Decoder with Nilay Patel · 2026-06-08 · 73 min · 13,925 words

Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, and I'm actually going to keep this intro pretty short. First, if you're watching the video, you can tell that I'm working from the basement of my wife's family farm.

But second, and way more importantly, and it's a real burner of an episode. Mustafa and I covered everything from his approach to training new models to his deep criticisms of anthropic talking about Claude as though it conscious. Of course, we also talked about all of the AI announcements Microsoft just made it build, its developer conference, the company's relationship with OpenAI, which is very different than it used to be, and the cultural and political pushback to AI across the country. I really wanted to know how Mustafa was thinking about it, and whether any of the consumer AI products available today are enough to overcome those objections.

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