[HN Gopher] Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for...
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Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
Author : marcyb5st
Score : 87 points
Date : 2026-01-22 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| vdupras wrote:
| It seems like quite a qualitative jump in consensus. Wasn't the
| previous consensus "you're using it wrong"?
| jsheard wrote:
| This still reads as "you're using it wrong" to me. Nadella's
| position is that AI spending would easily justify itself if
| only the plebs would use it as much as he thinks they should.
| If only the common man could see the prophetic vision of a
| coked out tech executive.
| tony-vlcek wrote:
| > We will quickly lose even the social permission to take
| something like energy [...]
|
| A way to drum up sense of urgency without mentioning that it's
| the patience of the investors (and _not_ the public) that will be
| the limiting factor here?
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Similar to my thoughts. If we are still scrambling to find
| stuff the average Joe finds useful, the 100s of Billions poured
| into this gold rush are wasted (IMHO).
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Ideally, zillions of consumers have been languishing for
| years and when the time is right they're all collectively
| chomping at the bit when a new highly-affordable technology
| comes along that they just can't get enough of.
|
| This isn't one of those times.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| People said the same thing 30 years ago about the internet.
|
| I'm spending $400/mo on AI subscriptions at this point.
| Probably the best money I spend.
| malfist wrote:
| And the people who bought a lot of shovels during the gold
| rush thought they were making the smartest money move
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| some of them did make it big, and towns and building are
| named after them
|
| but lots of folks were broke as hell and miserable
| m4rtink wrote:
| or dead
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Dude, I'm getting a shovel factory for practically
| nothing. I'm easily realizing 5x value on that
| investment.
|
| I'd say for an estate that I am the executor of, it
| probably saved me $50k in legal fees and other expenses
| because it helped me analyze a novel problem and organize
| it ask the right questions of counsel.
|
| Another scenario i had to deal with i needed a mobile app
| to do something very specific for a few weeks. I specced
| out a very narrowly useful iphone application, built it
| out on the train from DC to NYC, and had it working to my
| satisfaction the next day. Is it production code ready
| for primetime? Absolutely not. But I got capability to do
| what I needed super quickly that my skill level is no
| longer up to the task to accomplish!
|
| IMO, these things let you make power tools, but your
| ability to get value is capped by your ability to ask the
| right questions. In the enterprise, they are going to
| kill lots of stupid legacy software that doesn't add alot
| of value, but adds alot of cost.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit
| of the companies that are each investing hundreds of
| billions and hope to see a net return. How many
| developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as
| each is more productive) or enterprises you work for
| paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid
| to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?
| blibble wrote:
| that $400/month is essentially the introductory price,
| subsided in an attempt to grab market share
|
| that $400 will go up by at least a factor of 10 once the
| bubble pops
|
| would you be prepared to pay $4000/month?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Nah, I'll move much of it locally when it becomes cost
| justified to do so.
|
| I doubt that the exponential cost explosion day is
| coming. When the bubble pops, the bankruptcies of many of
| the players will push the costs down. US policy has
| provided a powerful incentive for Chinese players to do
| what Google has done and have a lower cost delivery model
| anyway.
| blibble wrote:
| it's not exponential, it's linear
|
| > the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the
| costs down
|
| the running costs don't disappear because people go broke
| brewdad wrote:
| It's the dot com bubble all over again. When you are
| losing money on every transaction you can't make it up on
| volume.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still
| very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote
| were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases
| were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took
| a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until
| gaming and the web became common.
| rchaud wrote:
| The web was an academic project funded by modest research
| grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and
| electricity AI requires. The output of that research
| emphasized open source and decentralized implementation,
| which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are
| predicated on vendor lock-in.
|
| Consumer adoption also happened organically over time,
| catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were
| huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and
| DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their
| operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly
| contributed to filling landfills with their free trial
| disks).
| goalieca wrote:
| Well, LLM is mainly aiming to "Improve" what we can already
| do. It's not really opening up new use cases the way the
| personal computer, the smart phone, or the Internet did.
| whazor wrote:
| This looks more like an attempt of gaining scarce electricity.
|
| If a country/state has to choice of giving power to data center
| A or B, it makes sense for Satya to make statements about how
| only Microsoft provides the most AI value
| tony-vlcek wrote:
| Well, even though electricity is a commodity it still needs
| to be bought. My point is that people funding this will run
| out of patience paying for the electricity long before the
| public/regulators will need to step in a decided how much of
| it you can buy.
|
| I guess you could always just use a fraction of the billions
| in investments and whip up a few new power plants. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx25v2d7zexo
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| They don't need to choose, just let them build their own
| power generation capacity.
