221–230 of 348 posts
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My suspicion is because they (HN) are very concerned this technology is pushing hard into their domain expertise and feel threatened (and, rightfully so).
Or they might know better than you. A painful idea.
Would be good if a sales person chime could in to keep me honest, but:
1. There is a difference between sales quotas and sales growth targets. The former is a goal, latter is aspirational, a "stretch goal". They were not hitting their stretch goals.
2. The stretch goals were, like, doubling the sales in a year. And they dropped it to 25% or 50% growth. No idea what the adoption of such a product should be, but doubling sounds pretty ambitious? I really can't say, and neither did TFA.
3. Only a fraction met their growth goals, but I guess it's safe to assume most hit their sales quotas, otherwise that's what the story would be about. Also, this implies some DID hit their growth goals, which implies at least some doubled their sales in a year. Could be they started small so doubling was easy, or could be a big deal, we don't know.
4. Sales quotas get revised all the time, especially for new products. Apparently, this was for a single product, Foundry, which was launched a year ago, so I expect some trial and error to figure out the real demand.
5. From the reporting it seems Foundry is having problems connecting to internal data sources... indicating it's a problem with engineering, and not a problem with the AI itself. But TFA focuses on AI issues like hallucinations.
6. No reporting on the dozens of other AI products that MSFT has churned out.
As an aside, it seems data connectivity issues are a stickier problem than most realize (e.g. organizational issues) and I believe Palantir created the FDE role for just this purpose: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
Maybe without that strategy it would be hard for a product like this to work.
AI 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…
CEOs have been sold on the ludicrous idea that "AI" will replace 60-80% of their total employee headcount over the next 2-3 years. This is also priced into current equity valuations.
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People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…
Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?
500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment.
I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are kept employed with.
Right now they are (very successfully) getting everyone dependent on LLMs. They will pull rug, and people will pay to get it back. And none of the labs care if 2% of people use local/chinese models.
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I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.
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This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…
The regular JetBrains IDEs have a setting to disable the AI-based inline completion, you can then just assign it to a hotkey and call it when needed. I found that it makes the AI experience so much better.
I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so absurdly anti-productive, but it was ignored
AI 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…
People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…
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This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…
Loosely related: voice control on Android with Gemini is complete rubbish compared to the old assistant. I used to be able to have texts read out and dictate replies whilst driving. Now it's all nondeterministic which adds cognitive load on me and is unsafe in the same way touch screens in cars are worse than tactile controls.
I'm a very forgetful person and easily distracted. This feature was incredibly valuable to me.
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Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic: "How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines. If those are the cause…
Stupidity, greed, and straight-up evil intentions do a bunch of the work, but ultimately short-term thinking wins because it's an attractor state. The influence of the wealthy/powerful is always outsized, but attractors and common-knowledge also create a natural conspiracy that doesn't exactly have a center. So with AI, the way the natural conspiracy works out is like this. Leaders at the top might suspect it's bulls…
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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…
> 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 Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd? I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually wo…