Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella message to every AI company: To make AI tolerable for people and governments, we must make sure ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently warned that artificial intelligence (AI) may lose “social permission” if it fails to deliver tangible results in areas like health care, education and productivity. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Nadella discussed AI’s massive energy footprint, stating that the use will be tolerated only if AI passes tests to improve people's lives. If the AI models failed this test, they risk losing public trust.

“We will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens,” Satya Nadella said, adding “If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on which countries will benefit most from AI

During the conversation, Nadella called AI as the latest chapter in a long arc of computing. He compared AI to the internet, mobile technology and cloud computing. But he kept coming back to the idea that AI must move beyond experimentation and hype, Benzinga reports.

He said that access to reliable power grids, data centers and energy storage will play a deciding factor in which countries benefit most from AI diffusion. Energy storage and battery efficiency advancements have become a critical component of sustainable growth as AI-driven data centres expands globally.

“All of these token factories are part of the real economy, connected to the grid, connected to the telco network,” Nadella said. “That's what's going to drive at scale, whether it's in the global south or in the developed world.”

“If you buy my entire argument that we've got a new commodity–it’s tokens–and the job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better,” he said

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on AI-led job cuts

When pressed by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink about AI-driven benefits coming at the cost of jobs, Satya Nadella acknowledged the fear, but argued that the bigger question is whether AI is used to expand human capability.

“Going and thinking of these as somehow living outside of the realm of human agency is probably not the right way to think about it,” Nadella said, adding “In the early 80s, if somebody had come to us and said that four billion people are going to wake up every morning and start typing, you would have said ‘Why?'” Nadella said. “We have a typist tool that’s good enough we don’t need four billion people”.