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This all just feels like sunk cost fallacy at this point. Capitalism can’t do anything besides grow, even when the growth involved and the tech they’re trying to sell isn’t even remotely as good as the hype states.
Self-hosted LLMs? Awesome.
AI in the hands of corporate ghouls? Not awesome.
It’s the same narrative every time. Capitalists bastardizing tech and exploiting workers for profit alone.
This has been Silicon Valley's MO for generations.
Yep! This is the first time the investment has been so catastrophic though. The amount of money they’re throwing at this absolutely dwarfs every past innovation spike.
What about all the vr garbage? The drooling baby zuckerberg has thrown away over $50 billion right? And that's just ONE company! And nobody wants that shit LOL
The VR hype was such a poor investment. It’s a tech that has never taken off in any way that’s large enough for the profits they demand I think the only place it’s gotten marginal interest in, is the gaming PC crowd, and even then, it’s still very niche. It feels like the further things progress, the more detached from reality the “innovations” become.
Not really. I'd argue the dot com bust was worse due to the quantity of websites that died because they didn't actually have a business model.
What we're seeing is a tech industry where all the tech is on the right side of the S curve and trying one last stab at a technology that may be on the left side.
You’re right, the dot com bust was far worse. That feels like forever ago these days.
I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn't produce quality results.
It gave CEOs an excuse to do layoffs even though they knew it would hurt their human capital long term, and that they would probably have to hire back a lot of those positions long term at higher wages. In the short terms it gave them a few quarters of increased profits. It also let them push out blatantly unfinished products on the promise of future improbable improvements. This will hurt companies reputations long term, but in the short term is let them juice the stock price.
They needed the increased profit and the pie in the sky growth promises to game the stock market, say all the right buzz words and show an improving price to earnings.
Sure they made the companies worse and less sustainable long term, but, they got huge compensation packages right now thanks to the markets, and they probably won’t be running these companies long enough to see the true fallout.
I hope the stock market craters.
We need to do away with capitalism completely, or put it on a very short leash.
I wish governments still believed in regulations instead of whatever this shit is.
Yeah, we need socialism /communism. Either would be better than this.
But it isn't about creating quality results. It is about creating good enough results where the cost of failure in AI over humans is lower than the cost of humans over AI.
i think it's a framing issue, and AI development is catching a lot of flak for the general failures of our current socio-economic hierarchy. also people having been shouting "super intelligence or bust" for decades now. i just keep watching it get better much more quickly than most people's estimates, and understand the implications of it. i do appreciate discouraging idiot business people from shunting AI into everything that doesn't need it, because buzzword or they can use it to exploit something. some likely just used it as an excuse to fire people, but again, that's not actually the AI's fault. that is this shitty system. i guess my issue is people keep framing this as "AI bad" instead of "corpos bad"
if the loom was never invented, we would still live in an oppressive society sliding towards fascism. people tend to miss the forest for the trees when looking at tech tools politically. also people are blind to the environment, which is often more important than the thing itself. and the loom is still useful.
compression and polysemy growing your dimensions of understanding in a high dimensional environment, which is also changing shape, comprehension growing with the erasure of your blindspots. collective intelligence (and how diversity helps cover more blindspots) predictive processing (and how we should embrace lack of confidence, but understand the strength of proper weighting for predictions, even when a single blindspot can shift the entire landscape, making no framework flawless or perfectly reliable.) and understanding how everything we know is just the best map of the territory we've figured out so far. if you want to know judge how subtle but in our face blindspots can be, look up how to test your literal blindspot, you just need 30 seconds a paper with two small dots to see how blind we are to our blindspots. etc.
more than fighting the new tools we can use, we need to claim them, and the rest of the world, away from those who ensure that all tools will only exist to exploit us.
am i shouting to the void? wasting the breath of my digits? will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?
will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?
Seems unlikely.
As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or "a few people have unaccountable power over many"
This is honestly a trash article. It can be summarized as:
"Microsoft, a trillion dollar corporation that makes around $150 billion in pure profit, every single year, is tempering expectations around AI, BUT then why are they still investing $12B dollars in it, that makes no sense!".
Like, they're tempering expectations around AGI revolutionizing the economy, not saying AI is trash and theres no value whatsoever in it.
But it destroys jobs!
Old news.
Same CEO now claims to use Copilot to summarize podcasts, emails, and Teams messages. Speedrunning dead Internet theory for all forms of communication...
as others have pointed out, this article is from February, which is like a year ago in techbro-time. If Nadella truly meant what he said, Microsoft would have scaled back AI spending by now.
It's only a matter of time until this whole facade comes crashing down. I can't wait to see OpenAI go out of business.
Fellow AI-haters should check out the newsletter and podcast of Ed Zitron.
The podcast is called "Better Offline" for anyone else searching.
I really like the 3 episodes I've listened to so far. Thanks for the rec!
Not sure if I'm learning much from it, but it's nice to hear someone explaining what's wrong with AI hype and stock-market-driven capitalism clearly.
Glad you're enjoying it. He sometimes has interesting interviews, too. Especially with authors and journalists.
Fellow AI-haters should check out the newsletter and podcast of Ed Zitron.
If you're not a hater and want a balanced and rationale take, don't.
There's no rationa reason for spending billions of dollars on a technology that loses money and has no chance of delivering promises from a lying CEO.
Just leave it. Don't expect people to have a balanced mindset and you will lead a calmer life.
I don't think people are going to stop with AI stuff. We saw that new AI video tech release just recently, and they're already showing it can replace commercials in terms of cost/time investment.
Commercials will 100% be AI going forward. Assuming these costs stay the same, there's no timeline where they stop doing it unless the law deems it illegal to do so. Or unless the public hates it.
