Microsoft CEO Nadella: We firmly believe that the wave of artificial intelligence is unstoppable

News on the morning of January 25, Beijing time, according to reports, Microsoft today released its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal year 2023 ending December 31, 2022.The financial report shows that Microsoft's second-quarter revenue was US$52.7 billion, a year-on-year increase of 2%.Net profit was US$16.4 billion, down 12% year-on-year.Non-GAAP net profit was US$17.4 billion, down 7% year-on-year.

After the financial report was released, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CFO Amy Hood, chief accounting officer Alice Jolla and legal counselOn behalf of Keith Dolliver and other company executives, he attended the subsequent earnings conference call, interpreted the main points of the financial report, and answered questions from analysts.

The following is the transcript of the conference call:

Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss: I want to discuss Microsoft's investment in artificial intelligence research company OpenAI in depth with management.With the further increase in investment, has the current scope of cooperation between Microsoft and OpenAI expanded?What are the specific areas of cooperation?In addition, from the perspective of investors, in addition to the recently released Azure OpenAI service, what functions and services will Microsoft and OpenAI bring to users?How will this partnership positively impact Bing and other Microsoft-owned products?

Satya Nadella: Our partnership with OpenAI started three years ago.In the past three years or so, Microsoft has been committed to achieving close cooperation between the two parties. The fundamental reason is that we firmly believe that the wave of artificial intelligence is unstoppable, and once enterprises seize this "wave", they can create a lot of value.In addition, the wave of artificial intelligence will affect all links of the technology stack, providing people with new solutions and creating new opportunities.So whenever we think about new opportunities for platforms, AI is the answer.We need to think: How to fundamentally ride the wave of AI?How to expand the reach of AI?What can we create with AI?From this perspective, the core of Azure or cloud computing lies in how to effectively combine network and storage.In a sense, the issues behind this are very complex.In the past three years or so, Microsoft has devoted itself to training supercomputers and building reasoning infrastructure, because once artificial intelligence is applied to programs, it will inevitably involve training and reasoning issues.So I think the impact of Azure on the industry is far-reaching, and we hope to provide you with far more than Azure OpenAI services.How to combine OpenAI with Microsoft's Azure Synapse analysis service and so on are all in our consideration.At present, our Power Platform already has the ability to integrate.

One of the reasons why Microsoft is the industry leader in workflow automation today is our outstanding AI capabilities.In fact, GitHub and Copilot have become the most AI-intensive products on the market.Whether it's productivity or consumer services, we want to integrate AI into every layer of the Microsoft technology stack.We are very much looking forward to these ideas.At the same time, we are also very optimistic about OpenAI's innovation capabilities.We are very excited by the attention that the recently launched Azure OpenAI service has received.All in all, in the future, we are not only concerned about Microsoft's investment in OpenAI, but also close business partnerships.The deep integration of AI with Microsoft's products can not only promote innovation, but also help us maintain industry competitiveness.