By Ethan Gach
Publication Date: 2026-01-02 19:43:00
Gen AI isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s just getting started. That’s what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes. He’d also like you to stop calling everything generated by LLM AI “slop.” People need to “get beyond” that in 2026, the executive who earned $79 million in compensation recently announced.
These and other musings were shared on his personal “sn scratchpad” blog in a December 29 post titled “Looking ahead to 2026.” It acknowledges the challenges of people figuring out how to actually use gen AI to do things that are useful, but remains bullish on the underlying technology itself to continue improving at a rate worth investing $100 billion in. Here’s the part that caught everyone’s’ attention, though:
We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier…