[HN Gopher] Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analys...
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Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
Author : suraci
Score : 281 points
Date : 2025-02-24 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| bob1029 wrote:
| > a couple of hundred megawatts.
|
| So, something approximating an entire region or 10~100k H100s.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Not surprised. You need massive amounts of compute for training
| LLMs from scratch, but practical uses of LLMs are increasingly
| focused on using existing models with minimal or no tweaks, which
| requires far less computing power.
| belter wrote:
| I would like to note Bloomberg pulls these types of FUD before
| every NVDA earnings release. The last one they did was the
| false reports on Blackwell technical issues.
|
| They have been doing it for years
|
| "Bloomberg fined EUR5m over report of fake news release" -
| https://www.ft.com/content/32013b6a-202f-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7...
|
| "Supermicro Statement on Bloomberg's Claims" -
| https://www.supermicro.com/en/pressreleases/supermicro-state...
|
| After Bloomberg reported a subpoena was sent to Nvidia and
| other unnamed technology companies...
|
| "Nvidia Denies It Was Subpoenaed In Justice Department
| Antitrust Probe" -
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/09/04/nvi...
| suraci wrote:
| This is indeed worth noting.
|
| Bloomberg seems to be a player in the market, or at least it
| is affected by players in the market.
|
| It always publishes news in good rhythm with the market.
|
| this article is just a reference, still need to wait for
| Microsoft's announcement
| isoprophlex wrote:
| so, historically speaking, who should i short? ;)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Unless you learn of a Bloomberg article before it goes
| out, you shouldn't.
| suraci wrote:
| when there's a scam, don't be scammed
| kjw wrote:
| Completely agree with you re: Bloomberg's somewhat shady
| history of reporting. However, in this case, the article is
| citing a research note written by TD Cowen equity research
| analysts.
|
| For example, here's another article from MarketWatch citing
| this same research note --
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-research-note-thats-
| ra...
|
| Leads me to lend more credence to the news even though OP is
| linking Bloomberg.
| intended wrote:
| I've worked in equity research, and an accusation of FUD is
| an accusation of intentionally malign behavior.
|
| Getting reporting wrong is not the same as FUD.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| When you double down on the incorrect reporting instead of
| retracting or correcting it, as Bloomberg did with their
| ludicrous spy chip story, it becomes FUD regardless of your
| initial intent.
| intended wrote:
| To what purpose? Enron spread FUD to further its goals.
|
| We can INVENT goals here, to FIT the conclusion we have
| already reached - that Bloomberg is spreading FUD.
|
| But this is because we have already concluded, and are
| now finding things to fit our conclusion.
| belter wrote:
| "Years later, Bloomberg doubles down on disputed Supermicro
| supply chain hack story" -
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/years-later-
| bloom...
| intended wrote:
| Sorry I forgot.
|
| Yes, this is absolutely FUD.
|
| This is the insistence to spread FUD for ... some
| uncertain aim.
|
| Perhaps it hitting all these various firms, in order to
| leverage their strong reputation, to cause the price to
| drop, allowing someone - perhaps Bloomberg himself, to
| make a profit off of it.
|
| No no, I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist now. But
| my eyes were opened by the sharing of the story.
|
| The fact that FT, WSJ, Fox or a million other sites
| haven't latched onto this obvious scheme, is heinous, and
| once again a sign of our completely captured media.
| bayesianbot wrote:
| https://archive.is/dWo55
| drexlspivey wrote:
| I guess Satya is not good for his $80B (for project Stargate) any
| more.
| fny wrote:
| He is: this refers to spending Microsoft had planned on its own
| outside of Stargate. It says so in the article.
| skywhopper wrote:
| In other words "Stargate" is itself a lie: no new spending,
| just a political repackaging of existing plans.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That's nothing new, politicians lie all the time.
|
| Everyone's response when a politician announcing some
| supposed massive spending program should be to say "show me
| the appropriation bill and receipts, then we can talk."
| shigawire wrote:
| Appropriation bills don't go as far as they used to
| anymore as well...
| fny wrote:
| Microsoft has committed $100B to Stargate. These cuts are
| meaningless by comparison.
| laserbeam wrote:
| I've read the first 2 paragraphs 5 times and I still can't tell
| if Microsoft was renting datacenters and paying for them, or if
| Microsoft was leasing out datacenters and decided "no more AI
| data centers for you, 3rd parties".
|
| And digging further into the article didn't help either.
| walrus01 wrote:
| The first one, they were acquiring datacenter space.
| ffjffsfr wrote:
| key piece of info at the end, looks like they are leaving the
| spending on datacenter to OpenAI
|
| > Microsoft's alliance with OpenAI may also be evolving in ways
| that mean the software giant won't need the same kind of
| investments. In January, OpenAI and SoftBank Group Corp.
| announced a joint venture to spend at least $100 billion and
| perhaps $500 billion on data centers and other AI infrastructure.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| In a recent Dwarkesh podcast this week Nadella was just
| commenting on how they expected to benefit from reduced DC rental
| pricing and were preparing for Jevon's paradox to max out
| capacity. I guess they are calculating a ceiling now.
| zkmon wrote:
| The hype starts to head down towards reality.
| smetj wrote:
| No it's one level deeper. The exclusive claim to the "hype" is
| heading down towards reality.
| fny wrote:
| Here's the TD Cowen research note:
|
| https://www.threads.net/@firerock31/post/DGbK1VkyKlp/in-late...
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Meanwhile: "Apple Says It Will Add 20k Jobs, Spend $500B, Produce
| AI Servers in US"
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/apple-say...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158168
| numbsafari wrote:
| This has nothing to do with supply/demand, and everything to do
| with geopolitics.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| You think they would spend 500B without thinking there will
| be any demand?
| rsynnott wrote:
| You're missing the key phrase. "Says it will". Companies,
| of course, say all sorts of things. Sometimes, those things
| come to pass. But not really all that often.
| dboreham wrote:
| The 500B is just something to put on a press release.
| sangnoir wrote:
| It cost Apple $0 to _say_ they 'll spend $500B.
| turnsout wrote:
| If Apple can pull off "Siri with context," it will completely
| annihilate Microsoft's first mover advantage. They'll be left
| with a large investment in a zero-margin commodity (OpenAI).
| asadhaider wrote:
| Unfortunately Siri remains near useless at times even with
| Apple Intelligence(tm)(r)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| The "LLM Siri" hasn't been rolled out even in beta,
| estimates reckon 2026
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/21/apple-llm-siri-2026
| joshstrange wrote:
| Correct, Apple changing the UI before changing the
| backend might be one of the more stupid things I've ever
| seen.
| drowntoge wrote:
| The messiest launch ever. The renewed UI makes it easy to
| assume that the LLM-backed Siri is already here but just
| isn't much better than the old one. A marketing disaster.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yes, although before full "LLM Siri," Apple promised an
| "enhanced" Siri with contextual understanding in iOS 18.
| The clock is ticking though--WWDC will be here before you
| know it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Just like all the other voice assistants.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here
|
| Microsoft has all the context in the world just waiting for
| exploitation: Microsoft Graph data, Teams transcripts and
| recordings, Office data, Exchange data, Recall data(?), while
| not context per se even the XBox gaming data
| svnt wrote:
| I'm sorry but what are you saying.
|
| How are any of these unique competitive advantages over
| iCloud, App Store, Safari, and just generally more locked-
| in high margin mobile platform users than anyone?
| michaelt wrote:
| If the money is in providing AI to businesses, to do
| things humans were previously paid to do - then Microsoft
| would be in a much better position than Apple, because
| they already have a big foothold whereas Apple has never
| really targeted business use.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here
|
| I'm sure MS will provide AI to business, but if Apple get
| things right, they'll be the biggest provider of AI to the
| masses.
|
| With a Siri that knows your email, calendar, location,
| history, search history, ability to get data from and do
| things in 3rd party Apps (with App Intents) and if it runs
| on your phone for security, it could be used by billions of
| consumers, not a few hundred million MS office users.
|
| What was that restaurant I went to with Joan last fall?
| Send linkedin requests to all the people I've had emails
| from company X.
|
| Of course they could take too long or screw things up.
| tallanvor wrote:
| I wouldn't be sure about that.
|
| Siri's success would greatly depend on app developers
| adopting intents. The major players are going to be
| hesitant to give Apple that much access to data - the EU
| may help push them that way, but even still, Microsoft,
| Google, Facebook, and others want their AIs to be the one
| people use.
|
| Siri is also limited to Apple products, and while lots of
| people have iPhones, many of them still have a PC, where
| Siri doesn't work.
|
| Companies are also very concerned about employees
| accidentally or purposefully exfiltrating data via AI
| usage. Microsoft is working hard to build in guardrails
| there and Intune allows companies to block Siri intents,
| so Apple would have to do a lot to reassure corporate
| customers how they'll prevent Siri from sending data to a
| search engine or such.
|
| But you might be right. I think it's way too early to
| tell, and that's why so much money is being poured into
| this. All the major players feel that they can't afford
| to wait on this.
| turnsout wrote:
| A lot of developers have already adopted intents to
| support Shortcuts and existing Siri. There will be
| tremendous business pressure to be able to fit into a
| request like "Get me a car to my next appointment"
| rs186 wrote:
| If history is our guide, that's never going to happen.
