Microsoft exec lashes out at AI skeptics, calls criticism "mind-blowing"

[midian182]

A hot potato: Many people don't share the same slavish enthusiasm for AI as the executives praising the technology. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft's AI group, finds this stance "mindblowing." His post further illustrates how most execs, especially those from companies that have poured billions into the tech, believe the average person who isn't enamored by AI is simply ungrateful.

Suleyman expressed his barely concealed contempt for non-AI-lovers in a post on X. "Jeez there so many cynics! It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming."

Suleyman then noted that he grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone – like many of us – so the fact that people were unimpressed by having a conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image or video is mindblowing to him.

Jeez there so many cynics! It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming. I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone! The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.

– Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyman) November 19, 2025

Microsoft's overall AI investment will soon exceed $90 billion, so Suleyman obviously wants people to be excited about a technology his company has poured a fortune into. But the main issue of contention is that he seems to think people aren't impressed by AI, but that usually isn't true.

For many, the problem with AI isn't that it's unimpressive – it is – it's the long list of bad things that come with it. The main problem is that people are sick of these systems being shoehorned into literally every aspect of our lives, regardless of whether they're a good fit.

Then there are the other aspects: the planet-destroying consumption of resources, higher electricity bills, more data centers taking up land, the mass extinction of job categories, the economic risks associated with the possibility of an AI-driven market bubble, the potential of an AGI that turns on humanity, and so on.

While Suleyman's post doesn't mention it explicitly, the message was likely prompted by the controversy surrounding Microsoft's vision of Windows evolving into an agentic operating system.

Stop this non-sense. No one wants this.

You live in a Twitter bubble where AI will create tons of wealth and you will perish unless you adopt it now.

But your users are not in this bubble. They don't care about any of this shit.

They chat with ChatGPT and that's about it.

– Hasen Judi (@Hasen_Judi) November 11, 2025

Users were about as outraged by Windows President Pavan Davuluri's post on the agentic OS as you'd expect, noting that it was something nobody other than Microsoft wanted.

But that backlash didn't deter the Redmond firm, which clarified a few days later that the agentic features are arriving sooner than expected. The company confirmed that these experimental changes will appear in a private developer preview build for unpaid beta testers enrolled in the Windows Insider program.

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Microsoft exec lashes out at AI skeptics, calls criticism "mind-blowing"

 

[ScottSoapbox]

The conversational aspect is impressive. It’s when you realize the “super smart AI” is often an 1diot that it becomes unimpressive.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Industry conman finds it mind-blowing that people criticize his snake oil.

 

[winjer]

Go peddle your AI slop somewhere else.

 

[OortCloud]

That jacket he is wearing says everything you need to know about that 'personality'.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

Investing so much into glorified search engines means they have to justify the spending by making all this be used somewhere, somehow.

Sadly, it's all being shoved down the throats of the consumers in hopes that they'll just accept it and they'll start to recoup costs, but I don't understand how costs will be recouped by the way they're using it.

I can't wait for this search engine bullshit bubble to pop or at least deflate.

 

[VitalyT]

The arrogant bastards! Unbelievable! Tell it to the thousands you fired from job over AI, you feckless pricks, and tell them how grateful they should be!

 

[bviktor]

He's as tone deaf as Don Mattrick, Steven Sinofsky and Adam Orth were.

Hint: neither of them works at MS anymore.

 

[wiyosaya]

Another industry dolt, who is only concerned about how much profit his company can make, shudders because his company's users reject the crap the company is peddling.

Why am I not surprised that yet another industry dolt toes the line rather than recognizes the company's users are rejecting the useless crap they are peddling?

Dude, go for a nature walk, clear your mind, and then come back and face reality. Your company cannot tell users they want some useless piece of crap when they clearly do not want your company's crap. How many times do your company's users need to teach the company this lesson?

 

[unoficialoficial]

The truth is that users have never before held such tremendous intellectual power in their hands. It’s like having an overloaded fusion of the most advanced scientists from every field, all accessible at once. For example, consider a friend who’s a mathematician. Challenge them to “calculate the formula for the spectral determinant of the hexagonal torus”—a notoriously difficult problem that even PhD-level researchers might struggle to solve. Now hand the same task to Gemini or Grok, and you’ll have a detailed solution in seconds. Even some strong local AI models can accomplish this feat.

Sure, AI can craft beautiful poems about cats—but it can also tackle problems of extraordinary complexity. Google provides free access to Gemini 3 Pro through search for anyone on the planet! Never before have people had access to such extraordinary intellectual power.

 

[Skully]

"For many, the problem with AI isn't that it's unimpressive – it is – it's the long list of bad things that come with it."

This is my stance as well.

 

[MasterAce]

The truth is that users have never before held such tremendous intellectual power in their hands. It’s like having an overloaded fusion of the most advanced scientists from every field, all accessible at once. For example, consider a friend who’s a mathematician. Challenge them to “calculate the formula for the spectral determinant of the hexagonal torus”—a notoriously difficult problem that even PhD-level researchers might struggle to solve. Now hand the same task to Gemini or Grok, and you’ll have a detailed solution in seconds. Even some strong local AI models can accomplish this feat.

