The CEO of Microsoft has made a shocking admission about AI after investing $12 billion in a tech company.
Satya Nadella, who has the top job at Microsoft, spent the billions of dollars investing in OpenAI.
However, the tech mogul appeared on a podcast where he seemed surprisingly critical of AI.
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During an interview on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, Nadella said: “Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me.”
The CEO made the point that when assessing the value of AI, we should be looking at how it impacts us in the real world rather than focusing on advancements like artificial general intelligence (AGI).
He continued: “So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let’s have that Industrial Revolution type of growth.”
Nadella went on to add: “The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%. Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry.”
Despite AGI becoming OpenAI’s main priority, Nadella claimed that it hasn’t actually generated much value to the economy.
That hasn’t stopped major tech firms, including Microsoft, investing a lot of money into AI, with many developing their own systems.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shocked the industry in recent weeks after unveiling a new AI model that is a lot cheaper to operate than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
This news caused the stock market to drop by over $1 trillion.
OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman responded to the drop on social media.
Posting on X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “DeepSeek’s R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases.”
DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, with claims it was trained for around $6 million, a fraction the cost of its US counterparts.
President Donald Trump has declared that this should be a ‘wakeup call’ for the American AI industry, arguing that they should now be ‘laser-focused on competing to win’ in light of DeepSeek’s almost revolutionary developments.
Trump recently gathered the likes of Altman’s OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to launch his $500 billion Stargate project that is focused on the advancement of AI.
The project, where the group intends to build data centers, is expected to ‘instantly’ create 100,000 American jobs and could even create personalized cancer vaccinations in the future.
Microsoft also recently signed on to take part in the project.