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AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders l

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made selling the fantasy is simply too good to ignore. In other words --- pure greed. Over the longer term, this is a weakness, not a strength.

ahartmetz 11mo ago
Imagine your supplier effectively telling you that they don't even value you (and your money) enough to bother a real human.
jollyllama 11mo ago
They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.
- jqpabc123 11mo ago
  They think we're all stupid. As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong. And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.
  - somenameforme 11mo ago
    Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics. In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself with government and then imposing itself on everybody and everything.
    - sallveburrpi 11mo ago
      Scrooge is a fictional person and Microsoft have been getting away with it since I’m alive with people hating it probably just as long. So I think GP definitely has a point.
      - somenameforme 11mo ago
        Are you a fan of reading? Good character fiction is based on reality as understood at a time and a great way to get insights into how and what people think, particularly as it's precisely those believable portrayals that tend to 'stick' with society. For example even most of George R. R. Martin's tales are directly inspired by real things, very much living up to the notion that reality is much stranger than fiction! Or similarly, read something like Dune and the 60s leaks into it hard. In modern times the tale of Scrooge probably wouldn't really resonate, nor 'stick', because we transitioned to a culture of worshiping wealth, consumerism, and materialism. See (relevant to this topic) how many people defend unethical actions by claiming that fiduciary duty precludes any value beyond greed. In the time of Scrooge this was not the case, and so it was a more viable cautionary tale that strongly resonated.
        sallveburrpi 11mo ago
        I think we would agree on a lot of things over a beer or beverage of your choice. I also think that we as a (globalised?) culture have decided that money trumps everything. But I don’t think that it’s the “fault” of single sociopaths or big companies; it’s some inherent flaw in human intelligence - we’re just not equipped to make smart long-term decisions or deal with a vast alien intelligence such as “the market”. Scrooges tale just resonates strongly - why else would it be still so popular that basically everyone know it - we just aren’t able to stop this machine and it will grind on until our species is wiped from the planet. Not that it matters too much for you and me - but a thousand years more of this? I can’t imagine what that would look like. Edit: you ever read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair? I don’t think being greedy above all morals is a new thing, it’s always been there. We just “scaled up”
- stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
  Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago
    Their customers largely aren't their users. Their customers are the purchasing departments at Dell, Lenovo, and other OEMs. Their customers are the purchasing departments at large enterprises who want to buy Excel. Their customers are the advertisers. The products where the customers and the users are the same people (Excel, MS flight simulator, etc.) tend to be pretty nice. The products where the customers aren't the users inevitably turn to shit.
  - thewebguyd 11mo ago
    > I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long. How would they? They are a monopoly, and partake in aggressive product bundling and price manipulation tactics. They juice their user numbers by enabling things in enterprise tenants by default. If a product of theirs doesn't sell, they bundle it for "free" in the next tier up of license to drive adoption and upgrades. Case in point, the InTune suite (includes EntraID P2, Remote assistance, endpoint privilege management) will now be included in E5, and the price of E5 is going up (by $10/user/month, less than the now bundled features cost when bought separately). People didn't buy it otherwise, so now there's an incentive to move customers off E3 and into E5. Now their customers are in a place where Microsoft can check boxes, even if the products aren't good, so there's little incentive to switch. Try to price out Google Workspace (and also, an office license still because someone will need Excel), Identity, EDR, MDM for Windows, mac, mobile, slack, VoIP, DLP, etc. You won't come close to Microsoft's bundled pricing by piecing together the whole M365 stack yourself. So yeah, they escape market discipline because they are the only choice. Their customers are fully captive.
  - drw85 11mo ago
    I think this time is the first time that it will actually hurt all the large corps investing gazillions of dollars into AI infra. Shipping some ads in windows? Doesn't really hurt you, it makes you extra money. Sure, some customers get a little annoyed, but who cares. But this time they invested huge amounts of money to chase something that will likely never get profitable and return enough to pay off.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago
  Do they think or do they know? I thought that Microsoft was over after the complete failure of Windows phone and Windows 8 and Office ribbon. And that was 20 years ago... Subpar companies selling subpar products can be massively successive, because they know their customers.
zdragnar 11mo ago
I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell apart and everyone is desperate to jump on the bandwagon because ZIRP is gone and everyone who is risk averse will only bet on what everyone else is betting on. Thus, the cycle feeds itself until the bubble pops.
- MengerSponge 11mo ago