I think it'll continue forward regardless if we like it or not. We'll have to adapt in our own ways to this tech. I don't like it, but unless there's a major shake-up, I think we're stuck
I don't see where he admits what the headline claims.
He doesn't. He says he cares more about generating growth (and thus presumably revenue) than about AGI.
Also, this thing is from February.
Social media sucks. Reporting on reporting sucks. News aggregators suck.
AI may suck, but it's definitely not alone in being shitty. We're all clearly very good at tool-less, artisanal misinformation.
Sturgeon's law
On the plus side, at least on the instance I'm on I was automatically given a link to when this same story was posted here three months ago. Saves some effort.
I guess it depends on how much you do your homework. I just spent a while listening to Satya Nadella regurgitate self-congratulatory CEO-speak just to verify that yes, indeed, this link is gargbage. I feel entitled to at least a bit of resentment for that.
Ironically, the time I spent doing this was much shorter because the podcast that originates the blatant misquote has an AI-generated searchable transcript.
Even more ironically, you could probably shorten that time even more by having an AI analyze the transcript for you.
I've found Firefox's Orbit extension to be quite handy whenever someone directs me to a 30-minute Youtube video as "proving" whatever point they're trying to argue. I can pop it open and ask it to tell me what the video says about that point in just a few seconds. I wouldn't use the AI summary as backing if I was doing surgery on someone, but for a random Internet argument it's fine.
Victor Tangermann February 22, 2025 3 min read
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has had it with the constant hype surrounding AI.
During an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's show this week, Nadella offered a reality check.
"Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me," Nadella told Patel.
Instead, the CEO argued that we should be looking at whether AI is generating real-world value instead of mindlessly running after fantastical ideas like AGI.
To Nadella, the proof is in the pudding. If AI actually has economic potential, he argued, it'll be clear when it starts generating measurable value.
"So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth," he said.
"The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent," he added. "Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."
Needless to say, we haven't seen anything like that yet. OpenAI's top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail's pace and requires constant supervision.
So Nadella's line of thinking is surprisingly down-to-Earth. Besides pushing back against the hype surrounding artificial general intelligence — the realization of which OpenAI has made its number one priority — Nadella is admitting that generative AI simply hasn't generated much value so far.
As of right now, the economy isn't showing much sign of acceleration, and certainly not because of an army of AI agents. And whether it's truly a question of "when" — not "if," as he claims — remains a hotly debated subject.
There's a lot of money on the line, with tech companies including Microsoft and OpenAI pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek really tested the resolve of investors earlier this year by demonstrating that its cutting-edge reasoning model, dubbed R1, could keep up with the competition, but at a tiny fraction of the price. The company ended up punching a $1 trillion hole in the industry after triggering a massive selloff.
Then there are nagging technical shortcomings plaguing the current crop of AI tools, from constant "hallucinations" that make it an ill fit for any critical functions to cybersecurity concerns.
Nadella's podcast appearance could be seen as a way for Microsoft to temper some sky-high expectations, calling for a more rational, real-world approach to measure success.
At the same time, his actions tell a strikingly different story. Microsoft has invested $12 billion in OpenAI and has signed on to president Donald Trump's $500-billion Stargate project alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
After multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk questioned whether Altman had secured the funds, Nadella appeared to stand entirely behind the initiative.
"All I know is I’m good for my $80 billion," he told CNBC last month in response to Musk's accusations.
let's make another article completely misrepresenting opinions/trajectories and the general state of things, because we know it'll sell and it will get the ignorant fighting with those who actually have an idea of what's going on, because they saw in an article that AI was eating the pets.
please seek media sources that actually seek to inform rather than provoke or instigate confusion or division through misrepresentation and disinformation.
these days you can't even try to fix a category error introduced by the media without getting cussed out and blocked from congregate sites because you 'support the evil thing' that the article said was evil, and everyone in the group hates, without even an attempt to understand the context, or what part of the thing is even being discussed.
also, can we talk more about breaking up the big companies so they don't have a hold on the technology, rather than getting mad at everyone who interacts with modern technology?
legit ss bad feels like fighting rightwing misinformation about migrant workers and trans people.
just make people mad, and teach them that communication is a waste of energy.
we need to learn how to tell who is informing rather than obfuscating, through historicity of accuracy, and consensus with other experts from diverse perspectives. not building tribes upon who agrees with us. and don't blame experts for not also learning how to apply a novel and virtually impossible level of compression when explaining their complex expertise, when you don't even want to learn a word or concept.
it's like being asked to describe how cameras work, and then getting called an idiot when some analogy used can be imagined in a less useful context that doesn't apply 1:1 with the complex subject being summarized.
outside of that, find better sources of information. fuck this communication disabling ragebait.
cause now just having a history of rebuking this garbage gets you dismissed, because a history of interacting with the topic on this platform is a good enough vibe check to just not attempt understanding and interaction.
TLDR: the quality of the articles and conversation on this subject are so generally ill-informed that it hurts, and obviously trying to craft environments of angry engagement rather than informing.
also i wonder if anyone will actually engage with this topic rather than get angry, cuss me out, and not hear a single thing being communicated.
My comment was going to be, let's see if they really change their mind, but then I read "February 22, 2025". So I already have my answer.
Also the article's content doesn't say what the headline says.
Ask AI to generate money 🤣
If it were generating that much new value, where is the associated bump in wages ( hint: working class issues circa 1970)? Dunno why people are pushing this so hard to generate someone else more value while making everyone else miserable in the process.
What they are trying to say is that open source and libre solutions have rendered their investments shitty.