Of course he will. He's giving them Azure credits and those cost him less than the alleged $13bn. He has thrown a spanner in the Google's works with his "investment" into OpenAI and that is worth something to MSFT, because it distracted Google for a few years. Unfortunately, LLMs and the rest of AI today are still not good enough to do any useful work, so it's all going down the same path as VR/AR. Ultimately, AI has no platform, no APIs, no standards, so it's impossible to achieve the economies of scale and the low barrier to entry to build something like you can on top of TCP/IP. Google hovered up information and made it accessible via their search service, LLMs are amazing at turning any amount of information into garbage.
> LLMs and the rest of AI today are still not good enough to do any useful work, so it's all going down the same path as VR/AR
As a former AR/VR dev, this is a wild take to me. Have you used cursor? Have you ever had to write copyright for a website? Have you ever tried to learn something new or ideate with chatgpt?
When I was working on immersive apps, I would only ever pick up my device to do dev work. Very rarely would I pick it up outside of that (admittedly, I'm not really a gamer). But I use these new generation of AI tools many times a day.
I have. I tried LLMs for creative writing, it was shit. I tried using them for translation, it went off the rails within the first page, then refused to continue. I tried using them to write code, I got an ethics lecture or a perfectly testable code that does not what I asked for. I got tired of trying different LLMs as it makes no sense to waste time and money on this shit. AI companies are the most incompetent IP thieves, they steal content and can't produce anything of value with it.
I think my previous comment came off a little combative. I am genuinely curious about your experience.
I fall somewhere in the indie-hacker/entrepreneur/not quite solo-preneur category and these tools have have provided a lot of value to me. I am maybe 3x more productive with them. They are definitely not without their flaws.
If you haven't tried cursor out, I recommend giving it a try
To me AI is like an Ouija board. It works if you believe it works, and if you doubt it it falls completely flat. However it's not magic, I think it's something self-fulfilling in the phrasing. If you approach it with suspicion and prompt it to 'see if it can', the model will auto-complete itself into failure. If you take a sunny, optimistic approach, the auto-complete grants your wish.
It's also just straight up non-deterministic like a roulette wheel, and some people get 100 jackpots in a row (this sucked me in at first, believing the world was about to change) and some people run out of luck so quickly they never got to feel the magic. On average its just OK and kind of annoying and not worth $20/month.
Yeah agreed, it s not garbage garbage it's just silly and useless, and all I can think is "meh". I really find it incredible they call those token generators "AI"
If you say so. I encourage you to invest your beliefs. But it's worth remembering that millions of people are already paying OpenAI and others for the value their models provide. GPT-4 can write code at least as well as a new college grad.
Also, there's no such thing as "Azure credits" at this scale. What they give OpenAI is control over billions of dollars of their capex, which is invested in datacenter scale GPU clusters designed by OpenAI, for their own exclusive use. It has as much in common with a startup getting a $1000 cloud credit coupon as a paper airplane does with an A380.
