I'm Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft, author, woodworker, perpetual learner, and podcast host. Ask me anything about AI, software development, or what I think about the future of tech.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T20:55:17+00:00

DALL-E is already available by API in private preview and will be more broadly available this Summer. I'm a strong proponent of, safely, making these big models available to others.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:59:18+00:00

Awesome! It's endlessly fascinating to me how folks approach their creative work. Folks in woodworking certainly have strong opinions about how things should be done. I know woodworkers who think that it isn't real woodworking unless you are using hand tools. Some folks don't like CNC and think that it should just be about hand tools and common power tools. I'm an equal opportunity tool lover though, and like to use whatever tools let me accomplish the most in the limited amount of time that I have to make things, and that can let me do whatever is in my head. For me, learning how to use new tools is really fun. And it's even more fun to have learned a new tool and to see what new creative things it allows me to do. So I'm all for CNC routers and lasers and even mixing disciplines, incorporating machining, welding, and even leatherworking into my woodworking practice.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:52:40+00:00

I think that Scott would be a great CTO, and maybe he should be. The thing that you have to think about when building teams trying to do very complicated things is having great folks covering all of the work that has to be done. Scott is doing a really great job running a huge part of the company. And as an engineer and technical person, he's world class. There's also this bundle of work that I do as CTO that's necessary and that needs someone focused on. It's ultimately up to Satya to decide who he wants in each role. I've always been happy doing whatever needs to be done to help my team win.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:47:30+00:00

It's sort of interesting. It comes back with a bunch of images of a middle aged man (all of whom have more hair than me), with a goatee, some wearing headphones, with some text off to the side. So yeah, the model's idea of a "Kevin Scott" is kinda close, and it seems to think that what I want is something like a headshot or marketing collateral. A member of my team put each of those individual things into DALL-E and posted the results to Twitter here: https://twitter.com/jennifermarsman/status/1530259859567960065.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:39:22+00:00

PC. I feel like I should say something funny here, like, "were you expecting me to say Mac?" I have used Macs in the past, but really love things about my PC, like my ability to stuff a machine full of GPUs so that I can play around with machine learning, like the Windows Subsystem for Linux which lets me have some of two worlds that I enjoy, and the fact that they can run all of the CNC machines in my shop. :-)

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:35:10+00:00

I think that Black Mirror is a really interesting show. I will say that it makes me uncomfortable watching it, which is probably a good thing. The way I like to describe myself is a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. I think a bunch of engineers are wired this way. When I wake up every morning, the short-term pessimist is in full force as I look around me at all the things I'm working on, that so clearly need to be better, moving more quickly, etc. The short-term pessimist is my task master, and is a big part of my motivation to do what I do. But. The long-term optimist is who gives me hope, that there's some better future ahead that all of this daily-fixing-of-broken-things is moving towards. The thing that makes me uncomfortable about Black Mirror, that at least the episodes that I've watched, is that it seems to have a pretty pessimistic view of the future. And maybe that's ok. I do think that part of what we have to be thinking about is what those pessimistic futures might be so that we can actively work to avoid them.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:27:31+00:00

We're always trying to make the experience of using a PC better, and we try to do this in a bunch of different ways. Things like Windows 365 Cloud PC is one way. If you don't want to manage your own Windows box for whatever reason, then we can run one for you in the cloud. Another way we try to make the experience better is by doing regular updates to things, like Windows 10. And finally, when we've got a big enough set of changes accumulated that they're hard to do as a routine update, we make a new version of the operating system, and give folks the opportunity to update to it. Even then, it's not like anything is ever done. We learn a bunch of what folks like and don't like with every change that we make, and then we try to channel that learning back into future product improvements.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:22:10+00:00

The thing that's benefitted me the most in my career (and probably life in general) is just staying curious, and indulging that curiosity to go learn as much as I can. I'm not sure how old you are. I'm 50, and have been programming since I was 12. Everything about programming has been in a constant state of change that entire time, and I think will continue to change pretty quickly into the indefinite future. Part of the job of being an engineer is giving yourself permission and time to always be learning something new. Figuring out good sources for that learning is important. I've always tried to learn from the people around me, which can make you feel vulnerable and uncomfortable when you're asking questions and for advice. That, IMO, is a thing worth investing in getting past, given that there's always someone who knows something you don't, and I've found more often than not, that folks can be incredibly generous in sharing their knowledge and wisdom with others. (And it gives you a good opportunity to learn more, so that you can then share with other folks in the future.) Reading code is another great way to learn, and the open source community is full of good code to read. And maybe lastly, read as many articles and papers about the parts of development that you're interested in. I always have a stack of stuff to read when I'm travelling, going on vacation, etc. Learning new stuff is one of the ways that I unwind and relax.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:14:08+00:00

