Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says It's Time To Stop Talking About Ai...
That sounds really neat man, could we have Arkane Austin back?
Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2025 was "slop," the catch-all term for machine-generated crapola—or, as Merriam-Webster more prosaically (and politely) defines it, "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." Hard to argue with the pick: As PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter said, it was "a year full of AI humiliation" that started with a stupid AI-generated Star Wars video and didn't stop until the calendar ran out.
But while "slop" is without doubt an appropriately defining word for 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it's time to stop talking about it, because we need to move on to bigger and more important things—like how they're going to make this obscenely expensive and resource-sucking mistake generator that nobody wants actually work.
"We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion," Nadella wrote on his sn scratchpad blog (via The Verge). "We are beginning to distinguish between 'spectacle' and 'substance'. We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world."
Nadella listed three key points the AI industry needs to focus on going forward, the first of which is developing a "new concept" of AI that builds upon the "bicycles for the mind" theory put forth by Steve Jobs in the early days of personal computing.
"What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals," Nadella wrote. "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs. sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our 'theory of the mind' that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer."
The inherent assumption that AI collectively represents "cognitive amplifier tools" is immediately suspect: There's a reason we call AI output "slop," after all, and beyond it merely not being very good (and certainly not original or "creative" in any way), there's a growing body of research—including one paper co-authored by Microsoft—indicating that the rise of AI is actually making its users, well, dumber.
Beyond trying to convince everyone to stop saying "slop," AI companies will also "evolve from models to systems when it comes to deployi
Source: PC Gamer
