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Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Is Betting Everything on AI

The CEO can’t imagine life without artificial intelligence—even if it’s the last thing invented by humankind.

He open-sourced products such as .net, made frenemies of former blood foes (as in a partnership with Salesforce), and began a series of big acquisitions, including Mojang (maker of Minecraft), Linked­In, and GitHub—networks whose loyal members could be nudged into Microsoft's world. Something created a few months earlier on the West Coast, United States, had made its way to a developer in India, who then wrote a mod that allows a rural Indian farmer to get the benefits of that technology on a WhatsApp bot on a mobile phone. I don't want to say this is recklessness, but it can be argued that your bold Bing move was a premature release that began a desperate cycle by competitors big and small to jump in, whether their technology was ready or not.

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