Microsoft's Nadella is building an AI empire

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-nadella-openai-inflection-9727e77a

by wallflower • 2 years ago

60 79 2 years ago

muhblah• 2 years ago

archerx2• 2 years ago

At the same time more people have never been more ready to move on from windows, I don’t want A.I. jammed into every nook and crany just the sake of raising stock prices. I want to use A.I. When I want and not have it constantly pushed in my face.

wdh505• 2 years ago

I read the last sentence as "ai constantly punched in my face"

SeanAnderson3• 2 years ago

Fortunately Operating Systems is only 10% of MSFTs revenue. I'm sure MSFT cares about getting money out of Windows, but it's not really do-or-die. I think that's kind of why it feels like the OS is languishing - MSFT has found lots of other ways to monetize.

HDThoreaun3• 2 years ago

Windows is the base that they use to get buy in on all their other products though. If everyone was on linux why not switch to google workspace at a third the cost?

archerx2• 2 years ago

Office sucks, Azure sucks, Windows sucks, xbox sucks and etc. Everything modern microsoft touches turns to crap. The only good thing they have is VScode and even that is getting bloated.

jstummbillig• 2 years ago

Nobody want's that – it happens, as part of a trade-off to improve rapidly and dial it in early into something that's good, before it is so good, that absolutely everyone will want/need it.

okasaki• 2 years ago

1. Nobody chooses Microsoft - it's rammed down their throats by corp IT or gaming addiction. 2. Alternatives are $3000 macs with 1% of the ecosystem, or an enthusiast OS that doesn't work with the most popular graphics card vendor and constantly breaks.

matsz• 2 years ago

SteamOS (via Steam Deck) is surprisingly amazing for gaming. Most of the titles I tried worked perfectly fine without any configuration changes.

I haven't felt the need to use Windows for years now thanks to this.

csomar• 2 years ago

enthusiast OS that doesn't work with the most popular graphics card vendor

It's not exactly there yet (especially that you need some technical knowledge to troubleshoot stuff). But I am getting similar performance playing games on Linux that I would be getting on Windows.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

The consumer never knows what they want.

That being said, I would hate an always on AI always watching my actions and phoning back home to Microsoft.

k8sToGo• 2 years ago

That's right. Just got a new Macbook Pro for myself last week. Couldn't be happier. My Windows PC has been downgraded to a pure gaming appliance and now is kind of collecting dust.

simonebrunozzi• 2 years ago

Watch the next few years as people move away from Microsoft and embrace Apple. Lesser of two evils.

elorant• 2 years ago

Thanks but no thanks. I want to choose the hardware myself. I also want hardware that is upgradable if my needs change after a while. Linux is the way for moving off Windows.

baxtr2• 2 years ago

I’m an Apple fanboy, big time.

At the same time I find categories like “god” and “evil” difficult when used in the context of corporates.

Maybe Apple can be described as more honest.

They sell you extremely expensive hardware so that they don’t need your data to be monetized.

I think that’s a fair deal.

_giorgio_• 2 years ago

Apple is going to use on every device chatGPT by openAI (effectively Microsoft). So good luck with your battle.

pipeline_peak• 2 years ago

The empire dependent on a competing product, how does that work?

belter• 2 years ago

Finally some sanity....

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Works where archive.ph is blocked:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/microsoft-s-nadella-is...

Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1o7AZY

29athrowaway4• 2 years ago

1. Copilot makes people 10% more productive

2. Company ranks their employees, lays off the lowest ranking percentage of people responsible for 10% of the productivity

3. Company reduces headcount

Rinse and repeat and then most people will be out of a job, unless stacked ranking is outlawed.

SeanAnderson3• 2 years ago

Point 2 and 3 are identical, no?

And it's not like those laid off can't start their own, disruptive ventures. As employees get more efficient, it'll be easier to run small, nimble companies that take on the big leagues. I'm quite optimistic about all of it.

29athrowaway4• 2 years ago

I am not so optimistic about it.

AI will create a large power asymmetry which will inevitably result in large scale abuse with no limits.

In almost every economy where the elite does not need the support of the population to be wealthy and to exercise territorial control, the result is almost always a brutal dictatorship where the population is weakened and disarmed so they do not revolt.

HeatrayEnjoyer4• 2 years ago

Economy of scale and power imbalance increases with more advanced technology, not the other way. A true AGI would allow a single person to replace all other humans. Robot soldiers are bulletproof, cheap to build, and never refuse orders to kill.

OtomotO• 2 years ago

And it's not like those laid off can't start their own, disruptive ventures.

That's a totally unrealistic take... on the scale of "communism". Not every person is a perfect communist, and not every person is a business man.

Now I know you may say that only some need to create disruptive ventures and hire others then, but that's also unrealistic due to power imbalances.

What will turn the wheel is how capitalism works right now: If too many people are unemployed and too few people can afford your mass market product, someone will need to give the unemployed a job or money so they can participate in the "free" market.

WarOnPrivacy• 2 years ago

Copilot makes people 10% more productive

I'd say Copilot makes me 5% more productive, as in - MS CP bloat adds 5% to the stack of stuff I need to remove from clients' Windows systems. Most of that is because I have to open Edge and cleaning Edge is a particularly tedious process.

None of this is hyperbole, btw. Keeping up with endless new Windows bloat/nags/traps/guff is a regular part of my billable hours.

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

Oh. Well, in my experience roughly 5% produce 80% of the value and the rest ensure they can focus on that, save the bottom 25% that are net negatives on productivity. The problem is it’s actually really hard to identify who is in the middle and keeping things going and who is a drag on the organization reliably especially given the middle bulge tends to be fairly quiet and the bottom bulge works hard to appear useful.

jc6• 2 years ago

The purpose of a system is not optimization.

Or as Stafford Beer would say - The purpose of a system is what it does.

dkrich• 2 years ago

This sounds good in theory. Then you try to use these tools and they don’t really make you more productive. More like asking someone for help, them giving a half baked response, giving up and walking away.

I had a conversation recently about this very thing. They were complaining that Salesforce is very hard to learn, even for simple tasks.

I asked why not use AI assistants? Because in practice they just aren’t capable of connecting the dots between documentation and configuration to complete the task at hand at the required level of customization. And that gap that exists between how things are stated to work and what’s actually required is where a lot of jobs are done and AI isn’t close to fixing. Which is why I still remain convinced that what’s being called AI is nothing more than a marketing tool to sell enterprise software and that jobs are going to be destroyed by it.

pydry• 2 years ago

Ive watched people who swear it makes them more productive lose productivity because it led them down a blind alley and they didnt spot it.

So, maybe it's actually helping offset the silicon valley investor war on compensation a little.

walterbell• 2 years ago

WSJ article comment:

The LLM bubble will be much bigger than the .com bubble from the 1990s. Its ultimate burst in 2026 will be also epic.

Like .com dark fiber, post-bubble dark GPU/TPU/NPUs would eventually find new use cases.

jsemrau2• 2 years ago

"We are shifting our focus on GPTs to Commercial and Enterprise scenarios and are stopping GPT efforts in consumer Copilot"

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/gpt-builder-is-bei...

cjk22• 2 years ago

This lines up with my whole theory around AI which I expect extrapolates to the commercial and enterprise scenarios as well based on how quickly I've seen stuff canned already at my org:

1. This is really cool! How amazing! We can do so much with this.

2. User activity drops off fairly quickly.

3. Oh they want money? Lets wait until the trial expires.

4. Not renewed.

jsemrau2• 2 years ago

That's my Heygen/D-ID story to the T.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

The current AI trend is running per the usual playbook. Before it was mobile apps, social media, crypto-currency and now AI.

Like the other trends we'll need for the marketing to die down and see what is actually real and useful. Once we hit that point the money is gone, no more crazy funding. It will also be interesting to see if we get helpful products that makes our lives better or if it's going to be damaging as we've seen with social media or relegated to the backrooms, like crypto-currency.

None of the technologies we've seen trending like this is good or bad on their own, but social media has been completely misused and rather than providing value and promoting human interaction it's used to track us and sell us stuff we don't need. Crypto-currency was, in hindsight, never going to be something that could be promoted to the average user, but is really useful as a backend technology. The current generation of LLMs have the possibility of been incredibly harmful, or extremely useful, but they aren't products in their own right.

Regarding the marketing hype, I think this video from der8auer at CompuTex was funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45CvTHmt_dI basically the AI label is just slapped on EVERY THING.

trustno2• 2 years ago

Huh, didn't they JUST shoved it to people's faces with that thing that saves everything you do forever?

Incipient• 2 years ago

Copilot GPTs created by customers will be deleted.

For a technology that's arguably going to be very core to a lot of businesses down the road, vendor lock-in looks to be an unmitigable risk.

rwmj• 2 years ago

You can run (and even fine tune) good enough LLMs locally on hardware which for a business is very modestly priced, so the risk looks easy to mitigate.

qsln• 2 years ago

What if LLM and sLLM are just the beginning, and what lies ahead will be a breakthrough on the scale of the steam engine? And it will drive the entire global economy up. Do you think the guys selling horses, in the early 20th century, thought that Ford's cars would be accepted or become widespread ^^?

djtango2• 2 years ago

Truth be told, I feel like we're hitting some diminishing returns on information automation. Most the low hanging fruit is probably done now.

With ageing demographics and increased education around the world, I think the next major productivity gains will be in robotics - replacing all the manual labour and care giving that needs doing in one way or another.

LLMs may be a stepping stone in that journey but hardware cycles don't move like software and hardware adoption is slow and painful. This is part of the reason why VC doesn't like hardware but loves software

benfortuna• 2 years ago

I think it's very difficult to predict even the near future with so many changes happening at once.

Consider even the previous excitement around the metaverse, that seemed to fizzle due to lack of content. Well now presumably generative AI can (soon) create all the 3D content you like, which could open many new possibilities.

steve1977• 2 years ago

But robotics certainly will require more intelligence and better software. I had a Roomba for a while and that thing was just to dumb to be actually usable.

amai• 2 years ago

Why should Microsoft build an Apple Intelligence empire?

Microsoft's Nadella is building an AI empire

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