|
| What the hell is going on in this type of argument anyways?
| Utilities are normally private businesses so what does the
| state have to do with it?
| malfist wrote:
| Also note that he's not saying Microsoft must find a use for
| AI, but that customers should.
|
| He's blaming customers that his product isn't hitting the
| valuation he wants.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| Ai and the energy required to power it does partly explain why
| Trump is so keen to setup American data centres in Saudi
| Arabia, and why he is so obsessed about Venezuelan oil.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| This is what happens in VC-driven hype cycles that are all about
| the technology, when VC orthodoxy is that it's not about
| technology but utility (see PMF etc).
| marcyb5st wrote:
| My take is that if we are still scrambling to find something
| objectively useful (as recognized by the median person) then we
| really are in AI bubble territory.
|
| When non techie friends/family bring up AI there are two major
| topics: 1) the amount of slop is off the charts and 2) said slop
| is getting harder to recognize which is scary. Sometimes they
| mention a bit of help in daily tasks at work, but nothing major.
| 101008 wrote:
| My non tech friends/family use AI to ask for silly stuff (they
| could google it), or just to ask silly questions and see how
| they react. We have a relative not that famous but maybe known
| in a niche and they spent like a whole weekendd sending
| screenshots of GPT, where they asked if this person was known,
| who was this person, etc.
|
| They don't find AI useful, just a toy. Is their fault? Maybe.
| blibble wrote:
| good luck with that
| lvl155 wrote:
| For 96% of the population, AI will not boost production.
| Generally speaking people are too stupid to use AI properly at
| least for awhile.
| TwoNineA wrote:
| I really hate condascending and arrogant stuff like "Generally
| speaking people are too stupid to use AI properly at least for
| awhile". There are plenty of tech illiterate people that are
| far from being "stupid" and they might not care about or like
| AI. They just need to send emails to family, share photos and
| videos and have a video call from time to time. For them, AI is
| worthless.
|
| But they aren't stupid. You sound like a tech bro.
| lvl155 wrote:
| I am not being condescending. I am part of that 96%. I am
| admitting I am too stupid to use AI as it is set up right
| now.
| kodyo wrote:
| That's not even the point, though. Those smart-but-not-techy
| people are not going to grow GDP at the pace that Satya
| Nadella needs them to in order to keep his KPIs going up and
| to the right, and he's getting pissed.
|
| That's the problem.
| remix2000 wrote:
| GenAI is only useful to bump terrible up to mediocre, so it'd
| be really stupid to spend time honing one's prompting skills.
| And as you noticed, so far 96% of the population agrees.
| lvl155 wrote:
| It's really not going to bump up terribles to mediocres. It's
| only going to mask the terribles and make it harder to assess
| intelligence and talent. Underlying human intelligence is not
| going to get a boost from AI. Intelligence is mostly innate.
| I would even argue that AI will make average humans
| marginally dumber for the most part.
| Tepix wrote:
| After increasing the prices of RAM, GPUs and flash memory for the
| entire world, energy cost is next. Thanks AI!
| TwoNineA wrote:
| But wait! There is more!
|
| Copilot Notepad.
|
| Copilot MS Paint.
|
| Copilot Shoes.
|
| Copilot Ice Cream.
| psychoslave wrote:
| I'm still waiting for copilot copilot though
| arkensaw wrote:
| > Copilot Shoes
|
| LOL. "Looks like you're trying to tie those laces - would you
| like me to order you velcro?"
| baal80spam wrote:
| And eventually Copilot Bluescreen.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| Energy costs have already risen substantially[0], but the
| increase has been slower, and it's garnered a bit less media
| attention than the recent leap in PC hardware prices.
|
| [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-
| elec...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Also, consumer energy costs tend to be hedged, so an increase
| in wholesale will generally only have delayed effect on more
| visible consumer rates. This was very noticeable in Europe
| after the Russian invasion of Ukraine; while spot market
| rates went very high very quickly, it took about a year for
| consumer rates to peak in most places.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| They built an oceanic fiber termination down in South
| Carolina. Data centers are starting to move in. Now they'll
| charge you $12/KWh during your peak usage.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| You really said 12 USD/KWh? Time to put solar
| panels/batteries over there. Even if you resell to the grid
| at 1/10th of that you recoup the investment in O(months)
| and not O(years)
| agentultra wrote:
| > ... it amplifies your cognitive abilities...
|
| And yet studies show the opposite [0].
|
| [0] https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-
| chatgpt...
| cptaj wrote:
| Study. Not studies. And with very limited methodology.
