4 ms·

They're not abandoning AI yet. They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They al

by thimp 3y ago

They're not abandoning AI yet. They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line. The thing is 99% of the people I know either played with their proposition and found it irritating or don't give a shit. They literally just want to be left alone and for people not to keep changing things. The machine is a means to an end and that end is well defined for them already. Only the tech and investment industries are gushing all over this and the latter are only riding the hype. Typical MS this. Give it 5 years and read this comment again...

keyringlight 3y ago
It's hard not to see it from the perspective of "for the person with a hammer, everything is a nail", Azure and already having the capability to build data centers is their hammer and the nail is a compute-heavy task. There's an element of speculation if whether it will be a lasting wave of the future people will pay for, but they have the levers to pull in case it is. It wouldn't be the first time they or any other company has made a bet so they don't get left out, time will tell if AI becomes a part of the furniture commodity or doesn't prove broadly valuable and fades away after a change of direction. The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves from a development/exploration phase to regular operations and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs, and probably provide a better experience running a model locally.
- thimp 3y ago
  Well they failed miserably at that first thing. Azure's only leverage is really AD, InTune, O365 etc for corporates and then shovel everything else in there around the edges. Even in the MS house I work in, other than AD, all the product stuff is in AWS. And the Azure hardware situation is so crap they had to buy in capacity from Oracle! Source: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-infrastructure-utilized-by-microsoft-for-bing-conversational-search-2023-11-07/ https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-infras...
imiric 3y ago
> They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line. You've just described every AI company. AI is not even their core business, but MS is certainly in the best position out of any of the Big Tech companies to deliver a successful consumer product. Whether someone else will step in and steal their lunch, or they just fumble the product, only time will tell, but none of this is an indication that they're "abandoning AI" as GP mentioned. Quite the contrary―they're heavily invested in it. The rest of your post is pure speculation, but I'll set a reminder for 5 years from now in case your crystal ball is legit.
- thimp 3y ago
  Not every AI company. There are two approaches to solving problems. One is finding problems you didn't have to solve with the latest hammer. The other is having existing problems and solving them with the latest hammer. The subtle difference tends to bisect product outcomes accurately and thus can drive investment decisions. My crystal ball is mostly fairly well proven heuristics and financial modelling (used to be the day job). I could be wrong but the chance of a favourable outcome is less than one I'd put money on.
justinclift 3y ago
> ... overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. That sounds exactly like how they did Cortana too -> "It'll be GREAT!!!". Fast forward a few years and they're ripping it out of everything as it's actually not useful.

by thimp 3y ago

keyringlight 3y ago

It's hard not to see it from the perspective of "for the person with a hammer, everything is a nail", Azure and already having the capability to build data centers is their hammer and the nail is a compute-heavy task. There's an element of speculation if whether it will be a lasting wave of the future people will pay for, but they have the levers to pull in case it is. It wouldn't be the first time they or any other company has made a bet so they don't get left out, time will tell if AI becomes a part of the furniture commodity or doesn't prove broadly valuable and fades away after a change of direction. The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves from a development/exploration phase to regular operations and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs, and probably provide a better experience running a model locally.

thimp 3y ago
Well they failed miserably at that first thing. Azure's only leverage is really AD, InTune, O365 etc for corporates and then shovel everything else in there around the edges. Even in the MS house I work in, other than AD, all the product stuff is in AWS. And the Azure hardware situation is so crap they had to buy in capacity from Oracle! Source: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-infrastructure-utilized-by-microsoft-for-bing-conversational-search-2023-11-07/ https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-infras...

imiric 3y ago

> They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line. You've just described every AI company. AI is not even their core business, but MS is certainly in the best position out of any of the Big Tech companies to deliver a successful consumer product. Whether someone else will step in and steal their lunch, or they just fumble the product, only time will tell, but none of this is an indication that they're "abandoning AI" as GP mentioned. Quite the contrary―they're heavily invested in it. The rest of your post is pure speculation, but I'll set a reminder for 5 years from now in case your crystal ball is legit.

thimp 3y ago
Not every AI company. There are two approaches to solving problems. One is finding problems you didn't have to solve with the latest hammer. The other is having existing problems and solving them with the latest hammer. The subtle difference tends to bisect product outcomes accurately and thus can drive investment decisions. My crystal ball is mostly fairly well proven heuristics and financial modelling (used to be the day job). I could be wrong but the chance of a favourable outcome is less than one I'd put money on.

justinclift 3y ago

> ... overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. That sounds exactly like how they did Cortana too -> "It'll be GREAT!!!". Fast forward a few years and they're ripping it out of everything as it's actually not useful.