Satya Nadella on how GPT-3.5 helped an Indian farmer: 'Powerful moment for me'

During the keynote address, Satya Nadella shared how technology transformed the life of an Indian farmer.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recounted an encounter with an Indian farmer who during the tech giant's annual developer conference Build 2024 where several artificial intelligence (AI) tools were released by the company like Azure and Copilot. During the keynote address, Satya Nadella shared how technology transformed the life of an Indian farmer. the audience with a story about an Indian farmer whose life was transformed by technology.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build opening keynote at the Seattle Convention Center Summit Building in Seattle, Washington. (AFP)

Satya Nadella shared. “In January 2023, I met a rural Indian farmer who used GPT-3.5, in his own voice, to understand government farm subsidies he’d heard about on television. It was a powerful moment for me. It illustrated the incredible impact of a cutting-edge model developed on the West Coast of the United States, now being used to directly improve the life of a rural farmer in India.”

Earlier as well, Satya Nadella had cited a meeting with an Indian farmer who was trying to access some government programme. He had then said, “He expressed a complex need in one of the local languages. This got translated and interpreted by a bot and a response came back saying go to a portal and here is how you will access the programme."

The farmer was hesitant to use the programme, Satya Nadella shared, adding, “And, it completed it and the reason why it was able to complete it was that the developer building it had taken GPT [General Purpose Technology] and trained it over all of the government of India documents and then scaffolded it with the speech recognition software.”