Alternate headline: AI FOMO CEO Satya Nadella doubles down on AI spending, fires profitable devs.
He doesn’t understand what LLM technology is and what they really can do and continues to buy the hype, so also continues firing staff (and whole departments) that generate income in order to employ ‘AI experts’ at exorbitant rates in the hope their magic AI will one day turn a huge profit - or at the very least to deny his competitors their skills.
The biggest issues Microsoft is facing at the moment are not AI: its EU (and wider) concerns about data sovereignty and surveillance driving businesses off their cloud, and their heavy-handed approach to spying on their users and forcing them into cloud services and apps in their ecosystem, which is driving users to alternative OSes.
Both are in the early stages and further loss could possibly be stemmed if the company strategy had a major overhaul in the other direction - but this whole direction has been Nadella’s doing, and a certain level of lost business is now unavoidable.
I hope they stay the path. The worst MS gets, the more interest and investment there will be in OSS alternatives.
Yeah, Nadella’s fear is that the company will be doomed if they don’t do AI hard enough, while any sane observer can see that his obsession with AI is leading them to throw hundreds of billions into a burning trash fire with zero gain to show for it. Microsoft still refuse to break out their AI earnings, which is proof enough that it’s making them close to zero profit (not counting the money OpenAI is throwing at them for compute). But everyone close to Nadella has been saying for a while that he’s genuinely monomaniacal about AI. He cannot see reason on this issue.
Alternate headline: AI FOMO CEO Satya Nadella doubles down on AI spending, fires profitable devs.
He doesn’t understand what LLM technology is and what they really can do and continues to buy the hype, so also continues firing staff (and whole departments) that generate income in order to employ ‘AI experts’ at exorbitant rates in the hope their magic AI will one day turn a huge profit - or at the very least to deny his competitors their skills.
The biggest issues Microsoft is facing at the moment are not AI: its EU (and wider) concerns about data sovereignty and surveillance driving businesses off their cloud, and their heavy-handed approach to spying on their users and forcing them into cloud services and apps in their ecosystem, which is driving users to alternative OSes.
Both are in the early stages and further loss could possibly be stemmed if the company strategy had a major overhaul in the other direction - but this whole direction has been Nadella’s doing, and a certain level of lost business is now unavoidable.
I hope they stay the path. The worst MS gets, the more interest and investment there will be in OSS alternatives.
Yeah, Nadella’s fear is that the company will be doomed if they don’t do AI hard enough, while any sane observer can see that his obsession with AI is leading them to throw hundreds of billions into a burning trash fire with zero gain to show for it. Microsoft still refuse to break out their AI earnings, which is proof enough that it’s making them close to zero profit (not counting the money OpenAI is throwing at them for compute). But everyone close to Nadella has been saying for a while that he’s genuinely monomaniacal about AI. He cannot see reason on this issue.
It’s Zuck and the metaverse all over again.
A cautionary tale that even the Zuck didn’t learn, given how much money he’s fruitlessly burning on bad AI and Ray Ban partnerships.
The only people actually making money off this whole thing are Nvidia, because if there’s one solid bet in a gold rush it’s selling picks and shovels.
You mean convince investors to GIVE THEM more money.
That would be OpenAI. Microsoft just borrows money against their share price when they need capitalization, they don’t have to beg for it.