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Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has compared the recent developments in AI to the internet boom of the 1990s. He cited Bill Gates’ 1995 memo, in which he described the internet as a “tidal wave,” and said that AI is similarly poised to have a major impact on society.

In a conversation with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on the show The Circuit, Satya Nadella compared the potential of AI to the impact of the internet in 1995, saying that he believes AI is “as big” as the internet.

He added, “We in the tech industry are classic experts at overhyping everything,”  and what motivates him is the fact that he wants to “use this technology to truly do what I think at least all of us are in tech for, which is democratising access to it.”

In 1995, when the dot-com era was taking shape and Microsoft was just launching Internet Explorer, Bill Gates—in a memo—stated that he wanted to “make it clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business.” He went on to say that the Internet is “the most important single development since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981” and called it a “tidal wave.”

Now—almost three decades later—it seems like things have come full circle as Satya Nadella commented on how artificial intelligence (AI) is now considered to be the Internet of today in terms of hype and industry focus.

For those uninitiated, Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI—including the GPT LLM and the ChatGPT chatbot it powers. According to CNBC, Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI. 

Notably, Microsoft’s new Bing chat uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, and the company has also developed Azure OpenAI, a platform that developers can use to quickly implement and deploy their AI models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI and Microsoft have a “great relationship.”