Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI can save the web, not destroy it
Today, I’m talking with Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft, and one of the company’s AI leaders. Kevin is one of my favorite repeat Decoder guests, and he joined the show this time to talk about the future of search.
Microsoft just announced an open-source tool for websites to integrate AI powered natural language search with just a little bit of effort, in a way that lets them actually run whatever models they want and keep control of their data. I saw some demos before Kevin and I chatted, and the improvements over the bad local search on most sites was obvious. So we talked about what this will mean for AI, for search engines, and for the future of the web.
Links:
Microsoft’s plan to fix the web: letting every website run AI search for cheap | Verge
Microsoft Build 2025: news and announcements from the developer conference | Verge
Introducing the Model Context Protocol | Anthropic
Copyright Office head fired after reporting AI training isn’t always fair use | Ars Technica
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI and art will coexist in the future | Decoder
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott thinks Sydney might make a comeback | Decoder
Microsoft’s CTO explains how AI can help health care in the US right now | Vergecast
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/669409
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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20VC: Microsoft CTO on Where Value Accrues in an AI World | Why Scaling Laws are BS | An Evaluation of Deepseek and How We Underestimate the Chinese | The Future of Software Development and The Future of Agents with Kevin Scott
Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft, where he leads the company's AI and technology strategy at global scale and played a pivotal role in Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI. Prior to Microsoft, Kevin spent six years at Linkedin as SVP of Engineering. Kevin has also enjoyed advisory positions with Pinterest, Box, Code.org and more.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Where is Enduring Value in a World of AI
10:53 Why Scaling Laws are BS
12:26 What is the Bottleneck Today: Data, Compute or Algorithms
15:38: In 10 Years Time: What % of Data Usage will be Synthetic
20:04 How Will AI Agents Evolve Over the Next Five Years
23:34: Deepseek Evalution: Do We Underestimate China
28:34 The Future of Software Development
31:53 The Thing That Most Excites Me in AI is Tech Debt
35:01 Leadership Lessons from Satya Nadella
41:13 Quickfire Round
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on How Far Scaling Laws Will Extend
The current LLM era is the result of scaling the size of models in successive waves (and the compute to train them). It is also the result of better-than-Moore’s-Law price vs performance ratios in each new generation of Nvidia GPUs. The largest platform companies are continuing to invest in scaling as the prime driver of AI innovation.
Are they right, or will marginal returns level off soon, leaving hyperscalers with too much hardware and too few customer use cases? To find out, we talk to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott who has led their AI strategy for the past seven years. Scott describes himself as a “short-term pessimist, long-term optimist” and he sees the scaling trend as durable for the industry and critical for the establishment of Microsoft’s AI platform.
Scott believes there will be a shift across the compute ecosystem from training to inference as the frontier models continue to improve, serving wider and more reliable use cases. He also discusses the coming business models for training data, and even what ad units might look like for autonomous agents.
Hosted by: Pat Grady and Bill Coughran, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned:
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, the 2018 Google paper that convinced Kevin that Microsoft wasn’t moving fast enough on AI.
Dennard scaling: The scaling law that describes the proportional relationship between transistor size and power use; has not held since 2012 and is often confused with Moore’s Law.
Textbooks Are All You Need: Microsoft paper that introduces a new large language model for code, phi-1, that achieves smaller size by using higher quality “textbook” data.
GPQA and MMLU: Benchmarks for reasoning
Copilot: Microsoft product line of GPT consumer assistants from general productivity to design, vacation planning, cooking and fitness.
Devin: Autonomous AI code agent from Cognition Labs that Microsoft recently announced a partnership with.
Ray Solomonoff: Participant in the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence that named the field; Kevin admires his prescience about the importance of probabilistic methods decades before anyone else.