| agentultra wrote:
| There's enough going on to call out Satya here for hyping up
| a nothing burger. It's not as world-changing as he makes it
| sound or else he wouldn't be imploring people to find a use
| for it.
|
| His bottom line depends on this bet that everyone is going to
| depend on AI and pay Microslop rent to use it.
|
| https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=cognitive+effects+of+ai+.
| ..
| MadDemon wrote:
| LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely
| useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than
| intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a
| response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more
| convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not
| that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were
| usually already able to find the information quickly and even a
| 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your
| overall productivity, because the time it took was already
| negligible.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| This is partly because Google is past the enshittification hump
| and ChatGPT is just starting to climb up it - they just
| announced ads.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| This. And the wonderful thing about LLMs is that they can be
| trained to bend responses in specific directions, say toward
| using Oracle Cloud solutions. There's fertile ground for
| commercial value extraction that goes far beyond ads. Think
| of it as product placement on steroid.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You don't even need training -- you can add steering
| vectors in the middle of the otherwise-unmodified
| computation. Remember Golden Gate Claude?
| robofanatic wrote:
| > they just announced ads
|
| wondering how is it going to work when they "search the web"
| to get the information, are they essentially going to take ad
| revenue away from the source website?
| linuxftw wrote:
| You're overestimating the mean person's ability to search the
| web effectively.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| And perhaps both are overestimating the mean person's ability
| to detect a hallucinated solution vs a genuine one.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I think hallucination is grossly overstated as a problem at
| this point, most models will actively search the web and
| reason about the results. You're much more likely to get
| the incorrect solution browsing stack overflow than you are
| asking AI.
| avaer wrote:
| The difference is LLMs let you "run Google" on your own data
| with copy paste. Which you could not do before.
|
| If you're using ChatGPT like you use Google then I agree with
| you. But IMO comparing ChatGPT to Google means you haven't had
| the "aha" moment yet.
|
| As a concrete example, a lot of my work these days involves
| asking ChatGPT to produce me an obscure micro-app to process my
| custom data. Which it usually does and renders in one shot.
| This app could not exist before I asked for it. The
| productivity gains over coding this myself are immense. And the
| experience is nothing like using Google.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| there have been various solutions that allow you to "run
| Google" on your own data for quite a while, what is the "aha"
| moment related to that?
| avaer wrote:
| By "run Google" I don't mean "index your data into a search
| engine". I mean the experience of being able to
| semantically extract and process data at "internet scale",
| in seconds.
|
| It might seem quaint today but one example might be fact
| checking a piece of text.
|
| Google effectively has a pretty good internal
| representation of whether any particular document concords
| with other documents on the internet, on account of massive
| crawling and indexing over decades. But LLMs let you run
| the same process nearly instantly on your own data, and
| that's the difference.
| dumbmrblah wrote:
| But before I needed to be a programmer or have a team of
| data analysts analyze the data for me, now I can just
| process that data on my own and gather my own insights.
| That was my aha moment.
| MadDemon wrote:
| It's great for you that you were able to create this app that
| wouldn't otherwise exist, but does that app dramatically
| increase your overall productivity? And can you imagine that
| a significant chunk of the population would experience a
| similar productivity boost? I'm not saying that there is no
| productivity gain, but big tech has promised MASSIVE
| productivity gains. I just feel like the productivity gains
| are more modest for now, similar to other technologies. Maybe
| one day AGI comes along and changes everything, but I feel
| like we'll need a few more break throughs before that.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| If only search engine AI output didn't constantly haluciate
| nonexistent APIs, it might be a net productivity gain for
| me...but it's not. I've been bit enough times by their false
| "example" output for it to be a significant net time loss vs
| using traditional search results.
| skybrian wrote:
| Using ChatGPT and phrasing it like a search seems like a
| better way? "Can you find documentation about an API that
| does X?"
| lazide wrote:
| It will often literally just make up the documentation.
|
| If you ask for a link, it may hallucinate the link.
|
| And unlike a search engine where someone had to previously
| think of, and then make some page with the fake content on
| it, it will happily make it up on the fly so you'll end up
| with a new/unique bit of fake documentation/url!
|
| At that point, you would have been way better off just...
| using a search engine?
| taude wrote:
| how is it hallucinating links? The links are direct links
| to the webpage that they vectorized or whatever as input
| to the LLM query. In fact, on almost all LLM responses
| DuckDuckGo and Google, the links are right there as sited
| sources that you click on (i know because I'm almost
| always clicking on the source link to read the original
| details, and not the made up one
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I would imagine links can be hallucinated because the
| original URLs in the training data get broken up into
| tokens - so it's not hard to come up with a URL that has
| the right format (say https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01234 -
| which is a real paper but I just made up that URL) and a
| plausible-sounding title.
