Microsoft’s A.I. Executives Have Gross Ideas About the World ⇥ bloomberg.com

Austin Carr and Dina Bass, in a largely defensive but, somehow, still pretty positive profile of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in Bloomberg:

Working out of offices in London and Mountain View, California, Suleyman’s employees set about creating a version of Copilot designed for life away from the office. As they’d done at Inflection, they taught this Copilot empathy, humor and kindness. Do people want an emotional connection with the company that makes Excel? Suleyman thinks so. Or at least he believes it’ll be harder to switch to a competitor if the user sees Copilot as a friend or therapist.

For those in the camp seeing artificial intelligence technologies as one tool among many to be incorporated into larger products and services — and I count myself among them — the idea of a faux emotional companion as a standalone goal appears utterly ludicrous. I do not think we should view these tools in this way. They do not substitute for real-life friendships. And why would anyone trust something which can be so easily swayed by bad actors? Using an emotional connection as a product differentiator or a matter of lock-in seems entirely unethical.

Also:

Nadella points out that Microsoft was once less relevant in videoconferencing too. “Everybody would say, ‘Hey, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom,’” Nadella says. “We won that in the enterprise.” (A Zoom spokesperson declined to comment.)

It did so by illegally advantaging Teams, and what Nadella seems to be saying here is that it would again be happy to use its disproportionate power to push its version of other new technologies.