Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI can save the web, not destroy it

Today, I’m talking with Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft and one of the company’s AI leaders. This is Kevin’s third time on Decoder, and he’s one of my favorite guests. He thinks a lot about the relationship between technology, art, and culture, and he’s unusually willing to dive into the weeds of it all, which obviously I can never resist. Kevin joined the show today during Microsoft’s Build conference to talk about the future of search — the company just announced an open-source tool for websites to integrate AI-powered natural language search with just a little bit of effort, in a way that lets those site owners actually run whatever models they want and keep control of their data. It’s neat stuff — I saw some demos before Kevin and I chatted, and the improvement over the bad local search on most sites was obvious. But the goal here isn’t just to improve the local search feature on a bunch of disconnected websites. It’s to rethink how search even works in a w ... Read full article.