The Rise of the Full-Stack Builder and Hyper-Leveraged Generalist with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

**Satya Nadella** (0:00)
The world is going to be very skeptical of tech and tech companies that say, trust us, we've got it, the future is going to be glorious. You kind of have to deliver tangible benefits, because it's too important this time around. It's too much of the economy for it not to be the case. True ambition is about making the impossible possible. I take great inspiration from sort of the people who were managing the Azure network. We built in the last 15 months more Azure capacity than we built in the first 15 years.

**Sarah Guo** (0:29)
It's crazy.

**Satya Nadella** (0:30)
Our job is not to do Azure networking. Our job is to build the agentic system that does Azure networking. The way to get to information, way to educate yourself, way to continuously keep yourself updated has changed so much. Maybe the next big startup could be someone who builds a new university, a new pedagogy even of how to get someone to go through a curriculum and find economic opportunity. That's highly valuable.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:11)
Please welcome Swicks, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, Satya Nadella.

**Satya Nadella** (1:29)
Hello, Son.

**Sarah Guo** (1:32)
I'm so excited to be here. Welcome to a crossover episode of No Priors and Latent Space with Satya Nadella. Congratulations on an amazing build.

**Satya Nadella** (1:41)
No, thank you so much, and it's great to be with both of you. I listen to both of you or both the podcast all the time. It's great to be on it.

**Sarah Guo** (1:48)
Thank you so much. So you're just talking about these amazing announcements from across the Microsoft estate all morning for three hours. What's the most important reflection or takeaway you have?

**Satya Nadella** (1:59)
I'd say perhaps the biggest one for me is, let's conceptualize this more as an ecosystem play, as opposed to a single model or even a single platform. Whatever, at least for me, having grown up at Microsoft, having seen whatever four major platform shifts, I fall into that camp where a platform is defined by fundamentally its ability to create more value about the platform versus what's captured in the platform. So if you view what's happening right now, I think this morning's keynote was, how can any company, whether it's an AI native company or a traditional enterprise company, participate as a first-class participant, where they can point to AI they create? It's not that they don't use other people's AI, of course, they will. But to me, what's the path? What's the recipe? How do I do it? What does a stack look like? What does the tooling look like? What is valuable? How do you do that? That's it. That's our job to do.
Yeah.

**Sarah Guo** (3:12)
Ecosystems strategy is very complicated, because you end up building certain components, partnering for certain components, supporting them. You just announced this big suite of models. Tell us a little bit about the training strategy for Microsoft now.

**Satya Nadella** (3:28)
So the thing that we wanted to do with the MAI models was to build, and as Mustafa talked about, first of all, a great lineage, starting with pre-training, with very good data quality, doing all the ablations, making sure, because in some sense, it's becoming even harder to build a clean lineage model. Yes, because there's so much stuff out there that you truly need to ablate out to be able to have a fantastic pre-trained model. In fact, that's one of the challenges of a lot of the open-weight models is, they look great on one benchmark or two, but they're not great on practice. So that's why, in fact, even in the RFDEs are pretty gone really excited about these MAI models, because how the heck can a small 5B model hill climb? It goes back a little bit to what I think is ultimately the key thing to do which is try to pursue finding that cognitive core. So to me, starting with a clean lineage, then creating that ability for companies to be able to use this, not just as a generalist, but to create their own specialist by building this hill climbing scaffold around it. So it's not just the model, but you have a hill climb scaffold around it, then you will start building your RLE. You will start collecting the traces. Most importantly, you'll have private evals because we know all the evals out there are good, interesting, but they're not really that critical at this point because they all can be max. So the point is each company will have its own private eval. So that end-to-end platform story around our models is what I think is interesting. Then the one other thing, Sarah, since you brought that up is, I do feel there's a new frontier. People talk about the frontier and are you operating at the frontier.