Kevin Scott
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
25statements → 11claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 2.36/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 4said about them ↓
4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 predictions · 6 assertions · 6 opinions · 5 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Kevin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Scott: Microsoft Copilots use a portfolio of AI models
“If you look at things like Bing chat or Microsoft three 65 copilot or GitHub copilot, you end up using a portfolio of models to do the work and like you use it for performance and cost optimization reasons, and you use it for you know, just sort of precision a…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Kevin Scott on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Kevin Scott said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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 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 seized Microsoft's entire GPU budget to stop peanut buttering resources
“At one point I seized the entire GPU budgets for the whole company. And I was like, we will no longer peanut butter these resources around. Like we will focus them because it's all capital intensive. It's like, we will just allocate these things to things wher…”
Kevin Scott: Microsoft Had Significant Internal Dissent Over OpenAI Deal
“So there was a huge diversity of opinions inside of the company on the wisdom of doing doing this.”
Scott: Microsoft Copilots use a portfolio of AI models
“If you look at things like Bing chat or Microsoft three 65 copilot or GitHub copilot, you end up using a portfolio of models to do the work and like you use it for performance and cost optimization reasons, and you use it for you know, just sort of precision a…”
ChatGPT launched as a 10-month-old model with RLHF as a practice test
“ChatGPT was a 10 month old model with a little bit of RLHF on top of it. And, you know, like by, you know, admission, like You know, not a beautiful user interface. It was just sort of a way to get something out there because you know, you needed some practice…”
Kevin Scott: AI Models and Infrastructure Are Not Products
“Models aren't products and infrastructure isn't a product.”
Kevin Scott: The Best Products Move Problems from Impossible to Hard
“Probably the place where the most interesting products are where you've made the phase change from impossible to hard. So like something that like literally you couldn't do at all before this technology exists has become hard now because like the things that h…”
Scott: Tech has a cognitive exponential today, not a robotics exponential
“We do not have a, Yeah. Sort of robotics exponentials right now. Like we've got a cognitive exponential.”
Scott: Past predictions of four-hour leisure workweeks were bull crap
“All of the, you know, the industrial revolution predictions about, you know, four hour work weeks and we're all going to live lives of leisure is bull crap. Yeah, like just hasn't happened.”
Scott: Microsoft software interactions will fundamentally change by the end of 2023
“It will touch all of Microsoft's product portfolio. Like the way that you will interact with our software will be substantially different by the end of this calendar year than it was coming in.”
Scott: OpenAI will release GPT-4 Vision to wide distribution soon
“OpenAI doesn't have GPTV and wide distribution, but, like, it'll get to wide distribution at some point in the not too distant future, and so, like, you'll have these, like, very powerful multimodal models”
Scott: AI Governance and Safety Should Focus Primarily on Deployments
“I think most of the stuff that people ought to be thinking about is deployments, making sure that as you deploy the technology, getting the requirements and the expectations right there is the most important thing.”
Scott: Early Google hiring lacked direction, leading engineers to zero-impact projects
“We were hiring these brilliant, brilliant people at the time, and the way that we did hiring was kind of crazy. It's like, all right, well, if you're smart, just come work here. And like, we have no idea like what exactly it is you're going to do. And you like…”
Kevin Scott: OpenAI's size and energy resemble early Google
“When I go sit In OpenAI, it really reminds me of early Google days, and it's about the same size Google was when I joined, and so, like, I couldn't figure it out for a while, and I was like, wow, this is, like, really giving me, like, you know, early Google no…”
Kevin Scott: OpenAI Was the Highest-Ambition AI Partner Available
“And when we looked around, like OpenAI was clearly the highest ambition partner that was in the field, you know, and I think still their ambition is just breathtaking in what it is that they're trying to accomplish.”
Scott: No single company can build all useful AI platform tools
“We'll build some of this stuff and like the community is going to build a tremendous amount of it because like there's never been a platform or ecosystem where one company builds all of the useful things. Like that's just nonsense. Like it's just never happene…”
Scott: A 6-month ML project from 2003 takes a high schooler four hours today
“The first project that I did, which was you know, like a machine learning classifier thing in 2003 2003, 2004. Like that was, you know, stacks of like super technical, you know, research papers and, you know this elements of statistical machine learning, you k…”
The other half of the tape: Kevin Scott's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on No Priors. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Satya Nadella 1Sarah Guo 1Reid Hoffman 1
Statements about Kevin Scott, by other people (1)
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.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| No Priors Ep. 18 | With Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft | May 24, 2023 | 44m |