Satya Nadella Urges Tech Industry to Move Beyond AI Slop Arguments in New Blog Post

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is now blogging about AI slop

Now that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has appointed a new CEO to run Microsoft's biggest businesses, he has a little more time on his hands for other adventures. Beyond focusing on Microsoft's technical work, Nadella is now turning to the ancient art of blogging to discuss Microsoft's year ahead and why he thinks everyone needs to move "beyond the arguments of [AI] slop vs sophistication." Nadella's first blog entry in "sn scratchpad" is all about Microsoft and other AI companies still needing to get a bunch of stuff right with AI. Chief among them is creating a new concept for AI that evolves the "bicycles for the mind" concept that Steve Jobs used to describe computers as tools in the '90s. "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," says Nadella. Nadella wants to move beyond the usual AI slop arguments, because Microsoft is betting on getting everyone hooked on AI agents instead of the Office and Windows software that has powered so many industries for decades. This speaks to the tension with AI models right now, and the fear from creatives about being edged out by AI models that are capable of copying the style of artists, designers, filmmakers, and more. We've been using PCs as tools for decades to create art, write code, and beyond, but Microsoft and others now want us to rely on AI agents as the new tools for creation instead -- even if a lot of what is generated is slop. Microsoft has a vision of everyone using Copilot with our voice to create content, search for information, and discover how to use things. The problem is that the vision doesn't match reality right now, and barely any of what Copilot promises to do actually works. Microsoft is betting on improved AI models to help Copilot and its own AI offerings, just as Meta warns that you can't trust your eyes to tell you what's real anymore. While Nadella has been part of the OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic AI model battle of 2025, he now argues that it's how people choose to apply AI instead of individual model power that ultimately matters. "We will evolve from models to systems when it comes to deploying AI for real world impact," says Nadella. These systems will have to take into consideration the societal impact they have on people and the planet, he says. "The choices we make about where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter. This is the socio-technical issue we need to build consensus around." Nadella's first sn scratchpad blog entry is brief, but it's all about 2026 being a "pivotal year for AI." The same could be said for 2025, but Nadella thinks the industry now has a "clearer sense of where the tech is headed" and how it will shape its impact on the world. We'll have to revisit whether the tech industry gets AI right this year once 2027 rolls around, but Nadella is now promising to deliver more of his personal "notes on advances in technology and real-world impact" in future blog posts throughout 2026.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls for consensus about AI

Exec argues we need a new metaphor focused on AI as a lever rather than a job killer Microsoft CEO and head AI peddler Satya Nadella wants you to know that it's time for the next phase of AI acceptance, where we focus on how humans are empowered by tools and agents and how we deploy resources to support this growth. Amid doubts that revenue from Microsoft Copilot subscriptions and cloud AI services will compensate for data center capital expenditures any time soon, Satya has some incentive to convince customers and investors that AI is a financially intelligent long-term bet. Thus he has taken up the pen in an act of "thought leadership," to use the marketing jargon of his company's LinkedIn where he announced his post on a new blog entitled "sn scratchpad." Early in his post Nadella writes, "We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion." That's fair enough, given that widespread can mean anything. According to Pew Research, 62 percent of US adults say they interact with AI at least several times a week. The more relevant stat for Microsoft, however, is the percentage of customers who pay for Copilot and other AI services. That remains a work in progress. He also offers a new variant on the filler phrase "it's early days," so often heard from tech execs deflecting inquiries about lack of results. "We are still in the opening miles of a marathon," he opined. "Much remains unpredictable." Getting down to business, the Microsoft CEO says that there are three things the tech industry and society need to "get right" in 2026 to make AI return real value for everyone. First, we must develop a "theory of mind" that treats AI as a tool that amplifies humans and products should be designed around this belief. He uses Steve Jobs' famous quote that computers are "bicycles for the mind" as a jumping off point. When Microsoft is having to reassure people that its own research on the labor impact of AI shouldn't be interpreted to mean that jobs will be eliminated, you can see why Nadella might be keen to avoid the impression that AI is intended as a substitute for human labor. "What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals," Nadella wrote. Second, Nadella posits that we move from "models" to "systems" for AI such that multiple models and agents working together can provide value. "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe 'tools use,'" said Nadella. So perhaps we can look forward to agents failing less than 70 percent of the time. Finally, he argues, that society needs to make tough decisions about how and where to deploy AI so that it has "real world impact." "The choices we make about where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter," he wrote. "This is the socio-technical issue we need to build consensus around."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it's time to stop talking about AI 'slop' and start talking about a 'theory of the mind that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools'

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 deploying AI for real world impact," Nadella predicted: "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe 'tools use'. This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world." And, finally, "we need to make deliberate choices on how we diffuse this technology in the world as a solution to the challenges of people and planet. For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact. The choices we make about where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter." There's a lot of jargon and bafflegab in Nadella's post, as you might expect from a CEO who really needs to sell this stuff to someone, but what I find more interesting is the sense that he's hedging a bit. Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into its pursuit of an AI panacea and expressed outright bafflement that people don't get how awesome it all is (even though, y'know, it's pretty obvious), and the chief result of that effort is hot garbage and angry Windows users. Against that less-than-happy backdrop, and with Microsoft and other AI companies still gobbling up untold mountains of money with no endgame in sight (short of the biggest financial bubble-pop in recorded history, I suppose), Nadella concluded his missive by saying the continued development of AI "will be a messy process of discovery," and deploying a very heavily freighted use of the word "if." "Computing throughout its history has been about empowering people and organizations to achieve more, and AI must follow the same path," he wrote. "If we do that, it can become one of the most profound waves of computing yet. This is what I hope we will collectively push for in '26 and beyond."

Microsoft CEO Says People Need To 'Get Beyond' Calling It AI Slop

CEO Satya Nadella says people 'need to get beyond' the gen AI slop debate Gen AI isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's just getting started. That's what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes. He'd also like you to stop calling everything generated by LLM AI "slop." People need to "get beyond" that in 2026, the executive who earned $79 million in compensation recently announced. These and other musings were shared on his personal "sn scratchpad" blog in a December 29 post titled "Looking ahead to 2026." It acknowledges the challenges of people figuring out how to actually use gen AI to do things that are useful, but remains bullish on the underlying technology itself to continue improving at a rate worth investing $100 billion in. Here's the part that caught everyone's' attention, though: 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. I'm not sure what exactly Nadella means by "a new equilibrium in terms of our 'theory of the mind,'" and perhaps he doesn't either. Given the executive's penchant for folding AI use into every facet of his work life, it's not only possible but actually very likely that some version of Copilot, perhaps even a "rich" multi-agent "scaffold," was the "bicycle for the mind" that helped him conjure this blog post in the first place. If true, that would be as good a reason as any not to move so quickly beyond the "slop vs. sophistication" distinction. But there's no doubt a deeper philosophical schism that separates people who deploy the term "slop" against AI from those whose future is inextricably bound up in gen AI services becoming widely and eagerly adopted. For Nadella, the difference is one of apparent quality. Like the Turing test which ascribes human-like intelligence to anything that can convincingly manipulate language well enough to trick humans, some think it's only slop if the slop can't convince them otherwise. For others, it's slop, no matter how sophisticated it may be, the second human creativity is interrupted, or even supplemented, by a plagiarism machine. In the world of cloud computing and stock prices, where everything is interchangeable and fungible, such distinctions are meaningless, or at the very least, don't drive quarterly profit growth. But in the world of people, slop in is slop out. Being content to eat from the trough does not transform it into a Michelin Star meal.