TECH NEWS – The term “slop” has become common when talking about artificial intelligence, but Satya Nadella believes it is time to move past the label and focus on what actually matters.
“Slop” was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025, defined as a broad term for machine-generated garbage. More politely, the dictionary describes it as low-quality digital content typically produced in large quantities with the help of artificial intelligence. While the word may accurately reflect much of what has circulated online, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues that the industry should stop obsessing over the term.
According to Nadella, the real issue is not what we call AI-generated content, but how to extract genuine value from a technology that is extremely expensive and resource-intensive. He suggests shifting the conversation toward making AI truly useful in the real world, rather than dwelling on its shortcomings.
Nadella believes the AI industry should focus on developing a new conceptual framework inspired by Steve Jobs’s idea of computers as “bicycles for the mind.” In this view, AI should act as a cognitive amplifier that helps people think and create more effectively, instead of serving as a novelty or a source of low-quality output.
“We have moved past the initial discovery phase and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between spectacle and substance. We now have a clearer sense of where technology is headed and the harder, more important question of how to shape its impact on the world. The power of any given model is not what matters, but rather how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals. We must move beyond the arguments of simplicity versus sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in our theory of the mind that considers how humans, equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools, relate to each other. This is the product design question that we must debate and answer.
We are entering a phase in which we will build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents, account for memory and entitlements, and enable safe and effective tool use. This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to develop to derive value from AI in the real world. We must make deliberate choices about how to diffuse this technology as a solution to the challenges facing people and the planet. For AI to be socially accepted, it must have a real-world evaluative impact. The choices we make about where to apply our limited energy, computing power, and talent will matter. Throughout its history, computing has been about empowering people and organizations to achieve more, and AI must follow the same path. If we do so, AI can become one of the most profound waves of computing yet. This is what I hope we will collectively push for in 2026 and beyond,” Nadella wrote on his Scratchpad blog.
Microsoft has invested tens of billions of dollars into AI research and development, often expressing frustration that users fail to see its potential. Critics, however, argue that the tangible results so far amount to little more than mediocre output and a growing number of dissatisfied Windows users.
Source: PCGamer, SN Scratchpad