| jjj123 wrote:
| Yeah, but the current state of ChatGPT doesn't really do
| this. The comment you're replying to explains why URLs
| from ChatGPT generally aren't constructed from raw
| tokens.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| You are absolutely right! The current state of ChatGPT
| was not in my training data.
| strange_quark wrote:
| I've used Claude code to debug and sometimes it'll say it
| knows what the issue is, then when I make it cite a
| source for its assertions, it will do a web search and
| sometimes spit out a link whose contents contradict its
| own claim.
|
| One time I tried to use Gemini to figure out 1950s
| construction techniques so I could understand how my
| house was built. It made a dubious sounding claim about
| the foundation, so I had it give me links and keywords so
| I could find some primary sources myself. I was unable to
| find anything to back up what it told me, and then it
| doubled down and told me that either I was googling wrong
| or that what it told me was a historical "hack" that
| wouldn't have been documented.
|
| These were both recent and with the latest models, so
| maybe they don't fully fabricate links, but they do
| hallucinate the contents frequently.
| skybrian wrote:
| I haven't seen this happen in ChatGPT thinking mode. It
| actually does a bunch of web searches and links to the
| results.
| sylware wrote:
| That makes me think about the development of much software out
| there: the development time is often several orders of
| magnitude smaller than its life cycle.
| skybrian wrote:
| I use ChatGPT "thinking" mode as a way to run multiple searches
| and summarize the results. It takes some time, but I can do
| other stuff in another tab and come back.
|
| It's for queries that are unlikely to be satisfied in a single
| search. I don't think it would be a negligible amount of time
| if you did it yourself.
| Gud wrote:
| This is the way. I do it the same way for development. The
| main point is I can run multiple tasks in parallel(myself +
| LLM(s)).
|
| I let Claude and ChatGPT type out code for me, while I focus
| on my research
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I find Gemini to be the most consistent at actually using the
| search results for this, in "Deep Research" mode
| binary132 wrote:
| The difference is that in the past that information had to come
| from what people wrote and are writing about, and now it can
| come from a derivative of an archive of what people once wrote,
| upon a time. So if they just stop doing that -- whether because
| they must, or because they no longer have any reason to, or
| because they are now drowned out in a massive ocean of slop, or
| simply because they themselves have turned into slopslaves --
| no new information will be generated, only derivative slop,
| milled from derivative slop.
|
| I think we all understand that at this point, so I question
| deeply why anyone acts like they don't.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random
| question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than
| googling it
|
| More convenient than traditional search? Maybe. Quicker than
| traditional search? Maybe not.
|
| Asking random questions is exactly where you run into time-
| wasting hallucinations since the models don't seem to be very
| good at deciding when to use a search tool and when just to
| rely on their training data.
|
| For example, just now I was asking Gemini how to fix a bunch of
| Ubuntu/Xfce annoyances after a major upgrade, and it was a very
| mixed bag. One example: the default date and time display is in
| an unreadably small "date stacked over time" format (using a
| few pixel high font so this fits into the menu bar), and
| Gemini's advice was to enable the "Display date and time on
| single line" option ... but there is no such option (it just
| hallucinated it), and it also hallucinated a bunch of other
| suggestions until I finally figured out what you need to do is
| to configure it to display "Time only" rather than "Data and
| Time", then change the "Time" format to display both data and
| time! Just to experiment, I then told Gemini about this fix and
| amusingly the response was basically "Good to know - this'll be
| useful for anyone reading this later"!
|
| More examples, from yesterday (these are not rare exceptions):
|
| 1) I asked Gemini (generally considered one of the smartest
| models - better than ChatGPT, and rapidly taking away market
| share from it - 20% shift in last month or so) to look at the
| GitHub codebase for an Anthropic optimization challenge, to
| summarize and discuss etc, and it _appeared_ to have looked at
| the codebase until I got more into the weeds and was
| questioning it where it got certain details from (what file),
| and it became apparent it had some (search based?) knowledge of
| the problem, but seemingly hadn 't actually looked at it
| (wasn't able to?).
|
| 2) I was asking Gemini about chemically fingerprinting (via
| impurities, isotopes) roman silver coins to the mines that
| produced the silver, and it confidently (as always) comes up
| with a bunch of academic references that it claimed made the
| connection, but none or references (which did at least exist)
| actually contained what it claimed (just partial information),
| and when I pointed this out it just kept throwing out different
| references.
