For Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, a man tasked with running one of the most integral — and most valuable — companies in the world, the basis of success is simple: make sure what they do is what their customers and employees want.
"Our success is aligned with the success of the world around us," Nadella told Cheddar's Hope King in an exclusive interview this week.
"Each of us comes into the workplace with a passion, with a personal philosophy, in terms of what we want, in terms of the meaning in our lives" he added. "That's, to me, the biggest unlock any corporation could do."
And with the innovative leaps on Microsoft's horizon, particularly in cloud and artificial intelligence, Nadella said to achieve that success means to build products that are easy to use — "really all one platform."
Although cloud computing — and its Azure platform, in particular — remains the biggest driving force for Microsoft's businesses, Nadella avoided giving too much credit to just one product.
"When we say we want to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve, more fundamental to that mission is not celebrating any success we have," he said."
Customers don't care about specific product lines, according to Nadella.
"Azure is a super important part of what we're doing, but when we think about what's happening, whether it is a Game Pass or xCloud, whether it's Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, LinkedIn or Azure, it's really all one platform effect," he said.
Nadella's comments come amid news of major deals struck with AT&T and Kroger earlier this year, as well as a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research startup co-founded by Elon Musk, who has since stepped down. That funding is meant to jumpstart supercomputing abilities for Azure, which has grown 64 percent since last year, according to the company's latest earnings. Azure competes against Amazon's Web Services, which dominated the sector for years, although Microsoft Azure is number two in market share and has grown steadily to about 16 percent in the first quarter of 2019 according to Synergy research.
Moreover, Microsoft's intelligent cloud services boasted about $11.4 billion in revenues — beating analyst expectations.
Nadella emphasized that ensuring all these technologies are cohesive is key.
Azure's new effort with OpenAI aims to scale general artificial intelligence — AI that can master a human field to an "expert" level — on an Azure-supported platform. But Nadella cautioned that these new technologies will require determining ways to reduce or remove bias from artificial intelligence systems and how we select the tasks artificial intelligence should be responsible for.
"Let's start with a set of ethical design principles," he said. "As AI develops, let's not just celebrate what AI can do. We should also really ask ourselves what should AI do?"
"The human should always be in the loop. What that means, in terms of being in the loop, will change in definition."
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
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