future. This will all correct itself in short order. This world where you're all gated on dollars per token is a thing that's gonna move to your own device, which is exactly what happened with all of computing. Anytime there's a resource constraint that you have to pay for, it moves to your device and becomes free.
AI introduces yet another opportunity to change that dynamic for the PC to have it be forward looking, not backward looking. And I think this is incredibly important opportunity for Microsoft and for the industry as a whole.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
Few people have had a front row seat to the personal computing revolution, quite like Steven Sinofsky.
Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he helped shape products that defined the PC era, including Windows, Office, and Surface.
Along the way, he also witnessed one of the technology industry's longest running rivalries, Microsoft and Apple. As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, questions about product design, platforms, hardware, software, and the future of computing remain as relevant as ever. Theo Jaffee speaks with Steven Sinofsky about Apple, Microsoft, and the evolution of personal computing.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:27)
I'm in the Situation Room with Steven Sinofsky, who might have been like the first ever guest on MTS back when we were still doing test streams, I think. He was the first person I interviewed on a test stream. He was the president of the Windows division at Microsoft. He created the Surface program at Microsoft, which we have some very interesting news about today.
We're thrilled to have you on. Steven, welcome to MTS. Welcome back.

**Steven Sinofsky** (1:55)
Well, thanks so much. Good to see you. Hi, everyone.

**Theo Jaffee** (2:00)
Yeah. Hi. First question would be, NVIDIA and Microsoft and ARM and a few other companies just announced something very interesting at Computex.
What exactly did they announce and what does it matter? Sure.

**Steven Sinofsky** (2:16)
Well, just so folks know, because it doesn't get in the news much, Computex is this big giant trade show in Taiwan, and it's the weirdest show because it's like this total inside baseball, you know, silicon supply chain show. And normally, you never hear about it. Like, in fact, I never went to it even.
I wanted to. Well, it actually turns out it was always right around the same time as a big Microsoft sales meeting, so I never went. But you can think of it as the ecosystem show for everything it takes to build a computing device of any kind. Totally well, but Jensen, in his keynote last night, did this incredible slide where he walked up and down the whole length of the stage, pointing to partners that he was very excited to be there. And I would bet anyone that anyone watching would have no idea who the companies he was pointing at, like these are, some of them, half of the ones he pointed to as being entertaining, were just names of companies in traditional Chinese.
So you didn't even know what they are. But it's an incredible show. It's just wild because it's such inside baseball about components, and peripherals, and chipsets, and assembly lines, and it's deals, and deals, and stuff. And every 10 years or so, it jumps into the mainstream. But never like the past 24 hours. Just, you never see that. And actually, it was a lot like, I think it was two years ago, Jensen keynoted CES.
And I had been to 30 CESs, and I'd never seen one with such a broad media reach.

**Theo Jaffee** (4:02)
Jensen's like Taylor Swift of the tech industry.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:04)
That's so true, yeah.

**Steven Sinofsky** (4:06)
It's an incredible level of, it just speaks to the awareness of tech, and then the awareness of AI and what NVIDIA has done. Because I mean, it was bigger than like CES, Xbox was like a sideshow compared to this.

**Theo Jaffee** (4:24)
Wow. And he's huge in China too.

**Steven Sinofsky** (4:27)
Well, the show is always huge in Asia, broadly, because most of the companies are there, whether they're in mainland or in Taiwan or in Vietnam or Singapore. And that's sort of the origin of the show. Like this show was like, they're there and speak in Asian language for forever. So fascinating. So the big amounts though, I mean, look, there's a zillion things going on. But the one that rose to the top was NVIDIA announcing what they called the RTX Spark Superchip, which is a mouthful. Before the show, it was broadly called N1X. And like that's sort of what it is.