Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: David. Epic Games won its five-year battle to get Fortnite back onto Apple’s App Store after a series of legal victories. The iPhone maker booted the popular game after Epic allowed for direct payments instead of going through Apple’s system. Tim Cook’s firm is still challenging the latest Epic victory.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Goliath. Google is launching an “AI Mode” version of search, its cash cow that is being disrupted by artificial intelligence and upstarts powered by the technology. The big question is how the Silicon Valley giant will keep up its revenue stream that makes up a bulk of its top line.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella helped create an artificial intelligence explosion. But instead of automating away his company’s workforce, he says the change has created a need for leadership with qualities that are fundamentally human.

“You can’t just come in and say, ‘I’m smart. I have a bunch of ideas, but I don’t know exactly what to do.’ No, you have to know what to do when it is ambiguous, when it is uncertain. So that bringing clarity is super, super important,” he told Semafor in an interview in the leadup to the company’s annual Build developer conference.

The company welcomed thousands of software developers to Seattle this week, people who for two decades had the world’s most secure jobs. Now, suddenly, the tools they build have thrown that profession into a state of existential soul searching. The question is how many humans you really need in a world shaped by the rapidly improving online coding tools that Microsoft pioneered with its Github Copilot product launched in 2022.

Nadella says as much as a third of his own company’s software is now written by AI. But the changes AI is bringing to software development are paradoxical. Microsoft still plans to hire more software engineers than it has today, but it cares more about what makes them human and less about their technical abilities.

The need for more well-rounded employees isn’t just a result of automated software generation. The nature of Microsoft’s next chapter and its broad ambitions to be the foundation for a new era of computing will require more than just code. Enabling autonomous AI “agents” that supercharge human productivity requires the construction of a new system of online interaction that is more complex than the early internet protocols we still use today, but with equally important, long-term implications.

But in a world with ambient intelligence, or agentic AI, Microsoft’s goal is to fade into the background while simultaneously becoming a bigger and bigger part of its customers’ lives. It’s a bold idea, but one that requires a kind of humility.

“My way of recruiting anyone who’s coming to Microsoft is saying, ‘hey, look, if you want to be cool, go join somebody else. If you want to make others cool, join Microsoft,’” Nadella says.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on his favorite optimization story as employees work on thousands of little problems in the AI stack:

“One of the really cool ones that a team solved is a big issue that we’ve had for two years now. Since inference demand really took off with GPT-4, we have been power-constrained. It’s not even about how much silicon can you order to go stand up to run these inference calculations on; it’s how fast can you build data centers and get electric power grids to connect or to let you connect to their grids with these gigantic data centers. We’ve done a whole bunch of AI work. Funny enough, we’ve used AI itself to do a bunch of stranded power harvesting inside of our data centers. We need to be running every data center at peak utilization so that we can provision it with as much compute as humanly possible, so that you don’t have a single stranded watt of power anywhere.

Doing that is extraordinarily complicated because you’re having to move workloads around. It’s like this giant bin-packing problem, and it’s predicting when things are going to get hot and when things are cooling, and what things you can run together. AI itself is really good at dealing with inhuman levels of complexity, things that are hard to write a classical algorithm to say, ‘OK, well, I understand the contours of this and all of the factors, and I’m just going to have a closed-form solution to this problem.’”

The global workforce is at an inflection point. New tech continues to impact how we work, and managers are struggling as organizations undergo major changes.

Join Semafor for newsmaking conversations in partnership with Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report. Explore new data on how employees and managers are navigating ongoing uncertainty in the global labor market. Experts will discuss key findings on productivity, resilience, and well-being, and examine how leaders and policymakers are responding to shifting workplace expectations.

June 12, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

— Elon Musk, after becoming one of the biggest Republican donors in US history in 2024, with about $300 million invested in President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Listen to the Zoomers. It actually is harder to find a job in tech as a recent graduate than in years past, according to a SignalFire analysis. Big Tech and startups are hiring roughly half as many early career workers as a share of their total new hires, compared to just before the pandemic. Instead, “companies are posting lower-level roles and hiring more experienced [individuals] to fill them,” the report said.

Big Tech had an odd year in 2023, when there were a higher number of layoffs in senior roles that opened more starting positions for recent graduates. But the job availability didn’t last. And the growth of AI tools that can automate work and replace junior employees may weigh these stats down even more in years to come. It’s a classic Catch-22: How do young people gain experience when companies only want to hire individuals who already have it?

“Marching off a cliff.” The chatter at Build this week, unaddressed by Microsoft executives during their keynotes on stage, was the extent to which the exact features the company is selling to developers will replace those same developers in due time.

“Is there going to be a Build 2035, or will there not be any more developers?” a software engineering vice president attending the conference told me, joking that future conferences will be attended by all of our agents. “It feels like we are marching off a cliff.”

That’s not a talking point for Microsoft, though. It needs buy-in from regular businesses to recoup the billions it has spent on AI, including $80 billion this year on data centers alone. Announcements this week included a new GitHub Copilot coding agent, the ability for agents to delegate tasks to each other, and expanded support for everyone’s favorite Model Context Protocol. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to free up engineers and allow them to be more creative. But these technologies may shrink (or wipe out) an entire class of junior developers who would have done this work previously.

That isn’t necessarily Microsoft’s problem to solve — other big tech companies are building features that will automate software work as well. It’s a product of the times.

Amanda Silver, a corporate vice president for Microsoft’s developer division, told me she expects a redistribution of talent in the coming years that will lead to rampant growth in the startup space. Independent ventures “are going to start getting seeded that are going to be much smaller than the previous generations of startups,” she said. “You’re going to need a smaller team to have as much impact.”

— Rachyl Jones

The new Pope recently expressed concerns about AI, and now a group of Christian leaders is urging Trump to convene an advisory council on AI safety. In an open letter, the group supports US efforts to “win” the AI race, but warns against “autonomous smarter-than-human machines that nobody knows how to control.”

That request seems reasonable — it’s not calling for regulation or a moratorium on AI development — and it follows in the footsteps of some Christian leaders who spoke out against nuclear proliferation during the Cold War.

By the time Starlink bumped up its monthly subscription prices in Nigeria by nearly 50% last week, most observers had been expecting the hike, Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega reports.

Despite being one of the most expensive options in the country, Starlink has gained about 65,000 users in Nigeria and is growing across Africa by targeting smaller, high-value markets rather than aiming for mass dominance. That strategy might not upend African connectivity overnight, but it could be good enough to build a profitable niche, Olumuyiwa writes.