The discussion focused largely on issues like model distillation - shrinking powerful AI systems into smaller versions - and export controls. The Pentagon dispute was not a central focus of the conversation, per two sources. The tone of the meeting was "friendly," according to multiple sources.
But when it comes to its own tech being copied, Google has no problem pointing fingers. This week, the company accused "commercially motivated" actors of trying to clone its Gemini AI. In a Thursday report, Google complained it had become under "distillation attacks," with agents querying Gemini up to 100,000 times to "extract" the underlying model - the convoluted AI industry equivalent of copying somebody's homework, basically.
What happens under the hood? How is the search engine able to take that simple query, look for images in the billions, trillions of images that are available online? How is it able to find this one or similar photos from all that? Usually, there is an embedding model that is doing this work behind the hood.
"I am much more convinced that this is a technology that will actually build on the foundation of cloud and mobile platforms, spread faster, bend the productivity curve, and create local surpluses and economic growth around the world," said Nadella. He also emphasized that the future is unlikely to belong to a single dominant AI model. According to Nadella, the core principle will be for companies to combine different models with their own data and model distillation to create smaller and cheaper solutions.