Fuck AI

It would be the first time AI does something useful.

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.

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.

You're the CEO. Do something about it.

Maybe they could bring back Steve Ballmer to accelerate the process

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

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.

So you're saying there are some upsides to AI?

I don't think we're going to get that lucky.

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.

It will if they keep spending so much time and money on it.

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.

I guess his hands are just tied on this one, the scary AI gnomes are literally pointing guns at his children as we speak

They have enough GovCo contracts to keep them alive forever. Consumer market is a secondary revenue stream.

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.

Good, burn it all down.

Microsoft is - checks notes - a company selling shitty OSes and bad Office tools. And it's very good at forcing those sales on the world. It's been good for it.

But instead of seeing AI and pioneering a stub to glue an Ai in as module and just letting the Ai losers fight it out, they decided they need to control the Ai so they can monetize that too.

They can't help themselves.

So they're bleeding staff now to pay for the Ai miracle like SCO bled staff trying to fight against IBMs legal and PR divisions, which is why no one knows anything of SCO except what IBM told them through its staff-built groklaw FoxNews clone. The difference is that Microsoft is fighting itself, and can just quit.

Go make that API, Microsoft, and let openai and all the others court YOU. Go back to bad OSes and teams and excel. It's what you know.

So you're telling me there's a use case for AI after all?

Then stop building it?

I hope it will

Microsoft pushing their AI on me sure isn't constructive.

I am going to dance on Microsoft's grave.

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.