  All these boosters think we're on the leading edge of an exponential, when it's way more likely that we're on the midpoint to tail of a logistic
  - rm_-rf_slash 11mo ago
    AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew. *Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.
- empath75 11mo ago
  Two things can be true: 1) We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do with existing AI technology. 2) Almost all of the money we are spending on AI now is ineffectual and wasted. --- If you go back to the late 1990s, that is the state that most companies were at with _computers_. Huge, wasteful projects that didn't improve productivity at all. It took 10 years of false starts sometimes to really get traction.
  - rizzom5000 11mo ago
    It's interesting to think Microsoft was around back then too, taking approximately 14 years to regain the loss of approximately 58% of their valuation.
Gormo 11mo ago
> In other words --- pure greed. Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. These attempts to try to steer demand despite clear indicators that it doesn't want to go in that direction aren't just driven by greed, they're driven by abject incompetence. This isn't pure greed, it's stupid greed.
- wubrr 11mo ago
  Pure greed is stupid greed. Also, if the current level of AI investment and valuations aren't justified by market demand (I believe so), many of these people/companies are getting more money than they would without the unreasonable hype.
- paganel 11mo ago
  > Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. Not necessarily, just look at this clip [1] from Margin Call, an excellent movie on the GFC. As Jeremy Irons is saying in that clip, the market (as usually understood in classical economy, with producers making things for clients/customers to purchase) is of no importance to today's market economy, almost all that matters, at the hundreds of billions - multi-trillion dollars-levels, is for your company "to play the music" as best as the other (necessarily very big) market participants, "nothing more, nothing less" (again, to quote Irons in that movie). There's nothing in it about "making what people/customers want" and all that, which is regarded as accessory, that is if it is taken into consideration at all. As another poster is mentioning in this thread, this is all the direct result of the financialization of much of the Western economy, this is how things work at this level, given these (financiliazed) inputs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE
- binary132 11mo ago
  you seem to be committing the error of believing that the problem here is just that they’re not selling what people want to buy, instead of identifying the clear intention to _create_ the market.
- estimator7292 11mo ago
empath75 11mo ago
It's not "fundamentally flawed". It is brilliant at what it does. What is flawed is how people are applying it to solve specific problems. It isn't a "do anything" button that you can just push. Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.
- stingraycharles 11mo ago
  You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
  - rtp4me 11mo ago
    My suspicion is because they (HN) are very concerned this technology is pushing hard into their domain expertise and feel threatened (and, rightfully so).
    - seanw444 11mo ago
      While it will suck when that happens (and inevitably it will), that time is not now. I'm not one to say LLMs are useless, but they aren't all they're being marketed to be.
    - LtWorf 11mo ago
      Or they might know better than you. A painful idea.
      - rtp4me 11mo ago
        Painful? What's painful when someone has a different opinion? I think that is healthy.
  - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
nightski 11mo ago
I think on some level it is being done on the premise that further advancement requires an enormous capital investment and if they can find a way to fund that with today’s sales it will give the opportunity for the tech to get there (quite a gamble).
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I have a feeling that Microsoft is setting themselves up for a serious antitrust lawsuit if they do what they are intending on. They should really be careful about introducing products into the OS that take away from all other AI shops. I fear this would cripple innovation if allowed to do so as well, since Microsoft has drastically fatter wallets than most of their competition.
- delfinom 11mo ago
  Under the current US administration the only thing Microsoft is getting is numerous piles of taxpayer bailouts.
  - shevy-java 11mo ago
    Corruption is indeed going strong in the current corporate-controlled US group of lame actors posing as government indeed. At the least Trump is now regularly falling asleep - that's the best example that you can use any surrogate puppet and the underlying policies will still continue.
    - eastbound 11mo ago
      If I mention a president who was more of a general secretary of the party, taking notes of decisions taken for him by lobbies from the largest corporations, falling asleep and having incoherent speech to the point that he seems to be way past the point of stroke, I don’t think anyone will guess Trump.
- dreamcompiler 11mo ago
  There's no such thing as antitrust in the US right now. Google's recent slap on the wrist is all the proof you need.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
  Trump has ushered in a truly lawless phase of american politics. I mean, it was kind of bad before, but at least there was a pretense of rule of law. A trillion dollar company can easily just buy its way out of any enforcement of such antitrust action.
danans 11mo ago
> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? > I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. Yes, perhaps, but many industries are built on a little bit of technology and a lot of stories. I think of it as us all being caught in one giant infomercial. Meanwhile as long as investors buy the hype it's a great story to use for triming payrolls.