| qgin wrote:
| A few things from the Dwarkesh interview with Satya:
|
| * He sees data center leases getting cheaper in near future due
| to everyone building
|
| * He's investing big in AI, but in every year there needs to be a
| rough balance between capacity and need for capacity
|
| * He doesn't necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet)
|
| * Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness
| will slow implementation
|
| * It won't be a winner-take-all market and there will be plenty
| of time to scale up capacity and still be a major player
| djtango wrote:
| > Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness
| will slow implementation
|
| Five years ago during covid all these clunky legacy businesses
| couldn't figure out a CSV let alone APIs but suddenly with AGI
| they are going to become tech masters and know how to automate
| and processize their entire operations?
|
| I found it very amusing that at the turn of the decade
| "digitalisation" was a buzzword as Amazon was approaching its
| 25th anniversary.
|
| Meanwhile huge orgs like the NHS run on fax and was crippled by
| excel row limits. Software made a very slow dent in these old
| important slow moving orgs. AI might speed up the transition
| but I don't see it happening overnight. Maybe 5 years if we
| pretend smartphone adoption is indicative of AGI and humanoid
| robot rollout
| qwertox wrote:
| > Meanwhile huge orgs like the NHS run on fax
|
| I thought this was a German-only thing?
| ta1243 wrote:
| Not convinced.
|
| In 2018:
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/news/health-and-social-care-
| se...
|
| > Matt Hancock has banned the NHS from buying fax machines
| and has ordered a complete phase-out by April 2020.
|
| The NHS is quite federated. Hell many parts of it are
| independent companies. Some trusts have decent modern
| systems though - I had to go for a test just before
| christmas - I'd phoned up my GP in the morning got an
| appointment for half an hour later, he ordered a test, said
| go to one of these 8 centres, so I went to one about half
| an hour away (I live a fair way away from a major town).
| Had the test, by the time I'd had lunch and driven back
| home I had another call from the GP asking me to come in
| that evening, the appointment was created by the GP and
| read seconds later at the hospital, the test was done there
| and results reported back again at the click of a system at
| the GP.
|
| But that's just my local trust. Go 10 miles west and it's
| another trust and they have different systems. And I had to
| go to one of the test centres in the trust, I couldn't go
| to one in a neighbouring trust as they have different
| systems and there's no/limited interconnects.
| ghaff wrote:
| The healthcare system I largely use in the US was bought up
| by another larger system. They are now primarily on an
| electronic system (which for me is welcome) but some of the
| offices still use faxes as well.
| dboreham wrote:
| I had a stint in healthcare software and can confirm the
| fax thing is real. That said, I had a hunch it's all
| cloud-hosted fax sending systems delivering to cloud-
| hosted fax-to-pdf systems. I challenged by colleagues to
| show me an actual fax machine and never had any takers.
| qgin wrote:
| I think you don't have widespread adoption until AI takes the
| form of a plug-and-play "remote employee".
|
| You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire "Bob" who
| joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee,
| interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can
| use all your software in whatever state it's currently in.
|
| It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world
| is brownfield.
| lazide wrote:
| Hah, that isn't a brownfield solution.
|
| These orgs could hire someone who could solve these issues
| right now (and for the last decade) if they would allow
| those people to exist in their org.
|
| The challenge is precisely that those people (or people
| with that capability) aren't allowed to exist.
| dnissley wrote:
| "Bob" in this example is just some other random
| individual contributor, not some master of the universe.
| E.g. they would have the title "associate procurement
| specialist @ NHS" and join and interact on zoom calls
| with other people with that title in order to do that
| specific job.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Right, but these jobs are inefficient mostly because of
| checks and balances. So unless you have a bunch of AIs
| checking one another's work (and I'm not sure I can see
| that getting signed off) doesn't it just move the problem
| slightly along the road?
|
| There's an argument here something like.. if you can
| replace each role with an AI, you can replace multiple
| with a single AI, why not replace the structure with a
| single person?
|
| And the answer is typically that someone has deemed it
| significant and necessary that decision-making in this
| scenario be distributed.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > those people (or people with that capability) aren't
| allowed to exist
|
| I'm not sure what personal characteristics or
| capabilities you're referring to, FWIW.
| jajko wrote:
| Completely unusable in any bank, or almost any organization
| dealing with data secrecy. You have complex, often
| mandatory processes to onboard folks. Sure, these can be
| improved but hiring some 'Bob' would be far from smooth
| sailing.
|
| Big enough corps will eventually have their own trusted
| 'Bobs' just like they have their own massive cluster farms
| (no, AWS et al is not a panacea and its far from cheap&good
| solution).
|
| Giving any form of access to some remote code into internal
| network of a company? Opsec guys would never ack that,
| there is and always will be malice coming from potentially
| all angles.
| kyle_grove wrote:
| Honestly, I think the mode that will actually occur is that
| incumbent businesses never successfully adopt AI, but are
| just outcompeted by their AI-native competitors.
| djtango wrote:
| Yes this is exactly how I see it happening - just like
| how Amazon and Google were computer-native companies
| joquarky wrote:
| And Sears had all the opportunity to be Amazon
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Sears also did everything it could to annihilate itself
| while dot-com was happening.
|
| their CEO was a believer of making his departments
| compete for resources leading to a brutal, dysfunctional
| clusterfuck. rent seeking behavior on the inside as well
| as outside.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _I think you don't have widespread adoption until AI
| takes the form of a plug-and-play "remote employee"._
|
| Exactly. The problem with the AGI-changes-everything
| argument is that it indirectly requires "plug-and-play"
| quality AGI to happen _before / at the same time_ as
| specialized AGI. (Otherwise, specialized AGI will be
| adopted first)
|
| I can't think of a single instance in which a polished,
| fully-integrated-with-everything version of a new
| technology has existed _before_ a capable but specialized
| one.
|
| E.g. computers, cell phones, etc.
|
| And if anyone points at the "G" and says "That means we
| aren't talking about specialized in any way," then you
| start seeing the technological unlikeliness of the dominoes
| falling as they'd need to for AGI fast ramp.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| In fact most of the industries out there are still slow and
| inefficient. Some physicians only accept phone calls for
| making appointments. Many primary schools only take phone
| calls and an email could go either way just not their way.
|
| It's just we programmers who want to automate everything.
| graemep wrote:
| Given how bad some of the apps and websites are I am not
| sure phone calls are any worse! They are also less prone to
| data breaches and the like.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| " only takes phone calls for appointments" is a huge
| selling point for a physicians office. People are very
| tired of apps.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| I'd far prefer a well done app. It's so frustrating doing
| a back and forth of dates when trying to make an
| appointment.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah maybe we programmers should start doing that too.
| Why do we use Teams, Slack or even emails?
|
| We should submit our code to a mainframe and everyone is
| going to improve their skills too.
| dboreham wrote:
| On punched cards.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Today I spent 55 minutes in a physical store trying to get
| a replacement for two Hue pendant lights that stopped
| working. The lights had been handed in a month ago and
| diagnosed as "can't be repaired" two weeks ago. All my
| waiting time today was spent watching different employees
| punching a ridiculous amount of keys on their keyboards,
| and having to get manual approval from a supervisor (in
| person) three times. I am now successfully able to wait 2-6
| weeks for the replacement lights to arrive, maybe.
|
| When people say AI is going to put people out of work, I
| always laugh. The people I interacted with today could have
| been put out of work by a well-formulated shell script 20
| years ago.
| mattlondon wrote:
| But why are these sort of orgs slow and useless? I don't
| think it is because they have made a conscious decision to do
| so - I think it is more than they do not have the resources
| to do anything else. They can't afford to hire in huge teams
| of engineers and product managers and researchers to
| modernize their systems.
|
| If suddenly the NHS had a team of "free" genuinely phd-level
| AGI engineers working 24/7 they'd make a bunch of progress on
| the low-hanging fruit and modernize and fix a whole bunch of
| stuff pretty rapidly I expect.
|
| Of course the devil here is the requirements and integrations
| (human and otherwise). AGI engineers might be able to churn
| out fantastic code (some day at least), but we still need to
| work out the requirements and someone still needs to make
| decisions on how things are done. Decision making is often
| the worst/slowest thing in large orgs (especially public
| sector).
| djtango wrote:
| IMO it comes from inertia. People at the top are not
| digital-native. And they're definitely not AI-native.
|
| So you're retrofitting a solution onto a legacy org. No one
| will have the will to go far enough fast enough. And if
| they didn't have the resources to engineer all these
| software migrations who will help them lead all these AI
| migrations?
|
| Are they going to go hands off the wheels? Who is going to
| debug the inevitable fires in the black box that has now
| replaced all the humans?
| ghaff wrote:
| And many of the users/consumers are not digital-native
| either. My dad is not going to go to a website to make
| appointments or otherwise interact with the healthcare
| system.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| It's not a resource problem; everyone inside the system has
| no real incentive to do anything innovative; improving
| something incrementally is more likely to be seen as extra
| work by your colleagues and be detrimental to the person
| who implemented it.
|
| What's more likely is a significantly better system is
| introduced somewhere, NHS can't keep up and is rebuilt by
| an external. (Or more likely it becomes a inferior system
| of a lesser nation as the UK continues its decline).
| qgin wrote:
| I think this is where the AGI employee succeeds where
| other automation doesn't. The AGI employee doesn't
| require the organization to change. It's an agent that
| functions like a regular employee in the same exact
| system with all of its inefficiencies, except that it can
| do way more inefficient work for a fraction of the cost
| of a human.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Assuming we get to AGI and companies are willing to
| employ them in lieu of a human employee, why would they
| stop at only replacing small pieces of the org rather
| than replacing it entirely with AGI?