|
| So, it's convenient to be able to chat with your "search
| engine" to drill down and clarify, etc, but a big time waste if
| a lot of it is hallucination.
|
| Search vs Chat has anyways really become a difference without a
| difference since Google now gives you the "AI Overview" (a
| diving off point into "AI Mode"), or you can just click on "AI
| Mode" in the first place - which is Gemini.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Another reason search vs chat has become a difference without
| a difference is that search results are full of highly-ranked
| AI slop. I was searching yesterday for a way to get a Gnome-
| style hot corner in Windows 11, and the top result falsely
| asserted that hot corners were a built-in feature, and
| pointed to non-existing settings to enable them.
| palmotea wrote:
| > For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random
| question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than
| googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant
| for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually
| already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x
| speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your
| overall productivity, because the time it took was already
| negligible.
|
| I'd even question that. The pre-LLM solutions were in most
| cases better. Searching a maintained database of curated and
| checked information is _far_ better than LLM output (which is
| possibly bullshit).
|
| Ditto to software engineering. In software, we have things call
| libraries: you write the code once, test it, then you trust it
| _and_ can use it as many times as you want forever for free.
| Why use LLM generated code when you have a library? And if you
| 're asking for anything complex, you're probably just getting a
| plagiarized and bastardized version of some library anyway.
|
| The only thing where LLMs shine is a kind of simple, lazy "mash
| this up so I don't have to think about it" cases. And sometimes
| it might be better to just do it yourself and develop your own
| skills instead of use an LLM.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| The real benefit to a search engine is to rework and launder
| other people's information and make it your information.
|
| Now instead of the wikipedia article you are reading the exact
| same thing from google's home page and you don't click on
| anything.
| robofanatic wrote:
| It really depends on what 'XYZ' is and how many hoops you need
| to jump through to get to the answer. ChatGPT gets information
| from various places and gives you the answer as well as the
| explanation at each step. Without tools like ChatGPT its
| definitely not negligible in a lot of cases.
| eightman wrote:
| The use case for AI is spam
| avaer wrote:
| Don't forget porn.
|
| Though it's a use case people like Satya will want to avoid for
| reasons.
| fkdk wrote:
| "Why d'you think the net was born? Porn, Porn, Porn"
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| spam implies low effort BS used in a low-hanging-fruit sense
|
| LLMs will be used for aggressive, yet incredibly subtle
| manipulation, consensus building, and response tracking.
|
| 20-40% of social media is already bots, and in the future it is
| likely you will not be able to reply to anything anywhere
| without a bot either 1) responding, or 2) logging and sending
| your response to multiple parties instantly.
|
| If the Stasi had LLMs the Berlin Wall would have never fallen
| Someone wrote:
| "Buy our stuff, or we're seen as wasting energy and helping to
| destroy the world"?
|
| That's courageous from a CEO of an US company, where the current
| government doesn't see burning more oil as being bad for the
| planet, and is willing to punish everyone who thinks otherwise.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I get it. A stunning indictment of our times... but there is
| something useful AI could be doing that MS has dropped the ball
| on: personal finance management. I should be able to have copilot
| grab all my transactions, build me budgets, show me what if
| scenarios, raise concerns, and help me meet my goals. It should
| be able to work in Excel where I can see and steer it. The math
| should be validated with several checks and the output needs to
| be trustworthy. Ship a free personal finance agent harness and
| you have your killer app.
|
| I think there are business reasons why they wouldn't do that, and
| that makes me sad.
| malfist wrote:
| Have you tried to get LLMs to do math or quantitative analysis?
| They're remarkably poor at it
| coffeefirst wrote:
| I have a personal budget app and every so often I try and get
| the latest model to compare my data against the statements and
| find any discrepancies.
|
| Every time it hallucinates visits to Starbucks.
|
| I never go to Starbucks, it's just a probable finding given the
| words in the question.
|
| This should work. I want it to work. But until it can do this
| correctly all analysis capabilities should be suspect.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Maybe it's the model you are using.
|
| Even a year ago I had success with Claude giving it a photo
| of my credit card bill and asking it to give me repeating
| category subtotals, and it flawlessly OCR'd it and wrote a
| Python program to do as asked, giving me the output.
|
| I'd imagine if you asked it to do a comparison to something
| else it'd also write code to do it, so get it right (and
| certainly would if you explicity asked).
