Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that artificial intelligence risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its benefits extend beyond big technology companies and wealthy economies.
Speaking on Tuesday, Nadella said the long-term success of the rapidly developing technology would depend on adoption across a broad range of industries and on uptake outside the developed world. He argued that concentration of benefits among a narrow group of companies would be a clear warning sign.
As quoted by the Financial Times, Satella said: “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.”
He added that a “tell-tale sign of if it’s a bubble” would be if only technology groups were benefiting from the rise of AI, rather than companies operating in other sectors.
Despite the warning, Nadella said he remained confident that AI would prove transformative across industries, pointing to its potential role in areas such as drug development.
“I’m much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, and bend the productivity curve, and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world,” he said.
Nadella’s comments were made during a discussion with BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. The session marked the first of several appearances by senior technology leaders at the event, including Google DeepMind chief Sir Demis Hassabis and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei.
The remarks come amid growing evidence of a global divide in AI adoption. Data from technology companies, including Microsoft in its Global AI Adoption report, has highlighted that productivity gains and workplace applications are currently concentrated in richer, developed economies.
Nadella also reiterated his view that the future of AI adoption would not be dominated by a single model provider. He said this belief had informed Microsoft’s decision to work with multiple AI groups, including Anthropic and xAI, alongside its longstanding partnership with OpenAI.
Microsoft secured an early advantage in AI through its $14bn investment in OpenAI, which provided the company with privileged access to the ChatGPT maker’s technology and priority on its data centre contracts. However, following a restructuring of the partnership with Sam Altman’s startup in October, Microsoft dropped exclusivity over OpenAI’s data centre needs and is set to lose exclusive access to its research and models in the early 2030s.
According to Nadella, companies will increasingly take advantage of multiple AI models, including open-source alternatives, or develop their own using techniques such as “distillation” to create smaller and cheaper versions of powerful systems.
“So the [intellectual property] of any application or any firm is, how do you use all these models with context engineering or your data?” Nadella said. “As long as firms can answer that question, they’re gonna be getting ahead.”
Source: DIGIT