EXCLUSIVE. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks about artificial intelligence, research and the « dance floor » of a thriving competition

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI surprisingly made ChatGPT, software capable of quickly answering any question, available to the public. While the tool isn't infallible, ChatGPT gained 1 million users in five days. Most importantly, this generative artificial intelligence, which has continued to improve, plunges us into a new Age of Enlightenment, as explained by Yann Le Cun, Turing Prize winner, the Nobel Prize of computer science.

Behind this poker move stands a man with incredible instinct. While tech giants from Google to Meta and Amazon looked down on him, Satya Nadella had the idea to sign a $1 billion check to Sam Altman in 2019, who had created OpenAI with a band of ingenious risk-takers four years earlier.

Since then, Microsoft's CEO hasn't stopped integrating AI into his tools. While competition – Anthropic, Google, Perplexity – is fierce, they will find in their path this engineer from India who transformed a company that, a quarter century ago, was almost dismantled, into the world's third-largest market capitalization.

Le Point : How is the rise of artificial intelligence disrupting the current world ?

Satya Nadella : We live in a world where computing power doubles every six months. The traditional Moore's Law [which historically stated that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every eighteen months] has been surpassed by new scaling laws. In the future, the acceleration of generative AI could be measured in « token per dollar per watt, » mean [...] Lire la suite