h2zizzle 11mo ago
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.
- hereme888 11mo ago
  It's like when a child doesn't want something, you "give them a choice": would you like to put on your red or white shoes?
- tech_ken 11mo ago
  > correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.
  - h2zizzle 11mo ago
    I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch. There should have been more, and Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.
    - tech_ken 11mo ago
      > A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground. > Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch I disagree, I think they're artifacts of the rehab environment (the ZIRP policy sphere). I think in a world where we fully ate the loss of '08 and started in a new direction you might get Tesla, but definitely not TSLA, and the version we got is really (Tesla+TSLA) IMO. Bitcoin to me is even less of a break with the pre-08 world; blockchain is cool tech but Bitcoin looks very much "Financial Derivatives, Online". I think an honest correction to '08 would have been far more of a focus on "hard tech and value finance", rather than inventing new financial instruments even further distanced from the value-generation chain. > Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist. Hard agree here
stingraycharles 11mo ago
Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. If, however, AI ended up delivering and they missed the boat, they’re going to be held accountable. It’s much less risky to just follow industry trends. It takes a lot of technical knowledge, gut, and confidence in your own judgement to push back against an industry-wide trend at that level.
- foobarchu 11mo ago
  > if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.
  - saubeidl 11mo ago
    And if it does deliver, everyone's gonna be out of a job and the US economy is also going to crash. Nice cul-de-sac our techbro leaders have navigated us into.
    - rwyinuse 11mo ago
      Yep, either way things are going to suck for ordinary people. My country has had bad economy and high unemployment for years, even though rest of the world is doing mostly OK. I'm scared to think what will happen once AI bubble either bursts or eats most white collar jobs left here.
  - anjel 11mo ago
    Race to "Too big to fail" on hype and your losses are socialized
ReptileMan 11mo ago
It was the same with the cloud adoption. And I still think that cloud is expensive, wasteful and in the vast majority of cases not needed.
dehrmann 11mo ago
> In other words --- pure greed. It's the opposite; it's FOMO.
bgwalter 11mo ago
They want to exfiltrate the customers' data under the guise of getting better "AI" responses. No company or government in the EU should use this spyware.
GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
Fake it till you make it.
- dfedbeef 11mo ago
  outside of the recovery community, this is known as 'fraud'
didibus 11mo ago
Thing is, it's hard to predict what can be done and what breakthrough or minor tweak can suddenly open up an avenue for a profitable use-case. The cost of missing that opportunity is why they're heavily investing in AI, they don't want to miss the boat if there's going to be one. And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?
- binary132 11mo ago
  this idea that AI is the only thing anyone could possibly do that might be useful has absolutely got to go
- layer8 11mo ago
  > And what else would they do? What's the other growth path? Are you arguing that if LLMs didn’t exist as a technology, they wouldn’t find anything to do and collapse?
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    _Number would not go up sufficiently steeply_, would be the major concern, not collapse. Microsoft might end up valued as (whisper it) a normal mature stable company. That would be something like a quarter to a half what it's currently valued. For someone paid mostly in options, this is clearly a problem (and people at the top in these companies mostly _are_ compensated with options, not RSUs; if the stock price halves, they get _nothing_).
- solumunus 11mo ago
  The cost of the boat sinking is also very high and that’s looking like the more likely scenario. Watching your competitors sink huge amounts of capital into a probably sinking boat is a valid strategy. The growth path they were already on was fine no?
layer8 11mo ago
US technocapitalism is built on the premise of technological innovation driving exponential growth. This is why they are fixated on whatever provides an outlook for that. The risk that it might not work out is downplayed, because (a) they don’t want to hazard not being at the forefront in the event that it does work out, and (b) if it doesn’t work out, nobody will really hold them accountable for it, not the least because everybody does it. After the mobile and cloud revolution having run out of steam, AI is what promises most growth by far, even if it is a dubious promise. It’s a gamble, a bet on “the next big thing”. Because they would never be satisfied with there not being another “big thing”, or not being prominently part of it.
- binary132 11mo ago
  Riding hype waves forever is the most polar opposite thing to “sustainable” that I can imagine
apercu 11mo ago
It's not just AI mania, it's been this way for over a decade. When I first started consulting, organizations were afraid enough of lack of ROI in tech implementations that projects needed an economic justification in order to be approved. Starting with cloud, leadership seemed so become rare, and everything was "us too!". After cloud it was data/data visualization, then it was over-hiring during Covid, the it was RTO, and now it's AI. I wonder if we will ever return to rationalization? The bellwether might be Tesla stock price (at a rational valuation).
- eastbound 11mo ago
