Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth
Perhaps it should have been wide adoption that led to a boom, instead of a boom in hope of adoption?
That’s just crazy talk. You’ll never create a blackhole moneypit that manages to keep you a billionaire that way.
Nadella was already a billionaire before the AI boom and all indicated it would stay that way.
So? Mentally ill moneysick people
That’s how faster horses work. If you want to sell something actually new you have to take some risk. Speculative investment is good. It’s just group-think me-too investment bandwagon bubbles that are bad. And to be clear I think the world is overinvesting in AI by a lot. The strange thing is that so thinks a lot of financial experts, but “the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent” so here we are.
The way that sort of invention often works is:
- Inventor thinks they have a world changing idea
- Inventor spends their own time and money to build a prototype
- Inventor shows the product off to the world.
If it truly is a world changing invention, step 4 is “world is amazed, inventor can’t keep up with demand”. There are also frequent cases where the world goes “meh, not for me”. Now occasionally those are when an invention is ahead of its time, and years or decades later the inventor is vindicated. The other case is when the invention really isn’t good, and there simply isn’t and will never be demand for it.
Somehow, the AI bubble is built with people ignoring the feedback from people that keep saying “meh, not for me”, and the various “inventors” burning more and more of their money trying to change people’s minds. Has that ever worked?
No, pamp it.
Today, the main factor in sales success or failure is not the ability to satisfy your customers’ needs, but the ability to create new ones for them. Ai failed to create new needs.
Such an under rated comedy set by DG. Maybe not under rated… just not as well known as it deserves to be.
A man needs a name.
Donald Glover (real name) / Childish Gambino / Troy Barnes
The comedy set is called “Weirdo”.
Thank you, I’ll be watching that tonight! Yeah knew who it was, just not the set name, I just haven’t watched a lot of his stand-up.
If nobody is using your product then you made a shit product and should scrap it before you lose any more money.
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I am so here for this.
Dear Rooty,
We promised investors adoption we could not achieve, and we had to rebrand our best product to create the illusion of adoption.
This leads to our question:
How can we make more of our product offering icons look like butt holes?
Thank you in advance for your wisdom!
Whining that nobody wants to use your product worked pretty well for Zuck and his Mii-verse. Oh, that’s right, it didn’t, never mind.
Translation: “Please help us justify our choices to our board. They want to know why we YOLO’d billions into making our users hate us.”
You could have every single piece of technology on the planet using AI and it would still falter, because HUMANS DON’T WANT AI! Time and time again it’s been shown that people don’t like this shit. You’re spending money that hasn’t been made, on ram that hasn’t been produced, to be installed in AI data centers that haven’t been built, to run AI farms that have zero interest from humans, to chase profits that will never come.
I would normally say “congratulations, you fell for it again”, except nobody is tricking you here. YOU are the one tricking yourself. Every expert has stated that CEOs everywhere report no actual benefit from their AI use. Tech experts everywhere report that customers don’t want AI in their toilet. Or their toaster. Or their TV. Or their cell phone.
So who is this for?
You mean you’re telling me that the technology that can’t even correctly predict my next word in my text messages, is untrustworthy at an even bigger scale? I remember when AI first came out and I talked about that, they went on and on about how they’re different.
Also, please don’t anyone forget that the CEOs of these corporations were firing and replacing their workers in proportion to the amount of trust they gave LLMs. Do not forget.
It’s simple, really.
You’ll save everything to the cloud. Your work really likes this, as they don’t have to maintain their own share drives anymore. All your files are on OneDrive.
Home users can no longer afford their own computing. The PC is dead. All the parts have been scooped up to build out massive AI data centers. All they can do is afford “dumb terminals”: cheap tablets and laptops that can’t do much on their own, but can stream cloud apps, videos, games exceedingly well. Most don’t care because they don’t want to be bothered with “all this IT stuff. God, those computer guys are annoying!”
LLMs are only actually “good” at one thing, analysis of text (including non-English languages and also computer file formats).
Microsoft and others will use their new trove of information, with their new tools of analysis, to get ahead of the market. Imagine what companies would pay for the “intelligence” of knowing what their competitors are thinking, as they type it out. Imagine what governments would pay for near instant knowledge of who disagrees with them. Imagine what advertisers might get for bids for when they can guarantee someone’s thought pattern will result in a successful sale.
And big tech will charge us all for the privilege, or we will get left behind and unable to participate in society. When Microsoft turns off the lights, you’re basically homeless and unable to work.
It needs to crash and burn before this can ever happen. It needs to be ended now.
Butlerian Jihad here we come!
If he wanted people to like it then he should have made it do things people want it to do.
It is the new metaverse.
Hell I’d almost settle for just “making it work”. No disclaimers, no bullshitting. Computers should be optimized and accurate. AI is neither.
Ai does work great, at some stuff. The problem is pushing it into places it doesn’t belong.
It’s a good grammar and spell check. It helps me get a lot of English looking more natural.
It’s also great for troubleshooting consumer electronics.
It’s far better at search than google.
Even then it can only help, not replace folks or complete tasks.
