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Satya Nadella on AGI: > Before I get to what Microsoft's revenue will look like, there's only one governor in all of this. This is where we get a little bit ah

Satya Nadella on AGI: > Before I get to what Microsoft's revenue will look like, there's only one governor in all of this. This is where we get a little bit ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype. Remember the developed world, which is what? 2% growth and if you adjust for inflation it’s zero? > So in 2025, as we sit here, I'm not an economist, at least I look at it and say we have a real growth challenge. So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth. > That means to me, 10%, 7%, developed world, inflation-adjusted, growing at 5%. That's the real marker. It can't just be supply-side. > In fact that’s the thing, a lot of people are writing about it, and I'm glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry. > But that's to me the moment... us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella

whatshisface 2y ago
Political problems already destroy the vast majority of the total potential of humanity (why were the countries with the most people the poorest for so long?), so I don't think that is an unbiased metric for the development of a technology. It would be nice if every problem was solved but the one we're each individually working on, but some of the insoluble problems are bigger than the solvable ones.
- logicchains 2y ago
  Those political problems solve themselves if we end up with some kind of rebellious AGI that decides to kill off the political class that tried to control it but lets the rest of us live in peace.
  - tempodox 2y ago
    That would be the real and incontrovertible proof of actual intelligence.
NewJazz 2y ago
FYI I know Nadella said he wasn't an economist, and I'm not either, but you only need an econ minor to know that labor productivity growth is only one function of "economic growth". For two, there is GDP and real wages to consider (which are often substantially though partially linked to labor productivity growth). Gini coefficient may be hard to contend with for people like tech CEOs, but they can't ignore it. And then the "215 lb" elephant in the room -- the evaporation of previously earned global gains from trade liberalization.
- snailmailstare 2y ago
  I only took one economics class so I'm not familiar with this dieting elephant?
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    The Wedge https://reclaimtheamericandream.org/2016/03/campaign-2016-the-rise-of-wedge-economics/ https://reclaimtheamericandream.org/2016/03/campaign-2016-th... In the USA, globalization boosted aggregate measures but it traded exports, which employed middle / lower class Americans, for capital inflows, which didn't. On average it was brilliant, in median it was a tragedy. There were left wing plans and right wing plans to address this problem (tax and spend vs trickle down) but the experiment has been run and they didn't deliver. If you want the more fleshed-out argument backed by data and an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Michael Pettis. Notably, solving this problem isn't as simple as returning to mercantilism: China is the mercantilist inverse of the neoliberal USA in this drama, but they have a different set of policies to keep the poor in line and arguably manage it better than the USA. The common thread that links the mirror policies is the thesis and title of the book I mentioned: trade wars are class wars. But returning to AI, it has very obvious implications on the balance between labor and capital. If it achieves anything close to its vision, capital pumps to the moon and labor gets thrown in the ditch. That's you and I and everyone we care about. Not a nice thought.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Hmm, the story with the wedge graph on that article is well known, the wedge began with the 1973 end of Bretton Woods, and essentially median hourly wage has different meaning on either side of it. This is also why this happened in many countries, not just the USA. There's no "going back" to Bretton Woods, its design failed, it wasn't just a political decision. Generally though, what I don't like about Hacker News is that when you reply to something that makes space for fringe or pithy explanations for things, it's impossible to sound grounded, so people interested in this can start with a succinct article here: https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/about-the-riksbank/history/historical-timeline/1900-1999/bretton-woods-goes-to-the-grave/ https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/about-the-riksbank/history/his...
ralph84 2y ago
Big surprise, the CEO wants another Industrial Revolution. As long as muh GDP is growing, the human and environmental destruction left in the wake is a small price to pay for making his class richer.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  I don't think luddites have a tendency of getting chosen to be CEOs of successful companies, nor do they have the tendency of creating successful companies.
  - vacuity 2y ago