  If rationalization comes back, everyone will talk like in Michael Moore’s documentary about GM and Detroit. A manager’s salary after half a career will be around $120k, like in an average bank, and that would be succeeding. I don’t think we even imagine how much of a tsunami we’ve been surfing since 2000.
Balinares 11mo ago
> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? Probably individual actors have different motivations, but let's spitball for a second: - LLMs are genuinely a revolution in natural language processing. We can do things now in that space that were unthinkable single-digit years ago. This opens new opportunity spaces to colonize, and some might turn out quite profitable. Ergo, land rush. - Even if the new spaces are not that much of a value leap intrinsically, some may still end up obsoleting earlier-generation products pretty much overnight, and no one wants to be the next Nokia. Ergo, defensive land rush. - There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI to serve, which in essence means deprecating the labor class. The benefits (to that specific someone, anyway...) would be staggering enough to make that a goal worth pursuing even if the odds of reaching it are unclear and arguably quite low. - The increasingly leveraged debt that's funding the land rush's capex needs to be paid off somehow and I'll venture everyone knows that the winners will possibly be able to, but not everyone will be a winner. In that scenario, you really don't want to be a non-winner. It's kind of like that joke where you don't need to outrun the lions, you only need to outrun the other runners, except in this case the harder everyone runs and the bigger the lions become. (Which is a funny thought now, sure, but the feasting, when it comes, will be a bloodbath.) - A few, I'll daresay, have perhaps been huffing each other's farts too deep and too long and genuinely believe the words of ebullient enthusiasm coming out of their own mouths. That, and/or they think everyone's job except theirs is simple actually, and therefore just this close to being replaceable (which is a distinct flavor of fart, although coming from largely the same sources). So basically the mania is for the most part a natural consequence of what's going on in the overlap of the tech itself and the incentive structure within which it exists, although this might be a good point to remember that cancer and earthquakes too are natural. Either way, take care of yourselves and each other, y'all, because the ride is only going to get bouncier for a while.
- 12_throw_away 11mo ago
  > There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI Bullshit
adventured 11mo ago
It's not "pure greed." It's keeping up with the Joneses. It's fear. There are three types of humans: mimics, amplifiers, originators. ~99% of the population are basic mimics, and they're always terrified - to one degree or another - of being out of step with the herd. The hyper mimicry behavior can be seen everywhere and at all times, from classrooms to Tiktok & Reddit to shopping behaviors. Most corporate leadership are highly effective mimics, very few are originators. They desperately herd follow ('nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'). This is the dotcom equivalent of every business must be e and @ ified (the advertising was aggressively targeted to that at the time). 1998-2000, you must be e ready. Your hotdog stand must have its own web site. It is not greed-driven, it's fear-driven.
Workaccount2 11mo ago
People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily. Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingredients pretty often). She loves it. This is where LLMs shine for regular people. She doesn't need it to create a 500k LOC turn-key baking tracking SaaS AWS back-end 5 million recipes on tap kitchen assistant app. She just needs a bespoke one off check list.
- trollbridge 11mo ago
  Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are kept employed with. Right now they are (very successfully) getting everyone dependent on LLMs. They will pull rug, and people will pay to get it back. And none of the labs care if 2% of people use local/chinese models.
    - gitremote 11mo ago
      > And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. False. Training happens once for a time period, but inference happens again and again every time users use the product. Inference is the main money sink. "according to a report from Google, inference now accounts for nearly 60% of total energy use in their AI workloads. Meta revealed something even more striking: within their AI infrastructure, power is distributed in a 10:20:70 ratio among experimentation, training, and inference respectively, with inference taking the lion’s share." https://blogs.dal.ca/openthink/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-conversations-understanding-llm-inference-energy-consumption/ https://blogs.dal.ca/openthink/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-convers...
rsynnott 11mo ago
I mean, see Windows Vista. It was eventually patched up to the point where it was semi-usable (and then quietly killed off), but on introduction it was a complete mess. But... something had to be shipped, and this was something, so it was shipped. (Vista wasn't the only one; Windows ME never even made it to semi-usable, and no-one even remembers that Windows 8 _existed_.) Microsoft has _never_, as far as I know, been a company to be particularly concerned about product quality. The copilot stuff may be unusually bad, but it's not that aberrant for MS.
DebtDeflation 11mo ago
>So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? CEOs have been sold on the ludicrous idea that "AI" will replace 60-80% of their total employee headcount over the next 2-3 years. This is also priced into current equity valuations.
int_19h 11mo ago
At this point, the people in charge have signed off on so much AI spending that they need it to succeed, otherwise they are the ones responsible for massive losses.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