00:00 - Introduction
01:20 - Kevin’s backstory
06:56 - The role of PhDs in AI engineering
09:56 - Microsoft’s AI strategy
12:40 - Highlights and lowlights
16:28 - Accelerating investments
18:38 - The OpenAI partnership
22:46 - Soon inference will dwarf training
27:56 - Will the demand/supply balance change?
30:51 - Business models for data
36:54 - The value function
39:58 - Copilots
44:47 - The 98/2 rule
49:34 - Solving zero-sum games
57:13 - Lightning round
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI and art will coexist in the future
I co-hosted the Code Conference last week, and today’s episode is one of my favorite conversations from the show: Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott. If you caught Kevin on Decoder a few months ago, you know that he and I love talking about technology together. I really appreciate that he thinks about the relationship between technology and culture as much as we do at The Verge, and it was great to add the energy from the live Code audience to that dynamic.
Kevin and I talked about how things are going with Bing and Microsoft’s AI efforts, as well the company’s relationship with Nvidia and whether it's planning to develop its own AI chips. I also asked Kevin some pretty philosophical questions about AI: Why would you write a song or a book when AI is out there making custom content for other people? Well, it’s because Kevin thinks the AI is still “terrible” at it for now, as Kevin found out firsthand. But he also thinks that creating is just what people do, and AI will help more people become more creative.
Links:
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott thinks Sydney might make a comeback
Hands-on with the new Bing: Microsoft’s step beyond ChatGPT
Microsoft Bing hits 100 million active users in bid to grab share from Google
How Microsoft is trying to lessen Its addiction to OpenAI as AI costs soar
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the AI revolution and competing with Nvidia
Microsoft's tiny Phi-1 language model shows how important data quality is for AI training
Microsoft says listing the Ottawa Food Bank as a tourist destination wasn’t the result of ‘unsupervised AI’
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23664239
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
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(IHP) Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott
Kevin Scott is the current Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. We talk about his entire career, how being an academic seemed to be his path before he transformed the ads system at Google. Then he revolutionized the entire advertising industry at AdMob; is credited by some people by saving LinkedIn from technical rot; and now, today, oversees Microsoft's efforts in AI, VR/AR all the future things. Fantastic conversation.
Kevin's podcast is: Behind the Tech
Originally Aired: May 2019
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How worried—or excited—should we be about AI? Recode Media with Peter Kafka
AI is amazing… or terrifying, depending on who you ask. This is a technology that elicits strong, almost existential reactions. So, as a Memorial Day special, we're running an episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka that digs into the giant ambitions and enormous concerns people have about the very same tech.
First up: Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1), a Stanford computer science dropout who tried to get an AI lawyer into court.
Then: Microsoft's CTO Kevin Scott (@kevin_scott) pitches a bright AI future.
Plus: hype-deflator, cognitive scientist and author Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) believes in AI, but he thinks the giants of Silicon Valley are scaling flawed technology now—with potentially dangerous consequences.
Subscribe for free to Recode Media to make sure you get the whole series: https://bit.ly/3IOpWuB
Pivot will return on Friday!
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Going Full Send on AI, and the (Positive) Impact of AI on Jobs, with Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft
In this episode, Sarah and Elad speak with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his unlikely journey from rural Virginia to becoming the driving force behind Microsoft's AI strategy.
Sarah and Elad discuss the partnership that Kevin helped forge between Microsoft and OpenAI and explore the vision both companies have for the future of AI. They also discuss yesterday’s announcement of “copilots” across the Microsoft product suite, Microsoft’s GPU computing budget, the potential impact of open source AI models in the tech industry, the future of AI in relation to jobs, why Kevin is bullish on creative and physical work, and predictions for progress in AI this year.
No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.
