Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it's time to stop talking about AI 'slop' and start talking about a 'theory of the mind that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools'

Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2025 was "slop," the catch-all term for machine-generated crapola—or, as Merriam-Webster more prosaically (and politely) defines it, "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." Hard to argue with the pick: As PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter said, it was "a year full of AI humiliation" that started with a stupid AI-generated Star Wars video and didn't stop until the calendar ran out.

But while "slop" is without doubt an appropriately defining word for 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it's time to stop talking about it, because we need to move on to bigger and more important things—like how they're going to make this obscenely expensive and resource-sucking mistake generator that nobody wants actually work.

"We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion," Nadella wrote on his sn scratchpad blog (via The Verge). "We are beginning to distinguish between 'spectacle' and 'substance'. We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world."

Nadella listed three key points the AI industry needs to focus on going forward, the first of which is developing a "new concept" of AI that builds upon the "bicycles for the mind" theory put forth by Steve Jobs in the early days of personal computing.

"What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals," Nadella wrote. "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs. sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our 'theory of the mind' that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer."

The inherent assumption that AI collectively represents "cognitive amplifier tools" is immediately suspect: There's a reason we call AI output "slop," after all, and beyond it merely not being very good (and certainly not original or "creative" in any way), there's a growing body of research—including one paper co-authored by Microsoft—indicating that the rise of AI is actually making its users, well, dumber.

Beyond trying to convince everyone to stop saying "slop," AI companies will also "evolve from models to systems when it comes to deploying AI for real world impact," Nadella predicted: "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe 'tools use'. This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world."

And, finally, "we need to make deliberate choices on how we diffuse this technology in the world as a solution to the challenges of people and planet. For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact. The choices we make about where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter."

There's a lot of jargon and bafflegab in Nadella's post, as you might expect from a CEO who really needs to sell this stuff to someone, but what I find more interesting is the sense that he's hedging a bit. Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into its pursuit of an AI panacea and expressed outright bafflement that people don't get how awesome it all is (even though, y'know, it's pretty obvious), and the chief result of that effort is hot garbage and angry Windows users.

Against that less-than-happy backdrop, and with Microsoft and other AI companies still gobbling up untold mountains of money with no endgame in sight (short of the biggest financial bubble-pop in recorded history, I suppose), Nadella concluded his missive by saying the continued development of AI "will be a messy process of discovery," and deploying a very heavily freighted use of the word "if."

"Computing throughout its history has been about empowering people and organizations to achieve more, and AI must follow the same path," he wrote. "If we do that, it can become one of the most profound waves of computing yet. This is what I hope we will collectively push for in ‘26 and beyond."