ahartmetz 11mo ago

Imagine your supplier effectively telling you that they don't even value you (and your money) enough to bother a real human.

jollyllama 11mo ago

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

jqpabc123 11mo ago
They think we're all stupid. As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong. And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics. In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself with government and then imposing itself on everybody and everything.
  - sallveburrpi 11mo ago
    Scrooge is a fictional person and Microsoft have been getting away with it since I’m alive with people hating it probably just as long. So I think GP definitely has a point.
    - somenameforme 11mo ago
      Are you a fan of reading? Good character fiction is based on reality as understood at a time and a great way to get insights into how and what people think, particularly as it's precisely those believable portrayals that tend to 'stick' with society. For example even most of George R. R. Martin's tales are directly inspired by real things, very much living up to the notion that reality is much stranger than fiction! Or similarly, read something like Dune and the 60s leaks into it hard. In modern times the tale of Scrooge probably wouldn't really resonate, nor 'stick', because we transitioned to a culture of worshiping wealth, consumerism, and materialism. See (relevant to this topic) how many people defend unethical actions by claiming that fiduciary duty precludes any value beyond greed. In the time of Scrooge this was not the case, and so it was a more viable cautionary tale that strongly resonated.
      - sallveburrpi 11mo ago
        I think we would agree on a lot of things over a beer or beverage of your choice. I also think that we as a (globalised?) culture have decided that money trumps everything. But I don’t think that it’s the “fault” of single sociopaths or big companies; it’s some inherent flaw in human intelligence - we’re just not equipped to make smart long-term decisions or deal with a vast alien intelligence such as “the market”. Scrooges tale just resonates strongly - why else would it be still so popular that basically everyone know it - we just aren’t able to stop this machine and it will grind on until our species is wiped from the planet. Not that it matters too much for you and me - but a thousand years more of this? I can’t imagine what that would look like. Edit: you ever read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair? I don’t think being greedy above all morals is a new thing, it’s always been there. We just “scaled up”
stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.
- SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago
  Their customers largely aren't their users. Their customers are the purchasing departments at Dell, Lenovo, and other OEMs. Their customers are the purchasing departments at large enterprises who want to buy Excel. Their customers are the advertisers. The products where the customers and the users are the same people (Excel, MS flight simulator, etc.) tend to be pretty nice. The products where the customers aren't the users inevitably turn to shit.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  > I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long. How would they? They are a monopoly, and partake in aggressive product bundling and price manipulation tactics. They juice their user numbers by enabling things in enterprise tenants by default. If a product of theirs doesn't sell, they bundle it for "free" in the next tier up of license to drive adoption and upgrades. Case in point, the InTune suite (includes EntraID P2, Remote assistance, endpoint privilege management) will now be included in E5, and the price of E5 is going up (by $10/user/month, less than the now bundled features cost when bought separately). People didn't buy it otherwise, so now there's an incentive to move customers off E3 and into E5. Now their customers are in a place where Microsoft can check boxes, even if the products aren't good, so there's little incentive to switch. Try to price out Google Workspace (and also, an office license still because someone will need Excel), Identity, EDR, MDM for Windows, mac, mobile, slack, VoIP, DLP, etc. You won't come close to Microsoft's bundled pricing by piecing together the whole M365 stack yourself. So yeah, they escape market discipline because they are the only choice. Their customers are fully captive.
- drw85 11mo ago
  I think this time is the first time that it will actually hurt all the large corps investing gazillions of dollars into AI infra. Shipping some ads in windows? Doesn't really hurt you, it makes you extra money. Sure, some customers get a little annoyed, but who cares. But this time they invested huge amounts of money to chase something that will likely never get profitable and return enough to pay off.
carlosjobim 11mo ago
Do they think or do they know? I thought that Microsoft was over after the complete failure of Windows phone and Windows 8 and Office ribbon. And that was 20 years ago... Subpar companies selling subpar products can be massively successive, because they know their customers.

zdragnar 11mo ago

I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell apart and everyone is desperate to jump on the bandwagon because ZIRP is gone and everyone who is risk averse will only bet on what everyone else is betting on. Thus, the cycle feeds itself until the bubble pops.

