Have we finally reached peak AI already? In that event we
will see the falling down phase next.
Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
31–40 of 348 posts
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#32AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
They want to exfiltrate the customers' data under the guise of getting better "AI" responses.
No company or government in the EU should use this spyware.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#33Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a feeling that Microsoft is setting themselves up for a serious antitrust lawsuit if they do what they are intending on. They should really be careful about introducing products into the OS that take away from all other AI shops. I fear this would cripple innovation if allowed to do so as well, since Microsoft has drastically fatter wallets than most of their competition.
Under the current US administration the only thing Microsoft is getting is numerous piles of taxpayer bailouts.
Corruption is indeed going strong in the current corporate-controlled US group of lame actors posing as government indeed. At the least Trump is now regularly falling asleep - that's the best example that you can use any surrogate puppet and the underlying policies will still continue.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#35AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
> In other words --- pure greed. Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. These attempts to try to steer demand despite clear indicators that it doesn't want to go in that direction aren't just driven by greed, they're driven by abject incompetence. This isn't pure greed, it's stupid greed.
> Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits.
Not necessarily, just look at this clip [1] from Margin Call, an excellent movie on the GFC. As Jeremy Irons is saying in that clip, the market (as usually understood in classical economy, with producers making things for clients/customers to purchase) is of no importance to today's market economy, almost all that matters, at the hundreds of billions - multi-trillion dollars-levels, is for your company "to play the music" as best as the other (necessarily very big) market participants, "nothing more, nothing less" (again, to quote Irons in that movie).
There's nothing in it about "making what people/customers want" and all that, which is regarded as accessory, that is if it is taken into consideration at all. As another poster is mentioning in this thread, this is all the direct result of the financialization of much of the Western economy, this is how things work at this level, given these (financiliazed) inputs.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#36AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to…
It's mass delusion
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#37AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
Fake it till you make it.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#38Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.
Blaming slow sales on salespeople is almost always a scapegoat. Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t.
Not saying that sales is useless, far from it. But with an established product that people know about, the sales team is more of a conduit than they are a resource-gathering operation.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell ap…
All these boosters think we're on the leading edge of an exponential, when it's way more likely that we're on the midpoint to tail of a logistic
AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew.
*Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.
I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch. There should have been more, and Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.