|
| AGI, by most definitions at least, would be better than
| most people at most things. Especially if you take
| OpenAI's definition, which boils it down only to economic
| value, a company would seemingly always be better off
| replacing everything with AGI.
|
| Maybe more likely. AGI would just create superior
| businesses from scratch and put human companies out if
| business.
| sevensor wrote:
| This is a huge selling point, and it will really
| differentiate the orgs that adopt it from those who
| don't. Eventually the whole organization will become as
| inscrutable as the agents that operate it. From the
| executive point of view this is indistinguishable from
| having human knowledge workers. It's going to be
| interesting to see what happens to an organization like
| that when it faces disruptive threats that require rapid
| changes to its operating model. Many human orgs fall
| apart faced by this kind of challenge. How will an extra
| jumbo pattern matcher do?
| mplewis wrote:
| What you are describing is science fiction and is not
| worthy of serious discussion.
| Delphiza wrote:
| As a first order of business, a sufficiently advanced AGI
| would recommend that we stop restructuring and changing to a
| new ERP every time an acquisition is made or the CFO changes,
| and to stop allowing everyone to have their own version of
| the truth in excel.
|
| As long as we have complex manual processes that even the
| people following them can barely remember the reason why they
| exist, we will never be able to get AI to smooth it over. It
| is horrendously difficult for real people to figure out what
| to put in a TPS report. The systems that you refer to need to
| be engineered out or organisations first. You don't need AI
| for that, but getting rid of millions of excel files is
| needed before AI can work.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I dont know that getting rid of those wacky Excel sheets is
| a prerequisite to having AI work. We already have people
| like Automation Anywhere watching people hand carve their
| TPS reports so that they can be recreated mechanistically.
| Its a short step from feeding the steps to a task runner to
| feeding them to the AI agent.
|
| Paradigm shifts in the technology do not generally occur
| simultaneously with changes in how we organize the work to
| be done. It takes a few years before the new paradigm backs
| into the workflow and changes it. Lift and shift was the
| path for several years before cloud native became a thing,
| for example. People used iPhone to call taxi companies,
| etc.
|
| It would be a shame to not take the opportunity to tear
| down some old processes, but, equally, sometimes
| Chesterton's fence is there for good reason.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Counterpoint: the PC.
|
| The minicomputer revolution was meant to replace all the big
| iron in the basement with computers shared by teams. This
| lasted a decade until we got computers meant for one person
| and we've used that format of computation for nearly 50 years
| now.
|
| Everyone is talking about how AI will replace people.
|
| It won't.
|
| AI without HI is useless. However, HI with AI is much better
| at handling all the bullshit office work that needs to get
| done--anyone who doesn't understand this is either an idiot,
| a troglodyte, or already has an expendable army of minions
| doing their work.
|
| The surge in AI demand won't be top-down but bottom-up. That
| stupid office birthday wish card being passed around? I can
| Shakespeare the motherfucker. And that email to the big boss
| telling him the project is doomed and that he needs a compass
| to find his own ass? Let's ask R1.
|
| >My boss is a moron who can't find his ass without a compass.
| His latest tech initiative will cost us millions and make the
| best staff leave. Write a professional letter that covers
| those points without being harsh.
|
| ---
|
| Subject: Request for Review of Upcoming [Tech Initiative]
|
| Dear [Recipient Name/Team Name],
|
| I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to share some
| thoughts regarding our upcoming [Tech Initiative Name], as I
| believe open dialogue will ensure its success while aligning
| with our team's strengths and long-term goals.
|
| While the initiative's intent to innovate is commendable,
| I've observed several potential challenges that may impact
| its effectiveness:
|
| Financial Impact: Based on preliminary analysis, the
| projected costs appear to be significantly higher than
| initially estimated. A detailed cost-benefit review or phased
| rollout might help mitigate financial risk while allowing us
| to test feasibility.
|
| Team Retention Concerns: Many of our top performers have
| expressed reservations about the initiative's current
| structure, particularly around [specific pain point, e.g.,
| workflow disruption, lack of clarity]. Retaining their
| expertise will be critical to execution, and their insights
| could refine the plan to better address on-the-ground needs.
|
| To ensure alignment with both our strategic objectives and
| team capacity, I respectfully suggest:
|
| Conducting a collaborative risk assessment with department
| leads.
|
| Piloting the initiative in a controlled environment to gather
| feedback.
|
| Hosting a forum for staff to voice concerns/solutions pre-
| launch.
|
| I'm confident that with adjustments, this project can achieve
| its goals while preserving morale and resources. Thank you
| for considering this perspective--I'm eager to support any
| steps toward a sustainable path forward.
|
| Best regards,
| nrclark wrote:
| To be honest, that kind of sounds like a dystopian hell:
| chatGPT writing memos because we can't be arsed, and the
| reading the same memos because neither can the recipient.
| Why even bother with it?
| llm_trw wrote:
| It is heaven.
|
| With a well working rag system you can find the reason
| why any decision was made so long as it was documented at
| some point somewhere. The old share point drives with a
| billion unstructured word documents starting from the
| 1990s is now an asset.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Is this the transcript of the interview (podcast) with
| Dwarkesh?
|
| https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella
|
| Because if so,
|
| > He doesn't necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet)
|
| the term "fast takeoff AGI" does not appear in the transcript.
| qgin wrote:
| Some paraphrasing on my part, but what he does say is at odds
| with fast takeoff AGI. He describes AI as a tool that
| gradually changes human work at a speed that humans adapt to
| over time.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is a very refreshing take.
|
| Our current intellectual milieu is largely incapable of nuance
| --everything is black or white, on or off, good or evil. Too
| many people believe that the AI question is as bipolar as every
| other topic is today: Will AI be godlike or will it be
| worthless? Will it be a force for absolute good or a force for
| absolute evil?
|
| It's nice to see someone in the inner circles of the hype
| finally acknowledge that AI, like just about everything else,
| will almost certainly not exist at the extremes. Neither God
| nor Satan, neither omnipotent nor worthless: useful but not
| humanity's final apotheosis.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > human messiness will slow implementation
|
| If by "messiness" he means "the general public having massive
| problems with a technology that makes the human experience both
| philosophically meaningless and economically worthless", then
| yeah, I could absolutely see that slowing implementation.
| adverbly wrote:
| > * He doesn't necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just
| yet)
|
| This is so based... I would probably have given slow take off a
| 1% chance of happening 10 years ago, but today I'd put that
| somewhere like 30%.
| mikesurowiec wrote:
| I expect data centers will become more expensive precisely
| because everyone is building at the same time. Supply chain
| crunch
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Temporary. During their operating and depreciating long tail
| phase the over supply will drive down costs for users. Like
| fiber cables.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| _Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value_ -
| https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value
|
| Bit of a click bait title, but it certainly seems like the
| realization is setting in that the hype has exceeded near term
| realistic expectations and some are walking back claims (for
| whatever reason; honesty, derisking against investor securities
| suits, poor capital allocation, etc).
|
| Nadella appears to be the adult in the room, which is somewhat
| refreshing considering the broad over exuberance.
| bognition wrote:
| Time to sort NVDA?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| A fellow degenerate gambler I see. The market can remain
| irrational longer than you can remain solvent, trade with
| caution. Being early is the same as being wrong.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Highly regarded people unite :D
|
| More seriously though: unless you have privileged
| information or have done truly extensive research, do not
| short stocks. And if you do have privileged information,
| still don't short stocks because unless you have enough
| money to defend yourself against insider trading like Musk
| and it's ilk, it's not going to be worth it.
|
| It's perfectly reasonable to determine that a particular
| high growth stock is not going to perform as well going
| forward, in which case I'd shift allocation to other,
| better candidates.
|
| Generally, being long equities is a long term positive
| expected value trade. You don't have to time the market,
| just be persistent. On the other hand, as you correctly
| alluded to, shorting equities requires decently precise
| timing, both on entry and exit.
| bognition wrote:
| A common hypothesis for why Nvidia is so hot is because
| they have an effective monopoly on the hardware to train AI
| models and it requires a crap ton of hardware.
|
| With DeepSeek it's been demonstrated you can get pretty
| damn for a lot cheaper. I can only imagine that there are
| tons of investors thinking that it's better to invest their
| dollars in undercutting the costs of new models vs
| investing billions in hardware.
|
| The question is, can Nvidia maintain their grip on the
| market in the face of these pressures. If you think they
| can't, then a short position doesn't seem like that big of
| a gamble.
| rangestransform wrote:
| it's effectively a software moat wrt. GPU programming,
| there's nothing stopping AMD from catching up besides
| insufficiently deep pockets and engineering culture
| hedora wrote:
| Not sure why AMD's software side gets so much flack these
| days. For everything other than AI programming, their
| drivers range from fine to best in class.
|
| I have an AMD minipc running linux that I use for steam
| gaming, light development, etc. The kernel taint bit is
| off.
|
| There is one intel device on the pci/usb buses: wifi/bt,
| and it's the only thing with a flaky driver in the
| system. People have been complaining about my exact issue
| for something like 10 years, across multiple product
| generations.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Nobody who controls the purse strings cares about the
| kernel taint bit if their model doesn't train, if they're
| burning developer time debugging drivers, if they have to
| burn even more dev time switching off of cuda, etc.
|
| If AMD really cared about making money, they would've
| sent MI300s to all of the top CS research institutions
| for free and supported rocm on every single product.
