Technology

So...he has something USELESS and he wants everybody to FIND a use for it before HE goes broke?

I'll get right on it.

You already don't have social permission to do what you are doing, and that hasn't stopped you. The world is bigger than the 10 people around your board's table.

How can you lose social permission that you never had in the first place?

Literally burning the planet with power demand from data centers but not even knowing what it could possibly be good for?

That's eco-terrorism for lack of a better word.

Fuck you.

"Microsoft thinks it has social permission to burn the planet for profit" is all I'm hearing.

The whole point of "AI" is to take humans OUT of the equation, so the rich don't have to employ us and pay us. Why would we want to be a part of THAT?

AI data centers are also sucking up all the high quality GDDR5 ram on the market, making everything that relies on that ram ridiculously expensive. I can't wait for this fad to be over.

I hope all parties responsible for this garbage, including Microsoft will pay a huge price in the end. Fuck all these morons.

Stop shilling for these corporate assholes or you will own nothing and will be forced to be happy.

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining <- They're here
• Depression
• Acceptance

The oligarch class is again showing why we need to upset their cart.

Social permission? I dont remember that we had a vote or something on this bullshit.

As far as I can tell there hasn't been any tangible reward in terms of pay increase, promotion or external recruitment from using the cognitive amplifier.

Just make copilot it's own program that is uninstallable, remove it from everywhere else in the OS, and let it be. People who want it will use it, people who don't want it won't. Nobody would be pissed at Microsoft over AI if that is what they had done from the start.

Translation: Microslop's executives are finally starting to realize that they fucked up.

you never had it to begin with. Goddamn leeches.

I work in AI and the only obvious profit is the ability to fire workers. Which they need to rehire after some months, but lowering wages. It is indeed a powerful tool, but tools are not driving profits. They are a cost. Unless you run a disinformation botnet, scamming websites, or porn. It is too unpredictable to really automatize software creation ( fuzzy is the term, we somehow mitigate with stochastic approach ). Probably movie industry is also cutting costs, but not sure.

AI is the way capital is trying to acquire skills cutting off the skilled.

Have to say though that having an interfacd that understands natural language opens so many possibilities. Which could really democratize access to tech, but they are so niche that they would never really drive profit.

"bend the productivity curve" is such a beautiful way to say that they are running out of ideas on how to sell that damn thing.

It basically went from :

• it's going to change EVERYTHING! Humanity as we know it is a thing of the past!

... to "bend the productivity curve". It's not how it "radically increase productivity" no it's a lot more subtle than that, to the point that it can actually bend that curve down. What a shit show.

AI industry needs to encourage job seekers to pick up AI skills (undefined), in the same way people master Excel to make themselves more employable.

Has anyone in the last 15 years willingly learned excel? It seems like one of those things you have to learn on the job as your boomer managers insist on using it.

Delusional, created a solution to a problem that doesn't exist to usurp the power away from citizens and concentrate it in the minority.

This is the opposite of the information revolution. This is the information capture. It will be sold back to the people it was taken from while being distorted by special interests.

Isn't there plenty of research it's the opposite of a cognitive amplifier, people get cognitively lazy using ai.

AI isn't at all reliable.

Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it's just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.

(This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)

Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it's just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn't try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting one kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it's in practice not a beach anymore.

You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you're just back to having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure since problems can pop-up anywere, take and form and, worse, unlike a human the AI work is not consistent so errors are unpredictable, plus the AI will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. how increase experience means you learn to do little things to make your work and even the work of others easier).

This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, "not very bad" includes things like "not significantly damage client relations" which is much broader than merely "not be life threathening", which is why, for example, Lawyers using AI to produce legal documents are getting into trouble as the AI quotes made up precedents), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset and if the AI fails to spot it, it's alright and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn't there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it and an AI alert just results in a human checking it, or scientific research were one tries to find unknown relations in massive datasets)

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn't really seem to be any area were MS' core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this "AI everywhere" strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

That's not how technology is supposed to work.

Take away:

1. MS is well aware AI is useless.
2. Nadella admits they invested G$ in something without having the slightest clue what its use-cas would be ("something something rEpLaCe HuMaNs")
3. Nadella is blissfully unaware of the "social" image MS already has in the eye of the public. You don't have our social permission to still live as a company!

AI can absolutely be useful. But it’s been wildly oversold and the actual beneficial use cases are not nearly as profitable as the marketing around it

I will try to have a balanced take here:

The positives:

• there are some uses for this "AI"
• like an IDE it can help speed up the process of development especially for menial tasks that are important such as unit test coverage.
• it can be useful to reword things to match the corpo slang that will make you puke if you need to use it.
• it is useful as a sort of better google, like for things that are documented but reading the documentation makes your head hurt so you can ask it to dumb it down to get the core concept and go from there

The negatives

• the positives don't justify the environmental externalities of all these AI companies
• the positives don't justify the pc hardware/silicone price hikes
• shoehorning this into everything is capital R retarded.
• AI is a fucking bubble keeping the Us economy inflated instead of letting it crash like it should have a while ago
• other than a paid product like copilot there is simply very little commercially viable use-case for all this public cloud infrastructure other than targeting with you more ads, that you can't block because it's in the text output of it.

Overall I wish the AI bubble burst already

Eeh didn't you pay attention in economy 101? If you generate more supply than demand that's a you problem. The free market will take care.

Best use for AI is CEO replacement

Textbook definition of a solution searching for a problem.

Honestly, this is the most reasonable take I have heard from tech bros on ai so far... Use it for something useful and stop using it for garbage!

Ai has a million great uses that could make so many things so much easier, but instead we are building AI to undress women on twitter

Did they ever have social permission in the first place?

Its a admission that it isn't doing anything useful.

So you admit it. You admit AI isn't useful.

"A great commander secures his victory before entering into battle. A poor commander first rushes into battle, then searches for victory."

~Sun Tzu, The Art of War