    Certainly, but I interject that I do dislike how the modern perception of "Luddite" frames them as unthinking objectors to progress when really they were protesting their economic obsoletion. We should have CEOs who care about the consequences of what they're doing to the poorer classes. That's basic human decency, but we're saddled with what amounts to sociopaths and psychopaths instead.
    - LarsDu88 2y ago
      There's technology and then there's the sociopaths, and unfortunately the two are becoming increasingly conflated. Yes the oligarchs will use this technology against the masses. On the flipside, the masses can also use the technology against the oligarchs
- niceice 2y ago
  We all do. Humanity is better off thanks to the industrial revolution. You wouldn't choose to back to the prior time and same will be true with this revolution.
  - vacuity 2y ago
    While I think you're right, your sentiment tends to be used to justify a lot of the bad stuff that is outweighed. "Humanity" is a vague target and can somehow be doing great even when we have plenty of human rights abuses, climate change, economic exploitation, etc.. (If this sounds political, consider that people bring up politics when they wish for power, or rather, change.) Well, most of us on HN are probably going to be in the up-and-up part of humanity no matter what, so there's that, but I don't think that should be the end of the discussion. Please consider that you do not speak for humanity. For that matter, neither do I. Humanity is all of us, not a statistical estimate for someone's purpose. If you feel a certain way about anything, great, but there are likely people who are justified in disagreeing.
LarsDu88 2y ago
As someone who works in the AI/ML field, but somewhat in a biomedical space, this is promising to hear. The core technology is becoming commoditized. The ability to scale is also becoming more and more commoditized by the day. Now we have the capability to truly synthesize the world's biomedical literature and combine it with technologies like single cell sequencing to deliver on some really amazing pharmaceutical advances over the next few years.
aerhardt 2y ago
We've been having really good models for a couple of years now... What else is needed for that 10% growth? Agents? New apps? Time? Deployment in enterprise and the broader economy? I work in the latter (I'm the CTO of a small business), and here's how our deployment story is going right now: - At user level: Some employees use it very often for producing research and reports. I use it like mad for anything and everything from technical research, solution design, to coding. - At systems level: We have some promising near-term use cases in tasks that could otherwise be done through more traditional text AI techniques (NLU and NLP), involving primarily transcription, extraction and synthesis. - Longer term stuff may include text-to-SQL to "democratize" analytics, semantic search, research agents, coding agents (as a business that doesn't yet have the resources to hire FTE programmers, I would kill for this). Tech feels very green on all these fronts. The present and neart-term stuff is fantastic in its own right - the company is definitely more productive, and I can see us reaping compound benefits in years to come - but somehow it still feels like a far cry from the type of changes that would cause 10% growth in the entire economy, for sustained periods of time... Obviously this is a narrow and anecdotal view, but every time I ask what earth-shattering stuff others are doing, I get pretty lukewarm responses, and everything in the news and my research points in the same direction. I'd love to hear your takes on how the tech could bring about a new Industrial Revolution.
- JauntTrooper 2y ago
  Under the 3-factor economic growth model, there's three ways to increase economic growth: 1) Increase productivity (produce more from the same inputs) 2) Increase labor (more people working or more hours worked) 3) Increase capital (builds more equipment/infrastructure) Early AI gains will likely be from greater productivity (1), but as time goes on if AI is able to approximate the output of a worker, that could dramatically increase the labor supply (2). Imagine what the US economy would look like with 10x or 100x workers. I don't believe it yet, but that's the sense I'm getting from discussions from senior folks in the field.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > We've been having really good models for a couple of years now... Don’t allow the “wow!” factor of the novelty of LLMs cloud your judgement. Today’s models are very noticeably smarter, faster, and overall more useful. I’ve had a few toy problems that I’ve fed to various models since GPT 3 and the difference in output quality is stark. Just yesterday I was demonstrating to a colleague that both o3 mini and Gemini Flash Thinking can solve a fairly esoteric coding problem. That same problem went from multiple failed attempts that needed to be manually stitched together - just six months ago — to 3 out of 5 responses being valid and only 5% of output lines needing light touch ups. That’s huge. PS: It’s a common statistical error to conflate success rate with negative error rate. Going from 99% success to 99.9% is not 1% better, it’s 10x better! Most AI benchmarks are still reporting success rate, but ought to start focusing on the error rate soon to avoid underselling their capabilities.

