Satya Nadella was asked why Microsoft, with a $175 billion AI budget, still doesn't have a frontier model.
Satya Nadella:
"We are well on our way building our MAI models our goal is to basically hill climb from the bottom, by the way, not distilling anything."
"My advice is more like use all but be independent of all. I would pull out a model and see whether I can retain the eval.
If I can't, that means you really are dependent on something that may or may not be yours."
"If you're a hyperscaler, you're not a supplier to two model companies, that's not a business we need more."
"I worked on Windows interrupt with Unix first. In fact, it was counterintuitive, right ?
We used to think, oh my god, this means we'll be less used, except we were more used we were able to penetrate the enterprise primarily because we did that interrupt work."
If owning the infrastructure layer was the Microsoft plan and winning move, why is the same company now racing to build its own frontier model ?