Microsoft: Golden opportunity for American AI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's interview
America’s productivity Renaissance
Start 2025 Right: Smarter Taxes for your business with Gelt’s AI-Powered Solutions and Expert CPAs!
New Year, Smarter Taxes with Gelt
Step into 2025 with confidence and a smarter tax strategy! Gelt combines cutting-edge AI and experienced CPAs to deliver precise, tailored tax solutions for your business. From maximizing deductions to minimizing stress, our platform and team are here to help you achieve your financial goals. Make this your best year yet—let Gelt power your tax success!
***
Microsoft: Golden opportunity for American AI
At Microsoft, we see a three-part vision for America’s technology success. This starts with advances and investments in world-leading American AI technology and infrastructure. Second, the country needs to champion skilling programs that will enable widespread AI adoption and enhanced career opportunities across the economy. Finally, the United States must focus on exporting American AI to our allies and friends, bolstering our domestic economy and ensuring that other countries benefit from AI advancements.
AI is already becoming a tool to enable small business owners with fewer staff to compete in new ways with larger companies. And it offers the best opportunity so far this century to help high school grads and others with less post-secondary education to reverse the growing economic inequality that has gripped the nation since the early 1990s. A key opportunity for most people will be to develop an AI fluency that will enable them to use AI in their jobs, much as they use laptops, smartphones, software applications, and the internet today.
There is a lesson here from the recent past. A big part of Microsoft’s 50-year history has been tied to the creation of knowledge workers that drive the modern services economy of the United States and many other countries. The PC/Mobile era has created a global economy with more than a billion such workers. During the next quarter century, we believe AI can help create the next billion AI-enabled jobs, reaching not just services but manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, government, and every other part of the economy. The third industrial revolution emerged in the latter half of the 1900s, fueled by computer chips and software. Once again, the United States led the world.
Each of these eras was marked by what economists call a General-Purpose Technology, or GPT. In contrast to single-purpose products, GPTs boost innovation and productivity across the economy. Ironworking, electricity, machine tooling, computer chips, and software all rank among history’s most impactful GPTs. Across the nation, a new generation of AI firms is emerging, each capitalizing on rapid advances in AI models and chips. And across the economy, software programs are being redesigned to operate as AI-enabled applications.
None of this progress would be possible without new partnerships founded on large-scale infrastructure investments that serve as the essential foundation of AI innovation and use. In FY 2025, Microsoft is on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world. More than half of this total investment will be in the United States....
Brad Smith President of Microsoft
***
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's interview
What’s the threshold where you’re going to say, “OK, we’ve achieved AGI now”? The very rough way I try to think about it is when an AI system can do what very skilled humans in important jobs can do—I’d call that AGI. There’s then a bunch of follow-on questions like, well, is it the full job or only part of it? Can it start as a computer program and decide it wants to become a doctor? Can it do what the best people in the field can do or the 98th percentile? How autonomous is it? I don’t have deep, precise answers there yet, but if you could hire an AI as a remote employee to be a great software engineer, I think a lot of people would say, “OK, that’s AGI-ish.”
You now have more than 300 million users. What are you learning from their behavior that’s changed your understanding of ChatGPT? Talking to people about what they use ChatGPT for, and what they don’t, has been very informative in our product planning. A thing that used to come up all the time is it was clear people were trying to use ChatGPT for search a lot, and that actually wasn’t something that we had in mind when we first launched it. And it was terrible for that. But that became very clearly an important thing to build. And honestly, since we’ve launched search in ChatGPT, I almost don’t use Google anymore. And I don’t think it would have been obvious to me that ChatGPT was going to replace my use of Google before we launched it, when we just had an internal prototype.
Can you describe how you actually run the company? Let me just call up my calendar. So we do a three-hour executive team meeting on Mondays, and then, OK, yesterday and today, six one-on-ones with engineers. I’m going to the research meeting right after this. Tomorrow is a day where there’s a couple of big partnership meetings and a lot of compute meetings. There’s five meetings on building up compute. I have three product brainstorm meetings tomorrow, and I’ve got a big dinner with a major hardware partner after. That’s kind of what it looks like. A few things that are weekly rhythms, and then it’s mostly whatever comes up.…
***
America’s productivity Renaissance
America is making strides in productivity, with businesses across industries finding innovative ways to get more done in less time. Vic Viktorov, a Boston gym owner, exemplifies this shift. In 2024, Viktorov boosted his business revenue by 30% without expanding his sales team of two. Instead, he harnessed the power of an AI model loaded with company documents, sales materials, and other data. Tasks that once consumed hours, such as drafting marketing plans, emails, and social media posts, now take mere minutes. “It allows us to be lean, nimble, and fast,” Viktorov said, crediting the AI tool for streamlining operations and freeing up valuable time.
This embrace of technology reflects a broader trend in the U.S. economy. Productivity, measured by the amount of output per hour worked, has been climbing steadily. According to the Labor Department, productivity rose 2% in the third quarter of 2024 compared to the previous year, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of such growth. For context, there were only two quarters with similar gains in the five years leading up to the pandemic.
These improvements stem from significant changes brought on by the COVID-19 crisis. Businesses adapted quickly, adopting new technologies and rethinking operations. Videoconferencing replaced time-consuming travel, and an unprecedented surge in new business formations injected fresh dynamism into the economy. Workers, too, played a role, transitioning to higher-skilled, better-paying roles that aligned with a changing job market.
Still, the rise in productivity isn’t without its challenges. Companies often achieve efficiency gains by downsizing, and advancements like AI can simultaneously create new jobs and render others obsolete. While the wave of post-pandemic job switching has slowed, productivity is yet to match the explosive growth of the 1990s, when personal computers and the internet reshaped industries. Nonetheless, America’s productivity renaissance is better now than before the pandemic, when economists worried the U.S. was stuck in a low-productivity funk.
For Viktorov, generative AI has proven invaluable beyond marketing. The tool assists with complex tasks like financial planning, enhancing efficiency across the board. “If I can save an hour or two a day by speeding up these tasks, it makes me much more efficient,” he said.…