| Investing any less than nvidia, the trillion dollar
| behemoth, is just letting big green expand their moat
| even more.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| A short position is always a gamble, because you could
| lose _more_ than everything.
| dpflan wrote:
| Using "bubble" sort? ;)
| jeyoor wrote:
| The combination of high and climbing price to earnings
| ratios for a smaller subset of tech firms, outsize retail
| investment in tech (cloaked by people buying crypto), and
| macro environment factors like high interest rates
| stimulating risky lending has me swapping this bubble
| toward the top of the list.
|
| See further: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2
| 0250123167/six...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Bubble sort is very resource-hungry...
| dijit wrote:
| I think its probably foolish to short nvidia until theres at
| least echoes of competition.
|
| AMD wants it to be them, but the reality is that the moat is
| wide.
|
| The closest for AI is Apple, but even then, I'm not certain
| its a serious competitor; especially not in the datacenter.
|
| For Gaming there's practically no worthwhile competition.
| Unreal Engine barely even fixes render bugs for Intel and AMD
| cards, and I know _this_ for fact.
|
| FD: I'm recently holding shares in nvidia due to the recent
| fluctuation, and my own belief that the moat is wider than we
| care to believe, as mentioned.
| suraci wrote:
| it's very dangerous, shorting in a market where a gamma
| squeeze can occur is extremely dangerous
|
| other markets s like Taiwan are preferable
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Nadella is looking for the world to grow at 10% due to AI
| enhancement, like it did during the industrial revolution.
|
| That seems like a low bar because it already is- it's just not
| equally distributed yet.
|
| My own productivity has grown far more than 10% thanks to AI,
| and I don't just mean in terms of dev. It reads my bloodwork
| results, speeds up my ability to repair a leak in my toilet
| tank, writes a concise "no I won't lend you money; I barely
| know you" message... you name it.
|
| Normally all of those things would take much longer and I'd get
| worse results on my own.
|
| If that's what I can do at the personal level, then surely 10%
| is an easily-achievable improvement at the enterprise level.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You should be curious _why_ Nadella is looking for the world
| to grow at that rate. That's because he wants Microsoft to
| grow into $500B /year in revenue by 2030, and it will be
| challenging without that economic growth to grow into that
| target. You can grow into a TAM, try to grow or broaden the
| TAM, or some combination of both. Without AI, it is unlikely
| the growth target can be met.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/26/microsoft-ceo-nadella-
| said-r...
| thagsF wrote:
| And Henry Ford would reply: "Who is going to buy the cars?"
|
| We have been living in a fake economy for quite some time
| where money is printed and distributed to the "tech" sector.
| Which isn't really "tech", but mostly entertainment (YouTube,
| Netflix, Facebook, ...).
|
| Growth of the economy means nothing. The money that has been
| printed goes to shareholders. What the common man gets is
| inflation and job losses.
|
| If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and reduce
| the cost of living.
| coliveira wrote:
| > If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and
| reduce the cost of living.
|
| Yes, I wonder why it is so hard for Western countries to
| understand that there's no future in a place where housing
| is more expensive than your average salary. If may look
| cool for a few years until most people have left or are
| living on the streets.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "there's no future in a place where housing is more
| expensive than your average salary."
|
| don't get me wrong, everyone want cheaper housing but not
| their house
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I for one would love it. If I have to sell housing then I
| have to buy housing, it's not a benefit to me unless I
| reduce my quality of life.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Plenty of housing. The problem is, people want cheap
| housing in places where everyone wants to live. I don't
| think that will happen any time soon.
| coliveira wrote:
| This is a non-sense that spreads because of North
| American style of housing. If you're talking about
| sprawling suburban houses then you're right. But big
| cities have provided reasonable housing for lots of
| workers for centuries. The only thing you need is to
| build more apartments in the cities that have an excess
| of job positions.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| No, you can't just "build more apartments". For these new
| inhabitants you will need more grocery stores, more
| bus/subway stops and overall transportation, more
| hospitals, more firefighters, more restaurants, more
| gyms, more tennis courts, more of everything.
| coliveira wrote:
| Of course. Big cities with all this infrastructure are
| nothing new. They existed in the past and are big in
| alive in Asia and other parts of the world. Only in North
| America we have this bizarre world where it seems like a
| strange thing to build cities and provide infrastructure
| for workers!
| hollandheese wrote:
| There is no cheap housing anywhere in the entire state of
| California. In the worst and poorest parts of the state
| where are basically no jobs or anything the housing is
| still way more expensive than anyone can afford.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| So move out of there. Plenty of cheap housing in the
| country.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| A friend tried to tell me China has a real estate crisis,
| because the value of houses is dropping due to building to
| many and people are losing on their investments. I asked
| him if he is sure cheap and available housing is a crisis.
| treis wrote:
| Everyone in the industry losing their shirts and going
| out of business is a crisis. It happened 15 years ago in
| the US and we still haven't made it back to mid 90s level
| of housing starts.
| threeseed wrote:
| Going to safely assume you've never worked at an enterprise.
|
| Because improving the productivity of every employee by 10%
| does not translate to the company being 10% more productive.
|
| Processes and systems exist precisely to slow employees down
| so that they comply with regulations, best practices etc
| rather than move fast and break things.
|
| And from experience with a few enterprise LLM projects now
| they are a waste of time. Because the money/effort to fix up
| the decades of bad source data far exceeds the ROI.
|
| You will definitely see them used in chat bots and replacing
| customer service people though.
| bbarnett wrote:
| It also gets all of these things wrong, like not paying
| attention to models of toilets and quirks for their repair,
| often speaking with an authoritative voice and deceiving you
| on the validity of its instructions.
|
| All of the things you site are available via search engines,
| or better handled with expertise so you know how much of the
| response is nonsense.
|
| Every time I use AI, it's a time waste.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Every time I contact an enterprise for support, the person
| I'm talking to gets lots of things wrong too. It takes
| skepticism on my part and some back and forth to clean up
| the mess.
|
| On balance AI gets more things wrong than the best humans
| and fewer things wrong than average humans.
| Eggpants wrote:
| AI is a lossy data compression technique at best. One can
| always tell when an AI cheerleader/ex blockchain bro has
| hitched their financial wagon to this statistic based
| word vomit grift.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Please elaborate, preferably without breaking HN
| guidelines about dismissive name-calling
| xienze wrote:
| The difference is that a human will tell you things like
| "I think", "I'm pretty sure" or "I don't know" in order
| to manage expectations. The LLM will very matter-of-
| factly tell you something that's not right at all, and if
| you correct them the LLM will go and very confidently
| rattle off another answer based on what you just said,
| whether your were telling it the truth or not. If a human
| acted that way more than a few times we'd stop asking
| them questions or at least have to do a lot of "trust but
| verify." LLMs do this over and over again and we just
| kind of shrug our shoulders and go "well they do pretty
| good overall."
| smw wrote:
| I can't count the number of times I've had a support
| person confidently tell me something that is obviously
| not applicable to my problem and makes completely flawed
| assumptions about cs/physics/networking/logic.
|
| I get a lot of correct answers from llms, but sometimes
| they make shit up. Most of the time, it's some function
| in a library that doesn't actually exist. Sometimes even
| the wrong answers are useful because they tell me where
| to look in the reference docs. Ask it to search the web
| and cite sources, makes it easier to verify the answer.
|
| I don't appreciate what's going on with AI art and AI
| generated slop, but the idea that they aren't a useful
| tool is just wild to me.
| xienze wrote:
| I'm not saying it's not useful, I'm saying that we hold
| humans giving us answers to a much higher standard than
| LLMs.
| suraci wrote:
| I think the 'grow at 10%' refers to the incremental part of
| the entire world/market.
|
| during the industrial revolution(steam/electricity/internet),
| the world was growing, there're trains, cars, netflix
|
| bussiness grown with productivity growing, even so, we lived
| through 2 world wars and dozens of economic crisis
|
| but now is very different, when you repair the tank with
| LLM's help, when the labour value of repairers is decreased,
| there's no addition value are produced
|
| there's a very simple thought experiment abt the result of
| productivity growing alone:
|
| let's assume robotics become to a extremely high level,
| everything humen work can be reduced to 1/100 with help of
| robots, what will happen next?
| ta1243 wrote:
| > let's assume robotics become to a extremely high level,
| everything humen work can be reduced to 1/100 with help of
| robots, what will happen next?
|
| We work 35 hour years instead of 35 hour weeks?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Lol, ever the optimist I see.
| tacomadome wrote:
| You're describing exactly what happened during both the
| Industrial Revolution and the advent of computer
| automation.
|
| Prior to computerization and databases, millions of people
| were required for filing, typing, and physically
| transporting messages and information. All of those jobs,
| entire fields of work were deleted by computerization.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Even "computer" was originally a job title. For a person.
| geuis wrote:
| All I hear is anecdotal statements from people claiming LLMs
| have made them some percent more productive. Yet few actually
| say how or demonstrate it.
|
| For the last year, I've tried all sorts of models both as
| hosted services and running locally with llama.cpp or ollama.
| I've used both the continue.dev vscode extension and cursor
| more recently.
|
| The results have been frustrating at best. The user interface
| of the tools is just awful. The output of any models from
| Deepseek to quen to Claude to whatever other model is
| mediocre to useless. I literally highlight some code that
| includes comments about what I need and I even include long
| explicit descriptions etc in the prompts and it's just
| unrelated garbage out every time.
|
| The most useful thing has just been ChatGPT when there's
| something I need to learn about. Rubber ducking basically.
