Name: Brainstorm AI 2024: The Shape of AI to Come
Uploaded: 2024-12-10
Duration: 12 min 31 s
Description: Christopher Young , Executive Vice President, Business Development, Strategy and Ventures, Microsoft Interviewer : Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune

Christopher Young , Executive Vice President, Business Development, Strategy and Ventures, Microsoft Interviewer : Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune 

Brainstorm AI 2024: The Shape of AI to Come 

Conferences

All right, good afternoon everyone. Chris. Good to be here with you. Thanks for having me, of course. So I want to start off by talking about investments. Obviously, Microsoft is a big investor in the A I space, but I want to talk about embodied A I. So some of the recent investments Microsoft has made is robotic start up figure, self driving car, start up wave. Where do you see the biggest potential for embodied A I? And how does that fit into Microsoft's bigger investment strategy? So what you just described are two great examples of autonomous systems. And a couple of years ago we did some work and we said, you know, this was even pre generative A I, we felt that autonomous systems were really going to be some of the future applications that would really change how we lived our lives, how organizations function. But like when we look at that space, we think it's going to be a combination of self driving cars or self driving vehicles to put it more broadly speaking, you know, I think it's going to be less about transporting people around and a lot more about transporting goods and services around ultimately long haul trucking would be an example of that or just think about all the vehicles that operate in small warehouse contexts or even in a shipyard, you know, as you move goods off a ship onto trucks and the like and then on the, on the look, I think humanoid robotics is a, it's going to happen, that will be something, it will be, it will be quite commonplace. I think particularly in categories of work where it's very dangerous for people. Think about offshore oil rigs or you know, Antarctic, you know, oil drilling in Antarctica, this is going to be a lot of different opportunities I think for us to bring new types of embodied technology into those kinds of categories and it's pretty exciting. Yeah, definitely. And speaking of investments, obviously, we just heard open A I um Microsoft, a big investor. So where does that relationship currently stand? Are you partners? Are you competitors? How do you find a coexistence with us? We're great partners and you, and it was even mentioned by Jason a little bit earlier, you know, we invested in open A I a number of years ago, even pre pandemic. Um over time, we've had an amazing partnership if you think about all the great things we've been able to do together as partners. Um If you look back, I mean, it's just been, it's been a great partnership and I would say one of the more unique partnerships you even if you would see in technology, um obviously, we have a lot to that we're doing together. You know, you even see, you know, Mike at, at our ignite event. A couple of weeks ago, we announced a number of new innovations, all of our copilot innovations are built on with open A I technology as part of it. And so we're really excited about the partnership and we continue to do a lot together. Speaking of ignite, there is a lot about um announcements around copilot including copilot actions. Tell us a little bit more about this and what excites you the most in terms of co pilots capabilities going forward. So three big things at at ignite, there were many, we had many announcements, I think 80 announcements, but three big ones, you just mentioned copilot actions really templates or really being able to bring more agentic functions to co pilot. The second one was agents which is ultimately going to be the extension of how people do their work and integrating that into a process flow. And the third is really Azure A I foundry, which is going to enable developers to build a lot of their own copilot like capabilities, build their own agents. So we were really proud of all the announcements, but those are some of the big categories that we announced a couple weeks ago. I want to come to the audience team for questions. But first, I want to go back to what you said about Azure, tell us about what the advancements in that have been and what excites you about it for the future. So first of all, think about Microsoft as a platform company, we have, you know, we we are bringing a diversity of capabilities to help developers build their own tools, their own co pilots, their own agents into, you know, into act. And that's really what Azure A I foundry is all about. And you're seeing a lot of that, I would say if you look back, we were really one of the first companies through github Copilot to bring capabilities for developers to do more code development. Now, what we're doing is bringing capabilities and tools for developers to build agents, to build co plots and to do that using a diversity of models. We have a lot of different models on our catalog and are allowing developers to use what works best for them. Make sense. Any questions for anyone over here? All right, good because I have a lot I can keep going. So um earlier last month, so Microsoft unveiled a new open source multi agent A I system system called Magnetic One. How is that different from all the other multi agent systems out there today? And where do you see the most commercial success there? So what you're referencing is some work that came out of our Microsoft Research Organization and they published a paper on on multi agent, which is an agentic framework. And if you think about it, it's really based on a lot of the theory that, you know, agents will function in teams in many ways, just like people do. And you'll have a lead, for example, a lead agent that will direct some of the specific work that will happen by very specific functional agents. And part of the reason for that is as you go through any completion of task, whether it takes a period of time or whether it has more both facets to it, there will be changes, there will be adjustments that need to be made and the lead agent will direct that work similar to the way a team leader might lead work in a project. And so it mirrors that concept, that concept. But if you think about it this way, ultimately, agents will need to function in concert with one another because there will be many different agents that work in an organization uh that might be even at work on behalf of an individual. And so having a lead agent that directs the functionality of other agents is really the core concept of that. And you know, you've seen a lot of this, you saw a lot of this ignite, we're focusing on, on extending the value of what we're doing with copilots into the world of agents. And, and the, and the multi agent framework is really a part of that. Makes sense. Another announcement this year that I personally found fascinating was the announcement around three Mile Island. Um So Microsoft announced plans to reopen it to um support A I. Can you talk to me a little