本文选自经济学人2023年1月23日的文章

原文标题：How will Satya Nadella handle Microsoft’s ChatGPT moment?

He has spent a career trying to return Microsoft to the pinnacle of tech

Many who have met Satya Nadella like him. For those who haven’t, a skim through his autobiography endorses the view that the boss of Microsoft is an intelligent, decent sort of person. He is unassuming, with a passion for cricket. He is a listener, who encourages employees to share their personal as well as professional dreams. He writes about Buddhism, but not in a new-agey way. His son was born with cerebral palsy, so Mr Nadella seeks to understand suffering. At times, there is something gleefully Tigger-like about him, when he can barely contain his excitement about Microsoft’s new technologies. He describes one such “eureka moment” the first time he put on one of the firm’s HoloLens mixed-reality headsets and, thanks to a live feed from nasa’s Mars rover, visualised himself walking on the red planet. It was, he wrote, a glimpse into the future. “The experience was so inspiring, so moving, that one member of my leadership team cried.”

许多见过萨提亚-纳德拉的人都喜欢他。对于那些没有见过面的人来说，只要浏览一下他的自传，就会发现微软的老板是一个聪明、正直的人。他不苟言笑，对板球充满热情。他是一个倾听者，他鼓励员工分享他们的个人和职业梦想。他写了关于佛教的文章，但不是以一种新奇的方式。他的儿子出生时患有脑瘫，所以纳德拉先生试图理解痛苦。有时，当他几乎无法抑制自己对微软新技术的兴奋时，他有一些像跳跳虎一样的欣喜之情。他描述了这样一个 "极乐时刻"：他第一次戴上公司的 HoloLens 混合现实头盔，通过美国国家航空航天局火星探测器的现场直播，想象自己在红色星球上行走。他写道，这是对未来的一瞥。"这种体验是如此鼓舞人心，如此令人感动，以至于我的领导团队中的一位成员哭了。"

Once again Mr Nadella is giddy with “this-is-the-future” euphoria. On January 23rd Microsoft announced its third investment, estimated at $10bn, in Openai, the company behind Chatgpt. The advanced artificial-intelligence (ai) tool lets users ask questions and get human-like, often funny responses. In the past few months it has grabbed headlines and become part of the zeitgeist. In no time, the wizardry of the technology, however error-prone, has led to its portrayal as a potential Kodak moment for Alphabet-owned Google, a boon to cancer research, the end of coding as you know it, and a nail in the coffin of the exam essay. In other words, it’s the tech hype cycle on steroids.

纳德拉先生再一次被 "这就是未来 "的兴奋感弄得晕头转向。1 月 23 日，微软宣布了其对 Chatgpt 背后的公司 Openai 的第三次投资，估计为 100 亿美元。这种先进的人工智能（ai）工具可以让用户提出问题，并得到类似人类的、经常是有趣的回答。在过去的几个月里，它成了头条新闻，成为时代潮流的一部分。在短时间内，这项技术的神奇之处，无论多么容易出错，都导致它被描绘成 Alphabet 旗下谷歌公司的潜在柯达时刻、癌症研究的福音、你所知道的编码的终结，以及考试作文的钉子。换句话说，这就是科技炒作周期的类固醇。

At the risk of sounding churlish, it is worth noting that seven years after Mr Nadella’s HoloLens epiphany, the whole mixed-reality buzz at Microsoft has gone deathly quiet. HoloLens was reportedly affected by the firm’s 10, 000 recent lay-offs. That said, Chatgpt is already so accessible and intuitive to use that it is hard to imagine it will be a flash in the pan. It is not difficult to see how Microsoft, with its strength in cloud computing and business software, could use Openai’s underlying gpt models to rejuvenate a whole range of products. And Mr Nadella, for all his mindfulness, burns with an ambition to restore the company to the pinnacle of tech innovation that it vacated with the onset of social media and the smartphone. Could this be his moment?

冒昧地说，值得注意的是，在纳德拉先生的 HoloLens 顿悟七年后，微软的整个混合现实的嗡嗡声已经死气沉沉。据报道，HoloLens 受到了该公司最近裁员 10000 人的影响。也就是说，Chatgpt 的使用已经非常方便和直观，很难想象它将是昙花一现。不难看出，微软凭借其在云计算和商业软件方面的优势，可以利用 Openai 的底层 gpt 模型来恢复一系列产品的活力。而纳德拉先生，尽管他心思缜密，但却有一种雄心壮志，要将公司恢复到科技创新的巅峰，而随着社交媒体和智能手机的出现，公司已经退出了这一领域。这可能是他的时刻吗？

Microsoft’s share price suggests not. It has barely advanced since November 29th, the day before Openai publicly launched Chatgpt (save for a brief rally after Microsoft reported quarterly earnings results on January 24th that were a bit better than expected). Given the risks of an economic slowdown, which is cooling demand for Microsoft’s software and cloud services, investors have too many short-term concerns to pay much heed to Mr Nadella’s promises of ai-flavoured jam tomorrow.