| It's alright at very simple coding questions or asking about
| obscure database questions I might have, but beyond that it's
| useless. Gotta keep the context window short, or it starts
| going off the rails every single time.
| infecto wrote:
| Just in the past couple months there have been a number of
| "I am a senior/principal engineer and this is how I use
| LLMs". I would agree that the tools are not optimal yet but
| every iteration has improved for me.
|
| Maybe whatever language you are coding it or whatever
| project you are working on is not a good fit? It is an
| equally perplexing situation for myself when I hear
| anecdotes like yours which don't align with my experience.
| The fact that you say everything is garbage calls into
| question either how you are using the tool or something
| else.
|
| I can reliably use cursor's composer to reference a couple
| files, give a bullet list of what we are trying to do and
| point it to one of the better models and the output is
| junior engineer level or better output. When I say junior,
| I mean a junior who has experience with the codebase.
| andy24 wrote:
| What kinds of projects are you working on? My experience
| is jot very good with these tools (expanded in a sibling
| comment).
| infecto wrote:
| Generally a lot of web-dev which is where I would assume
| LLMs shine the best. I noted elsewhere but I think it
| depends a lot on the age of the product and the level of
| velocity. For early life products where the speed of your
| velocity matters, I think you can get the most benefit.
| The more mature the product and the slower the team
| implements features, the benefits are still measurable
| but not as high.
| andy24 wrote:
| Ah yeah, I can totally see how it can be useful for
| churning put tons of code. Even without copy-paste, just
| generating a ton of references and rewriting/improving
| them. Anecdotally, I've tried asking deepseek to review a
| few files of my code -- it wasn't bad at all, though not
| without false positives.
| andy24 wrote:
| I have a similar experience. Tried to use it for real work
| and got frustrated by the chat's inability to say "I don't
| know". It's okay for code snippets demonstrating how
| something can be used (stack overflow essentially), also
| code reviews can be helpful if doing something for the
| first time. But they fail to answer questions I'm
| interested in like "what's the purpose of X".
| ta1243 wrote:
| > All I hear is anecdotal statements from people claiming
| LLMs have made them some percent more productive. Yet few
| actually say how or demonstrate it.
|
| It's very difficult to measure productivity of most people,
| certainly most people in office jobs, so while you can have
| a gut feeling that you're doing better, it's no more
| measurable than pre-AI individual productivity measurement
| was
| skydhash wrote:
| It's not really about objective measurements, but
| practical applications. Like try this in the following
| manner and compare it to your previous workflow. Sensible
| advices like the ones found in The Pragmatic Programmer.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Sure, so it's always going to be annecdotal. That doesn't
| mean the benefits don't exist, just means they can't be
| objectively measured. Just like we can't objectively
| measure the output of a single knowlege worker,
| especially output on a single day
| alexvitkov wrote:
| If LLM chatbots are making you vastly more productive in a
| field, you are in the bottom 20% of that field.
|
| They're still useful tools for exploring new disciplines,
| but if you're say a programmer and you think ChatGPT or
| DeepSeek is good at programming, that's a good sign you
| need to start improving.
| agentultra wrote:
| This. I shudder to think of the hubris of a programmer
| who doesn't understand pointers prompting an AI model to
| generate low-level system code for them. Sure it might
| generate a program that appears to work. But is that
| human reading the code qualified to review it and prevent
| the model from generating subtle, non-obvious errors?
| infecto wrote:
| If you have to tell others that then perhaps some
| introspection for yourself might be helpful. Comes across
| more as denial than constructive commentary.
|
| I do believe the benefit decreases the more senior or
| familiar the work is but there is still a noticeable
| benefit and I think it largely depends on the velocity
| and life cycle of the product. I think you get less
| benefit the slower the velocity or the more mature of a
| product. To deny it like in your post is simply being an
| intellectual minimalist.
| nyeah wrote:
| I see a gap between "vastly more productive" and
| "noticeable benefit".
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| good shoes help me walk a bit faster, and for longer.
|
| they don't let me walk at the pace of a SUV.
|
| AI is like the good shoes. they help, and make many tasks
| a bit easier. but they can't make me into an SUV.
|
| and if they can, then no programmers will have jobs.
| which is the end-state of this whole LLM thing as far as
| I can tell.
| geuis wrote:
| Again, show your evidence.
|
| You make a polite but still ad hominem "attack" about me
| instead of addressing my points with demonstrations of
| evidence.
|
| Make a video or blog article actually showing how your
| use of LLMs in coding is making you more productive. Show
| what it's doing to help you that has a multiplier effect
| on your productivity.
| infecto wrote:
| I was not replying to you so I hope your comment was not
| directed at me?
| llm_trw wrote:
| Linus Trovalds: bottom 20% coder.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHHT6W-N0ak&pp=ygUMTGludX
| MgQ...
| strangescript wrote:
| I think its about scope and expectations. I have had some
| form of AI code completer in my neovim config for 3 years.
| It works flawlessly and saves me tons of keystrokes. Sure
| sometimes it suggests the incorrect completion but I just
| ignore it and keep coding as if it didn't exist. I am
| talking about line by line, not entire code blocks, but
| even that it does well at times.
|
| From what I have seen the people that have the most success
| have AI building something from scratch using well known
| tooling (read: old tooling).
|
| The problem is that doesn't immediately help most people.
| We are all stuck in crap jobs with massive, crusty code
| bases. Its hard for AI because its hard for everyone.
| llm_trw wrote:
| I fixed the hinge in my oven by giving perplexity.com the
| make and problem. I saved an hour on the phone calling
| people to organise a visit some time in the next week.
|
| Maybe you should stop using the Ai slop tools that don't
| work?
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Very likely you would have been as successful without AI
| to fix your oven hinge yourself, there is tons of content
| about that online.
| llm_trw wrote:
| No. I'd already spend 30 Min looking at how to solve it
| myself. The search on perplexity was a hail marry before
| I started calling handymen.
| vipshek wrote:
| I would like to propose a moratorium on these sorts of "AI
| coding is good" or "AI coding sucks" comments without any
| further context.
|
| This comment is like saying, "This diet didn't work for me"
| without providing any details about your health
| circumstances. What's your weight? Age? Level of activity?
|
| In this context: What language are you working in? What
| frameworks are you using? What's the nature of your
| project? How legacy is your codebase? How big is the
| codebase?
|
| If we all outline these factors _plus_ our experiences with
| these tools, then perhaps we can collectively learn about
| the circumstances when they work or don't work. And then
| maybe we can make them better for the circumstances where
| they're currently weak.
| azemetre wrote:
| I feel like diet as an analogy doesn't work. We know that
| the only way to lose weight is with a caloric deficit. If
| you can't do this, it doesn't matter what you eat you
| won't lose weight. If you're failing to lose weight
| because of a diet you are eating too much, full stop.
|
| Whereas measuring productivity and usefulness is way more
| opaque.
|
| Many simple software systems are highly productive for
| their companies.
| xienze wrote:
| I agree with the other commenter that said if you're
| "vastly" more productive as a developer due to AI, you
| probably weren't that good to begin with. Otherwise, please
| provide concrete examples.
|
| Myself, I do find it quite useful in a few respects. First
| and foremost, as a "better Google/StackOverflow." If
| something's not working, I can describe my exact scenario
| and usually get pointed in the right direction. Sometimes
| the LLM just wastes my time by very confidently telling me
| some function/library that solves my exact problem exists
| when in fact it doesn't.
|
| Second, IntelliJ's local LLM is sort of a smarter
| autocomplete. It makes some outright wrong suggestions, but
| when there's areas where I have to do a lot of repetitive
| tasks that follow a simple pattern (like for instance,
| mapping fields from one type of object to another), it does
| a pretty good job of making correct suggestions. I
| definitely appreciate it but it's certainly not doing
| things like writing a significant portion of code in my
| style.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've been using Amazon Q Developer as it was provided and
| approved by my employer. It has been pretty good with
| Python codebases, Kubernetes configurations, and (not
| surprisingly) CDK/Cloudformation templates. I can pretty
| much just ask it "here's my python script, make everything
| I need to run it as a lambda, hook that lambda up to x, it
| should run in a vpc defined in this template over here",
| and it'll get all that stuff put together and its normally
| pretty solid code it generates. It seems to pull in a lot
| of the context of the project I have open. For instance, I
| can say "it should get those values from the outputs in
| other-cf-template.yml" and it knows the naming schemes and
| what not across templates, even if it didn't generate those
| templates.
|
| I might go back and tweak some stuff, add some extra tags
| and what not, but often its pretty good at doing what I
| ask.
|
| Sometimes its suggestions aren't what I was really wanting
| to do in my codebase, a handful of times it has made up
| methods or parameters of even well-known libraries. But
| usually, its suggestions are better than a basic
| IntelliSense-style autocomplete at least in my experiences.
|
| I haven't used many of the other developer assistant
| plugins like say GitHub Copilot. I couldn't really say
| which is better or worse. But I do think using Q Developer
| has made me faster in many tasks.
|
| I wouldn't expect a tool that doesn't have access to the
| context of my editor and the files I have open to be very
| useful for actually coding. There's a lot of context to
| understand in even a basic application. If you're just
| asking a locally running app in ollama "give me a method to
| do x", don't be surprised if it doesn't know everything
| else happening in your app. Maybe it'll give you a halfway
| decent example of doing something, but devoid of how it
| actually plugs in to whatever you're making it might be
| entirely worthless.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| Seriously. It's like half of the people in this thread are
| living in a completely different world.
