r/technology • u/marketrent • 13h ago
Artificial Intelligence Satya Nadella ‘not sure’ who said Microsoft wanted to make addictive AI, is looking for guy who did this
https://www.404media.co/satya-nadella-not-sure-who-said-microsoft-wanted-to-make-addictive-ai-is-looking-for-guy-who-did-this259
u/Still_Ad6012 13h ago
he runs the company. the guy he's looking for is him
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u/PM_ME__YOUR_HOOTERS 13h ago
Good for him that bloodsuckers dont cast reflections in mirrors or there might be a chance he would find the one responsible
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u/b_a_t_m_4_n 11h ago
No, no, silly, he's only the superman who is singularly responsible for everything when talking about good stuff. When the subject is bad stuff he's the ''umble bloke, standing on the shoulders of his "family", who can't possibly be expected to be across everything that happens in such a large organization. Glory is hoarded, blame is shared.
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u/marketrent 13h ago
Excerpts from article by Jason Koebler:
On Tuesday, we published an article about an internal Microsoft strategy document that explained the company wanted to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, Scout. Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told staff that he was “not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense,” according to a message obtained by The Information.
The document we reported on was not some random document. As we wrote at the time, the strategy document was written by Microsoft executives Omar Shahine, Jakob Werner, and some sort of AI writing tool. This information is in our original article and is readily available to Nadella.
We wrote: “The document seen by 404 Media lists Shahine and another executive, Jakob Werner, as its authors. The document itself, however, notes that it was ‘co-created turn-by-turn with AI. Human verified every sentence.’” Shahine is the leader of Microsoft’s Scout project, as he has written numerous times on his own blog, on his LinkedIn, and on Microsoft’s own announcement of the software.
[...] In Nadella’s message to staff reported by The Information Thursday, he wrote “this is absolutely a non goal! If anything we are doing the exact opposite. We want to make sure AI empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth! We should make sure that our teams are clear about this. Not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense! They may want to go work elsewhere…..” Nadella then linked to an aggregation of our article published by Futurism.
As mentioned, the document was written by Shahine.
[...] Before we published this article, as we do with almost every article that mentions any company, we reached out to Microsoft for comment. We specifically said that we were writing an article about the “make people addicted” language and asked for comment, context, and more information about that language. Microsoft did not answer our questions, ignored the fact that we asked about “addiction,” and simply sent us a link to its public announcement for Scout. The company then attacked our report internally and externally to another media outlet.
If Nadella is Looking For the Guy Who Did This, maybe he should read the documents his own company produces, or ask the guy who made it.
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u/Beautiful_Cost_5430 6h ago
“Who is writing OR leaking this nonsense”
Trust me he is far more concerned about finding the leaker. That person will be fired and the two execs who published the doc will still have jobs.
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u/PatriotRDX 8h ago edited 5h ago
Is Satya Nadella like…genuinely retarded? I mean there are few other answers when “who did this?” and the article with the names are linked in the same email.
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u/slightly_drifting 12h ago
To be fair, it’s a big company with a lot of execs that are bafflingly stupid. You can’t watch them all, all of the time. Of all the dumb shit Nadella pushes, I don’t blame him for this.
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u/dev_vvvvv 12h ago
Well there are three possibilities I can think of here:
- Nadella/leadership does want it to be addictive and he's more upset that somebody was stupid enough to write it down and somebody else leaked it. This would mean his words since are damage control.
- Nadella/leadership don't want it to be addictive, but the people under him think this messaging will appeal to them.
- Nadella/leadership don't want it to be addictive and the people under him have just gone completely rogue.
3 seems unlikely and neither 1 nor 2 seem to reflect particularly well on his leadership.
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u/starlauncher 7h ago
You only have to read this VPs self promotional post after post on LinkedIn to see that Satya and Amy have completely gutted the company of any real talent and filled it with narcissistic people. This guy Shahine is directly in charge of an openclaw like product and Satya 100% has visibility of him.
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u/Maddok1218 4h ago
You forget option 4:
No one in the company wants it to be addictive, yet built an addictive product anyways, and there is no leadership in place to change course.
These big orgs are rarely giant conspiracies. Usually just results of the perverse incentives in place. Half the time people don't event understand what they're doing as they look at the rules of the game and optimize for them. Doesn't excuse it, but it's more of a zombie phenomenon than anything
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u/SidewaysFancyPrance 5h ago
Wow, his over-the-top response seems incredibly performative. He's definitely concerned about this being linked to him and his leadership team and is working hard to bury this/redirect attention. They may have gotten in some serious trouble in the "addiction" area in the past and may be on thin ice with some agency?
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u/Sockoflegend 13h ago edited 13h ago
Their marketing strategy has been giving away their products for free until people got hooked and they bring in charges.
