and the peril of the digital age. We'll explore technology's role in the world as we look for new solutions for society's biggest challenges.
You can look at AI as a potential way to transform really hard zero sum problems into non-zero sum ones. And I think that lens is one that we ought to use more because that's the true benefit and power of technology is helping us have more leverage, more abundance, more of everything for everyone.
That's Kevin Scott, Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer who leads the company's AI strategy. His vision to make AI a tool available to people everywhere has roots for creating technology, forged when he was at LinkedIn, and how he applies it today to build technology in a responsible way. And he shares the goosebumps he gets when he listens to classical music and what that reveals about AI in our future. My conversation with Kevin Scott, up next on Tools and Weapons.
Kevin, you are working on an extraordinary range of issues dealing with artificial intelligence. You're really at the forefront of the field. But before we turn to that, I wanna ask you a little bit about what has shaped your view. Tell us a little bit about growing up there.
Yeah, so I grew up in rural central Virginia in this town called Gladys, where I think there are more cows than there are human beings and there are many towns like this throughout the country.
I do wanna interject. I grew up in Wisconsin. That was true of the entire state for me. So yes, I appreciate that.
Yeah, and look, I think these are wonderful parts of the United States. My dad and my grandfather, my great-grandfather were all construction workers. So neither my mom nor my dad went to college and we didn't have a ton when I was growing up. They would do more things with their hands. My dad made furniture and my grandfather restored antiques. They fiddled around with rebuilding cars. And so there was always this flurry of activity around me. And so the two things that I really understood from very early on is that the people around me were incredibly industrious. They had this sort of versatility and grit, they just solved problems and everybody was committed to their community. So you were just acutely aware of who everyone else was and when someone needed a meal because they were sick or old church ladies needed firewood, you just went and solved those problems.
It's sort of an obligation to everyone and just recognizing that they're ingenious, hardworking people everywhere. And if you equip them with tools, like particularly the tools of technology, they're gonna go do interesting, great things in their communities and at broader scale.
We are working in an industry that fundamentally was invented and built by engineers, software engineers, computer scientists, data scientists. But we're talking here about a future that needs to be built by people with a breadth of perspective that reflects many disciplines, I'll say a bigger role. And what I have always enjoyed among many things about you is so are you. You have this extraordinary range of interests and maybe it comes from that ability to see people tinker with so many things. What do you do when you're not thinking about AI? I think that's worth people learning a little bit about.
Look, I think the thing that my parents and my family gave me that maybe is the most defining thing about me, other than my inventive vocabulary, which you've also been exposed to, is just this almost pathological curiosity. I want to understand everything and how everything works. And so I just am constantly tinkering with things. My wife calls me a serial hobbyist because I will switch from one thing to another and go super deep. And so it's been photography or sometimes it's an obsession with cooking. Like Nathan Myhrvold, one of the previous Microsoft CTOs, also I think is serially obsessed with learning things. But it also, I think to your point, includes I went to a liberal arts undergraduate school and I was a computer science major and I was minoring in English. And when I got to the end of my four years, I had a computer science advisor who was like, you must go get a PhD in computer science. And it was sort of a pragmatic choice that I, and this is a sad statement about society more than anything else. Like I was broke and I decided that my economic prospects were gonna be better with a career in computer science, although I had no idea why, it was just this vague sense I had. It turns out, I'm guessing it was right 'cause I was more likely to be Kevin Scott's CTO of Microsoft, although that's a very unlikely thing in of itself, than I was going to be James Patterson or Stephen King or JK Rowling.
But a couple of months ago you and I were at a dinner together in Washington DC with about a dozen very reputable, esteemed journalists. And we were talking about AI as one does when one is with journalists, fielding a lot of questions. And I was sitting across this table and so the context here is like people were, we were having this conversation about what AI may or may not subsume about the human experience. And one of the things that I really do believe is that part of what we want from each other is connection. And that the purpose of art is not just expression, but it is a desire to be connected to one another. Like the composer, to the performer, to the audience that you're sitting in, to other people who may not be in the physical audience who are experiencing the same thing as you are. Like how they're experiencing it differently and how they're experiencing it similarly.
And even though it's my favorite, like I have favorite performances of it, it's been performed thousands and thousands of times by thousands of different performers. And so even though they all approach the notes on the page, which are the same for all of them, and they are playing on instruments that are slightly different instrument to instrument, but they all have 88 keys, they all are sort of a piano, what they get out of that instrument and that score is very different from performance to performance. It releases all of the tension that you've been building up. And there are certain performances of this where I get this goosebumps, right, every time. And I gotta believe that is something about something very deeply human. Like I just can't imagine how an AI produces that because when I have it, I'm just in such an emotional state and it is about what that performer must be thinking and feeling when he's producing this thing that is producing this reaction in me.
And I think that gets to the core of something important for all of our enthusiasm about AI and for all of the potential we think it can bring, and you see that through that experience. And then let me ask you about one other thing that you commented a bit about at that dinner, you still make things with your hands. Tell us what you've been making recently.
I've been doing a bunch of woodworking and a bunch of, funny enough, leather working. So I make bags and a bunch of complicated leather goods.
Like handbags and the like?
Yeah. So the briefcase that I carry around, I made myself, I make my own luggage. Like it's really weird man, when I say it out loud.
No, you and I were about to walk into a meeting at the RAND Corporation earlier this year and you said, oh yeah, I made this bag that you had I think on your back or in your hand at that point.
And I think we take for granted the people who have, with their hands, made these things that are integral parts of our daily life. And being able to understand how things come together and to try to replicate some of these things, poorly as I might myself, helps me be more grateful for all of the things that I have. And it's also a good release, like you know this very well. Our jobs are doing things that are so complex that your individual contribution to a thing is very diffused because you're one among a very large number of people trying to make a thing happen. And it usually takes a long time to get a thing accomplished. Or in my case, I have one other person that I work with and over a short time horizon you can say, oh here I did this thing. And so it also serves that purpose where I get anxious honestly if I don't have that creative outlet, a way to go spend a few hours, do something with my hands and then see what it is that I made because that's not the way my job as CTO works.
One of the things that I think is interesting about life is we all look at the world through our own eyes by definition, and they reflect our own unique experience. And here in 2023, one question that people are sometimes asking is, how did Microsoft and OpenAI come together? I asked Kevin Scott if he'd go over and spend some time and see if there was a future. You were not excited about spending that day there when you first got that, I'll just say, 'request,' in quotes, from Satya. What were you thinking when you embarked on that day to sit down and understand what OpenAI was working on?