It only looks good in comparison to Google search because they trashed Google search.
Which of course, Google did just so you’d have to search more, so you’d see more ads.
Ai does work great, at some stuff. The problem is pushing it into places it doesn’t belong.
I can generally agree with this, but I think a lot of people overestimate where it DOES belong.
For example, you’ll see a lot of tech bros talking about how AI is great at replacing artists, but a bunch of artists who know their shit can show you every possible way this just isn’t as good as human-made works, but those same artists might say that AI is still incredibly good at programming… because they’re not programmers.
It’s a good grammar and spell check.
Totally. After all, it’s built on a similar foundation to existing spellcheck systems: predict the likely next word. It’s good as a thesaurus too. (e.g. “what’s that word for someone who’s full of themselves, self-centered, and boastful?” and it’ll spit out “egocentric”)
It’s also great for troubleshooting consumer electronics.
Only for very basic, common, or broad issues. LLMs generally sound very confident, and provide answers regardless of if there’s actually a strong source. Plus, they tend to ignore the context of where they source information from.
For example, if I ask it how to change X setting in a niche piece of software, it will often just make up an entire name for a setting or menu, because it just… has to say something that sounds right, since the previous text was “Absolutely! You can fix x by…” and it’s just predicting the most likely term, which isn’t going to be “wait, nevermind, sorry I don’t think that’s a setting that even exists!”, but a made up name instead. (this is one of the reasons why “thinking” versions of models perform better, because the internal dialogue can reasonably include a correction, retraction, or self-questioning)
It will pull from names and text of entirely different posts that happened to display on the page it scraped, make up words that never appeared on any page, or infer a meaning that doesn’t actually exist.
But if you have a more common question like “my computer is having x issues, what could this be?” it’ll probably give you a good broad list, and if you narrow it down to RAM issues, it’ll probably recommend you MemTest86.
It’s far better at search than google.
As someone else already mentioned, this is mostly just because Google deliberately made search worse. Other search engines that haven’t enshittified, like the one I use (Kagi), tend to give much better results than Google, without you needing to use AI features at all.
On that note though, there is actually an interesting trend where AI models tend to pick lower-ranked, less SEO-optimized pages as sources, but still tend to pick ones with better information on average. It’s quite interesting, though I’m no expert on that in particular and couldn’t really tell you why other than “it can probably interpret the context of a page better than an algorithm made to do it as quickly as possible, at scale, returning 30 results in 0.3 seconds, given all the extra computing power and time.”
Even then it can only help, not replace folks or complete tasks.
Agreed.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. To go through your points, spell check I don’t find particularly impressive. That was solved previously without requiring the power demands of a small town. Grammer, maybe - but in my experience my “LLM powered” keyboard’s suggestions are still worse than old T9 input.
I’ve had no luck troubleshooting anything with AI. It’s often trained on old data, tries to instruct you to change settings that don’t exist, or dreams up controls that might appear on “similar” hardware. Sure you can perhaps infer a solution, maybe, but it’s rarely correct at first response. It’ll happily run you through steps that are inconsequential to fixing a problem.
Finally, it might be better than indexed search NOW - but mostly because LLMs wrecked that too. I used to be able to use a couple search operators and get directly to the information I needed - now search is reduced to shifting through slop SEO sites.
And it does all this half assing while using enough power to justify dedicated nuclear reactors. I cant help but feel we’ve regressed on so many fronts.
Stop calling LLMs ‘AI’, there’s nothing intelligent about regurgitating statistically luke-warm refried Reddit threads.
My line, thanks for saving me the work of typing it out this time.
My gripe with calling LLMs AI is it makes it harder to discuss enemy AI behaviour in video games lol.
As this asshole and his asshole company tries to force adoption via shoving it down Windows 11 users without consent.
Reminder that now is a great time to switch to Linux desktop.
If people aren’t adopting it, it’s not a boom.
It’s an investment boom.
It’s an investment boom.
Well said. I’m going to steal this.
So they‘re finally reaching the „we could fail…“ stage of the hype cycle. This is great news, actually. The sooner this charade ends the lesser destructive it will be. Even when it already caused devastating damage to society.
Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth
Let me rephrase:
“Smart” entitled person says our product is not showing value, so we need to force people to use it more than we already are after years of cramming it down their throats.
Man, I cannot wait for the comedy movies that come out based on this farce, explaining exactly how these jokers lost all their money.
The best comedies will be made by them… like the NFT cartoon that was made using the bored ape pictures that was so bad that even the biggest advocates of NFTs had no idea what the hell they were doing.
Unless someone bails them out.
Who’s going to do that? Everyone with any money is already leveraged up to the eyeballs in this shit.
oh honey, it’s going to be tax dollars
The stone hasn’t bled enough. Squeeze harder.
- The American Economy
“People don’t want our product and we’re in danger of failure, wahhh” -capitalist oligarch
Something something free market dynamics something something. Oh wait, they only believe in that when it means deregulating, but if it means letting their company fail then all of a sudden everyone else has a responsibility to carry weight for them?
Privatized profits and socialized losses. Damn greedy crooks.
