This will sound pedantic but I'll explain why it matters: the exact wording is "We need to
do something useful with AI", because the current (editorialized) submission title (of an already slanted article) makes it sound like people
don't know what to do with AI.
We already know many useful things to do; there are already 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-related) doing various ostensibly useful things. And there a ton more use-cases discussed in the comments here and elsewhere. But because of the headline the discussion is missing the much more important point!
Satya's point is, we need to do things that improve people's lives. Specific quotes from TFA:
>... "do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries."
> "We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness, across all sectors, small and large, right?" said Nadella. "And that, to me, is ultimately the goal."
Which is absolutely right. He's the only Big Tech CEO I've heard of who constantly harps on the human and economic benefit angle of LLMs, whereas so many others talk -- maybe in indirect ways -- about replacing people and/or only improving company outcomes (which are usually better for only a small group of people: the shareholders.)
He's still a CEO, so I have no illusions that he's any different from the rest of them (he's presided over a ton of layoffs, after all.) But he seems to be the only CEO whose interests appear to be aligned with the rest of ours.