The Vigilance Of Satya Nadella

Ten years in as CEO, Nadella has turned Microsoft into the world's most valuable company and one of the top players in Al. He's navigated two sweeping tech transformations. His biggest worry is that he won't see the next one coming.

- JEREMY KAHN

SOMETHING HAS CAUGHT Satya Nadella’s attention. It’s a small thing—just a five-letter word inside a box, lurking in the corner of a complicated PowerPoint slide, flashed on a screen for a fraction of a second inside a convention hall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But it niggles. “You’re doing also Llama? You’re using both?” Nadella asks, a note of surprise in his voice.

Llama is the AI model, not the animal. It is a piece of open-source software created by Meta, the social media giant that has pivoted hard to AI and is competing with Microsoft and others to dominate the foundations of the emerging generative AI economy. “Both” is a reference to the fact that this Malaysian agriculture technology company—chosen to show off its use of Microsoft’s technology to Microsoft’s CEO— is using Meta’s rival AI model in addition to GPT-4, the large language model (LLM) created by Microsoft’s strategic partner, OpenAI. Nadella wants his Redmond, Wash.–based software giant to have the most capable, popular AI models on the market.

“Um, yep, so we are, we are using Llama also,” says Adrian Lee, the chief technology officer at Agroz, the Malaysian startup, a hint of embarrassment in his reply. Agroz, which builds hydroponic farms, has created an AI chatbot to answer farmers’ questions about how best to tend their lettuce and bok choy.

“What are you using Llama for?” Nadella asks pointedly, standing before Lee at Agroz’s exhibition kiosk.

Agroz, Lee explains, eventually wants to use humanoid robots for farming, and the robots may need to operate offline. Some versions of Meta’s Llama model are compact enough to be embedded in robots or phones, unlike the larger GPT-4.