“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”
talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.
oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.
one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.
being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.
in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.
and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.
Never mind any of that - does no-one do market research anymore? Did anyone bother to ask customers if they actually wanted any of this AI crap before billions of dollars was commited to it? Not to mention the damage to the environment.
What’s funny is its not the first time Microsoft has found itself out of touch with customers.
“The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me."
That’s your killer feature? “But you can converse and it can make any image!”
He says it like no one has seen the party trick yet. Like, yeah dude, we were all impressed with it in 2022. Then we learned that it’s all smoke and mirrors.
Some of us weren’t even impressed in 2022 because we don’t want to talk to a computer or create shitty images.
This is exactly it.
In true tech bro dumb dumb fashion, instead of recognizing failure and learning from it, he doubles down and blames the critics.
The simplest things will mindblow the stupidest, most idiotic, brain amputated people.
No, we think it’s great, keep going.
