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Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has warned that AI risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its use spreads beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies.
Nadella said on Tuesday that the long-term success of the fast-evolving technology will depend on its use across a wide range of industries as well as outside the developed world.
“For it not to be a bubble by definition, the benefits need to be more evenly spread,” Nadella said. He said that “the clearest sign if this is a bubble” would be that only tech groups, rather than companies in other sectors, are benefiting from the rise of AI.
However, Nadella said he is confident AI will prove transformative across all industries, such as helping develop new medicines.
He said, “I have full confidence that this is a technology that will really build on the tracks of cloud and mobile, spread rapidly, and bend the productivity curve, and bring local surplus and economic growth around the world.”
Nadella’s comments came as part of a conversation with BlackRock chief Larry Fink on the first day of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, which kicked off a series of speeches from tech executives including Google DeepMind head Sir Demis Hassabis and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
A growing body of data from tech companies including Microsoft has shown a global divide in AI adoption rates, pointing to productivity gains and work applications being concentrated in rich developed countries.
Nadella also reiterated his view that the future of AI adoption will not depend on one dominant model provider, which has inspired the tech giant’s decision to work with several AI groups, such as Anthropic and XAI, as well as OpenAI.
Microsoft gained an early advantage in AI through its $14bn bet on OpenAI, which gave the software group unique access to the ChatGPT maker’s technology and first claim on its data center contracts.
But after restructuring its partnership with Sam Altman’s start-up in October, Microsoft has given up exclusivity on its data center needs and will lose exclusive access to its research and models in the early 2030s.
Nadella said companies will be able to take advantage of a number of models, including open-source ones or even building their own models using a technique called “distillation” to create smaller, cheaper versions of powerful models.
“So the (intellectual property) of any application or any firm is how do you do context engineering or use all these models with your data?” Nadella said. “As long as companies can answer that question, they will continue to grow.”