MengerSponge 11mo ago
All these boosters think we're on the leading edge of an exponential, when it's way more likely that we're on the midpoint to tail of a logistic
- rm_-rf_slash 11mo ago
  AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew. *Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.
empath75 11mo ago
Two things can be true: 1) We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do with existing AI technology. 2) Almost all of the money we are spending on AI now is ineffectual and wasted. --- If you go back to the late 1990s, that is the state that most companies were at with _computers_. Huge, wasteful projects that didn't improve productivity at all. It took 10 years of false starts sometimes to really get traction.
- rizzom5000 11mo ago
  It's interesting to think Microsoft was around back then too, taking approximately 14 years to regain the loss of approximately 58% of their valuation.

Gormo 11mo ago

> In other words --- pure greed. Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. These attempts to try to steer demand despite clear indicators that it doesn't want to go in that direction aren't just driven by greed, they're driven by abject incompetence. This isn't pure greed, it's stupid greed.

wubrr 11mo ago
Pure greed is stupid greed. Also, if the current level of AI investment and valuations aren't justified by market demand (I believe so), many of these people/companies are getting more money than they would without the unreasonable hype.
paganel 11mo ago
> Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. Not necessarily, just look at this clip [1] from Margin Call, an excellent movie on the GFC. As Jeremy Irons is saying in that clip, the market (as usually understood in classical economy, with producers making things for clients/customers to purchase) is of no importance to today's market economy, almost all that matters, at the hundreds of billions - multi-trillion dollars-levels, is for your company "to play the music" as best as the other (necessarily very big) market participants, "nothing more, nothing less" (again, to quote Irons in that movie). There's nothing in it about "making what people/customers want" and all that, which is regarded as accessory, that is if it is taken into consideration at all. As another poster is mentioning in this thread, this is all the direct result of the financialization of much of the Western economy, this is how things work at this level, given these (financiliazed) inputs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE
binary132 11mo ago
you seem to be committing the error of believing that the problem here is just that they’re not selling what people want to buy, instead of identifying the clear intention to _create_ the market.
estimator7292 11mo ago

empath75 11mo ago

It's not "fundamentally flawed". It is brilliant at what it does. What is flawed is how people are applying it to solve specific problems. It isn't a "do anything" button that you can just push. Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

stingraycharles 11mo ago
You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
- rtp4me 11mo ago
  My suspicion is because they (HN) are very concerned this technology is pushing hard into their domain expertise and feel threatened (and, rightfully so).
  - seanw444 11mo ago
    While it will suck when that happens (and inevitably it will), that time is not now. I'm not one to say LLMs are useless, but they aren't all they're being marketed to be.
  - LtWorf 11mo ago
    Or they might know better than you. A painful idea.
    - rtp4me 11mo ago
      Painful? What's painful when someone has a different opinion? I think that is healthy.
- bigstrat2003 11mo ago

nightski 11mo ago

I think on some level it is being done on the premise that further advancement requires an enormous capital investment and if they can find a way to fund that with today’s sales it will give the opportunity for the tech to get there (quite a gamble).

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

I have a feeling that Microsoft is setting themselves up for a serious antitrust lawsuit if they do what they are intending on. They should really be careful about introducing products into the OS that take away from all other AI shops. I fear this would cripple innovation if allowed to do so as well, since Microsoft has drastically fatter wallets than most of their competition.

delfinom 11mo ago
Under the current US administration the only thing Microsoft is getting is numerous piles of taxpayer bailouts.
- shevy-java 11mo ago
  Corruption is indeed going strong in the current corporate-controlled US group of lame actors posing as government indeed. At the least Trump is now regularly falling asleep - that's the best example that you can use any surrogate puppet and the underlying policies will still continue.
  - eastbound 11mo ago
    If I mention a president who was more of a general secretary of the party, taking notes of decisions taken for him by lobbies from the largest corporations, falling asleep and having incoherent speech to the point that he seems to be way past the point of stroke, I don’t think anyone will guess Trump.
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
There's no such thing as antitrust in the US right now. Google's recent slap on the wrist is all the proof you need.
Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
Trump has ushered in a truly lawless phase of american politics. I mean, it was kind of bad before, but at least there was a pretense of rule of law. A trillion dollar company can easily just buy its way out of any enforcement of such antitrust action.

danans 11mo ago

> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? > I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. Yes, perhaps, but many industries are built on a little bit of technology and a lot of stories. I think of it as us all being caught in one giant infomercial. Meanwhile as long as investors buy the hype it's a great story to use for triming payrolls.

h2zizzle 11mo ago

It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.

