In a late December blog post titled “Looking Ahead to 2026”, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote down some thoughts on how he and his company should approach the year ahead. Spoilers: it's almost entirely about AI, and it is some of the most unhinged stuff I have ever seen someone with a supposedly reputable job ever post on the internet.
He begins with an opening that sounds like a man who knows the game is up, but who is in too deep to back out now:
As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there’s no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this moment feels different in a few notable ways.
The passage that has attracted the most attention over the past week, though, is the one below, where he says everyone needs to move past the idea of AI being 'slop', a sentiment gathering so much momentum among normal human beings not over-invested in a planet-destroying bluffing machine that it was crowned 2025's word of the year. In a list of things “we still need to get right,” Nadella includes:
A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute. What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals. We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.
None of that means anything! You sound like an anime villain! Deranged stuff. This is a man drunk on repulsive levels of executive pay and global power, whose brain has been turned to mush by Linkedin and executive self-improvement podcast speak to the point where he writes shit like this down and, instead of recoiling in horror at the first re-read, hitting delete, looking at himself in the mirror and leaving it all behind to go live in the woods decides to publish it for the world to see.
We don't need to get beyond any argument over slop. You need to stop ramming this shit into everything we use, and realise we used your products and platforms to send emails and play video games, not to delude ourselves into thinking a glorified auto-correct is some kind of "scaffolding for human potential".