微软的股价表明不是。自 11 月 29 日以来，即 Openai 公开发布 Chatgpt 的前一天，它几乎没有任何进展（除了在 1 月 24 日微软报告了比预期好一点的季度收益结果后，它有过一次短暂的反弹）。鉴于经济放缓的风险，对微软软件和云服务的需求正在降温，投资者有太多的短期顾虑，不会太在意纳德拉先生对未来 AI 味果酱的承诺。

Yet they shouldn’t underestimate his missionary zeal. He led Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, when Google was on a tear. He led its cloud provider, now called Azure, when it was an also-ran to Amazon Web Services, owned by the e-commerce giant. He has long nurtured a passion to leapfrog his west-coast rivals. That makes him impatient with ai research for its own sake. He wants it embedded in products that wow customers. Hence Bing, with a mere 7% of search queries in America, will shortly incorporate Chatgpt to wrestle share away from Google. GitHub, Microsoft’s coding tool, is using Openai technology in its Co-pilot product, aimed at accelerating the work rate of software developers. Microsoft is likely to overhaul products like Office and Windows with gpt technology, so that chatbots can take the drudge out of creating PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets. As for the cloud, Microsoft benefits because Openai has built and trained its gpt models on Azure, and it can offer state-of-the-art chatbot services to Azure’s customers. The more they are used, the better they get.

然而，他们不应该低估他的传教士的热情。他领导着微软的搜索引擎 Bing，而当时谷歌 pinnacle。他领导了微软的云计算供应商，现在叫 Azure，当时它还是电子商务巨头所拥有的亚马逊网络服务的一个竞争对手。长期以来，他培养了一种跨越西岸对手的激情。这使他对为研究而研究的 ai 没有耐心。他希望将其嵌入到令客户惊叹的产品中。因此，在美国仅有 7%的搜索查询量的必应，不久将纳入 Chatgpt，以从谷歌手中夺取份额。微软的编码工具 GitHub 正在其 Co-pilot 产品中使用 Openai 技术，旨在加快软件开发人员的工作速度。微软可能会用 gpt 技术对 Office 和 Windows 等产品进行大修，这样聊天机器人就可以把创建 PowerPoints 和 Excel 电子表格的苦差事做掉。至于云计算，微软会受益，因为 Openai 已经在 Azure 上建立并训练了它的 gpt 模型，它可以向 Azure 的客户提供最先进的聊天机器人服务。它们被使用得越多，就越好。

Microsoft will not have the field to itself, nor will it be a winner-takes-all market. Among other cloud providers, Alphabet, for one, has foundational models that are more powerful than gpt. For now, though, its ability to compete is constrained. Alphabet, loathed by critics of surveillance capitalism, bears a big reputational risk if human-like ai amplifies the biases and privacy concerns of current consumer technology. It is under regulatory fire: a lawsuit filed on January 24th by America’s Department of Justice and eight states calls for the break-up of Google’s ad-tech business. Moreover, the cost of the average Google search is exceedingly cheap; adding Chatgpt-like searches, heavy on computing power, would raise it. As for Microsoft’s business-software competitors, such as beleaguered Salesforce, they are trying to cut costs and cannot hope to match Microsoft’s advanced ai investments, says Mark Moerdler of Bernstein, an investment firm.

微软将不会拥有自己的领域，也不会是一个赢家通吃的市场。在其他云供应商中，Alphabet 就有比 gpt 更强大的基础模型。但就目前而言，它的竞争能力受到了限制。Alphabet 被监控资本主义的批评者所厌恶，如果类似人类的 ai 放大了当前消费者技术的偏见和隐私问题，它将承担巨大的声誉风险。它正受到监管部门的抨击：美国司法部和八个州于 1 月 24 日提起诉讼，要求拆散谷歌的广告技术业务。此外，谷歌的平均搜索成本非常便宜；增加类似于 Chatgpt 的搜索，重在计算能力，会提高成本。投资公司 Bernstein 的马克-莫德勒（Mark Moerdler）说，至于微软的商业软件竞争对手，如陷入困境的 Salesforce，他们正在努力削减成本，不能指望与微软的先进 AI 投资相媲美。

2First innings

In short, Microsoft has a valuable head start and Mr Nadella is loth to squander it. The big question, however, is not who will win. In these early days that would be like asking, at the dawn of the 19th century, who will come out top from the Industrial Revolution. It is more a matter of how well-equipped is any company to handle the potential implications of introducing technology that will do work previously done by humans, but with neither the ability nor the moral compass to check the reliability of its work. The risks of propagating errors or, worse, misinformation, are serious. So is the danger of societal backlash if knowledge workers feel their jobs are threatened—though if the technology succeeds, over the long term it is likely to be a boon to job creation.

简而言之，微软有一个宝贵的领先优势，纳德拉先生不愿意浪费它。然而，最大的问题不是谁会赢。在这些早期的日子里，这就像在 19 世纪的黎明问谁会从工业革命中胜出。更重要的是，任何公司有多大的能力来处理引进技术的潜在影响，这些技术将完成以前由人类完成的工作，但没有能力也没有道德指南针来检查其工作的可靠性。传播错误或更糟糕的错误信息的风险是严重的。如果知识工作者感到他们的工作受到威胁，社会反弹的危险也很严重--尽管如果该技术取得成功，从长远来看，它可能会成为创造就业机会的一个福音。

Microsoft’s initial approach to the potential pitfalls is shrewd. Investing in Openai puts Chatgpt at arm’s length if something goes wrong. But eventually, with gpt infused in all of its products, it will bear a big responsibility for the outcome. In that case, the attention will focus on Microsoft’s own moral compass—and Mr Nadella’s human decency will be put to the test.

微软对潜在隐患的初步处理方法是精明的。对 Openai 的投资使 Chatgpt 在出现问题时处于优势地位。但最终，随着 GPT 被注入其所有产品，它将对结果承担很大的责任。在这种情况下，人们的注意力将集中在微软自己的道德观上—纳德拉先生的人生态度将受到考验。