hereme888 11mo ago
It's like when a child doesn't want something, you "give them a choice": would you like to put on your red or white shoes?
tech_ken 11mo ago
> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.
- h2zizzle 11mo ago
  I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch. There should have been more, and Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.
  - tech_ken 11mo ago
    > A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground. > Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch I disagree, I think they're artifacts of the rehab environment (the ZIRP policy sphere). I think in a world where we fully ate the loss of '08 and started in a new direction you might get Tesla, but definitely not TSLA, and the version we got is really (Tesla+TSLA) IMO. Bitcoin to me is even less of a break with the pre-08 world; blockchain is cool tech but Bitcoin looks very much "Financial Derivatives, Online". I think an honest correction to '08 would have been far more of a focus on "hard tech and value finance", rather than inventing new financial instruments even further distanced from the value-generation chain. > Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist. Hard agree here

stingraycharles 11mo ago

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. If, however, AI ended up delivering and they missed the boat, they’re going to be held accountable. It’s much less risky to just follow industry trends. It takes a lot of technical knowledge, gut, and confidence in your own judgement to push back against an industry-wide trend at that level.

foobarchu 11mo ago
> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.
- saubeidl 11mo ago
  And if it does deliver, everyone's gonna be out of a job and the US economy is also going to crash. Nice cul-de-sac our techbro leaders have navigated us into.
  - rwyinuse 11mo ago
    Yep, either way things are going to suck for ordinary people. My country has had bad economy and high unemployment for years, even though rest of the world is doing mostly OK. I'm scared to think what will happen once AI bubble either bursts or eats most white collar jobs left here.
- anjel 11mo ago
  Race to "Too big to fail" on hype and your losses are socialized

ReptileMan 11mo ago

It was the same with the cloud adoption. And I still think that cloud is expensive, wasteful and in the vast majority of cases not needed.

dehrmann 11mo ago

> In other words --- pure greed. It's the opposite; it's FOMO.

bgwalter 11mo ago

They want to exfiltrate the customers' data under the guise of getting better "AI" responses. No company or government in the EU should use this spyware.

GoblinSlayer 11mo ago

Fake it till you make it.

dfedbeef 11mo ago
outside of the recovery community, this is known as 'fraud'

didibus 11mo ago

Thing is, it's hard to predict what can be done and what breakthrough or minor tweak can suddenly open up an avenue for a profitable use-case. The cost of missing that opportunity is why they're heavily investing in AI, they don't want to miss the boat if there's going to be one. And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?

binary132 11mo ago
this idea that AI is the only thing anyone could possibly do that might be useful has absolutely got to go
layer8 11mo ago
> And what else would they do? What's the other growth path? Are you arguing that if LLMs didn’t exist as a technology, they wouldn’t find anything to do and collapse?
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  _Number would not go up sufficiently steeply_, would be the major concern, not collapse. Microsoft might end up valued as (whisper it) a normal mature stable company. That would be something like a quarter to a half what it's currently valued. For someone paid mostly in options, this is clearly a problem (and people at the top in these companies mostly _are_ compensated with options, not RSUs; if the stock price halves, they get _nothing_).
solumunus 11mo ago
The cost of the boat sinking is also very high and that’s looking like the more likely scenario. Watching your competitors sink huge amounts of capital into a probably sinking boat is a valid strategy. The growth path they were already on was fine no?

layer8 11mo ago

US technocapitalism is built on the premise of technological innovation driving exponential growth. This is why they are fixated on whatever provides an outlook for that. The risk that it might not work out is downplayed, because (a) they don’t want to hazard not being at the forefront in the event that it does work out, and (b) if it doesn’t work out, nobody will really hold them accountable for it, not the least because everybody does it. After the mobile and cloud revolution having run out of steam, AI is what promises most growth by far, even if it is a dubious promise. It’s a gamble, a bet on “the next big thing”. Because they would never be satisfied with there not being another “big thing”, or not being prominently part of it.

binary132 11mo ago
Riding hype waves forever is the most polar opposite thing to “sustainable” that I can imagine

apercu 11mo ago

It's not just AI mania, it's been this way for over a decade. When I first started consulting, organizations were afraid enough of lack of ROI in tech implementations that projects needed an economic justification in order to be approved. Starting with cloud, leadership seemed so become rare, and everything was "us too!". After cloud it was data/data visualization, then it was over-hiring during Covid, the it was RTO, and now it's AI. I wonder if we will ever return to rationalization? The bellwether might be Tesla stock price (at a rational valuation).

eastbound 11mo ago
If rationalization comes back, everyone will talk like in Michael Moore’s documentary about GM and Detroit. A manager’s salary after half a career will be around $120k, like in an average bank, and that would be succeeding. I don’t think we even imagine how much of a tsunami we’ve been surfing since 2000.

