‘Heard the one about the Indian farmer and the AI bot?’ Microsoft’s Nadella told the story at Davos

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Generative is the buzzword of the moment and so it was, both on the magic mountain and off it.

Quartz recently recounted an interesting story from Davos about the real, life-changing effects of artificial intelligence and generative pre-trained transformers such as ChatGPT.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, told the story in conversation with Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. Microsoft, remember, owns a stake in Open AI, which produced ChatGPT. So it’s hardly a surprise he’s so enthusiastic about AI bots.

That said, Mr Nadella’s account is worth considering. He told the Davos delegates that he was in India in January and saw a demo of an Indian farmer accessing a government programme via an app:

“He just expressed a complex thought in speech in one of the local languages. That got translated and interpreted by a bot, and a response came back saying ‘Go to a portal, and here’s how you can access the program.’ He said: ‘I’m not going…