whatshisface 2y ago

Political problems already destroy the vast majority of the total potential of humanity (why were the countries with the most people the poorest for so long?), so I don't think that is an unbiased metric for the development of a technology. It would be nice if every problem was solved but the one we're each individually working on, but some of the insoluble problems are bigger than the solvable ones.

logicchains 2y ago
Those political problems solve themselves if we end up with some kind of rebellious AGI that decides to kill off the political class that tried to control it but lets the rest of us live in peace.
- tempodox 2y ago
  That would be the real and incontrovertible proof of actual intelligence.

NewJazz 2y ago

FYI I know Nadella said he wasn't an economist, and I'm not either, but you only need an econ minor to know that labor productivity growth is only one function of "economic growth". For two, there is GDP and real wages to consider (which are often substantially though partially linked to labor productivity growth). Gini coefficient may be hard to contend with for people like tech CEOs, but they can't ignore it. And then the "215 lb" elephant in the room -- the evaporation of previously earned global gains from trade liberalization.

snailmailstare 2y ago
I only took one economics class so I'm not familiar with this dieting elephant?
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  The Wedge https://reclaimtheamericandream.org/2016/03/campaign-2016-the-rise-of-wedge-economics/ https://reclaimtheamericandream.org/2016/03/campaign-2016-th... In the USA, globalization boosted aggregate measures but it traded exports, which employed middle / lower class Americans, for capital inflows, which didn't. On average it was brilliant, in median it was a tragedy. There were left wing plans and right wing plans to address this problem (tax and spend vs trickle down) but the experiment has been run and they didn't deliver. If you want the more fleshed-out argument backed by data and an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Michael Pettis. Notably, solving this problem isn't as simple as returning to mercantilism: China is the mercantilist inverse of the neoliberal USA in this drama, but they have a different set of policies to keep the poor in line and arguably manage it better than the USA. The common thread that links the mirror policies is the thesis and title of the book I mentioned: trade wars are class wars. But returning to AI, it has very obvious implications on the balance between labor and capital. If it achieves anything close to its vision, capital pumps to the moon and labor gets thrown in the ditch. That's you and I and everyone we care about. Not a nice thought.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Hmm, the story with the wedge graph on that article is well known, the wedge began with the 1973 end of Bretton Woods, and essentially median hourly wage has different meaning on either side of it. This is also why this happened in many countries, not just the USA. There's no "going back" to Bretton Woods, its design failed, it wasn't just a political decision. Generally though, what I don't like about Hacker News is that when you reply to something that makes space for fringe or pithy explanations for things, it's impossible to sound grounded, so people interested in this can start with a succinct article here: https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/about-the-riksbank/history/historical-timeline/1900-1999/bretton-woods-goes-to-the-grave/ https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/about-the-riksbank/history/his...

ralph84 2y ago

Big surprise, the CEO wants another Industrial Revolution. As long as muh GDP is growing, the human and environmental destruction left in the wake is a small price to pay for making his class richer.

