Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, said on Wednesday that the backlash against artificial intelligence was evident across the United States, but that the technology would boost wages and that “everyone is a stakeholder” in A.I.
“You can’t deny that the perception is terrible,” Mr. Nadella, 58, said during a live interview in San Francisco with “Hard Fork,” The New York Times’s tech podcast. He acknowledged there might be job displacement because of A.I., but pointed to the technology’s power and benefits.
Mr. Nadella added that he was not opposed to people sharing in the wealth from A.I. companies. That idea was recently floated by Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont, who has called A.I. a “public resource“ that Americans should have some ownership in. On Wednesday, President Trump also raised the notion for the second time in a week, saying Americans could get rich by sharing in the wealth from A.I. firms.
Mr. Nadella made his comments as A.I. has become an increasingly political issue. A national movement of parent groups, religious leaders, environmentalists and former Tea Party activists have decried the technology and the construction of A.I. data centers across the nation. Many have criticized the technology for how it could displace jobs, endanger national security and affect people’s mental health.
Mr. Nadella has been steering Microsoft, one of the largest public companies in the world, through a fierce A.I. race. The tech giant, along with Google, Amazon and Meta, has spent billions to build data centers to gain enough computing power to develop the technology.
In 2019, Mr. Nadella oversaw Microsoft’s early investment in OpenAI, a bet that proved prescient when the A.I. lab’s ChatGPT chatbot took the world by storm in late 2022. Microsoft eventually invested another $12 billion in OpenAI. The partnership gave Microsoft an early lead in A.I.
But as competition intensified, Mr. Nadella recently renegotiated Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI to make the companies less codependent. Microsoft remains a major shareholder in the start-up and its biggest financial backer
Mr. Nadella has talked about needing to carefully allocate Microsoft’s resources — computing, especially — for serving customers, powering OpenAI and developing Microsoft’s own A.I. products and systems.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
At Wednesday’s event, Mr. Nadella said Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI remained important to his company, pointing to how the start-up continues to provide it with intellectual property.
Mr. Nadella also addressed a memo that the new leaders of Xbox, Microsoft’s video game division, sent to staff on Wednesday about a reset over the next 100 days. The challenge for Xbox was making money from its entertainment content, he said, and it also had to deal with the rising prices of materials for the video game console it makes.
“The scarcity of the semiconductor supply and memory, in particular, are having a massive impact on consumer electronics,” Mr. Nadella said.
He added, “We have to turn this into a sustainable business that delivers what is fundamentally one of the best sources of entertainment.”
Karen Weise contributed reporting from Seattle.