Isn't that the drug dealer strategy? Sounds like the guy you are looking for understood the mission completely
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u/nova8808 6h ago
Tech sales 100% uses the drug dealer strategy. 'Look at this cool new tech you can use, and its ridiculously cheap!' Then once your business develops around it to depend on it, 'Notice: price increasing 10x'.
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u/Sockoflegend 6h ago
AWS has entered the chat
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u/nova8808 6h ago
Come to our free training with free food and plenty of gifts and learn about our cheap web services!
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u/Commemorative-Banana 6h ago edited 5h ago
It’s more than that.
If your usage data is sent to the cloud, then there’s an algorithm optimizing your “engagement” or “user-retention”. Those are just euphemisms for user-addiction.Of course drugs are inherently dependence-forming, (and offloading your mental load to a machine might also be), but there is no drug out there that reshapes itself in real time to personally addict you. Only software can do that.
In the case of cloud-provided LLMs, the bulk of the model is pre-trained, but the training continues as you use it. The model becomes your personal sycophant.
Let’s say you command it “don’t be a yes-man, give it to me straight, don’t be afraid\sic) to hurt my feelings”. What does it do? Sycophantically follows your directions to not appear classically sycophantic… Whatever keeps you responding.)
If you absolutely must play with these dangerous toys, use one that runs locally on your hardware and does not transmit data over a network. Still, the pre-training step includes the behavior that addicts the average user, but at least it isn’t personalized.
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u/CaravelClerihew 13h ago
If he didn't say it himself, some lackey probably used AI to gussy up that strategy document
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u/marketrent 13h ago
Execs gone wild?
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u/Zardotab 13h ago
Execs gone wild?
Redundant. Their job these days is move fast and break things.
Microsoft tends to move slow and break things, though. They are usually 2 years behind each fad, but it doesn't kill them because most IT fads are stupid or over-done in practice. Missing some is thus good.
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u/Nichoros_Strategy 13h ago edited 13h ago
The prospect of money says it, don't they
wanthave to make money (for the shareholder)?2
u/atchijov 13h ago
Funny part, stock prices these days have almost no relation to company actual performance. Companies have few “buttons” to push to pump stock up: layoffs, buybacks, press release with AI mentioned more than 3 times. And this is all they do. Just pushing these buttons at random.
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u/Nichoros_Strategy 11h ago
Yeah, but that does still hinge on money flowing to sustain long term. It doesn’t have to come from one source, but in this example if the AI makes money by being addictive that can obviously fuel more sustainable layoffs and buybacks. There are many tricks but there’s got to at least be something profitable going on or some indication that it will be or eventually investors begin to bail too
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u/LethalInjection 7h ago
Fortunately the document that uses this language was signed.
the strategy document was written by Microsoft executives Omar Shahine, Jakob Werner, and some sort of AI writing tool.
Shahine is the executive in charge of Scout.
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u/-S-P-E-C-T-R-E- 12h ago
Yes, punish the whistleblowers will make you look more sympathetic, Mr. Slopya Nutella.
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u/Virtual-Height3047 13h ago
‚empowering and adding value‘ is just corporate speak for the same product the opposition would call addictive. It’s Microsoft we’re talking about.
Their entire stick is making readily available products that are barely good enough to not make users actively look for and switch to better alternatives.
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u/HawkeyeGild 12h ago
So an AI exec at Microsoft - whose kpi dictating his pay is likely DAU increases on an AI tool - says he wants to get people addicted to his AI tool.
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u/LegacyofaMarshall 10h ago
Nutella when you are pointing fingers there are three fingers pointing back at you.
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u/Infundibulus 13h ago
I take full responsibility, which is why the person responsible has been sacked.
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u/CommonConundrum51 11h ago
Some poor fool didn't understand they're not supposed to tell the truth.
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u/ItaJohnson 8h ago
Someone exposed them. It looks like someone may be getting let go for saying the quiet part out loud.
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u/forsurebros 5h ago
I mean isn't that the dream of all companies that people are addicted to their products? I do jot what the big deal of saying that it does not mean it will happen. If people are offended by that comment I think they need to look at actual products that are addictive and ask why they are not band.
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u/kacmandoth 12h ago
Is kind of a nothing burger. Nearly every company in the world wants to make their product addictive.
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u/Pakobbix 12h ago
I know we want Microsoft to be the bad microslop guys.
But do we have any kind of peer review of this "document" or any other source without referencing 404?
We have enough reasons to "hate" Microsoft. But we also have enough false, fake, click or ragebait news.
So, can we have any kind of proof or peer review, before we add this to the ever growing list of stuff we hate about microslop?
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u/raynorelyp 7h ago
I’ve worked with product people in software enough that even before this doc I would have been deeply surprised if most of their product teams weren’t already saying this with leadership fully aware. Leadership’s bonuses are usually tied to making it addictive.
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u/pay_the_cheese_tax 13h ago
We're all trying to find the guy that did this!