Satya Nadella: commitment

Transcript context

…I got a chance to see some of the videos in the real-time demo this morning with your lead researcher Katja on this. Only once I talked to her did it really hit me how incredible this is, in the sense that we've used AI in the past to model agents, and just using that same technique to model the world around the agent gives consistent real-time – we'll superimpose videos of what this looks like atop this podcast so people can get a chance to see it for themselves. I guess it'll be out by then, so they can also watch it there. This in itself is incredible. You, through your span as CEO, have invested tens of hundreds of billions of dollars in building up Microsoft Gaming and acquiring IP. In retrospect, if you can just merge all of this data into one big model that can give you this experience of visiting and going through multiple worlds at the same time, and if this is the direction gaming is headed, it seems like a pretty good investment to have made. Did you have any premonition about this? I wouldn't say that we invested in gaming to build models. We invested, quite frankly, because- here's an interesting thing about our history: We built our first game before we built Windows. Flight Simulator was a Microsoft product long before we even built Windows. So, gaming has got a long history at the company, and we want to be in gaming for gaming's sake. I always start by saying I hate to be in businesses where they're means to some other end. They have to be ends unto themselves. And then, yes, we're not a conglomerate. We are a company where we have to bring all these assets together and be better owners by adding value. For example, cloud gaming is a natural thing for us to invest in because that will just expand the TAM and expand the ability for people to play games everywhere. The same thing with AI and gaming: we definitely think that it can be helpful in maybe changing- it's kind of like the CGI moment, even for gaming long-term. And it's great. As the biggest, world's largest publisher, this will be helpful. But at the same time, we've got to produce great quality games. I mean, you can't be a gaming publisher without, sort of, first and foremost being focused on that. But the fact that this data asset is going to be interesting, not just in a gaming context, but it's going to be a general action model and a world model, it's fantastic. I mean like, you know, I think about gaming data as perhaps, you know, what YouTube is perhaps to Google, gaming data is to Microsoft. And so therefore I'm excited about that. Yeah, and that's what I meant, just in the sense of like, you can have one unified experience across many different kinds of games. How does this fit into the other, separate from AI, the other things that Microsoft has worked on in the past, like mixed reality? Maybe giving smaller game studios a chance to build these AAA action games? Just like five, ten years from now, what kinds of ways could you imagine?…

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