bit about what the future of the nuclear industry is as it relates to A I? And then also how does that relate to sustainability? I'd love to hear your thoughts. So look, the way we look at nuclear, nuclear is it is a, it is a clean energy source that will become part of our overall portfolio of energy sources that we use for delivering, you know, our data center capacity around the world. And you know, we expect there's going to be a diversity of energy sources, you know, we've made certain commitments as a company to being carbon neutral and even carbon negative in 2030. And so nuclear is a part of that portfolio. And that's, you know, that's really what that announcement was. It's part of a much bigger strategy that we've got as a company. Got you interesting and how are you looking about sustainability as it relates to it as well? So the way we think about sustainability is number one, it's a must. And you know, we expect that we expect that, you know, there's going to be a lot of different. In fact, there's a, there's a recent blog that we publish, which are some of the trends that we see. And one of the big trends that we see are is really, you know, the ability to deliver more and more compute past capacity with a lot better efficiency. So for example, better efficiency around how we build data centers in the first place, better efficiency on how we do cooling in data centers. That's one of the big ways uh in which power gets used in a data center context is that the cooling take, it takes a lot of energy being more water efficient in how we do and how we run our data centers as well. So, you know, we have a series of different methods that we're employing in our data centers. You know, some of them we've been doing for a while, others are new. We continue to work with our partners, all of our partners like NVIDIA A MD, even the in House Silicon that we're building at Microsoft, all of that is with an eye towards making our data centers more efficient, more effective and ultimately part of a more sustainable uh delivery mechanism across what we do around the globe. If you had to pick um three big bets that you would make on A I in 2025 or big trends, what would those be? Well, I'll tell you what we're investing in right now. Um because I as was mentioned earlier, you know, one of my responsibilities is for our venture arm M 12 at Microsoft. And so a couple of key categories that I think are really important. One is broadly speaking A I infrastructure. But if I were to break that down into some core components, one aspect of that is going to be cyber security near and dear to my heart. I used to be in cyber for a long time. But, you know, for example, we've invested in a company called hidden layer and their, their focus is protecting models against being manipulated by third party actors because the models themselves will become a tax surface for malicious actors. And so that's just one example, we're all of seeing need, for example, for data governance and data compliance, data protection. So if you think about this way, as we bring more A I capabilities into organizations, those A I agents, the A I CO pilots are going to want to access information. Um you need better governance, you need identity capabilities. And so we're seeing a resurgence, we've invested in a number of companies reliance A I is one we recently invested in in that space, that's in the data governance category. We also have a number of our own products at Microsoft first party products that are in this category. And then we're even seeing the need for new databases in some cases, like one of our recent investments was a company called Neon. It's a serverless Postgres database. And we're seeing, you know, we're seeing a lot of demand for different database models, different data architectures as it relates to developers, building new applications that are A I first in nature. And so there's so much happening right now, but that broad category of capabilities that are A I infrastructure enablers is a big area that I think is important to focus on. That's where we're making a lot of bets. And then some of the other ones, you just said a moment ago, embodied A I. Although the last one I'd add is I do, I do think there's a lot of opportunity in uh generally speaking in the health care space all the way from patient care and delivery through drug discovery and development. A lot of exciting companies that are using A I. One example I would share is we, we recently invested in a company called Invita uh uh in Beta and in beta. What they do is they map, they're using generative A I to essentially study what happens in nature and look for the natural remedies that nature has for certain ailments like eczema is one that they've got actually a few drugs and trials to, to treat eczema using natural remedies that occur in nature. And so, you know, those are some, that's just one example of many, you know, we've invested in companies that are um using A I as a better mechanism for diagnosing or assisting pathologists and radiologists in the diagnoses of cancer by being, you know, just really good at the screening aspects of this. So I think there's a lot to be done there across the board in health care and it should hopefully raise the bar for health outcome for all of us. And I love that you have this cybersecurity background too. I think it's so fascinating. So I'm going to ask you on the flip side of things then what, what is your biggest fear right now as it relates to cyber security and A I uh I mean, there's, there's near term fears and there's long term fears. I mean, I look, you, you, my wife would tell you that, you know, being married to somebody like me, you have a certain degree of, of paranoia as your baseline. Same with a journalist. So, yeah, but I, I would tell you, uh look, I think there's a real need for responsible A I it's one of the reasons why at Microsoft, we've invested really heavily in really testing and a lot of the, the use cases around, you know, looking for what we think could be model manipulation, misinformation, disinformation. You know, there's a lot of focus on that the last couple of months here and just even in the United States, given the election people were, were on the, I would say really on the lookout for that. And I think we, you know, we came through all things being equal, came through without a lot of too many big alarms on that on that front. So I think we have to be mindful though that everything that we do with models for good can be flipped and turned to be done, you know, be used by malicious actors. And so just making sure we have the right security models, that's why responsible A I is really important. It's one area we've invested heavily at Microsoft and we encourage all of our own customers, our partners to have their own investments and responsible A I for that reason, you know, in the, in the long run, you know, we'll find new things, we'll have new challenges we face. Uh but I actually, I am pretty confident that we're making a lot of the right decisions and we, we'll, we'll work through challenges as they arise. My words. Well, thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.