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It seems Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants to spend more time hanging out with engineers and less with customers and government officials. That’s the upshot of Microsoft’s announcement early Wednesday that Nadella would hand off some of his business responsibilities to Microsoft’s chief commercial officer, Judson Althoff. Nadella, an engineer by training, oversaw the company’s cloud and enterprise group before taking the top job in 2014. He gets to dip his toes more deeply into those waters now.
Nadella told staff he and the company’s engineer leaders would now be “laser focused on our highest-ambition technical work,” including in areas like Microsoft’s data center buildout, AI science and product innovation. That seems like a smart move, so much so that you have to wonder why Nadella was dealing with business stuff in the first place! Still, let’s not nitpick. If ever there was a time for Nadella to make this shift, it’s now. (Catch The Information’s Aaron Holmes discussing the news on TITV today).
Artificial intelligence is transforming the business landscape for everyone, and Microsoft is smack in the middle of that. Like most big tech firms, Microsoft is spending a boatload of money on servers and AI chips for its data centers. The company also faces serious challenges: Its longtime AI partner, OpenAI, has started making moves to be more independent, with plans to build its own data centers.
Meanwhile, persuading customers to pay for Microsoft’s AI-powered software has proved challenging, as we reported in this piece two weeks ago. We said in that story that Nadella has lately made improving the quality of the company’s 365 Copilot product a top priority. Stuff is happening: On Monday, Microsoft announced a new AI service for Office that will largely run on models from OpenAI rival Anthropic. As we reported here, Copilot (which runs mostly on OpenAI’s tech) offers similar functions, but customers haven’t been happy with aspects of it. With stuff like this to deal with, who can be surprised Nadella no longer wants to deal with the distraction of business meetings?
Murati Lifts the Veil
How about that! Less than a week after The Information published a detailed story about Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, highlighting the fact that after a year the company hasn’t yet released a product or even talked about what its product will be, we suddenly get a product announcement!
TML, as the startup is known, announced an application programming interface called Tinker that “allows developers to fine-tune, or tweak, open-source models,” our AI reporter Stephanie Palazzolo reported. The company said it is “designed for researchers and developers who want flexibility and full control of their data and algorithms without worrying about infrastructure management.” Translated into English, Tinker will let researchers and developers do the fun stuff they enjoy doing, while it watches the servers to make sure things are going smoothly.
Does this justify the $10 billion valuation TML won in a $2 billion fundraising round earlier this year? That’s a whole other question.
In Other News
• Apple and OpenAI asked a federal judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s xAI that alleged the two companies squashed competition in AI by steering users toward ChatGPT instead of competitors like xAI’s Grok.
• SUI Group, a Nasdaq-listed firm dedicated to buying and holding Sui cryptocurrency, said it is launching two stablecoins for the Sui blockchain.
Today in The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which our Washington correspondent Sylvia Varnham O’Regan talks about the executive who could end up leading TikTok U.S.
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