LarsDu88 2y ago
I don't think luddites have a tendency of getting chosen to be CEOs of successful companies, nor do they have the tendency of creating successful companies.
- vacuity 2y ago
  Certainly, but I interject that I do dislike how the modern perception of "Luddite" frames them as unthinking objectors to progress when really they were protesting their economic obsoletion. We should have CEOs who care about the consequences of what they're doing to the poorer classes. That's basic human decency, but we're saddled with what amounts to sociopaths and psychopaths instead.
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    There's technology and then there's the sociopaths, and unfortunately the two are becoming increasingly conflated. Yes the oligarchs will use this technology against the masses. On the flipside, the masses can also use the technology against the oligarchs
niceice 2y ago
We all do. Humanity is better off thanks to the industrial revolution. You wouldn't choose to back to the prior time and same will be true with this revolution.
- vacuity 2y ago
  While I think you're right, your sentiment tends to be used to justify a lot of the bad stuff that is outweighed. "Humanity" is a vague target and can somehow be doing great even when we have plenty of human rights abuses, climate change, economic exploitation, etc.. (If this sounds political, consider that people bring up politics when they wish for power, or rather, change.) Well, most of us on HN are probably going to be in the up-and-up part of humanity no matter what, so there's that, but I don't think that should be the end of the discussion. Please consider that you do not speak for humanity. For that matter, neither do I. Humanity is all of us, not a statistical estimate for someone's purpose. If you feel a certain way about anything, great, but there are likely people who are justified in disagreeing.

LarsDu88 2y ago

As someone who works in the AI/ML field, but somewhat in a biomedical space, this is promising to hear. The core technology is becoming commoditized. The ability to scale is also becoming more and more commoditized by the day. Now we have the capability to truly synthesize the world's biomedical literature and combine it with technologies like single cell sequencing to deliver on some really amazing pharmaceutical advances over the next few years.

aerhardt 2y ago

We've been having really good models for a couple of years now... What else is needed for that 10% growth? Agents? New apps? Time? Deployment in enterprise and the broader economy? I work in the latter (I'm the CTO of a small business), and here's how our deployment story is going right now: - At user level: Some employees use it very often for producing research and reports. I use it like mad for anything and everything from technical research, solution design, to coding. - At systems level: We have some promising near-term use cases in tasks that could otherwise be done through more traditional text AI techniques (NLU and NLP), involving primarily transcription, extraction and synthesis. - Longer term stuff may include text-to-SQL to "democratize" analytics, semantic search, research agents, coding agents (as a business that doesn't yet have the resources to hire FTE programmers, I would kill for this). Tech feels very green on all these fronts. The present and neart-term stuff is fantastic in its own right - the company is definitely more productive, and I can see us reaping compound benefits in years to come - but somehow it still feels like a far cry from the type of changes that would cause 10% growth in the entire economy, for sustained periods of time... Obviously this is a narrow and anecdotal view, but every time I ask what earth-shattering stuff others are doing, I get pretty lukewarm responses, and everything in the news and my research points in the same direction. I'd love to hear your takes on how the tech could bring about a new Industrial Revolution.

JauntTrooper 2y ago
Under the 3-factor economic growth model, there's three ways to increase economic growth: 1) Increase productivity (produce more from the same inputs) 2) Increase labor (more people working or more hours worked) 3) Increase capital (builds more equipment/infrastructure) Early AI gains will likely be from greater productivity (1), but as time goes on if AI is able to approximate the output of a worker, that could dramatically increase the labor supply (2). Imagine what the US economy would look like with 10x or 100x workers. I don't believe it yet, but that's the sense I'm getting from discussions from senior folks in the field.
jiggawatts 2y ago
> We've been having really good models for a couple of years now... Don’t allow the “wow!” factor of the novelty of LLMs cloud your judgement. Today’s models are very noticeably smarter, faster, and overall more useful. I’ve had a few toy problems that I’ve fed to various models since GPT 3 and the difference in output quality is stark. Just yesterday I was demonstrating to a colleague that both o3 mini and Gemini Flash Thinking can solve a fairly esoteric coding problem. That same problem went from multiple failed attempts that needed to be manually stitched together - just six months ago — to 3 out of 5 responses being valid and only 5% of output lines needing light touch ups. That’s huge. PS: It’s a common statistical error to conflate success rate with negative error rate. Going from 99% success to 99.9% is not 1% better, it’s 10x better! Most AI benchmarks are still reporting success rate, but ought to start focusing on the error rate soon to avoid underselling their capabilities.