Sharma: Industry spending on AI post-training will eventually surpass pre-training
Asha Sharma · How 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts | Asha Sharma · Aug 28, 2025 · at 45:03
Asha Sharma, Microsoft AI Product CVP, discusses shifting economics in AI model development toward fine-tuning and post-training.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like, I believe we will see, you know, just as much money spent on post-training as we will on pre-training, and in the future, more on post-training.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Asha Sharma
Sharma: Continuous reward-model tuning is every AI company's true IP
“The whole KPI is what is the metabolism of a product team to be able to ingest data and then digest the rewards model and then create some sort of outcome? Because these models are so effective at this point, you want to start to tune them to certain types of …”
Sharma: The Future of Software Products Is Composability, Not UI Canvas
“The future of products being about composability and not the canvas. And I think that product makers really need to rewire their mindset around this because I think we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the UI of something rather than how someth…”
Sharma: AI agents will flatten traditional corporate org charts into work charts
“And so I think that when all of that happens, the work chart the org chart starts to become the work chart. I think that tasks and throughput become more important than they have been before. I also think that you just don't need as many layers. Like I think t…”
Sharma: 600,000 expert annotations boosted Microsoft Dragon AI acceptance to 83%
“We've got an AI product called Dragon that's for physicians. And we saw a massive difference from when we used, you know, synthetic fine tuning to when we annotated 600,000 patient physician interactions by experts and actually fed that into the model and cont…”
Sharma: Near-zero cost of good AI output will trigger exponential demand
“I think that we're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of a good output is approaching zero. And I think when that happens, we're going to see exponential demand for productivity and outputs.”
Sharma: Traditional strategy docs will fade into interactive applications and artifacts
“I think docs themselves, like for every idea, for every, you know, need will just start to kind of fade into, you know, applications and different artifacts. In the productivity suite, which you know, is just a different way of working.”