A Positive-Sum Future

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the net benefit of the AI platform wave is. The real question is how to empower every company out there to get more out of this platform shift and build their own AI native capabilities and enterprise value (vs inadvertently just transfer their unique value to the tech sector!!).

Bill famously said a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. That’s the essence of the positive-sum future.

Even in our somewhat zero-sum mindset industry, we can create partnerships that create value for all parties involved. Our partnership with OpenAI is a great example. Our investment helped them scale; their research accelerated our own innovation. That’s what healthy platforms and partners do—they catalyze and compound progress.

There’s no better proof than what we announced just this week. The world’s first AI superfactory was co-designed with OpenAI and informed by three generations of AI supercomputers we built for frontier model training and inference. It was also a result of working closely with Nvidia and getting better at the full stack optimization from model architecture to micro-architecture of the chip and everything between three companies!

We also did the work to bring AMD into the fleet doing inference of GPT models, which enabled them to get up to speed on their own software stack for AI.

And now all this infrastructure will scale to support every startup to enterprise doing their own training to inference.

You can see the same dynamic in coding. Thanks to AI, the category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don’t ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.

Of course, the real test of this era won’t be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights.

When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure. That’s when we’ll know the system is working.

Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.

We know that the Internet wave had tremendous positive sum impact in the world, and yet we also had some sectors that got hollowed out like local media. This time around we have the opportunity to ensure broad diffusion of this tech with choice and control that is distributed to ensure positive sum outcomes across the board.

At the end of the day, this new technological wave gives us the opportunity to dream bigger and set higher ambitions for what we can collectively achieve. Each of us will need to play our part!