上周我在华盛顿州雷德蒙德微软总部采访萨提亚·纳德拉时，看到的这位 CEO 与 2023 年在那里见到的、想让谷歌“跳舞”的那位已判若两人。当时生成式 AI 是令人兴奋（也令人恐惧）的新事物，若没有微软在算力上的投入，OpenAI 就无法打造 ChatGPT，整个行业的轨迹可能会截然不同。
The Satya Nadella I interviewed last week for Future Proofat Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., was a very different version of the CEO I saw there in 2023, who wanted to make Google “dance.”Back then, generative AI was the exciting (and scary) new thing, and without Microsoft’s investment in compute, OpenAI wouldn’t have been able to build ChatGPT, and the industry’s trajectory might have been very different.
如今距离 ChatGPT 发布已过去四年，除软件开发领域外，AI 对世界的影响是渐进式的，而非指数级的。微软不再致力于让竞争对手“跳舞”，而是专心致志于让 AI 可预测、可靠地落地 —— 纳德拉重回打造坚实“舞池”的 CEO 角色。
We’re now four years on from the launch of ChatGPT and, outside of software development, AI’s impact on the world has been incremental, not exponential. And Microsoft is less about making competitors dance than it is about getting down to the nitty-gritty of making AI work predictably and reliably — Nadella has gone back to being the CEO of a company that is building a sturdy dance floor.
“作为一个行业，我们必须清醒认识到这一点，”纳德拉说，“这不是追逐光鲜对象和害怕错失良机（FOMO）。”华尔街对这一策略表示认可。微软股价在过去六个月上涨 27%，市值接近 4 万亿美元。但从长远看，它能否超越前沿实验室和英伟达？纳德拉称前沿实验室为“神奇的企业”，但指出微软拥有非凡的 51 年历史。“我看着它们会说，嘿，这不是一个初期成功就意味着一切的行业，”他说。
“We, as an industry, have to wake up to this,” Nadella said. “It’s not about the shiny object and FOMO.”Wall Street is happy with the strategy. Microsoft’s stock is up 27% over the past six months and it’s valued at close to $4 trillion. But will it outpace the frontier labs and Nvidia in the long run? Nadella calls the frontier labs “magical businesses,” but points to Microsoft’s remarkable 51-year history. “I look at them and say, hey, this is not an industry where your initial success means anything,” he said.