Distillation is ‘like magic’
Microsoft’s ideal, Nadella said, is an orchestration layer that will offer the ability to mix and match AI models, with users pulling different aspects of intelligence from different models in areas where they excel. Open source “absolutely has a massive, massive role to play” in the building out of such platforms.
“I’m not dogmatic about closed source or open source, both of them are needed in the world,” he said. “And customers will demand them, right?”
Whether it be interplay between SQL, MySQL, Postgres, Linux, Windows, or other products, having a posture that allows interoperability is incredibly important, Nadella noted. Enterprise customers want to be able to distill custom models built with their intellectual property (IP), and open weight models will have a “huge structural advantage” in supporting that, compared to closed models.
