Name: Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s New CoPilot+ and the Future of AI PCs
Uploaded: 2024-05-20T18:59:00Z
Duration: 17 min 37 s
Description: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discusses the new Windows CoPilot+ PCs with Qualcomm chips, the future of AI computers, and Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI in a wide-ranging interview with WSJ’s Joanna Stern. Photo: David Hall

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discusses the new Windows CoPilot+ PCs with Qualcomm chips, the future of AI computers, and Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI in a wide-ranging interview with WSJ’s Joanna Stern. Photo: David Hall

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Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s New CoPilot+ and the Future of AI PCs

Satya Nadella, great to see you again. Thank you so much for sitting down with us to talk about AI and computers.

No, thank you so much, Joanna for having me.

Can we call him AI Peters?

No. I like Copilot plus PCs.

I've been hearing this term AI PC for a while now and I'm using the air quotes because I don't quite know what they do that's different than other PCs.

Yeah, so here's the interesting thing, right? If you sort of take all of what we've been talking about with AI, it all came about because of abundance of compute, all primarily in the cloud, right? So that's what created the GPT4, for example, which essentially changed the world. Now what happened in the cloud, from the silicon to the system architecture to the application interface to the experiences is going to come to the Edge. And the Edge that first needs to be reinvented before we talk about everything else is the PC. And so that's sort of what I think of as the AI PC or the Copilot plus pc, right? We had to rethink what does it mean? Hey, there's gotta be a CPU in this case we have ARM plus all the X86, right? We AMD Intel. Everyone's innovating on the CPU, GPU is integrated and guess what? We now have an NPU, right? Like the AI accelerators in the cloud. So that's the new system in these Copilot plus pc. Then we have a new operating system that takes advantage of all that silicon. We have a new application interface, the, you know, and new experiences like Copilot.

Okay, so let's break down some of that. Pretend I'm not a computer nerd, what is an NPU?

It's a neural processing unit. So now if you wanna build any AI application, you have to have an accelerator just like we have in the cloud to be able to run these matrix math multiplication fast in order to drive AI features. And that's what the NPU does. So this new capable machines, which is the fastest sort of Edge computers for AI are just gonna be exciting. 45 tops is what you are going to get with these new computers, and that's gonna be the fastest AI computer at the Edge.

We're gonna get to some of the new features in Windows, but hardware seems to be enabling so much as you've just said. What are you doing on the hardware side to enable that AI performance?

You know, I feel very, very good about where we have come on the ARM journey. We've taken multiple cranks at it. I think we've finally there with great performance. Qualcomm's got a new processor, which we've optimized Windows for. I mean like the battery life, I've been using it now. I mean it's 22 hours of continuous video playback. I mean this is just really for, you know, Windows has come a long way on battery life and it's gonna be pretty magical. Second thing is the NPU, right? So it's not just about the CPU, it is about even having a specific AI accelerator so that you can give Windows, eyes, years ability for dueling low latency, you know, AI tasks, right? Whether it's audio or video and or images. So all of that system breakthroughs, but the big work was on the operating system side, right? Which is, you know, what is an operating system? It abstracts hardware and exposes application interfaces. Windows now, just like back in the day it did for graphical interface, it's doing for AI applications.

And take me through some of the things you've done in Windows to really enhance the AI performance.

Yeah, so I think there, first of all, you know, to enhance the AI performance, we built an operating system that exposes the power of the NPU to the application developers. And guess what? First is the Windows itself, right? So Windows comes with some unbelievable new experiences. One of the dreams we've always had is how do we introduce memory, right? Photographic memory into what you do on the PC. And now we have it, it's called Recall. I don't dunno if you got a chance to see it.

Oh, I did.

It's pretty magical because it's sort of like you, it's not keyword search, right? It's semantic search over all your history. And it's not just about any document. We can recreate moments from the past essentially. So that's one feature we built, co-pilot itself, right? You know, just like back in the day there was the Start Menu, then there was the Browser, now there is the personal agent. These are the things that are built in and co-create, I think you use this, which is how do we really take good old paint. And say, hey, I'm not just painting myself, but I'm able to co-create with an AI, right? So these are all experiences we build and of course offices building and we have developers from WhatsApp to Adobe building on top of it.

So when you're talking about Hybrid AI, some things have to run in the cloud, some things have to run on the computer. How do you decide and where do you think about, okay, these things should be running in the cloud. These things should be running locally on the NPU?

Yeah, I mean the beauty of distributed computing is that you have all this compute resources that are all connected over the internet between the cloud and the Edge. And developers decide, right? So even in our own Copilot, for example, we may have some things that are being sampled locally, right? So for example, I may even do low latency, audio prompt recognition stuff locally and then send it to the cloud. That's is an example. The thing that you used co-create, right? It's using a local diffusion model completely. So the reason why develop, we wanted to make sure that developers have a choice, whether it's for privacy reasons, latency reasons, or cost or cogs reasons, right? Because there are times when you may wanna offload everything to the local computer. And so we will have our own experiences be hybrid, but that hybrid capability is gonna be available. And I think now we'll see a lot of innovation from software developers.

