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Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

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Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#11

Post by TwoNineA »

lvl155 wrote: post #9

For 96% of the population, AI will not boost production. Generally speaking people are too stupid to use AI properly at least for awhile.

I really hate condascending and arrogant stuff like "Generally speaking people are too stupid to use AI properly at least for awhile". There are plenty of tech illiterate people that are far from being "stupid" and they might not care about or like AI. They just need to send emails to family, share photos and videos and have a video call from time to time. For them, AI is worthless.

But they aren't stupid. You sound like a tech bro.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#13

Post by fuzzfactor »

marcyb5st wrote: post #6
tony-vlcek wrote: post #3

> We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy [...] A way to drum up sense of urgency without mentioning that it's the patience of the investors (and _not_ the public) that will be the limiting factor here?

Similar to my thoughts. If we are still scrambling to find stuff the average Joe finds useful, the 100s of Billions poured into this gold rush are wasted (IMHO).

Ideally, zillions of consumers have been languishing for years and when the time is right they're all collectively chomping at the bit when a new highly-affordable technology comes along that they just can't get enough of.

This isn't one of those times.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#14

Post by tony-vlcek »

whazor wrote: post #7
tony-vlcek wrote: post #3

> We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy [...] A way to drum up sense of urgency without mentioning that it's the patience of the investors (and _not_ the public) that will be the limiting factor here?

This looks more like an attempt of gaining scarce electricity. If a country/state has to choice of giving power to data center A or B, it makes sense for Satya to make statements about how only Microsoft provides the most AI value

Well, even though electricity is a commodity it still needs to be bought. My point is that people funding this will run out of patience paying for the electricity long before the public/regulators will need to step in a decided how much of it you can buy.

I guess you could always just use a fraction of the billions in investments and whip up a few new power plants. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx25v2d7zexo

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#16

Post by jsheard »

vdupras wrote: post #2

It seems like quite a qualitative jump in consensus. Wasn't the previous consensus "you're using it wrong"?

This still reads as "you're using it wrong" to me. Nadella's position is that AI spending would easily justify itself if only the plebs would use it as much as he thinks they should. If only the common man could see the prophetic vision of a coked out tech executive.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#17

Post by MadDemon »

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your overall productivity, because the time it took was already negligible.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#19

Post by remix2000 »

lvl155 wrote: post #9

For 96% of the population, AI will not boost production. Generally speaking people are too stupid to use AI properly at least for awhile.

GenAI is only useful to bump terrible up to mediocre, so it'd be really stupid to spend time honing one's prompting skills. And as you noticed, so far 96% of the population agrees.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#20

Post by mossTechnician »

Tepix wrote: post #10

After increasing the prices of RAM, GPUs and flash memory for the entire world, energy cost is next. Thanks AI!

Energy costs have already risen substantially[0], but the increase has been slower, and it's garnered a bit less media attention than the recent leap in PC hardware prices.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

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