Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, said on Wednesday that the backlash against artificial intelligence was evident across the United States, but that the technology would boost wages and that \u201ceveryone is a stakeholder\u201d in A.I.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t deny that the perception is terrible,\u201d Mr. Nadella, 58, said during a live interview in San Francisco with \u201cHard Fork<\/a>,\u201d The New York Times\u2019s tech podcast. He acknowledged there might be job displacement because of A.I., but pointed to the technology\u2019s power and benefits.<\/p>\n Mr. Nadella added that he was not opposed to people sharing in the wealth from A.I. companies. That idea was recently floated by Bernie Sanders<\/a>, the progressive senator from Vermont, who has called A.I. a \u201cpublic resource\u201c that Americans should have some ownership in. On Wednesday, President Trump also raised the notion<\/a> for the second time in a week, saying Americans could get rich by sharing in the wealth from A.I. firms.<\/p>\n Mr. Nadella made his comments as A.I. has become an increasingly political issue<\/a>. A national movement of parent groups, religious leaders, environmentalists and former Tea Party activists have decried the technology and the construction of A.I. data centers across the nation. Many have criticized the technology for how it could displace jobs, endanger national security and affect people\u2019s mental health.<\/p>\n Mr. Nadella has been steering Microsoft, one of the largest public companies in the world, through a fierce A.I. race. The tech giant, along with Google, Amazon and Meta, has spent billions<\/a> to build data centers to gain enough computing power to develop the technology.<\/p>\n In 2019, Mr. Nadella oversaw Microsoft\u2019s early investment in OpenAI, a bet that proved prescient when the A.I. lab\u2019s ChatGPT chatbot took the world by storm in late 2022. Microsoft eventually invested another $12 billion in OpenAI. The partnership gave Microsoft an early lead in A.I.<\/p>\n But as competition intensified, Mr. Nadella recently renegotiated Microsoft\u2019s relationship with OpenAI to make the companies less codependent<\/a>. Microsoft remains a major shareholder in the start-up and its biggest financial backer<\/p>\n Mr. Nadella has talked about needing to carefully allocate Microsoft\u2019s resources \u2014 computing, especially \u2014 for serving customers, powering OpenAI and developing Microsoft\u2019s own A.I. products and systems.<\/p>\n