It would be the first time AI does something useful.
No–I'm sure at least one of the people it drove into a mental health crisis that ended in suicide was a fascist.
AI is destroying the company but not for the reason they're thinking.
Alternate headline: AI FOMO CEO Satya Nadella doubles down on AI spending, fires profitable devs.
He doesn't understand what LLM technology is and what they really can do and continues to buy the hype, so also continues firing staff (and whole departments) that generate income in order to employ 'AI experts' at exorbitant rates in the hope their magic AI will one day turn a huge profit - or at the very least to deny his competitors their skills.
The biggest issues Microsoft is facing at the moment are not AI: its EU (and wider) concerns about data sovereignty and surveillance driving businesses off their cloud, and their heavy-handed approach to spying on their users and forcing them into cloud services and apps in their ecosystem, which is driving users to alternative OSes.
Both are in the early stages and further loss could possibly be stemmed if the company strategy had a major overhaul in the other direction - but this whole direction has been Nadella's doing, and a certain level of lost business is now unavoidable.
I hope they stay the path. The worst MS gets, the more interest and investment there will be in OSS alternatives.
Yeah, Nadella's fear is that the company will be doomed if they don't do AI hard enough, while any sane observer can see that his obsession with AI is leading them to throw hundreds of billions into a burning trash fire with zero gain to show for it. Microsoft still refuse to break out their AI earnings, which is proof enough that it's making them close to zero profit (not counting the money OpenAI is throwing at them for compute). But everyone close to Nadella has been saying for a while that he's genuinely monomaniacal about AI. He cannot see reason on this issue.
It's Zuck and the metaverse all over again.
A cautionary tale that even the Zuck didn't learn, given how much money he's fruitlessly burning on bad AI and Ray Ban partnerships.
The only people actually making money off this whole thing are Nvidia, because if there's one solid bet in a gold rush it's selling picks and shovels.
lol. The only thing destroying Microsoft right now is said CEO.
More CEO bullshit trying to convince us AI is going to be actually useful.
I will say this - I suck at coding. I've spent years taking courses, learning basics over and over, only to be novice level at best. I can read code and KIND OF understand what it is doing, but writing it? Absolute dogshit.
LLMs have not raised my skill level in coding from a 15/100 to anything higher. It has, however, made it easier to generate code I want, can review, and use. It writes it at maybe 40/100, which is better than me. That's the only thing it's good at.
That's not your fault! You aren't bad at coding, and you aren't bad at learning. Coding courses and tutorials are almost never assembled by anyone with any familiarity with pedagogy and they are famously bad at teaching. Tutorial hell is everyone's experience.
If you actually want to learn, like any craft, time with your hands on the tools trying to make things is number 1. Literacy and familarity with jargon will help a lot as nothing is ever as useful as just reading the documentation and that is always dogshit.
Find a space you want to play in, like simple robots, maths puzzles, sound synthesis, simple games (godot is great for giving immediate visual feedback if you're still trying to learn the basics), embedded systems/iot devices whatever. Then set yourself simple goals, first tweaking prior art and then building your own stuff. As you gain familarity work through a good textbook like The Art of Programming or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs to get some ideas of the higher principles.
And stop doing tutorials, you will learn nothing. You need to study principles not practices, practices can only really be learned through independent practise.
I believe you can do it! and doing it yourself is really rewarding and playful. Don't de-skill yourself and become dependent on a bunch of creepy fascist billionaires. Learning is a skill all skills can be improved to basic competence if you are sufficiently motivated.
Im a little bit the same. But I have more desire to keep learning the hard way than to use shortcuts. Using it as a learning tool is fine I guess. I just feel sick any time I use it and its not all that helpful vs finding something from a web search. Plus, its often wrong and teaches bad habits soo yeah.
Im always wanting to take the hard road though. I feel gross taking shortcuts on any task.
You're the CEO. Do something about it.
Oh you sweet summer child...
It's gotten too big to stop. He knows he has to risk it all, or the other companies might do it first.
It's like the nuclear arms race where they believed that nukes might burn the sky and kill us all.
Except, this time they might.
Maybe they could bring back Steve Ballmer to accelerate the process
He could throw a chair at it.
Maybe this was Ballmers play all along? Maybe he wanted all those developers so MS could train AI models on their output.
Developers developers developers developers developers developers developers
Why do we talk about CEOs like anything they say is not complete bullshit?
you spent billions upon billions building data centers to host azure/openai, with no returns of value.