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Maybe. But it's always Claude. I even tried copying the
| text in directly to take OCR out of consideration. It still
| didn't work very well.
| api wrote:
| Energy doesn't take "social permission," but it costs money.
| Translation for this is: we need to make AI make money or the
| bubble will collapse.
|
| I've been predicting for a while: free or cheap AI will
| enshittify and become an addictive ad medium with nerfed
| capabilities. If you want actually good AI you will have to pay
| for it, either a much heftier fee or buying or renting compute to
| run your own. In other words you'll be paying what it actually
| costs, so this is really just the disappearance of the bubble
| subsidy.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| It does take social permission in places like Europe. There's a
| big pressure against datacenters here that use scarce
| resources. Like here in Holland the power grid is overloaded
| and companies need to wait for ages to get a connection.
|
| So this is something that factors in hugely in planning
| permission. What do we get back for it is a question asked a
| lot. And datacenters are notoriously bad at providing jobs,
| during construction yes but in the run phase it's mainly low-
| value remote hands and security stuff.
| Driver4732 wrote:
| Wasn't Satya saying earlier that AI would replace knowledge
| workers? Now he's saying we need to find something useful for
| AI...lol. Quite the reversal.
| glimshe wrote:
| When I read HN comments where people say "AI sux, AI is useless,
| AI is a waste of time", I think I must be living in a different
| universe. Maybe Hacker News is a dimensional portal between my
| reality and other people's.
|
| Hi there, friends from another dimension! In my reality, there's
| a cold front coming from the north. Healthcare is expensive and
| politics are a mess. But AI? It hallucinates sometimes but it's
| so much better for searching, ad hoc consultation and as a code
| assistant than anything I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it
| saved me SO much time I decided to pay for it. I'm a penny
| pincher, so I wouldn't be paying for it otherwise.
|
| I think Satya is talking about cost/benefit. AI is incredibly
| useful but also incredibly expensive. I think we still need to
| find the right balance (perhaps slower model releases), but
| there's no way we'll put the genie back in the bottle.
|
| I hope your AI gets better! Talk to you later!
| vdupras wrote:
| Is your AI faulty? Did you bother asking it for a sentiment
| analysis of the comments here before drawing your conclusions?
| That's not what the comments here are saying.
| an0malous wrote:
| Likewise I keep seeing all these comments on HN about how AI is
| revolutionary and all these AI skeptics are just haters. I
| really want to understand what this gap is between the
| believers and skeptics.
|
| I have access to all the popular AI tools from work for free, I
| use them for the same cases you mentioned like search,
| consultation, a better StackOverflow, and autocomplete. It's
| definitely useful but I would describe that as incrementally
| useful, not revolutionary.
|
| Satya is saying that AI needs to start doing more than vibe
| coding and autocomplete, there's probably half a trillion
| invested into the technology worldwide now and it's not enough
| for AI to be a good coding assistant. It needs to replace
| customer support, radiologists, and many other professions to
| justify the unprecedented level of investment its garnered.
| morelandjs wrote:
| There's more to AI than foundation models. I think you are going
| to see meaningful progress on chore automation over the next
| decade through a combination of algorithmic and mechanical
| improvements, and it will measurably improve our lives. Recently
| got a Matic robot (awesome btw), and I no longer feel the need to
| vacuum my floors. It's not life changing, but it's an appreciable
| convenience upgrade. The capabilities feel like a peek into the
| future.
| AlexeyBrin wrote:
| > Recently got a Matic robot
|
| This probably has nothing to do with gen AI (the kind of AI
| Nadela is speaking about).
| linuxftw wrote:
| Things AI is already better at than (many/most) humans: Customer
| service (chat, phone), writing software, writing docs about
| software, computer graphics (animation, images), driving cars.
|
| There are plenty of uses for AI. Right now, the industry is
| heavily spending on training new models, improving performance of
| existing software and hardware, and trying to create niche
| products.
|
| Power usage for inference will drop dramatically over the next
| decade, and more models are going to run on-device rather than in
| the cloud. AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0%
| chance it 'fails' and we return to 2020.
| sjajshha wrote:
| > Customer service (chat, phone)
|
| Only because companies have been cutting costs for decades
| here. This is not a good argument for AI.
|
| > writing software
|
| If you mean typing characters quickly, yes. Otherwise, there's
| still a lot of employed devs, with many AI companies hiring.
|
| > writing docs about software
|
| The most useful docs are there because they contain info you
| cannot determine from the code. AI is not able to do this.
|
| > computer graphics (animation, images)
|
| If you are producing slop, yes.
|
| > driving cars
|
| True, but only because of its improved physical awareness. ie
| it's a mechanical gain (better eyes, ears, etc) not an
| intellectual one (interpreting that information). Self driving
| cars aren't LLMs and not really applicable here. Entirely
| different field.
