Kevin Scott: Microsoft CTO | Lex Fridman Podcast #30

The following is a conversation with Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft. Before that, he was the senior vice president of engineering and operations at LinkedIn, and before that, he oversaw mobile ads engineering at Google. He also has a podcast called Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott, which I'm a fan of. This was a fun and wide-ranging conversation that covered many aspects of computing. It happened over a month ago, before the announcement of Microsoft's investment in OpenAI that a few people have asked me about. I'm sure there'll be one or two people in the future that'll talk with me about the impact of that investment. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And I'd like to give a special thank you to Tom and Ilanti Beckhausen for their support of the podcast on Patreon. Thanks, Tom and Ilanti. Hope I didn't mess up your last name too bad. Your support means a lot and inspires me to keep this series going. And now here's my conversation with Kevin Scott. You've described yourself as a kid in a candy store at Microsoft, because of all the interesting projects that are going on. Can you, uh, try to do the impossible task and give a, uh, brief whirlwind view of all the spaces that Microsoft is working in-

(laughs)

... (laughs) both research and product?

If you include research, it becomes even, uh, even more difficult. So, so, like, I, I think broadly speaking, Microsoft's product portfolio includes everything from, you know, big cloud business, uh, like a big set of SaaS services. We have, you know, sort of the original, uh, or, like, some of what are among the original productivity, uh, software products that everybody uses. We have an operating system business. We have a hardware business, uh, where we make everything from, uh, computer mice and headphones to high-end, uh, high-end personal computers and laptops. We have a fairly broad-ranging research group where, like, we have people doing everything from economics, uh, research, so, like there's this really, uh, really smart, uh, young economist, Glen Weyl, uh, who, uh, like my group works with a lot, who's, uh, doing this research on, uh, these things called radical markets. Uh, like, he's written an entire, uh, entire technical book about, uh, about this whole notion of, uh, radical markets. So, like, the research group l- sort of spans from that to human computer interaction to artificial intelligence a- and we have, uh, we have GitHub, we have LinkedIn, uh, we have a search, advertising, and news business, and, and, like, probably a bunch of stuff that I'm embarrassingly, uh, not-

Forget, yeah.

... recounting in, in this, uh, list.

Uh, gaming too, Xbox and so on, right?

Yeah. Gaming, for sure. Like, I was, uh, I was having a super fun conversation this morning with, uh, with Phil Spencer. So, when I was, uh, in college, there was this game that, uh, LucasArts made called Day of the Tentacle that my friends and I, uh, played forever. And, like, we're, you know, doing some, uh, interesting collaboration now with, uh, the folks who made, uh, Day of the Tentacle. And I was, like, completely nerding out with Tim Schafer, like, the guy who wrote, uh, Day of the Tentacle, uh, this morning, just a complete fanboy, uh, which-