Reading Michael Feldstein's post I would have thought Satya Nadella's post was a tome, but in fact it's only a few well-chosen paragraphs long. We need to frame our understanding properly to even understand it. Feldstein compares it in a way to Ronald Coase's 1937 paper, The Nature of the Firm, where it is written, "that people join together in firms when the cost of coordinating as individual agents is too high." Now when Coase - or Nadella - are talking about people, they are not talking about you or I, they are talking about owners who run companies and enter into compacts. We are nothing more than "human capital", owned by them, alongside (writes Nadella) 'token capital', which "is the firm's AI capability it builds and owns". What Nadella sees is that there is no purpose to increasing token capital for its own sake; at most, it could eat entire segments of the economy, but to what end? But it's not clear he can see what more there is. "Our priority has to be building a frontier ecosystem, not just a frontier model, so value flows broadly across every company, every industry, and every country... When that happens, companies will create value for themselves and for the economy around them. Employees will see their expertise amplified and their judgment become part of systems that make it replicable and scalable."
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