|
| > AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0% chance
| it 'fails' and we return to 2020
|
| Absolutely true. But not for the reasons you think.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Wrong on all accounts.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| > Customer service
|
| An AI might be better than an indian call center but I doubt
| that when the AI is made by indians anyway.
|
| > writing software, writing docs about software
|
| I have asked AI about exactly one topic and it lied about the
| API of a library making up the functions I was supposed to
| call.
|
| > computer graphics (animation, images)
|
| I have indeed seen many wonderful meme images come out of the
| generators but that was before they got lobotomized for
| producing that subject matter
|
| [EDIT]
|
| And the worst part is these are all just more "software as a
| service" designed to remove the possibility of using a tool
| without approval.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Investor hype bubbles kill technologies. If we let tech mature at
| a reasonable pace, we would actually get there faster in the long
| run. There are real applications of AI that aren't ready yet. All
| the hype bubble has done is push out unnecessary and broken AI,
| eroding consumer trust, use up valuable resources, eroding public
| trust, hype up ability to destroy jobs, causing public
| discontent, and push out unsafe AI that has real societal harm.
| shishcat wrote:
| I agree with this dicussion, AI should be used for improving,
| researching, and as he says, do something useful that changes the
| outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.
| BUT IT'S SATYA NADELLA SAYING IT! The person whose company owns
| Copilot, Copilot in Bing, Copilot for Word, Copilot for Dynamics
| 365 Supply Chain...
|
| With all this useless slop, he's literally arguing against his
| own point.
| kodyo wrote:
| "Quick, guys, find something useful" coming from a CEO who's bet
| his company on an idea should be a market top signal, right?
|
| And no, I'm not saying the technology is bad. The business isn't
| going swimmingly, though.
| JanneVee wrote:
| They have made huge investments into hardware so everyone is
| getting more expensive hardware, and now begging everyone else to
| make their investments worthwhile. Don't mind that they are
| driving up prices for hardware and requiring new hardware for
| Windows 11 upgrades. I'm suspecting that we don't have enough
| memory manufacturing capacity in the world to do both AI
| datacenters and replace all hardware that they made obsolete with
| their forced upgrade. AI didn't turn everyone into paperclips but
| it turned everyone to memory and AI processors in datacenters
| that can't be powered or has no useful economic utility.
| Gazoche wrote:
| Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things
| that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't
| get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this
| context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either).
|
| If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application
| in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been
| moving at a steady pace for decades and has nothing to do with
| the current hype wave of GenAI, so there's no reason to assume
| it's suddenly going to go exponential. I used to work in that
| field and I'm confident it's not going to change overnight:
| progress there is slow not because of the models, but because
| data is sparse and noisy, labels are even sparser and noisier,
| deployment procedures are rigid and legal compliance is a
| nightmare.
|
| If they mean "generative AI", then how is that supposed to work
| exactly? Asking LLMs for medical diagnosis is no better than
| asking "the Internet at large". They only return the most
| statistically likely output given their training corpus (that
| corpus being the Internet as a whole), so it's more likely your
| diagnosis will be based on a random Reddit comment that the LLMs
| has ingested somewhere, than an actual medical paper.
|
| The only plausible applications I can think of are tasks such as
| summarizing papers, acting as augmented search engines for
| datasets and papers, or maybe automating some menial
| administrative tasks. Useful, for sure, but not revolutionary.
| croon wrote:
| The most statistically likely output given your diligently
| described symtoms could still be useful. The prohibitive cost
| in healthcare in general is likely your time with your doctor.
| If you could "consult" with a dumb LLM beforehand and give the
| doctor a couple of different venues to look at that they can
| then shoot down or further explore could likely save time
| rather than them having to prod you for exhaustive binary tree
| exploring.
|
| This from a huge LLM skeptic in general. It doesn't have to be
| right all the time if it in aggregate saves time doctors can
| spend diagnosing you.
| wosined wrote:
| Such "AI" has already existed for decades. Look up expert
| systems.
| Gazoche wrote:
| Sure, but what confidence do you have that what the "dumb"
| LLM says is worth any salt ? It's no different than
| aggregating the results of a Reddit search, or perhaps even
| worse because LLMs lack the intent or common sense filter of
| a human. It could be combining two contradicting sources in a
| way that only makes sense statistically, or regurgitate joke
| answers without understanding context (the infamous "you
| should eat at least one small rock per day").
