By invoking the legendary 1995 ‘tidal wave’ memo, Microsoft boss Satya Nadella aims for his Bill Gates moment

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly buzzy, bringing back a bit of that perspiration-fueled fervor reminiscent of the dotcom boom era. The frenzy it’s stirred up has led to some rather curious deals, such as the case of a fledgling startup, roughly a week old, boasting a valuation of around $100 million, all on the basis of a lofty A.I.-infused vision rather than much of a physical product, as reported by the New York Times.

Clearly, many are trying to get a fraction of the action OpenAI scooped up with its whopping $13 billion investment from Microsoft. Entire companies are revamping their business blueprints to embrace the A.I. wave—including my alma mater, Business Insider. While some sectors are playing catch up, companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are throwing elbows for the biggest slice of the pie.

For those who rode the wild waves of the dotcom boom, you might be having déjà vu. Only two decades ago, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates was fiercely competing for dominance in the browser wars, pitting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer against Netscape’s Navigator. Gates, the ultimate strategist, even mapped out a plan for total domination of the buzzy new tech in a 1995 memo to his staff.

“In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981,” Gates wrote in the 1995 memo, describing the internet as a “tidal wave” with profound implications for the future of their business. Fast forward nearly two decades and Microsoft’s present-day chief draws a parallel between Gates’ gusto and today’s artificial intelligence frenzy.

“The Bill memo in 1995, it does feel like that to me,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on the latest episode of The Circuit With Emily Chang. “I think it’s as big.”

It’s funny how history repeats itself. As Bloomberg points out, just as Gates penned that battle cry to his staff as a retort to Netscape (which Microsoft then vanquished, causing an infamous antitrust lawsuit), the birth of OpenAI and Microsoft’s guiding touch was goaded, in a way, by Google’s looming supremacy over A.I. OpenAI is certainly in the lead now, but it seems to be treading cautiously to avoid retracing Gates’ steps from 1995. The firm’s CEO, Sam Altman, just went on a world tour asking leaders to regulate the new technology, clearly seeing the potential for similar litigious backlash.

The parallels are certainly not lost on Nadella. Yet, he points out to Bloomberg a slight divergence—unlike the internet in 1995, the genuine impact of A.I. is still unknown. I personally won’t hold my breath until A.I. unlocks wonders like the ’90s and ’00s internet did with Neopets and Runescape (kidding, sort of).

Here’s what else is going on in tech today.

Kylie Robison

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NEWSWORTHY

Spotify tried to cancel white noise. White noise and ambient podcasts accounted for 3 million daily consumption hours on Spotify, according to internal documents viewed by Bloomberg. Its popularity surged thanks to Spotify's own algorithm that encourages users to consume "talk" content, like podcasts, instead of music content. Once Spotify realized that users were obsessed with white noise podcasts, the company considered removing them, prohibiting future uploads, and redirecting users to more favorable content—doing so, according to the document seen by Bloomberg, would boost Spotify’s annual gross profit by $38 million.

Inside SpaceX's finances. Elon Musk's privately held rocket company, SpaceX, eked out a profit of $55 million on $1.5 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2023, according to documents seen by the Wall Street Journal. SpaceX, which lost $559 million in 2022, has invested huge sums of capital in a rocket called Starship that it eventually hopes will transport humans to Mars. But while that rocket has been plagued by a litany of technical problems, the company has been doing brisk business sending satellites and humans into orbit for clients including NASA.

Databricks seeks cash infusion. Databricks, an enterprise software firm focused on A.I., is discussing a new funding round worth hundreds of millions as it looks to capitalize on the A.I. craze, The Information reported. The company has moved closer to break-even after losing a total of about $900 million in its last two fiscal years with a revenue growth of more than 70% to over $1 billion in sales. While it's unclear if Databricks will follow through on this fundraising (which would delay its much-anticipated IPO), it's a clear sign that the A.I. boom is only just beginning.

ON OUR FEED

“It’s almost like talking about drugs: ‘I know a guy who has H100s.’”

—George Sivulka, chief executive of Hebbia, an A.I. productivity software maker, told the Times as startups like his hunt for graphics processing units (like the NVIDIA H100) to power their A.I. products

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Linda Yaccarino said X has never been safer—but major brands are pulling advertising after posts appeared beside pro-Nazi content, by Eleanor Pringle

What if OpenAI trained ChatGPT with illegal data scraping? The New York Times is reportedly considering suing to put that to the test, by Irina Ivanova

What history can teach us about A.I.’s Great Leap Forward, by Christian Auty

Bill Gates sees A.I. as a win-win for education: It will make you a better essay writer and feed an ‘infinite’ need for teachers, by Chloe Berger

FTX and Genesis avoid ‘costly and uncertain litigation’ by reaching $175 million settlement, by Leo Schwartz

BEFORE YOU GO

Meta to launch free code-generating software. Meta is introducing Code Llama, an open-source A.I. model designed to automatically generate code for developers, The Information reported. Meta launching a free coding assistant is a pretty snazzy move, potentially shaking up the coding assistant domain, competing with proprietary alternatives such as OpenAI's Codex and GitHub Copilot, which is powered by Codex, and charges $10 a month.

“For enterprise adoption, this could be pretty big leverage to get people to use this much faster,” Tim Chen, a managing partner of Essence VC, a venture firm, told The Information. “If I’m Bank of America, I can fine-tune something on my own and have a really great model now that can generate a lot of specific code based on my existing code base."