|
| And this is coming from someone who uses LLMs daily at the
| subscription, API (vscode and 3 nextjs apps) and local
| level. I have a custom langchain stack, prompt repo, you
| name it. And regardless of how little or how much I use
| what I have, or what soup de jour prompt or process (from
| Keep it simple to Prompt enhancers) I can't say it's made a
| meaningful difference in my life. Even with all of the
| customization and planning.
|
| It's a great search engine though.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Would it look like such a good search engine if the
| actual search engines hadn't progressively broken
| themselves over the last 15 years?
|
| I swear half the time when I use it to look up the
| nuances of system API stuff, it's replaying forum,
| mailing list or Stackoverflow conversations that Google
| ought to be able to find but somehow can't.
| jononor wrote:
| What is your personal productivity metric by which you have
| more than 10% increase? More money earned, less money spent,
| fewer working hours for same income, more leisure time? It
| needs to be something in aggregate to mean something related
| to what Nadella meant. There are many individual task which
| LLM system can help with. But there is also may ways for
| those gains to fail to aggregate into large overall gains.
| Both on personal level and on corporate, and economy wide
| level.
| maigret wrote:
| Who suddenly knows how to measure developer productivity? I
| thought this was impossible.
| toberoni wrote:
| Annual growth rates during the Industrial Revolution where
| way lower than 10%. In the 18th century it was well below 1%,
| during the 19th century it was on average at 1-1.5% (the
| highest estimates go up to 3% annual growth for certain
| decades close to 1900).[0][1][2]
|
| Some regions or sectors might have experienced higher growth
| spurts, but the main point stands: the overall economic
| growth was quite low by modern standards - even though I
| don't think GDP numbers alone adequately describe the huge
| societal changes of such sustained growth compared to
| agrarian cultures before the Industrial Revolution.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071127032512/http://minneap
| oli... [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-
| has-growth-ch... [2]
| https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162
| deadbabe wrote:
| Unless you're producing 10% more money with AI you're not
| doing shit.
| mvandermeulen wrote:
| How close do we need to be for you to help a brother out?
| Feeling seriously unsupp0rted right now
| bsenftner wrote:
| The "elephant in the room" is that AI is good enough, it's
| revolutionary in fact, but the issue now is the user needs more
| education to actually realize AI's value. No amount of uber-
| duper AI can help an immature user population lacking in
| critical thinking, which in their short shortsightedness seek
| self destructive pastimes.
| geuis wrote:
| It's not "good enough", it's mostly overhyped marketing
| garbage. LLM models are mostly as good as they're going to
| get. It's a limitation of the technology. It's impressive at
| what has been done, but that's it.
|
| It doesn't take billions of dollars and all human knowledge
| to make a single human level intelligence. Just some hormones
| and timing. So LLMs are mostly a dead end. AGI is going to
| come from differenst machine learning paradigms.
|
| This is all mostly hype by and for investors right now.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| LLM direct response models are quite mature, yes (4o)
|
| LLM based MoE architectures with some kind of reasoning
| process ( Claude 3+, o series, R1, grok 3 with thinking ),
| are the equivalent of v0.2 atm, and they're showing a lot
| of promise.
| infecto wrote:
| It's pretty good for a whole class of problems that humans
| currently do.
| rsynnott wrote:
| "You're holding it wrong" only goes so far.
| petee wrote:
| I spent more time yesterday trying to get "AI" to output
| runnable code, and retyping, than if I had just buckled down
| and done it myself.
|
| But I don't think you can blame users if they're given an
| immature tool, when it really is on companies to give us a
| product that is obvious to use correctly.
|
| Its not an exact analogy, but I always like to think of how
| doors are designed - if you have to put a sign on it, its a
| bad design. A well designed door requires zero thought, and
| as such, if "AI" usage is not obvious to 99% of the
| population, its probably a bad design.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Think of it like you're talking to someone so smart that
| they answer before you're finished explaining, and get the
| general idea wrong, or seem really pedantic and your
| misplaced use of a past tense verb that should have been
| active tense causes then to completely reinterpret what
| you're talking about. Think of our current LLMs like idiot
| savants, and trust them as much.
|
| I don't use AI to write code if that code is not short and
| self contained. It's great at explaining code, great at
| strategy and design about code. Not so much at actually
| implementing code larger than 1/4 to 1/3rd it's output
| context window. After all, it's not "writing code", it's
| statistically generating tokens that look like code it's
| seen before. It's unknown if the training code in which the
| LLM is statistically generating a reply actually ran, it
| could have been pseudo code explaining that computer
| science concept, we don't know.
|
| People seem to want a genie that does what they are
| thinking, and that is never going to work (at least with
| this technology.) I'm really talking about effective
| communications, and understanding how to communicate with a
| literal unreal non-human construct, a personality theater
| enhanced literary embodiment of knowledge. It's subtle, it
| requires effort on the user's side, more than it would if
| one were talking to a human expert in the area of knowledge
| you operate. You have to explain the situation so the AI
| can understand what you need, and developers are surprising
| bad at that. People in general are even worse at
| explaining. Implied knowledge is rampant in developer
| conversation, and an LLM struggles with ambiguity, such as
| implied references. Too many same acronyms in different
| parts of tech and science. It does work, but one really
| needs to treat LLMs like idiot savants.
| mrtksn wrote:
| IMHO anyone who started using AI seriously:
|
| 1) Wouldn't want to go back
|
| 2) Wouldn't believe that it's about to replace human
| intellectual work
|
| In other words AI got advanced enough to do amazing things but
| not 500B or T level of amazing and people with the money are
| not convinced that it will be anytime soon.
| righthand wrote:
| What is using AI seriously?
|
| I've tried to use it as a web search replacement and often
| the information is generic or tells me what I already know or
| wrong.
|
| I've used a code suggestions variant long before OpenAI hype
| started and while sometimes useful, rarely is it correct or
| helpful on getting over the next hurdle.
|
| Any code from my coworkers is now just AI slop they glanced
| over once. Then I spend a long time reviewing and fixing
| their code.
|
| I really don't find spending time writing long form questions
| so a bot can pretend to be human all that time saving,
| especially if I have to clarify or reword it to a specific
| "prompt-engineer" quality sentence. I can usually find the
| results faster typing in a few keywords and glancing at a
| list of articles. My built in human speed reading can
| determine if what I need is probably in an article.
|
| LLM seriousness has made my job more difficult. I would
| prefer if people did go back.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In my case its coding real world apps that people use and
| pay money for. I no longer personally type most of my code,
| Instead I describe stuff or write pseudo code that LLMs end
| up converting into the real thing.
|
| It's very good at handling the BS part of coding but also
| its very good at knowing things that I don't know. I
| recently used it to hack a small bluetooth printer which
| requires its own iOS app to print, using DeepSeek and
| ChatGPT I was able to reverse engineer the printer
| communication and then create an app that will print
| whatever I want from my macOS laptop.
|
| Before AI I would have to study how Bluetooth works now I
| don't have to. Instead, I use my general knowledge of
| protocols and communications and describe it to the machine
| and I'm asking for ideas. Then I try things and ask the
| stuff that I noticed but I don't understand, then I figure
| out how this particular device works and then describe it
| to the machine and ask it to generate me code that will do
| the thing that I discovered. LLMs are amazing at filling
| the gaps in a patchy knowledge, like my knowledge of
| Bluetooth. Because I don't know much about Bluetooth, I
| ended up creating a CRUD for Bluetooth because that's what
| I needed when trying to communicate and control my
| bluetooth devices(it's also what I'm used to from Web
| tech). I'm bit embarrassed about it but I think I will
| release it commercially anyway.
|
| If I have a good LLM under my hand, I don't have to know
| specialised knowledge on frameworks or tools. General
| understanding of how things works and building up from
| there is all I need.
|
| It's like a CNC machine but for coding.
| righthand wrote:
| I see, for single operator, no customers products it
| works nicely. You may find you use it less and less and
| will actually require that Bluetooth knowledge eventually
| as you grow a product.
|
| LLMs so far seem to be good at developing prototype apps.
| But most of my projects already have codegen and
| scaffolding tools so I guess I don't get that use out of
| them.
|
| I predict that once you release your embarrassing app,
| you will find all the corner cases and domain secrets
| come rearing out with little ability of the LLM to help
| you (especially with Bluetooth).
| mrtksn wrote:
| The Bluetooth app thing is just an example of LLMs
| helping me build something I don't have beyond-basics
| knowledge of.
|
| For other stuff, I still find it very useful because why
| would I bother to code something non-novel when I can
| just tell the LLM what I need?
|
| For example, if I need a code that finds the device that
| given characteristics belongs(bluetooth stuff, again) to
| I can just tell the LLM to write it for me. It doesn't
| take a genius to write such a code, its elemental stuff
| and I would rather not spend my working memory on
| remembering the structures and names of variables. I
| copy+paste the current class that handles the bluetooth
| comms, tell it that I need a function for sending data to
| the printer and it gives me back the result. There's no
| art in writing such a code, its standard code for an API
| and I would prefer not to bother with it.
| eitally wrote:
| You seem to be overestimating the quality of a many
| production software products.
| righthand wrote:
| Don't worry I am not. I understand that most prod
| deployed softwares are prototypes before LLMs came
| around.
| kamranjon wrote:
| "Before AI I would have to study how Bluetooth works now
| I don't have to."
|
| And
|
| "It's very good at handling the BS part of coding..."
|
| This is the part that I think is difficult in a team
| situation.
