This was my take as well. Nadella is looking increasingly desperate by the day to salvage this investment. First that Jevon paradox tweet after futures opened Sunday night now this clearly leaked story plus a tweet from Altman of them together lol. I actually recall him making a similar tweet last time futures tanked a few months ago though I don’t recall the context.
Pretty clear that this thing is quickly getting away from them. Even if the data was stolen it doesn’t make any difference. You have no moat if scraped data is your moat. The moat was supposedly their ingenious engineers.
I think a 180 is coming soon when Microsoft stops doubling down, takes their medicine and shifts their strategy to cut back on infrastructure spend. I think the risks are still enormous for the tech sector.
They did try to lock people in quickly with their copilot o365 extension by just increasing its price. I am not sure how this can be even legal to sell this as a price hike instead of a new product.
Especially since the same product does still exist without copilot for cheaper. I think they weren't brazen enough to put this on business customers though, but I am not sure. Scummy in any way.
This blog has taken an odd turn. It seems like he is invested in meta stock given the timing of this post and its focus on the stock market reaction to deepseek. That’s fine and I find no fault with it except that it’s hard to read the past few posts and not filter it through someone very bullish on meta no matter how the facts change.
I don’t necessarily disagree, I think he has very thorough and detailed analyses of many topics and I’ve learned a ton reading his blog over the years.
Nevertheless he’s human and every human no matter how hard they try is prone to certain biases at various times.
So he’s not invested monetarily in meta stock. But he’s clearly spent time with the higher ups at meta and settled on a particularly bullish narrative as it pertains to their future. That in and of itself makes him vested in meta being the winner because he predicted it and wants to be proven right.
The reason I bring this up is as someone who has read this blog very consistently for a long time now this is the first time I’ve sensed a shift in the tone. And this post seemed to be fired off quickly about an hour before the market opened and it seemed like he was palpably nervous about tHe situation and trying to calm people’s nerves. That in and of itself feels like it’s squarely in the bullish camp and hoping for a particular outcome.
He talks about it on his SharpTech podcast that he has access to every major tech CEO except for Apple. He’s had interviews with the CEOs of Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia and an SVP of Google.
He’s been bullish on all of the BigTech companies except Google and he’s had to admit that he was wrong.
He has been bullish about Meta every time that their stock has dropped and even after everyone thought they were doomed after Apple introduced Ad tracking transparency and when big companies started leaving - two separate times
I think a lot of his decisions can be boiled down to being hellbent on disrupting Apple.
I think the metaverse was his first crack at it until Wall Street gave him the hook for over spending.
Then when AI came around he again became fixated on the meta verse but using AI as the means of generating content for it.
I think these are all moon shot bets and meta still has no track record of success in hardware despite multiple attempts.
It seems that the next great hardware platform is probably a long ways away and will require some breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet and likely to come from a person with maniacal focus on a single application because that seems to have been the pattern in the past.
In other words I think it’s highly unlikely a current incumbent fosters the next hardware platform. I remember a time not so long ago when a lot of smart people were saying that Alexa was going to disrupt everything as we know it.
Also this AI shit on Facebook these days just seems really weird. But maybe there’s a vision of the future that suddenly makes it’s indispensable. Who knows?
One of the unusual trends of the past several years is that higher education has become less and less respected and people now look to private industry for the R&D that universities were designed to perform for the public good.
I think 2025 Will mark a bottom for that in one way or another- either private industry (the FANGs) suffers a setback or (more likely in my view) research universities start a comeback as a new set of startups begin to launch out of a department (not necessarily CS or hardware). Perhaps in another field like gene therapy.
That’s because it sparked a virtuous feedback loop at a time when it just so happens people’s credulity levels are off the charts. The creators of AI tools have a benefit in hyping it, as do software vendors as do hardware companies as do hyper scalers as does meta as does musk as do systems integrators like Accenture and on and on.
