Kevin Scott
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivescientistauthorhostinvestor@kevin_scott ↗LinkedIn ↗news.microsoft.com/exec/kevin-scott ↗Wikipedia ↗
Kevin Scott directs company-wide technical strategy and research at Microsoft, playing a key role in its AI infrastructure and OpenAI partnership. Prior to Microsoft, he served as SVP of Engineering and Operations at LinkedIn and authored the 2020 book Reprogramming the American Dream.
3shows
3appearances
52statements
6resolved
6supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
15said about them ↓ Everything Kevin Scott said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Scott: AI scaling laws have not hit a limit yet
“I can very clearly see what we're doing now and like what we're doing next. And I don't see the limit to the scaling laws. Like if you're just sort of thinking about the raw capability of the models and like how well you can condition them to reason over incre…”
Scott: Microsoft chose not to launch models more interesting than DeepSeek-R1
“We've had models more interesting than Deep Seek R-One that, like, we didn't even We chose not to even launch them.”
Scott: 95% of net new code will be AI-generated within five years
“95% is going to be AI generated. I think very little is going to be line by line is going to be human written code.”
Scott: Frontier AI models diagnose health issues better than average GPs
“It is already the case that I think the frontier models are probably better like health diagnosticians than Your average GP is”
Scott and Altman suspect the next trillion-dollar company is founded in 2023
“You know, one of the things that Sam Altman and I have talked about a lot is like, I suspect that this year, like the next trillion dollar company gets founded.”
Scott: AI's economic value will accrue to products, not infrastructure
“But most of the value has to be in the products. Like, you know, we don't build infrastructure just for the sake of infrastructure. Like we build infrastructure so people can make product.”
Scott: Claims about proprietary data's value for AI lack scientific backing
“Most of those assertions that people make are like most of the assertions that people make are just unfounded in any kind of science. Like no, no one's gotta, and like the measurements we do have show that there's a pretty big disconnect around what some peopl…”
Scott: Using AI models as factual databases is inefficient and expensive
“People who think of models as repositories of factual information, and they're treating them like the world's worst and most expensive databases. Like it's not, not super useful.”
Scott: AI will render traditional product engineering teams obsolete within ten years
“It basically means, and like, I don't think this is next year, but it's probably not going to be 10 years. This whole notion that the, That, that you have teams of people who are, who, whose job is to go anticipate a bunch of very granular user needs in some n…”
Scott: Future AI user interfaces will consist of many specialized agents
“The user interface that surfaces, those capabilities will probably be agents. And, you know, product managers, like I don't all don't believe in this, like one agent. For everything sort of theory. I think you'll have a lot of agents.”
Scott: Future AI product managers must be deep domain experts
“Your product managers are probably going to have to be domain experts, like people who sort of deeply understand something like medicine or, you know, drug discovery or early round venture investing, or, you know, like, you know, just sort of pick your thing.”
Scott: The tech industry must respect the capabilities of Chinese AI developers
“So we should really, really, really respect the capability of Chinese entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers. They are very good. Like we shouldn't, you know, if you are underestimating it like you shouldn't”
Scott predicts the AI industry will never have enough compute capacity
“I just had super, super high confidence that we were never going to get to the point where we're like, all right, we got enough compute.”
Scott: AI will create value through assistive tools, not full autonomy
“We started with this assumption that AI is going to be a platform and the way that people are going to most usefully
Make or the way that people are going to make most use of the platform is by building tools that assist people with jobs. So it's like less abo…”
Scott: Generative AI transition is harder for ML veterans than new entrepreneurs
“I think it's honestly harder for some, Machine learning people than it is you know, for like a brand new entrepreneur who's, you know, just looking for an interesting thing to go do because it is a very different way for a machine learning team to do its work.…”
Scott: AI is the only realistic way to deliver universal 1-on-1 tutoring
“Every learner in the world, ah, deserves to have access to that individualized, high-quality instruction at no cost. Which seems like a reasonable thing. And then when you think about how you go realize that in the world, like the only way that you can realist…”
Scott: Society will probably need many more physical-world jobs than today
“So like I think all of the, like the world is just sort of full of these jobs where you know, really, you know, affecting change on a physical system, like doing something in the physical world, like all of those things like we will need probably many, many mo…”
Scott: Society must rebuild entire power generation and distribution system
“Especially because we're going to have to rebuild our entire power generation and distribution system, like in our children's lifetimes.”
Scott is not worried about major AI competitors behaving unsafely
“The thing that I will say is we fiercely compete with a whole bunch of these folks. But, like, one of the things that I don't do is, like, look at any of those companies that you just named and, like, worry that they're going to do something that like, is, lik…”
Scott: Reasoning models require different training tokens than fact recallers
“What you want models to be able to do is to be able to reason over information. So like if you give them access to information, like how well are they able to reason over a set of information to go do something that's useful for you? And so you just need diffe…”
Scott: Software optimizations drive AI inference efficiency far more than hardware
“A little bit of that is because you get, you know, maybe like a two X benefit price performance from hardware every generation. Like if you're lucky but you get a much bigger improvement price performance wise from. All of the things that you're doing in the s…”
Scott: Search economics flow entirely to large integrated infrastructure operators
“All of the economics in search go to like somebody who's stood up a gigantic infrastructure and who's sort of running like a whole. Search business like with its own feedback loop.”
Scott: AI agent memory will improve significantly over the next year
“I think one of the things is going to happen because I know lots of people are working on it right now is memory is going to get a lot better over the next year or so, which means that as you're using an agent, like, and it remembers more and more about your p…”
The other half of the tape: Kevin Scott's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 11 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Sarah Guo 2Reid Hoffman 2Satya Nadella 1Jean-Michel Lemieux 1Ethan Mollick 1Eno Reyes 1
Statements about Kevin Scott, by other people (3)
Microsoft Board Approved $1B for OpenAI Despite Having No Clear Product
“The very first OpenAI Microsoft deal was, you know, Satya and Kevin Scott brought to the Microsoft board. We want to put a billion dollars into the investment in this vehicle. From a five one C three that doesn't really have any particular plans at making its …”
Hoffman: English and Chinese will become the most significant programming languages
“The most significant programming language in the next few years is gonna turn into English, and then of course rapidly followed by Chinese, because the broad use of the language and being able to create things, computational artifacts, Code, et cetera.”
Guo: Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott led Microsoft's AI transition brilliantly
“I mean, how could you not, right? I think Satya has done an amazing job making a, making Satya and Kevin Scott have done an amazing job championing, like really believing in this set of technologies, taking a bunch of bets, open AI and otherwise, using it as a…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 9
No Priors 3
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- Larry Aschebrook, Founder & MP @GSquared: How We Lost Money on Uber and Made Millions on Lyft · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Arvind Narayanan: AI Scaling Myths, The Core Bottlenecks in AI Today & The Future of Models | E1195 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Reid Hoffman: The Future of TikTok and The Inflection AI Deal | E1163 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Kevin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft | 1 | 25 | 100% 4/4 | full record on No Priors → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft | 1 | 19 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 a16zLEDGER | Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft | 1 | 8 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |