I thought the point was to generate investment money, not value
The article boils down to “it doesn’t make sense to try to focus on Artificial General Intelligence” and they need to focus on the ones that they have.
Clickbait/fake tittle
I’ve said it before, all ceos could be replaced by mascots and it would have no negative effect on the productive capabilities of our society. On the contrary things might actually improve for once in my life
They could certainly be replaced by the LLMs they’ve dumped billions into. A large chunk of middle management too.
Companies need a well paid fall guy so they can demonstrate the illusion of solving the major problem by letting them retire.
you’ve left out the most important part: the CEO can make decisions that harm the company but benefit the other higher-ups (e.g. signing a moronic contract with a subcontractor owned by them), and then when they’ve done that enough that they can’t justify keeping them as CEO any longer they can kick them off with a massive golden parachute that gets portioned out to the same higher-ups, then they can repeat the whole thing to keep sucking the corporation dry like a disgusting mosquito.
“Machines were the weapons deployed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor”
Welcome to the trough of disillusionment.
here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value
it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant
judging by the “more top stories” on Futurism’s home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:
Trump White House Tells Elon He’s Stepped Over the Line
Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value
Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws
here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella
there’s a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:
Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we’re going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.
right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new “breakthroughs” that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just “regular” access journalism, it’s hard to say.
around 15 minutes in, the host asks:
You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it’ll be 10x that. You’ll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate… we’re doing with all that intelligence?
Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?
and Nadella responds:
Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it’s a great question because at some level, if you’re going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft’s sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there’s only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let’s first see if, let’s say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it’s zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I’m not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker, right? So it’s not just, it can’t just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that’s the thing, right?
I think there’s a lot of people are writing about it. I’m glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.
When that happens, We’ll be fine as an industry. But that’s, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.
that word salad is a lot of things, but I don’t think it lives up to the “generating basically no value” hype that Futurism tried to give it.
also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition…which is of course for an AI product:
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did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the “SEAL team”?
Damn, you did the legwork. Thank you for the added context!
Aren’t they the guys who used to make that trash operating system? Weird that they are still around.
I assume they thought they would get more personal information from people when they ALREADY STOLE IT ALL IN THE FIEST PLACE.
Glad to see these companies realizing they are wasting money on this mostly useless trash
Lol seriously. The personal info scams have to be hitting some kind of ceiling by now, like with these diminishing returns what else could they possibly want that can translate into profit at this point?
I’m thinking they were hoping that people would jump on it so hard they would rely on AI to make decisions and tell them what to do, but Microsoft would hold the keys to what information the AI put out.
Generally, though, when you force things down people’s throats and they don’t want it or want to use it, you’re in for a bad time. I personally go out of my way not to use AI; there are tons of articles and talks out there about how it stifles critical thinking and research. That, coupled with how early it is and how they tried to put it in EVERYTHING, put a bad taste in my mouth just like Y2K many moons ago.
Its just wrong too often, I use it when all else fails or if im really lazy on basic basic stuff like editing a template sometimes feels easier to answer questions vs clicking through
I don’t use it because I don’t trust it to be accurate. Also I am old enough to remember y2k fellow old man.
I don’t know that the story backs up the hed. Nadella’s quotes are your stereotypical shots at shareholders of “hey, if you bought into the hype, that’s your problem, not ours.”
The story is also not saying that AI generates no value, just that it’s not generating revolutionary change-the-world new-Industrial-Revolution levels of value.
But that’s exactly what Microsoft promised its shareholders and why they invested billions into it. They need world changing revenue to make it worthwhile.
Exactly. And that’s why people are misunderstanding the sentiment. Its not that AI doesn’t have value, its that it doesn’t have revenue. They want more return on investment before investing more.
I can criticize Microsoft all day, but that logic in itself isn’t bad business. Of course the counter argument is they have the money to float the difference until they turn a profit. But I’m not in the habit of saying how other people should spend their money.
They’re reaping what they sowed in zero-interest-rate days. Can’t really generate revenue when your user base is used to everything being free.
im doubtful these things could turn a profit if their price started to reflect their resource cost. has anyone actually come up with an application of AI so revolutionary that people wouldn’t happily abandon if it cost like $300/mo to use?
Sounds about right.
why do you think theyre investing into it so heavily?
Well I run it locally for free so it certainly isn’t making them money. Mostly use it for talking to management and customers.