Sure, AI can craft beautiful poems about cats—but it can also tackle problems of extraordinary complexity. Google provides free access to Gemini 3 Pro through search for anyone on the planet! Never before have people had access to such extraordinary intellectual power.

Sometimes it does that, yes. Other times you give it some niche problem and it spews out highly believable nonsense and has you chase some dead end sollution for hours before you realize that it was just affirming your own ideas in a most fantastic way…

 

[brucek]

It's not about how good AI is or isn't, now or later. It's about maintaining a separation between the core operating system and any higher level features above it. If Microsoft wants to offer a separate AI suite that's fine with me. I'd just like them to offer an o/s that is solely under my control first. (Yes I know that ship has long sailed.)

 

[axiomatic13]

Well, let's start at the beginning, Suleyman? LLMs are not AI.

 

[brucek]

The truth is that users have never before held such tremendous intellectual power in their hands

Google Search, wikipedia, and before that libraries have been around a long time. AI isn't always even more convenient. And if you searched up the peer-reviewed, published version of the proof, at least you'd know you had the right thing without any hallucinations.

And as for its alleged prowess, last night Claude messed up a simple regexp to remove a trailing .00s after whole numbers, two different ways.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen it be a useful tool also. But "tremendous intellectual power"? Give me a break.

 

[redgarl]

He is right. People are acting delusional over the past 2 weeks over a technology they cannot even fathom to understand.

 

[redgarl]

Investing so much into glorified search engines means they have to justify the spending by making all this be used somewhere, somehow.

Sadly, it's all being shoved down the throats of the consumers in hopes that they'll just accept it and they'll start to recoup costs, but I don't understand how costs will be recouped by the way they're using it.

I can't wait for this search engine bullshit bubble to pop or at least deflate.

You are really thinking we are going back to google search with ads results in the first page?

Man... this is the delusions I am talking about...

There is many automation processes that can leverage AI processes for phenomenal results.

And we are not talking about robotics, medecine, physics, chemistry, defense and so on...

The only grasp people have with AI is with content creation, which in itself, is not even what the technology is really about.

 

[Tyler Dur Den]

The problem is the way MS pushes AI on users of its products in a desparate attempt to draw attention to products that were generally perfected a long time ago. For exmaple I use Outlook 365 on my PC and Outlook on Android and those relentlessly keep showing me a Copilot button that I can't make go away. My corporate-controlled Windows 11 laptop also has the Copilot garbage. These prodcuts were perfected a long time ago and MS is not improving them.

 

[wiyosaya]

The problem is the way MS pushes AI on users of its products in a desparate attempt to draw attention to products that were generally perfected a long time ago.

Agreed. This reminds me of MS trying to incorporate Internet Explorer into Windows. I know their AI is different, but incorporating Internet Explorer into Windows did not work out well for them either.

Like I said previously, their users will have to teach them this lesson again.

 

[wiyosaya]

Well, let's start at the beginning, Suleyman? LLMs are not AI.

Its amazing that he does not know that.

 

[wiyosaya]

He is right. People are acting delusional over the past 2 weeks over a technology they cannot even fathom to understand.

I see it as everyone investing in something they don't understand, yet they believe that it will make them all billionaires.

 

[acrossthestars]

Microsoft's relationship with AI is like that one guy who has a super-toxic relationship with his should-be-ex girlfriend, where she bleeds him dry and let's everyone "hit it", but she's too hot for him to let go, so he keeps saying "one more time won't hurt..."

The fallout from this AI bubble is going to be apocalyptic on the stock valuation. There is basically no part of Microsoft, as a company, that has been spared from AI; thus, no part of Microsoft will be spared.

 

[user556]

Never before have people had access to such extraordinary intellectual power.

We've had that for decades. AKA, a search engine.

 

[MiqWalsh]

Well, of COURSE Nadella, Huang, the division heads at M$ AND the bloke from Anthropic are all going to praise AI to the sky and force it down everybody's throats. Anything to keep those obscenely fat paychecks rolling in, eh?

But to suggest we're all "ungrateful"? F**king cheek of it. These guys live in a fantasy world where most of them have never done a real day's work in their lives, because despite the eye-watering amounts being invested into this crap A.I has yet to prove itself actually useful in the "real" world. And to add insult to injury, we're supposed to be "grateful" that every bit of hardware is NOW being priced way out of Joe Ordinary's reach.....

What a s**t-shower.

 

[SRB]

He is right. People are acting delusional over the past 2 weeks over a technology they cannot even fathom to understand.

Actually, it's not that terribly hard to understand, and anyone who thinks this will solve all of the worlds problems (including Microsoft) really does not understand the world, not the AI. As far as massive calculations, we've had supercomputers for quite some time now. The examples given by another poster illustrates that a computer can do math faster than you can. Really? Where is the next great battery breakthrough? As far as poems and pictures of cats, we're not talking Shakespeare here. Humans crank this stuff out for greeting cards every day. The only thing AI will improve with that is to put the people who do it out of work. We, the consumer, would probably never know the difference.

While there are some uses for AI, this is looking more and more like blockchain. "it will revolutionize everything!!!!" Not so much.