|
| Learning and understanding _is_ the important part, and
| certainly isn't BS.
|
| I understand that it really can make it seem like
| velocity has increased when you really are shipping
| things that more or less "work", but it's really a good
| practice to understand your code.
|
| I've had to spend a significant amount of time fixing
| work that was admittedly generated using AI by other
| engineers, and I really fear engineers are beginning to
| trade deep understanding for the high of getting
| something that "works" with little effort.
|
| It might "work" but you might be ignoring the work
| everyone around you is doing to clean up your brittle
| code that doesn't scale and wasn't thought through at
| inception.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It is effective because you can spend your mental energy
| on the things that matter, things that make difference.
|
| Code quality actually doesn't matter when you remove the
| human from the loop as long as it works correctly because
| it becomes something made by a machine to be interpreted
| by a machine.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Code isn't a binary scale of works or doesn't - there is
| inefficient code and insecure code and everything else in
| between that still technically "works" - but a lack of
| understanding will eventually cause these "working"
| solutions to catch up to you.
| mrtksn wrote:
| You can always revisit that part of code if it doesn't
| perform. For vast majority of code running on consumer
| devices there's no difference between smart
| implementation and mediocre implementation. LLMs are
| great at being mediocre by default.
|
| As for security, that mostly stems from the architecture.
| LLMs mediocracy also helps with following industry
| conventions and best practices.
|
| In my case I never get the code being written at once,
| instead I make LLMs write pieces that I put together
| myself. Never got used to copilot or Cursor, I feel in
| control only with the chat interface.
| smw wrote:
| Oh come on, I'm not an "AI believer", but it regularly
| does things for me like write complex SQL queries that I
| can then verify are correct. Just something like that
| will often save me 20-40 minutes over doing it manually.
| There is _something_ there, even if it's not going to
| replace the workforce anytime soon.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| You have an entirely valid worry and I get a bit scared
| at my use of AI because of this. I fear that dev jobs
| might go away or become third world only jobs like
| electronics manufacturing but in the mean time its scary
| how much it atrophies your mind. At the same time, it has
| opened up a universe of answers to questions I wouldn't
| normally ask because the bar was too high. Everyone seems
| to have their own unique stories.
|
| For example just today, I dumped a crash log from the Mac
| version of Microsoft Remote Desktop into it. This damn
| app locks up 10 times a day for me causing a "Force Quit"
| event and subsequent crash dump to be generated. Normally
| what can I do with that crash dump other than send it off
| to Apple/Microsoft? It identified where it thought the
| crash was coming from: excessive right clicking causing
| some sort of foundational error in their logic. Avoiding
| right clicking has solved the issue for me. Now that I
| write this out, I could have spent hours upon hours
| finding a needle in a haystack and that would probably
| made me a better developer but the bar is too high, there
| is too much other work I have to get done than to chase
| this. Instead I would have just lived with it. Now I have
| some closure at least.
|
| Again it seems like everyone has got their own unique
| stories. Is AI taking everything over? Not yet. Can I go
| back to pre-AI? No, its like going back to Windows 95.
| rurp wrote:
| The only part I would quibble with is the fear that
| superficial AI generated code becomes widespread. It's
| not that I think this won't happen, and I wouldn't want
| it on my team, but I think it could actually increase
| demand for competent software engineers.
|
| I got into coding about a decade ago when cheap
| outsourcing had been all the rage for a number of years.
| A lot of my early experience was taking over very poorly
| written apps that had started off with fast development
| and then quickly slowed down as all of the sloppy
| shortcuts built up and eventually ground development to a
| halt. There's a decent chance LLMs lead to another boom
| in that kind of work.
| hedora wrote:
| Either you're using it wrong, or you are using the wrong
| tools.
|
| For search, try kagi fastgpt (no subscription required):
|
| https://kagi.com/fastgpt
|
| For code completion, I've found it's not good at jumping
| hard hurdles, but it is a bit better than find replace
| (e.g. it finds things that are syntactically different, but
| semantically related), and can notice stuff like "you
| forgot to fix the Nth implementation of the interface you
| just extended".
|
| It's also good at "I need to do something simple in a
| language I do not know".
|
| I've definitely encountered ai slop from coworkers. I'm
| sure they also produce stack overflow copy paste garbage
| too. Dealing with their newly-found increased
| "productivity" is an open problem.
|
| Insisting on strict static typing helps. The LLMs can't
| help with that, and it forces a higher bar before
| compilation succeeds.
| righthand wrote:
| I shut off Kagi search LLM stuff because I don't need an
| LLM typing stuff out while I'm literally looking at a
| list of results.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > 1) Wouldn't want to go back
|
| I went back. It sucks pretty bad, actually.
| jdlshore wrote:
| I went back. It's fine at solving small problems and jump-
| starting an investigation, but only a small step better than
| a search engine. It's no good for deep work. Any time I've
| used it to research something I know well, it's got important
| details wrong, but in a confident way that someone without my
| knowledge would accept.
|
| RLHF trains it to fool humans into thinking it's
| authoritative, not to actually be correct.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Lining up for whatever the next thing is. "Look, we know we
| said AR/VR was the next big thing in the late tens and LLMs
| were the next big thing in the early 20s, but quantum is the
| next big thing now. For real, this time!"
|
| (Not entirely sure what the next fad will be, but some sort of
| quantum computing thing doesn't feel unlikely. Lot of noise in
| that direction lately.)
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Curiously, all of these three (VR/AI/QC) are limited by
| hardware. But AI is the only one that has seen meaningful
| progress by just throwing more contemporary hardware at it.
| Sure, future hardware might bring advancements to all of
| them. But if you're making an investment plan for the next
| quarter, the choice is pretty obvious. This is why AI rules
| the venture capitalist sector instead of fusion or other long
| term stuff.
| zamalek wrote:
| Of the three, QC is different in that it's _not_ a solution
| looking for a problem. If we ever scale QC to the point
| where it can do meaningful work (the "if" is doing a lot
| of work there - per your point about hardware), then I
| don't see it fumbling like the other two have. We have
| immediate and pressing needs that we know how to solve with
| QC. The other two are very much research coming up with
| cool toys, and product fucking around so that they can find
| out what to use them for.
| akomtu wrote:
| Quantum AI will be the next buzzword, once AGI loses steam.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Did they tell the M365 sales/marketing teams about this? My
| users get bombarded with sales pitches, new free trials and
| other commms about how wonderful copilot is. It's almost a full
| time job to manage people's expectations around this...
| fny wrote:
| Nadella is just saying we haven't yet seen a revolution yet
| measurable by 10% economic growth--he makes no statement about
| the future.
|
| Most people have no clue how to use AI or where to use it in
| their lives. There was a guy at work who was submitting
| command-like queries (give meeting summary) and complained
| about how it left out XYZ. Then I told him to ask "Give me the
| meeting summary with X, Y, Z" or "what did so and so say about
| Y."
|
| His mind was blown.
|
| We are in the first inning. We haven't figured out how to
| integrate this into everything yet.
| apsec112 wrote:
| He doesn't actually say that, the (very biased and polemical)
| article writer seems to have made that up. The actual quote is:
|
| "Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence]
| milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. So,
| the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is
| like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial
| Revolution type of growth. The real benchmark is: the world
| growing at 10 percent. Suddenly productivity goes up and the
| economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll
| be fine as an industry."
|
| That's a completely different statement from "AI is generating
| no value"!
| m00dy wrote:
| what happened to Jevons paradox then ?
| orzig wrote:
| Remember that there is a lot of nuance to these sorts of deals.
|
| I don't have any domain knowledge, but I recently saw an
| executive put in restaurant reservations for five different
| places the night of our team offsite, so he would have
| optionality. An article could accurately claim that he later
| canceled 80% of the teams eating capacity!
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| But if it was reported in the press that your team was going to
| eat 5 meals at the same time before it was revealed that it was
| just an asshole screwing over small businesses, then that
| correction in eating capacity should be reported.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "should "
|
| But often not.
|
| That was the point in the parent. How this is being reported
| is bit skewed.
|
| And also there is the problem that nobody reads corrections.
| Lies run around the globe before the Truth has tied its
| shoelaces, or some quote like that.
| smetj wrote:
| > Wall Street stepped up its questions about the massive outlays
| after the Chinese upstart DeepSeek released a new open-source AI
| model that it claims rivals the abilities of US technology at a
| fraction of the cost.
|
| And that's the crux of it and that's also why DeepSeek was such a
| big deal.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| This could simply be datacenter deals started years ago that they
| are pulling out of now they have larger AI-optimized DC's being
| commissioned in places more suited to faster & larger power
| availability.
| strangescript wrote:
| OpenAI is pivoting away from MS. MS also has their own internal
| AI interests. Need to frame this for investors that doesn't look
| like we are losing out. "Nadella doesn't believe in AI anymore".
| Done and done.
| blonderoast wrote:
| a lot of this sounds like a normal course of business and stuff
| that msft does all the time. i don't understand the openai drama
| speculation on here. msft continues to have right of first
| refusal on openai training and exclusivity on inferencing. if
| someone else wants to build up openai capacity to spend money on
| msft for inferencing, msft would be thrilled. they recognize
| revenue on inferecing not training at the moment, so it's all
| upside to their revenue numbers
| feverzsj wrote:
| Seems consumers just hate every product with AI functionality.
| lompad wrote:
| More like consumers hate every product where AI gets shoved in
| their face without any thought and --
|
| Okay, maybe you're right.
