It was only eight months ago that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was triumphantly crowing about how his partnership with OpenAI had endowed him with the power to make Google “dance.” In a Washington, D.C., courtroom today, however, Nadella sounded like someone so enfeebled and despondent that he could barely operate his own laptop without escaping Google’s yoke.
“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google,” Nadella, the boss of $2.4 trillion Microsoft, testified in the antitrust trial about Google’s search monopoly, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It was a great performance by Nadella (including the sly reference to Google founder Larry Page’s “toothbrush test”—the idea that the company makes products that people will use twice a day) as the Microsoft boss plays every possible angle to score points against his arch-rival. Even the best NBA players, after all, are not too proud to flop.
The most notable takeaway of the testimony however is that the AI secret weapon that Microsoft has paid so dearly for, shelling out $13 billion to partner with OpenAI, has produced so few gains in market share. AI was supposed to be a game changer for internet search. And yet Microsoft’s Bing search engine, even with its ChatGPT superpowers, is still a bit player. Google remains the 800-pound gorilla that refuses to dance for anyone but its keepers.
By seeking succor from regulators, Microsoft is acknowledging the limits of AI's powers as a panacea—a timely warning that the hoards of startups, venture capital firms, and established companies betting huge sums on AI makeovers would do well to take to heart.
Nadella's plaintive court performance is also an acknowledgment that innovation does not always move faster than regulation, as many regulation-averse tech execs—most recently Spotify CEO Daniel Ek— would have you believe. It's an important lesson to keep in mind as we debate how to put guardrails on this new class of companies and technologies.
Alexei Oreskovic
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Today’s edition was curated by Rachyl Jones.