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Realistically the more likely use will be medical
| transcription - making an official record of doctors' patient
| notes. The inevitable errors will reduce the quality of
| patient care, but they will let doctors see more patients in
| a day, which is what the healthcare companies care about.
| wrenky wrote:
| Totally anecdotal, but recently my wife had to go to urgent
| care for something wrong with her ankle- They send a 4-5 page
| sheet of arcane terms and diagnoses to her care app (relayed to
| me via text) and I just slammed that into gemnai and asked
| "what does this mean" and it did quite well! Gave possible
| causes, what it meant for her in the long term vs short term,
| and ways to prevent it. I had a better understanding of what
| was wrong before the doctor even got to my wife in the waiting
| room!
|
| Obviously still double check things, but it was moment of
| clarity I hadn't really had before this. Still needed the
| doctor and all the experience to diagnose and fix things, but
| relaying that info back to me is something doctors are only
| okay at. Try it out! take a summary sheet of a recent visit or
| incident and feed it in.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the
| things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I
| just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by
| "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them
| either).
|
| It's a more-or-less intentional equivocation between different
| meanings of AI, as you note, machine learning vs generative AI.
| They want to point at the real but unsexy potential of ML for
| medical use in order to pump up the perceived value of LLMs.
| They want to imply to the general public and investors that
| LLMs are going to cure cancer.
| lunias wrote:
| They definitely don't build CEOs like they used to...
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Interesting statement coming from Nadella - almost that AI is a
| solution looking for a problem, or at least looking for a problem
| that justifies the cost in terms of the resources (energy, memory
| chips, fab capacity) it is sucking up, not to mention looming
| societal disruption.
|
| There obviously are some compelling use cases for "AI", but it's
| certainly questionable if any of those are really making people's
| lives any better, especially if you take "AI" to mean LLMs and
| fake videos, not more bespoke uses like AlphaFold which is not
| only beneficial, but also not a resource hog.
| jordemort wrote:
| LOL, fuck all the way off, Satya
| pupppet wrote:
| Let's rename our breadwinner MS Office to the product we're still
| trying to find a use for.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| "It's not a bubble as long as you believe in it!"
| Yizahi wrote:
| "Right now, he is imagining that he is just fine. And that a
| ton of burning leather and metal is fully functioning car."
|
| https://youtu.be/M0S3a32RzEo?t=278
| keeda wrote:
| This will sound pedantic but I'll explain why it matters: the
| exact wording is "We need to _do_ something useful with AI ",
| because the current (editorialized) submission title (of an
| already slanted article) makes it sound like people _don 't know
| what_ to do with AI.
|
| We already know many useful things to do; there are already
| 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-
| related) doing various ostensibly useful things. And there a ton
| more use-cases discussed in the comments here and elsewhere. But
| because of the headline the discussion is missing the much more
| important point!
|
| Satya's point is, we need to do things that improve people's
| lives. Specific quotes from TFA:
|
| _>... "do something useful that changes the outcomes of people
| and communities and countries and industries."
|
| > "We will quickly lose even the social permission to take
| something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to
| generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health
| outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private
| sector competitiveness, across all sectors, small and large,
| right?" said Nadella. "And that, to me, is ultimately the goal."_
|
| Which is absolutely right. He's the only Big Tech CEO I've heard
| of who constantly harps on the human and economic benefit angle
| of LLMs, whereas so many others talk -- maybe in indirect ways --
| about replacing people and/or only improving company outcomes
| (which are usually better for only a small group of people: the
| shareholders.)
|
| He's still a CEO, so I have no illusions that he's any different
| from the rest of them (he's presided over a ton of layoffs, after
| all.) But he seems to be the only CEO whose interests appear to
| be aligned with the rest of ours.
| tempodox wrote:
| The number of startups is no proof they're doing anything
| useful. It only proves that the founders think they can make
| money with it.
| keeda wrote:
| And potentially their investors, for the startups that got
| funding. And maybe their customers, for the startups that are
| already hitting millions in ARR in a year or less. There are
| some of the numbers out there worth looking up.
|
| Is your contention that we don't already know how to do
| useful things with AI?
| orangea wrote:
| > We already know many useful things to do; there are already
| 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are
| coding-related) doing various ostensibly useful things.
|
| I don't think you meant "ostensibly".
| cmxch wrote:
| Scale it back and give us the ability to make our own AI rigs?
| amai wrote:
| Why doesn't he ask an AI what it wants to do?
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I find copilot in office deeply underwhelming. Considering how
| much Microsoft evangelises it. I wouldn't pay the 30$ a month
| personally.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| I think best case, we're looking at a "do what spreadsheets did
| for accountants" type moment here. You still need to be able to
| prompt the thing what to do, and relatively fine granularity, but
| if you know what to ask (and know enough to verify the answer you
| get back) it can still be a pretty useful tool.
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