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| The consumer market doesnt matter much here, imo.
|
| I think most companies know b2b is the most lucrative segment
| for AI because it reduces one of their top costs - people.
| Companies selling AI are basically just selling the ultimate
| automation tool, which (in theory) is massive value for
| companies. Having a nice consumer product is a side gig.
| jr-ai-interview wrote:
| It's sad, people are already recklessly rearranging business
| logic via AI in key medical software systems due to global
| outsourcing linguistic reasons.
|
| I have so much intense hatred for pg and Sama right now I rarely
| come to this shit show of a site
| jr-ai-interview wrote:
| Surely smart people exists, right?
| nokun7 wrote:
| So, Microsoft's move to ditch leases for "a couple hundred
| megawatts" of data center capacity, as noted in TFA, is a pretty
| intriguing shift--and it's not just a random cutback. Per some
| reports from Capacity Media and Analytics India Magazine, it
| looks like they're pulling some of their international spending
| back to the U.S. and dialing down the global expansion frenzy.
| For context, that "couple hundred megawatts" could power roughly
| 150,000 homes, (typical U.S. energy stats) so it's a decent chunk
| of capacity they're letting go.
|
| IMO it's not a full-on retreat--Microsoft's still on track to
| drop $80 billion this fiscal year on AI infrastructure, as
| they've reaffirmed. But there's a vibe of recalibration here.
| They might've overcooked their AI capacity plans, especially
| after being the top data center lessee in 2023 and early 2024.
| Meanwhile, OpenAI--Microsoft's big AI partner--is reportedly
| eyeing other options, like Project Stargate with SoftBank, which
| could handle 75% of its compute needs by 2030 (per The
| Information report). That's a potential shift in reliance that
| might've spooked Microsoft into rethinking its footprint.
|
| Also it seems they're redirecting at least some costs - over half
| that $80 billion is staying stateside, per Microsoft's own blog,
| which aligns with CEO Satya Nadella's January earnings call push
| to keep meeting "exponentially more demand." It's a pragmatic
| flex--trim the fat, dodge an oversupply trap, and keep the core
| humming. Whether it's genius or just good housekeeping, it shows
| even the giants can pivot when the AI race gets too hot.
| tsunego wrote:
| No stargate?
| rcleveng wrote:
| Maybe stargate is the reason why MS doesn't need these leases?
| meindnoch wrote:
| It's already done. Their AI is self-evolving now. No need for
| data centers anymore.
| ivalm wrote:
| I don't think they are a compute partner for stargate.
| w0m wrote:
| IIRC, MS has right-of-first-refusal on providing any
| new/necessaary compute for stargate.
|
| But also iirc; Stargate was well along before trumps
| horse/pony show also no idea how much is still necessary to
| purchase.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Related discussion on reddit:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1ix27vd/microsoft_c...
| packetlost wrote:
| Man, bubble popping already?
| cgcrob wrote:
| Yep. Investors are shifting capital out of the market. Always
| happens. The little guys end up paying for the losses.
| Aurornis wrote:
| By itself this doesn't mean much. If they're reallocating funds
| to different data centers or building their own then this could
| be a wash.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It's additive math, is the overall plus or minus. There is always
| gonna be some push and pull.
|
| " TD Cowen posited in a second report on Monday that OpenAI is
| shifting workloads from Microsoft to Oracle Corp. as part of a
| relatively new partnership. The tech giant is also among the
| largest owners and operators of data centers in its own right and
| is spending billions of dollars on its own capacity. TD Cowen
| separately suggested that Microsoft may be reallocating some of
| that in-house investment to the US from abroad"
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Is the AI Bubble already popping?
| kittikitti wrote:
| Do you think Big Tech will go down when it does or will it
| further consolidate and centralize power?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Given how things go when past bubbles have popped, this is
| likely to be "both" I think. Just not all at once
|
| When the bubble pops you see things collapse
|
| Then it becomes a feeding frenzy as companies and IPs get
| bought up on the cheap by whoever has a bit of money left
|
| When the dust clears, some old players are gone, some are
| still around but weaker, some new players have emerged that
| resemble conglomerates of the old players, but overall a lot
| of the previous existing power is consolidated into fewer
| hands
| elif wrote:
| I doubt it. MS has what they need in oAI partnership. I think
| this is more likely just a reflection of the broader economic
| environment. Going into a recession, cut investment, try to
| retain as much talent as you can afford to for the next few
| years.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Old news and incorrect the way it is phrased :
| https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1894050388145508586
|
| I'm not sure why there is so much poor reporting on accelerator
| demand recently, it seems there are a lot of people looking to
| sell a message that isn't grounded in reality.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Quite a lot of money is at stake in the control for retail
| investors' minds.
|
| Lots of stupid takes get amplified by people who lack
| background. Look at the recent Intel/TSMC/Broadcom merger
| rumors. The story was "Canada could join the US" level of
| stupid to anyone with experience anywhere near chip fabrication
| but it still circulated for several days. Also, look at what it
| did to the stock price of INTC. Lots of money made and lost
| there.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Microsoft said they were going to spend 80 Billion on AI data
| centers, and they confirmed this again, so there is no 'scaling
| back'.
|
| Speculation:
|
| I suspect after they observed the incredible speed with which
| Grok was able to build out a leading edge AI infrastructure
| themselves in Memphis, far faster than what the traditional data-
| centers could offer it, Microsoft might have had an epiphany and
| went 'wait, why are we not doing this?'
| mistrial9 wrote:
| somehow, Memphis, an ancient Egypt royal center and core of a
| grand imperial slave state.. is such a fitting name for these
| developments
| kragen wrote:
| Ancient Egypt was neither imperial nor a slave state; though
| it did have slavery, most Egyptians were not slaves.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Egypt
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt
| kragen wrote:
| These pages are somewhat out of date, but they confirm
| what I said: "Ancient Egypt was a peasant-based economy
| and it was not until the Greco-Roman period that slavery
| had a greater impact."
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no - by not specifying which Kingdom you were referring
| to, it revealed an incomplete, obstinate, reactive
| answer.. (as I have also done many times) So my remedy to
| that today was to _read_ a bit before further damage is
| done. Non-English pages might also be useful on this
| massive and historical topic
| aresant wrote:
| - This is a proper MSFT resource allocation commentary, not an
| industry wide canary in coalmine
|
| - MSFT CapEx is up 45% YoY, positioning for inference dominance
|
| - MSFT is prioritizing AI inference for millions of customers
| over massive AI training for OpenAI
|
| - Losing inference demand risks clients moving to AWS/GCP
|
| - MSFT taking bet that industry overbuild will lead to more
| attractive leasing terms in future vs owning
|
| - OpenAI chases AGI; MSFT chases scalable, affordable AI that
| drives Azure adoption
|
| - Leadership is risk adjusted - they win if OpenAI succeeds, and
| win if open-source wins
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If they are taking the bet that industry will overbuild, how is
| it not a canary in a coal mine?
|
| There is almost certainly at least one person in Redmond
| working on this that's smarter and better informed than you,
| just going off probability.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Or that person is this person
| snapcaster wrote:
| >There is almost certainly at least one person in Redmond
| working on this that's smarter and better informed than you,
| just going off probability.
|
| this isn't the actual test though right? it's surely true,
| and yet companies make bad decisions all the time. It needs
| to be conditioned on "someone smarter and better informed
| than you _with influence in the organization sufficient to
| enact change_"
| echelon wrote:
| Nailed it. Nadella's commentary is essentially this.
|
| Dwarkesh's interview is fantastic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GLSzuYXh6w&t=348s (timestamp
| for "where is the value created?" question)
| iainctduncan wrote:
| The thing that is driving me crazy in all these threads is that
| we have invariably a bunch of programmers saying "I use it for
| coding and I would never go back" but this is orthoganal to the
| question of whether it's a good business.
|
| If you use gen-AI but don't pay the real cost, you're not really
| a data point on the economics of it. It could be useful to
| programmers and still be a terrible business if the cost of
| giving you that usefulness is more than you (or your employer)
| would pay.
| Valord wrote:
| My impression is that costs will continue to go down. Large
| investments are unlikely to be profitable for these businesses.
| Whoever is dumping billions into this is unlikely to get their
| money back. The new tooling, models, discoveries seem to be
| commoditized within months. There are no moats. If things keep
| going this way there will never be a point where employers (or
| anybody for that matter) have to pay the real cost.
| fabiofzero wrote:
| Yikes
| crowcroft wrote:
| My theory:
|
| - OpenAI and Oracle partnership: When Microsoft is 'at capacity'
| more demand can go to Oracle, so now Microsoft don't need to
| rapidly add capacity with leases (which likely have a lower ROI
| than Microsoft owned and operated centres).
|
| - Longer term investments are still going ahead: Microsoft aren't
| cutting back on capex investment. They don't want to lease if
| they don't have to, but long term still see a huge market for
| compute that they will want to be a key supplier of.
|
| I think Microsoft's goal here is to focus on expanding their
| capex to be a long term winner instead of chasing AI demand at
| any cost in the short term. Likely because they already think
| they're in a pretty strong position already.
| light_triad wrote:
| Makes sense given what Nadella recently said:
|
| - Self claiming some AGI milestone is "non-sensical benchmark
| hacking"
|
| - The AI model race won't be winner-take-all
|
| - The real benchmark is if the world is growing at 10%
|
| MSFT is putting its focus on AI adoption in the app layer and
| "at-scale consumer properties"
|
| Full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GLSzuYXh6w
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