I think OP is saying despite all that there is little evidence that end users are actually paying significant sums of money to use it. To this point it’s a great marketing tool for companies that are all eager to be viewed as innovative and you have lots of very wealthy smart people with clout like Bezos and Zuckerberg talking it up. Like any good bubble you have to have at the core a real asset.
So of course there are people who use it daily as many anecdotes here in the comments point out. It’s a genuinely interesting and useful technology. That doesn’t mean though that it’s going to result in AGI or become profitable while liquidity conditions are still easy. I promise you Mark Zuckerberg would be singing a very different tune regarding chip investment if he were having to compete with bonds yielding 6-7%+.
Interestingly it seems like we are investing many more magnitudes of capital for smaller and smaller gains.
For example, the jump in productivity from adding an operating system to a computer is orders of magnitude larger than adding an LLM to a web development process despite the LLM requiring infrastructure that cost tens of billions to create.
It seems that while tools are getting more and more sophisticated, they aren’t really resulting in much greater productivity. It all still seems to be resulting in software that solves the same problems as before. Whereas when html came around it opened up use cases that has never been seen before despite being a very simple abstraction layer by today’s standards.
Perhaps the opportunities are greatest when you are abstracting the layer that the fewest understand when LLMs seem to assume the opposite.
The real gains in software are still to be had by aggressively destroying incidental complexity. Most of the gunk in a web app doesn't absolutely need to exist, but we write it anyway. (Look at fasthtml for an alternate vision of building web apps.)
The issue with LLMs is they enshrine the status quo. I don't want ossified crappy software that's hard to work with. Frameworks and libraries should have to fight to justify their existence in the marketplace of ideas. Subverting this mechanism is how you ruin software construction.
You mentioned a great point that LLMs are hitting the edge of a marginal gain decreasing point, at least I think so. Many applications are struggling to provide real benefits instead of just entertaining people.
Another funny thing is that we are using LLM to replace creative professionals, but the real creativity is from human experience, perception and our connections, which are exactly missing from LLM.
As someone is not an artist I want ai to do art so I can restore my antique tractor. Of course we all have diffeent hobbies but there are also hobbies we don't want to get into but may nee.
I think the parent comment mean "art" as "having fun", like playing a guitar, definitely no fun to see the robot playing it and not letting you even touch it.
AI generated art/music/etc is the answer to people having creative vision and lacking technical expertise or resources to execute it. There are lots of stories waiting to be told if only the teller had technical ability/time/equipment to tell it. AI will help those stories be told in a palatable way.
Curation of content is also a problem, but if we can come up with better solutions there, generative AI will absolutely result in more and better content for everyone while enabling a new generation of creators.
The AI will also take over your work of restoring antique tractors, much faster and cheaper. It won't be historically accurate, and it may end up with the fuel pump connected to the radio but it'll look mostly Good Enough. The price of broken tractors will temporarily surge as they need them for training data.
If it can create some decal close enough where nobody know the original other than fragmets that remain that helps. For common tractors we know but I'm interested in thing where exactly one is known to exist in the world.
I see it very differently. We are just at the very dawn of how to apply LLMs to change how we work.
Writing dumb scripts that can call out to sophisticated LLMs to automate parts of processes is utterly game changing. I saved at least 200 hours of mundane work this week and it was trivial.
My favorite example of this is grep vs method references in IDEs. Method references are more exact, but grep is much simpler (to implement and to understand for the user).
I think you're also right about LLMs. I think path forward in programming is embracing more formal tools. Incidentally, search for method references is more formal than grepping - and that's probably why people prefer it.
Pretty clear that this thing is quickly getting away from them. Even if the data was stolen it doesn’t make any difference. You have no moat if scraped data is your moat. The moat was supposedly their ingenious engineers.
I think a 180 is coming soon when Microsoft stops doubling down, takes their medicine and shifts their strategy to cut back on infrastructure spend. I think the risks are still enormous for the tech sector.