You mentioned Recall there could be this reaction from some people that this is pretty creepy. Microsoft is taking screenshots of everything I do.

I mean that's why that it can only do it on the Edge, right? So this is like, you know, you have to put two things together. This is my computer, this is my Recall, and it's all being done locally, right? So that's the promise. So that's one of the reasons why recall works as a magical thing because I can trust it that it is on my computer.

It seems to me this whole next wave of AI computing is gonna be built somewhat around trust. If we're gonna have AI agents that go out and do things for us, why should people trust Microsoft over another company?

You'll bring up a very important point, right? Because if these personal agents are about that trust relationship, right? All of us, whether it's Microsoft or anyone else, how we evolve the relationship between the personal agent and us to be a relationship of trust, I think we are at the very early stages of understanding how our relationship with AI agents should be shaped by us primarily because that's the only way to build trust if somebody else, this is not a vendor decision, it's a personal, maybe even spiritual decision of how we want to, and I, that's why I don't believe there's just gonna be one, right? Because I may have multiple agents that I may want to delegate different types of things to, time will tell, but it's a the question to be answered

And those agents come from different companies?

Yeah, exactly. Like what for us it'll always be, that's why we are building our agent, but we will always have that core ethos of a platform company, right? Which is let's expose everything underneath, all of these models, the local models that we have, right? We all of them will be available for developers and people can build their own applications, their own agents and so on.

There are a number of benefits to running stuff locally versus in the cloud. And we've discussed some of them, but some are also cost and energy usage. Do you have a sense of how much you'll save by doing this?

Since you brought up energy, right? It's, I think ultimately it's always gonna be better in terms of utilization of the energy if the compute is distributed. But fundamentally I think about like if you think about all the, if you say this is like the next industrial revolution and compute is going to allow for economic growth everywhere, then I would say the use of energy to power the most malleable resource, which essentially what halves and price every six months is the best raw material one can produce, right? So that's kind of my fundamental argument. And by the way, it's just 4% of the total energy consumption is compute. And so even if it doubles in the next say five years, I think it'll save as much in terms of how, what you can optimize around the world or in terms of power consumption because of this as the input. The other thing on cost is there are certain times when I wanna be able to take advantage of all the compute I have. It's kind of crazy sometimes when you have the most powerful computer in your pocket or on your desk to all the time round trip to the cloud. So I think a more optimal compute architecture is to use the cloud on the Edge together.

Let's talk a little bit about the hardware you're announcing new surfaces with this new Qualcomm chip. How do they compare to what Apple's got out there?

You know, look, I think we finally feel, we have a very competitive product. Apple's done a fantastic job of really innovating on, you know, on the Mac, let's just take that. So we now think between surface pro and the surface laptops, we have essentially the best specs when it comes to ARM-based silicon and performance or the NPU performance on all the benchmarks, we are gonna outperform them. The thing is, you know, it's just not like in the past it was about taking what we had and improving it, but not thinking of what's the next big change. I finally feel the big change now is there, which is this AI as a new input. There is a reason why the creation device, which is the PC, needs to be rethought, reinvented all the way from Silicon Op.

So you feel like you've got Apple now.

Well look, let's, let's face it, we have a computer for people who love Windows that they can be very, very proud of. And so we are really looking forward to getting it out in the market and you know, there'll be competition and you know, it's always good.

On the ARM stuff. I've been coming to Microsoft for many years, you guys saying we've got it, we've got this, we've got this worked out. Now is this time different?

I think so it's, I mean there's Native ARM, right? Like even everyone like Chrome, WhatsApp, Spotify all built for ARMs. So that's fantastic. And the emulator is fantastic and so therefore I feel we have it. I see it. I've been using it for a long time now and it's just really like, you know, the performance and the battery life. And I think we are finally there in terms of delivering what we always wanted to get done.

Which system do you use?

I use the Surface Laptop.

Have you heard the fan go on?

No.

Yeah. Okay. See, this is, this is what I'm really hoping for, a Windows pc that doesn't sound like it's gonna outer space. You think

You'll have it. You got it.

Okay. We got it. You got it. You know, back to Apple for a second because since they introduced those M Chips, they've steadily increased their laptop market share. They've got one of the most popular 13 inch and 15 inch laptops out there. Was this to take aim at that?

For sure. We wanna grow our share in those form factors in those screen sizes. I think just having a market share goal itself is not gonna get us there. Like what's the point of view, right? So the point of view is, is there something really fundamentally changed and can we build experiences that shine through, right? Which is, whenever we've had success, we've had a complete thought, a complete thought from Silicon to the app experience and the third party platform, that's when Microsoft is at its best, right? When we have these incomplete thought where we do one thing and then not do the other, it doesn't work. So I feel like we now have a complete thought, right? In fact, one of the things I always tell our teams is, look, unless until we build something that is at Microsoft that's compelling using Windows and Windows innovation, why would anybody else do it? So that's when I started seeing, oh, here's how Copilot uses all this new systems. Here is how Office uses it, here is how Recall was built, here's how Studio Effects work, here's how good old Paint uses it with co-create, that's when I know we have something. And so I feel excited about the innovation, the specs, and now the market will decide.