Balinares 11mo ago

> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? Probably individual actors have different motivations, but let's spitball for a second: - LLMs are genuinely a revolution in natural language processing. We can do things now in that space that were unthinkable single-digit years ago. This opens new opportunity spaces to colonize, and some might turn out quite profitable. Ergo, land rush. - Even if the new spaces are not that much of a value leap intrinsically, some may still end up obsoleting earlier-generation products pretty much overnight, and no one wants to be the next Nokia. Ergo, defensive land rush. - There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI to serve, which in essence means deprecating the labor class. The benefits (to that specific someone, anyway...) would be staggering enough to make that a goal worth pursuing even if the odds of reaching it are unclear and arguably quite low. - The increasingly leveraged debt that's funding the land rush's capex needs to be paid off somehow and I'll venture everyone knows that the winners will possibly be able to, but not everyone will be a winner. In that scenario, you really don't want to be a non-winner. It's kind of like that joke where you don't need to outrun the lions, you only need to outrun the other runners, except in this case the harder everyone runs and the bigger the lions become. (Which is a funny thought now, sure, but the feasting, when it comes, will be a bloodbath.) - A few, I'll daresay, have perhaps been huffing each other's farts too deep and too long and genuinely believe the words of ebullient enthusiasm coming out of their own mouths. That, and/or they think everyone's job except theirs is simple actually, and therefore just this close to being replaceable (which is a distinct flavor of fart, although coming from largely the same sources). So basically the mania is for the most part a natural consequence of what's going on in the overlap of the tech itself and the incentive structure within which it exists, although this might be a good point to remember that cancer and earthquakes too are natural. Either way, take care of yourselves and each other, y'all, because the ride is only going to get bouncier for a while.

12_throw_away 11mo ago
> There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI Bullshit

adventured 11mo ago

It's not "pure greed." It's keeping up with the Joneses. It's fear. There are three types of humans: mimics, amplifiers, originators. ~99% of the population are basic mimics, and they're always terrified - to one degree or another - of being out of step with the herd. The hyper mimicry behavior can be seen everywhere and at all times, from classrooms to Tiktok & Reddit to shopping behaviors. Most corporate leadership are highly effective mimics, very few are originators. They desperately herd follow ('nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'). This is the dotcom equivalent of every business must be e and @ ified (the advertising was aggressively targeted to that at the time). 1998-2000, you must be e ready. Your hotdog stand must have its own web site. It is not greed-driven, it's fear-driven.

Workaccount2 11mo ago

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily. Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingredients pretty often). She loves it. This is where LLMs shine for regular people. She doesn't need it to create a 500k LOC turn-key baking tracking SaaS AWS back-end 5 million recipes on tap kitchen assistant app. She just needs a bespoke one off check list.

trollbridge 11mo ago
Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are kept employed with. Right now they are (very successfully) getting everyone dependent on LLMs. They will pull rug, and people will pay to get it back. And none of the labs care if 2% of people use local/chinese models.
  - gitremote 11mo ago
    > And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. False. Training happens once for a time period, but inference happens again and again every time users use the product. Inference is the main money sink. "according to a report from Google, inference now accounts for nearly 60% of total energy use in their AI workloads. Meta revealed something even more striking: within their AI infrastructure, power is distributed in a 10:20:70 ratio among experimentation, training, and inference respectively, with inference taking the lion’s share." https://blogs.dal.ca/openthink/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-conversations-understanding-llm-inference-energy-consumption/ https://blogs.dal.ca/openthink/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-convers...

rsynnott 11mo ago

I mean, see Windows Vista. It was eventually patched up to the point where it was semi-usable (and then quietly killed off), but on introduction it was a complete mess. But... something had to be shipped, and this was something, so it was shipped. (Vista wasn't the only one; Windows ME never even made it to semi-usable, and no-one even remembers that Windows 8 _existed_.) Microsoft has _never_, as far as I know, been a company to be particularly concerned about product quality. The copilot stuff may be unusually bad, but it's not that aberrant for MS.

DebtDeflation 11mo ago

>So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? CEOs have been sold on the ludicrous idea that "AI" will replace 60-80% of their total employee headcount over the next 2-3 years. This is also priced into current equity valuations.

int_19h 11mo ago

At this point, the people in charge have signed off on so much AI spending that they need it to succeed, otherwise they are the ones responsible for massive losses.

deleted 11mo ago

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