Show Links:
May 23, 2023: The Verge - Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott Thinks Sydney Might Make a Comeback
May 23, 2023: Microsoft Outlines Framework For Building AI Apps and Copilots
January 10, 2023: A Conversation with Kevin Scott: What’s Next In AI
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @kevin_scott
Show Notes:
[00:00] - Kevin Scott's Journey to Microsoft CTO
[12:44] - Microsoft and Open AI Partnership
[21:18] - The Future of Open Source AI
[32:12] - AI for Everyone
[45:29] - AI and the Future of Jobs
[51:44] - The Future of AI and Regulation
[58:10] - Taking a Global Perspective
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on AI copilots, disagreeing with OpenAI, and Sydney making a comeback
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s new AI assistant tools, which Microsoft calls Copilots. Microsoft is big into Copilots. GitHub Copilot is already helping millions of developers write code, and now, the company is adding Copilots to everything from Office to the Windows Terminal.
Basically, if there’s a text box, Microsoft thinks AI can help you fill it out, and Microsoft has a long history of assistance like this. You might remember Clippy from the ’90s. Well, AI Super Clippy is here.
Microsoft is building these Copilots in collaboration with OpenAI, and Kevin manages that partnership. I wanted to ask Kevin why Microsoft decided to partner with a startup instead of building the AI tech internally, where the two companies disagree, how they resolve any differences, and what Microsoft is choosing to build for itself instead of relying on OpenAI. Kevin controls the entire GPU budget at Microsoft. I wanted to know how he decides to spend it.
We also talked about what happened when Bing tried to get New York Times columnist Kevin Roose to leave his wife. Like I said, this episode has a little bit of everything. Okay. Kevin Scott, CTO and executive vice president of AI at Microsoft. Here we go.
Links:
Microsoft Build - The Verge
Kevin Scott on Vergecast in 2020
GitHub Copilot gets a new ChatGPT-like assistant to help developers write and fix code - The Verge
Hackers made Iran's nuclear computers blast AC/DC - The Verge
Microsoft resurrects Clippy again after brutally killing him off in Microsoft Teams - The Verge
Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft - The Verge
Congress hates Big Tech — but it still seems optimistic about AI - The Verge
Hollywood writers to strike over low wages caused by streaming boom. - The Verge
The 70 percent solution — CNN
Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education | TED Talk
Why a Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York Times
Responsible AI principles from Microsoft
Microsoft has been secretly testing its Bing chatbot ‘Sydney’ for years - The Verge
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23497429
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and Raghu Manavalan, and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr. Audio Director is Andrew Marino, our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters, and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
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Bing’s Revenge + Google’s AI Faceplant
Microsoft’s release of a ChatGPT-powered Bing signifies a new era in search. Then, a disastrous preview of Bard — Google’s answer to ChatGPT — caused the company’s stocks to slide 7 percent. The A.I. arms race is on.
Plus: What “Nothing, Forever,” the 24/7, A.I.-generated “Seinfeld” parody, says about bias in A.I.
On today’s episode:
Sam Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI.
Kevin Scott is the chief technology officer of Microsoft.
Additional reading:
Microsoft integrated OpenAI's technology into its search engine and kicked off an A.I. arms race.
Google released Bard, a rival chatbot to ChatGPT.
“Nothing, Forever” was temporarily banned on Twitch.
Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on AI for rural America
Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his new book Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley―Making AI Serve Us All.
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Kevin Scott: Microsoft CTO
Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft. Before that, he was the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations at LinkedIn. And before that, he oversaw mobile ads engineering at Google. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon.
S4:E8 - What’s it like to be the CTO of Microsoft? (Kevin Scott)
Kevin Scott is the first CTO of Microsoft in almost twenty years. But what does the chief technology officer at such a large tech company do? He tells us all about his day-to-day, how he ended up at Microsoft, and shares his thoughts on the value of computer science degrees.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
LEAP Apprenticeship at Microsoft
Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott (podcast)
Microsoft Build (conference)
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Kevin Scott
Kevin Scott is executive vice president and the chief technology officer for Microsoft. His 20-year career in technology spans both academia and industry as researcher, engineer and leader at companies such as LinkedIn, AdMob and Google.
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