AI is this new type of way of interacting with computers. Yet here you're releasing a pretty traditional looking type of computer.

It's a great point. I mean I, one of the things I think about is, you know, think about what we did back in the day when the internet happened. It sort of like the browser was born on Windows and it went beyond Windows. That's I think what's gonna happen. That's why I think we wanna make sure we build the Copilot plus PC that's optimized for Copilot, but I fully expect the Copilot to be everywhere and the innovation of the interface of your personal agent, how I interact with it, how it accesses memories, how it act, you know, does actions is gonna be everywhere. It's gonna be ambient.

Where else could it go?

Oh, of first it'll go on the phone, right? I'll use it on WhatsApp, I'll use it on any other messaging platform. It'll be on speakers everywhere. So in some sense it'll be anywhere users wanna interact with it with different modalities, right? If you take what GPTO showed and you combine it with co-pilot as the interface for us, that's the type of magic that we wanna bring first two Windows and everywhere else,

Some are putting IT glasses. What do you think about glasses?

Well, we loved glasses for a long time. In fact, one of the things that we will do with Meta is to take Copilot and really bring it to all of the work that they're doing. So that's one place. And HoloLens continues to be something that we are very focused on, a very narrow market there, which is around enterprise first line work and what have you. And so we'll continue down that path as well.

You brought up the phones and obviously Microsoft had a long history in phones. Do you think you're at a disadvantage there? Because you're gonna see, as we are seeing Google integrate Gemini into Android, Apple's got some stuff coming with iOS, we expect.

Yeah, there clearly, you know, someone who's got phone share between Apple and Google, they have the inherent distribution advantages and what have you. And so therefore we will have to sort of live with that. And that means we will have to innovate over the top, right? So we have to go through their app stores and have co-pilot. But at some level, you know, we've been able to do that successfully with things like productivity software and if this is a new category, that's what I think customers will have a choice.

Joanna: You could bring back Nokia.

I think I'm gonna really think more about sort of what we can do next in terms of where co-pilot goes.

And you mentioned GPT, it really struck me, I was listening to that, you know, where we have come with voice assistance, right? Microsoft had Cortana, RIP. Where do you see that going?

I think the multimodality of GPTO is just pretty magical, now with GPTO, whether it's images, whether it is speech or text, all coming together and to be able to find the relationships between all three, I think is going to create a completely new way for us to interact, right? When you start using, in fact, I think, I dunno if you've seen that, the new Copilot with GPTO,

I haven't.

But when you see that it's kind of like a new browser effectively. So it's right there. It sees the screen, it sees the world, it hears you. And so it's kind of like that personal agent that's always there that you wanna talk to. You can interrupt it, it can interrupt you. It feels so much more fluid. I think that that's a new modality of natural user interface that in some sense you could say even pre Cortana, I mean we have dreamt about this since Windows 95. I remember my first speech demos. So we've come a long, long way from there and I think it's finally come to fruition.

You recently hired Mustafa Soliman as the Microsoft CEO of AI. Tell me a little bit about your impetus to do that. You've got this relationship with OpenAI, he's been on the other side working at DeepMind, working at Inflection. What is he going to do here?

First of all, I think we are very, very thrilled about our partnership with OpenAI, right? I mean we are gonna build Copilot, guess what? On open AI's models GPTO. That's why I'm excited about it. And Mustafa is here, you know, because he is, you know, fundamentally because he wants to build a great personal agent and the Canvas on that he's going to innovate on is Copilot. So he's come here to lead that team. And so we are very excited. Obviously he's thought deeply about it for a decade plus and it's great to have him here.

How are you using AI in your every day?

To me, Copilot is like the place, right? I mean it's become the new browser for me. The new search engine for me, the new productivity tool for me. You know, where, what did I do this morning? I said, hey, summarize the documents for my meeting. So Copilot as the go-to app, which sort of is become the grand unifier of a lot of my information needs, I think is probably the biggest change in AI habits.

So I'm, this is my last thing and it has to do with co-create, can we close our eyes together and we're gonna imagine a future of computing. What is the future that you see?

Close my eye. The future I see is a computer that understands me versus a computer that I have to understand.

Okay, does it look like this? I drew this in co-create.

Is it like, it reminds me of XP. There you go.

This is what it turned it into.

Oh wow.

This was my drawing.

So that was your drawing and that's AI?

This is what it turned it into. What do you think? Could this be the wallpaper of the future PC?

It definitely can be. And you have the power to do it Joanna. You can set your wallpaper on Windows.

Well, I wanna leave this with you and maybe you can make this the default in Windows 12.

Thank you so much.

The future of PCs.

I will take that. That's beautiful.

Would you like me to sign that for your office?

Yeah, I think that's a great one.

Everything is now a tech thing. In creative and humorous videos, WSJ senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern explains and reviews the products, services and trends that are changing our world.

Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s New CoPilot+ and the Future of AI PCs

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