Oh yay, Nadella has picked up Altman's grift now.
If we don't build it, the bad guys will! If anyome builds it, it will destroy everything! You should give us money to solve the problem we made up to make our tools sound cooler, and that we directly profit from perpetuating!
In a way. I’m in the processing of switching over to Linux cos I’m just fucking sick of Microsoft and I know many, many others are way ahead of me
I mean, you’ve done an amazing job at destroying Xbox without it so I’m excited to see how effective a job your “ai” will do on the rest.
Good thing they spent time and money working on that Gaming Copilot AI shit!
Microsoft has been self-sabotaging for decades. AI sucks, but we know the truth.
It was legitimately in their core practices.
If I remember correctly, several years ago there were articles about their internal practices, which amounted to having the teams all compete against each other.
Once I learned that, everything made sense about their software.
I don't think we're going to get that lucky.
So you're saying there are some upsides to AI?
It will if they keep spending so much time and money on it.
That's what I thought he meant at first.
I’ve been noticing weird stuff with Microsoft online products since they have been leaning into ai.
I don’t really know how to describe it. My old windows pc had a virus back in the early 2000s that slowly ate away at .dll and .exe files. It basically caused very random errors and noticeable weirdness for a few days until core system services eventually started dying. That’s what Microsoft online products feel like to use for me now. Random loops of confirmations and links that go nowhere. Even the payment system rarely seems to work.
His concern seems valid to me.
This is less of a Fuck AI post, and more of a WTF is MSFT strategy reply.
OpenAI does not actually have that good of models, definitely poor value models, and a strategy depending on skynet contract from US military, which means having the absolute largest most trained most expensive model. MSFT has hedged its bets on decent alternative US model Antropic. But open source models, many from China, have genuine technical advances that make smaller (or larger) models that can be run within enterprise, or just you recent PC, viable competition.
MSFT cannot possibly make money by repackaging paid models from other providers that offer direct access. Just because copilot is in your OS and your office suite, does not mean there aren't great alternatives that cost less, If MSFT ever made profit from its outsourced AI bunding, surely its own partners would make better offers to you for you to use them directly. LLM access still has massive free access options.
The US datacenter business is also massively energy constrained, with current administration only permitting expensive dead ender energy solutions, the moral of the story being datacenters being extra expensive. Local (smaller than openAI) LLMs in US will face similar electricity scarcity, but globally, local LLMs will prevail. MSFT being NSA/military/empire allies further prevents them from offering value to people/enterprise, and incapable of serving foreign markets.
God I hope so. Fuck microshaft.
Various anti-trust commissions could have broken them up, but always fell short of that. Now they’re too big to fail, but still trying as hard as they can to do so anyway.
So you're telling me there's a use case for AI after all?
I read the article here is summary.
He is scared the people microsoft lays off will go work for their competitors.
He thinks if they lose "the AI race" they may be replaced by another company.
Microsoft still pledged to give $80 billion for their AI projects.
OpenAI wants to go for-profit but computing costs is not affordable for microsoft so they made a barely official agreement instead.
Workers suffered the most in this as the company has a culture where you may be sacked at any time due to a tweet from Musk.
My thoughts.
Microsoft won't become irrelavent. Every single school and university go to unimaginable lengths to use their suite.
Highschools have a "microsoft word class" and colleges that pride themselves on their "academic integrity" give all students premium chatgpt accounts.
But they may do what AT&T did and go from a huge monopoly to just some random big company.
40% of their revenue is from Azure and servers. You'd think even if companies aren't using MS branded AI products, they'll still make a shitload of money providing the backbone for it.
It's just like when they realized the lost the phone OS race and Ballmer left, they pivoted. They said, if we can't run the OS, at least our software can be on all the phones. So, they push Office mobile, make their own launchers, put a bunch of investment into Intune and MDM management.
They have enough GovCo contracts to keep them alive forever. Consumer market is a secondary revenue stream.
I guess his hands are just tied on this one, the scary AI gnomes are literally pointing guns at his children as we speak
Good, burn it all down.
I am going to dance on Microsoft's grave.
Then stop building it?
I hope it will
Microsoft pushing their AI on me sure isn't constructive.
It's neat how the mark never sees the con, even when the tubes of noise are full of the truth.
Do it. Do it hard.
Oh if only you fucks would lie in the bed you made once...
Lol please let this happen.
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.