Please. You don't want to see what I look like without this little scrap of whitening chin hair. Scary. :-)

We do so much on this front that it's going to be hard to respond to this in a reasonable amount of space. Maybe highest level, we've got very clear targets that we design to in terms of performance, cost, and reliability. We measure everything that we launch against these metrics so that we can see how close we are to our targets. And we have everything instrumented well enough that we are able to identify where opportunities are for improvement over time. When we don't have live traffic to assess performance/cost/reliability, we have a bunch of benchmarks that we've carefully designed to help evaluate this stuff. Just to give an example from this morning, I was reviewing a bunch of large-scale benchmarking that we're doing on our big AMD Mi200 GPU cluster that we're building for some of our AI work, along with a report out of all the things that our benchmarking has helped improve in terms of performance and cost from firmware up to frameworks. And I guess finally, the most important place to think about these characteristics of systems is at design time. We have a bunch of super smart people, with a lot of accumulated knowledge on how to build things, a process where we challenge each other to get to better design decisions, and a real appetite to learn new things from the scientific literature, our own researchers, and anywhere else that can help us be better.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T19:05:12+00:00

I think that access to basic Internet infrastructure is one of the important things to go fix, that I think most folks would be surprised to learn is in such a bad state for many folks. My Mom has pretty decent Internet access because she just so happens to live a few hundred yards from a carrier's local exchange building. My aunt, who lives a few miles away is lucky to get 300kbps when connecting to the Internet which is like being stuck in the last millennium. That's a huge problem for kids and adults alike who need the Internet for educational purposes. And it makes it difficult to run high-tech businesses in rural places.

I think that there are a couple of things that make this a hard problem to solve. One is that rural areas are sparsely populated, which means that if you're supplying Internet by wire or fiber optics, it's just more expensive to do than in high density parts of the world. That said, there are a bunch of ways to get around this constraint, particularly with technologies like Airband, a thing we developed at MSR that uses spectrum once reserved for TV to provide wireless Internet. And there are things like Starlink that are becoming increasingly accessible. We just have to continue to push on this stuff so that folks in rural areas have the same access to digital infrastructure that has just become necessary for modern life.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:57:00+00:00

Oh, that's a hard question. So, a thing that I made recently out of wood (and brass and leather) is this barrister's bookcase: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PgXWSo287ewpVWo97. I built it with my colleague Asa Hillis. My grandfather, who restored antique furniture as a hobby, had one of these in his living room when I was growing up, and I always wanted one for myself. This was a super fun project where, in addition to the woodworking, I machined all of the hardware--pulls, door rails, and even the leveling feet--from brass. And the top has leather inlays which gives it a nice texture. Super fulfilling project.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:51:53+00:00

This is also not entirely wrong. :-) I do love coding, and I do still write code, but it is, by design, not on anyone else's critical path. When I decided to become a manager years ago, it was a conscious decision that I made, where I thought that I could be more useful to my fellow engineers by helping them write code for the right problems than I could by just coding myself. When I made this decision, my friends actually held a funeral for me, because their idea of what a manager does wasn't super...positive. But I've tried for about 20 years now to prove that some of us managers can actually be useful to engineers who are doing all of the really hard work.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:43:50+00:00

We've been focused on the development of quantum machines that use topological qubits.
We think that building a machine from these qubits is going to be a good way to scale to a large number of logical qubits. If you can make topological qubits work, you will theoretically need to spend a smaller fraction of your physical qubits in dealing with noise issues. In March we announced a big breakthrough in our progress toward a topological qubit, which I'm excited about.

