It would be the first time AI does something useful.
AI is very useful. LLMs are not the magic bullet that is being sold.
No–I’m sure at least one of the people it drove into a mental health crisis that ended in suicide was a fascist.
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.
You mean convince investors to GIVE THEM more money.
That would be OpenAI. Microsoft just borrows money against their share price when they need capitalization, they don’t have to beg for it.
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.
That’s drying up for even Nvidia if the circular investing we’re seeing is any indication
Yeah, which is a problem for their share price, but not for their bottom line.
Like, the worst case scenario for Nvidia is they go back to merely being the world’s biggest supplier of GPUs. Oh boo hoo hoo. They will see a massive correction to their share price, and the execs would all rather tht didn’t happen because it will destroy a lot of their newfound personal fortunes, but the company itself will be fine (unless they’ve massively over leveraged themselves with their shares as collateral).
Good, burn it all down.
Why do we talk about CEOs like anything they say is not complete bullshit?
More CEO bullshit trying to convince us AI is going to be actually useful.
So you’re saying there are some upsides to AI?
So you’re telling me there’s a use case for AI after all?
lol. The only thing destroying Microsoft right now is said CEO.
AI is destroying the company but not for the reason they’re thinking.
I guess his hands are just tied on this one, the scary AI gnomes are literally pointing guns at his children as we speak
Do not be silly now.
It is Clippy.
Clippy with a sexy voice who will let you fold him into any shape.
