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Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

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Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#61
post #53
post #22

A few things from the Dwarkesh interview with Satya: * He sees data center leases getting cheaper in near future due to everyone building * He’s investing big in AI, but in every year there needs to be a rough balance between capacity and need for capacity * He doesn’t necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet) * Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation * It won’t…

> Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation Five years ago during covid all these clunky legacy businesses couldn't figure out a CSV let alone APIs but suddenly with AGI they are going to become tech masters and know how to automate and processize their entire operations? I found it very amusing that at the turn of the decade "digitalisation" was a buzzword as Amazon was ap…

I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”.

You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire “Bob” who joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee, interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can use all your software in whatever state it’s currently in.

It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world is brownfield.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple can pull off "Siri with context," it will completely annihilate Microsoft's first mover advantage. They'll be left with a large investment in a zero-margin commodity (OpenAI).

Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here Microsoft has all the context in the world just waiting for exploitation: Microsoft Graph data, Teams transcripts and recordings, Office data, Exchange data, Recall data(?), while not context per se even the XBox gaming data

I’m sorry but what are you saying.

How are any of these unique competitive advantages over iCloud, App Store, Safari, and just generally more locked-in high margin mobile platform users than anyone?

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#64

Meanwhile: "Apple Says It Will Add 20k Jobs, Spend $500B, Produce AI Servers in US" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/apple-say... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158168

If Apple can pull off "Siri with context," it will completely annihilate Microsoft's first mover advantage. They'll be left with a large investment in a zero-margin commodity (OpenAI).

If history is our guide, that's never going to happen.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "elephant in the room" is that AI is good enough, it's revolutionary in fact, but the issue now is the user needs more education to actually realize AI's value. No amount of uber-duper AI can help an immature user population lacking in critical thinking, which in their short shortsightedness seek self destructive pastimes.

It's not "good enough", it's mostly overhyped marketing garbage. LLM models are mostly as good as they're going to get. It's a limitation of the technology. It's impressive at what has been done, but that's it. It doesn't take billions of dollars and all human knowledge to make a single human level intelligence. Just some hormones and timing. So LLMs are mostly a dead end. AGI is going to come from differenst machine…

LLM direct response models are quite mature, yes (4o)

LLM based MoE architectures with some kind of reasoning process ( Claude 3+, o series, R1, grok 3 with thinking ), are the equivalent of v0.2 atm, and they're showing a lot of promise.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#66
post #61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation Five years ago during covid all these clunky legacy businesses couldn't figure out a CSV let alone APIs but suddenly with AGI they are going to become tech masters and know how to automate and processize their entire operations? I found it very amusing that at the turn of the decade "digitalisation" was a buzzword as Amazon was ap…

I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”. You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire “Bob” who joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee, interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can use all your software in whatever state it’s currently in. It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world is brownfield.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#67
post #28

Remember that there is a lot of nuance to these sorts of deals. I don’t have any domain knowledge, but I recently saw an executive put in restaurant reservations for five different places the night of our team offsite, so he would have optionality. An article could accurately claim that he later canceled 80% of the teams eating capacity!

But if it was reported in the press that your team was going to eat 5 meals at the same time before it was revealed that it was just an asshole screwing over small businesses, then that correction in eating capacity should be reported.

"should "

But often not.

That was the point in the parent. How this is being reported is bit skewed.

And also there is the problem that nobody reads corrections. Lies run around the globe before the Truth has tied its shoelaces, or some quote like that.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#68

Meanwhile: "Apple Says It Will Add 20k Jobs, Spend $500B, Produce AI Servers in US" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/apple-say... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158168

This has nothing to do with supply/demand, and everything to do with geopolitics.

You think they would spend 500B without thinking there will be any demand?

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#69

Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value - https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value Bit of a click bait title, but it certainly seems like the realization is setting in that the hype has exceeded near term realistic expectations and some are walking back claims (for whatever reason; honesty, derisking against investor securities suits, poor capital allocation, etc). Nadella appea…

IMHO anyone who started using AI seriously:

1) Wouldn't want to go back

2) Wouldn't believe that it's about to replace human intellectual work

In other words AI got advanced enough to do amazing things but not 500B or T level of amazing and people with the money are not convinced that it will be anytime soon.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#70
post #53
post #22

A few things from the Dwarkesh interview with Satya: * He sees data center leases getting cheaper in near future due to everyone building * He’s investing big in AI, but in every year there needs to be a rough balance between capacity and need for capacity * He doesn’t necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet) * Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation * It won’t…

> Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation Five years ago during covid all these clunky legacy businesses couldn't figure out a CSV let alone APIs but suddenly with AGI they are going to become tech masters and know how to automate and processize their entire operations? I found it very amusing that at the turn of the decade "digitalisation" was a buzzword as Amazon was ap…

In fact most of the industries out there are still slow and inefficient. Some physicians only accept phone calls for making appointments. Many primary schools only take phone calls and an email could go either way just not their way.

It's just we programmers who want to automate everything.

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