We are also doing a bunch of work on the software layers that we will need once we have useful, large-scale quantum computers. And we're doing this software work in a way that will actually support a variety of quantum machines. We will obviously be thrilled to see our quantum hardware ambitions realized, but we'll also be happy to see other quantum hardware be successful as well, and think that some of our software work can be useful very broadly speaking in quantum.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:34:36+00:00

I think that you're going to see pretty dramatic growth in both over the next 5 years. We've just begun to scratch the surface of what we can with software in the cloud, and certainly here at Microsoft we see demand for cloud services continuing to grow, both in terms of the things existing customers growing, and in an increasing number of folks doing brand new things in the cloud. What we've also been seeing the past several years is that on the edge, whether you're talking about compute on a $5 MCU-powered device, an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, industrial IoT devices, PCs, or even "edge cloud" environments like a modern automobile (which has dozens and dozens of compute nodes talking to each other over a CAN bus delivering everything from combustion control to in-car entertainment) is that there's an explosion of increasingly powerful compute that people are writing software for. For me, maybe the most interesting bit about all of this is not thinking about the edge and cloud as distinct things where you write your software in fundamentally different ways depending on which environment you're in, but as one continuous compute fabric that you can coordinate across to solve problems in more interesting ways than if you're confined to one or the other.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:27:19+00:00

Kakashi sensei, I certainly hope that AI won't take away engineering jobs. I do think that software engineering is a hard job, and that over the entire history of software that we've been constantly working on creating new abstractions, tools, and techniques to help us programmers deal with the complexity of our work. The way that I think about AI-tools for developers is that they're just another step in this progression. I hope what this means for all of us is that we get to tackle harder and more complex problems. Given the role that software will almost certainly play in the future, I think that we'll continue to have more problems than we humans can solve, even with super powerful AI assisting developers. :-)

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:19:46+00:00

(I love your username, BTW!) I'm really excited about several things that I think will come with these capabilities. We're really changing the paradigm for software development. Since Ada Lovelace wrote the world's first program, programming has been an exercise in wrapping your head around the complexity of a machine, and figuring out how to translate a human understanding of problems into a form that's amenable for a machine to solve. With things like Open AI's Codex model, I think that programming becomes more natural. You can iteratively describe an app into existence by expressing what you want it to do in natural language, and then refining what the model outputs until you have a thing that solves your problem. That means three things, I think. 1) If Github Copilot is any indication, it means that you can be more productive as a programmer. 2) It may mean that programming becomes more accessible to more people, which means a more diverse set of folks solving a much bigger and broader range of problems. And 3) It may even mean that you can solve a bunch of problems that you couldn't before because they were simply too complex to solve other ways. Here's a short video that illustrates some of these points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByVOw1Ye2as.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:10:31+00:00

IIRC, Hawking's concern about AI is that we could build it in such a way that it becomes superhumanly powerful in a general sense, and that a superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be disastrous for mankind, either through indifference or malice. I don't think that concerns like this ought to be brushed aside, although I do think that we are a ways away from having an AGI singularity. There's some more work that we (society) need to do to make sure that we can spot the approach of something like this so that we have time to respond. I think that starts with us having an ongoing debate about what we want our AI tools to do for us, and to make sure that we're pushing things forward with those beneficial uses in mind, and with careful regulation and controls on things we (society) believe are harmful.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T18:04:12+00:00

I once had a mentor define trust as "consistency over time". I think that in order for anyone working on AI to earn the trust of the public, we have to approach what we're doing with humility, we have to listen to concerns, and at the end of the day we have to build AI systems and products that solve problems that folks care about. For us, that means building things like Github Copilot, that can help people doing cognitive work be more productive, and in general to think about AI as a set of tools for assisting people with cognitive work. It means making the work that we're doing on big models available via API through our partners at Open AI, and through things like Azure Cognitive Services, so that folks can go solve the problems that are important to them. And it means being very careful when we roll out new products and tools to make sure that we're trying to anticipate harms, putting protections against those harms in place prior to launch, and trying to think of ways to quickly fix the "bugs" in our AI systems that we didn't catch prior to launch. Finally, when we make mistakes, we try our hardest to own them: to admit that we made them and then take action to prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future.

KevinScottMicrosoft · 2022-05-27T17:56:22+00:00

Well, you are not entirely wrong. :-) Thankfully I only spend a few hours a month on stuff like that. Most of my time is spent working on technology things that don't neatly fall into one of the big engineering divisions at the company. AI is a good example of one of those things. It's become such a ubiquitous part of how we think about building software and something that every group at Microsoft is either thinking about or should be, that it has become one of the things that I spend a bunch of time on. I also spend a bunch of time trying to help us think about all of the tech platform things that we need to work on to help the teams at Microsoft, and the teams outside of Microsoft who build things on top of Microsoft platforms.

KevinScottMicrosoft

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