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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
#142Microsoft 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.
What is using AI seriously?
I’ve tried to use it as a web search replacement and often the information is generic or tells me what I already know or wrong.
I’ve used a code suggestions variant long before OpenAI hype started and while sometimes useful, rarely is it correct or helpful on getting over the next hurdle.
Any code from my coworkers is now just AI slop they glanced over once. Then I spend a long time reviewing and fixing their code.
I really don’t find spending time writing long form questions so a bot can pretend to be human all that time saving, especially if I have to clarify or reword it to a specific “prompt-engineer” quality sentence. I can usually find the results faster typing in a few keywords and glancing at a list of articles. My built in human speed reading can determine if what I need is probably in an article.
LLM seriousness has made my job more difficult. I would prefer if people did go back.
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kinds of projects are you working on? My experience is jot very good with these tools (expanded in a sibling comment).
Generally a lot of web-dev which is where I would assume LLMs shine the best. I noted elsewhere but I think it depends a lot on the age of the product and the level of velocity. For early life products where the speed of your velocity matters, I think you can get the most benefit. The more mature the product and the slower the team implements features, the benefits are still measurable but not as high.
Ah yeah, I can totally see how it can be useful for churning put tons of code. Even without copy-paste, just generating a ton of references and rewriting/improving them. Anecdotally, I’ve tried asking deepseek to review a few files of my code — it wasn’t bad at all, though not without false positives.
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is using AI seriously? I’ve tried to use it as a web search replacement and often the information is generic or tells me what I already know or wrong. I’ve used a code suggestions variant long before OpenAI hype started and while sometimes useful, rarely is it correct or helpful on getting over the next hurdle. Any code from my coworkers is now just AI slop they glanced over once. Then I spend a long time review…
In my case its coding real world apps that people use and pay money for. I no longer personally type most of my code, Instead I describe stuff or write pseudo code that LLMs end up converting into the real thing.
It's very good at handling the BS part of coding but also its very good at knowing things that I don't know. I recently used it to hack a small bluetooth printer which requires its own iOS app to print, using DeepSeek and ChatGPT I was able to reverse engineer the printer communication and then create an app that will print whatever I want from my macOS laptop.
Before AI I would have to study how Bluetooth works now I don't have to. Instead, I use my general knowledge of protocols and communications and describe it to the machine and I'm asking for ideas. Then I try things and ask the stuff that I noticed but I don't understand, then I figure out how this particular device works and then describe it to the machine and ask it to generate me code that will do the thing that I discovered. LLMs are amazing at filling the gaps in a patchy knowledge, like my knowledge of Bluetooth. Because I don't know much about Bluetooth, I ended up creating a CRUD for Bluetooth because that's what I needed when trying to communicate and control my bluetooth devices(it's also what I'm used to from Web tech). I'm bit embarrassed about it but I think I will release it commercially anyway.
If I have a good LLM under my hand, I don't have to know specialised knowledge on frameworks or tools. General understanding of how things works and building up from there is all I need.
It's like a CNC machine but for coding.
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here I'm sure MS will provide AI to business, but if Apple get things right, they'll be the biggest provider of AI to the masses. With a Siri that knows your email, calendar, location, history, search history, ability to get data from and do things in 3rd party Apps (with App Intents) and if it runs on your phone for security, it could be used by billions of consumers,…
I wouldn't be sure about that.
Siri's success would greatly depend on app developers adopting intents. The major players are going to be hesitant to give Apple that much access to data - the EU may help push them that way, but even still, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and others want their AIs to be the one people use.
Siri is also limited to Apple products, and while lots of people have iPhones, many of them still have a PC, where Siri doesn't work.
Companies are also very concerned about employees accidentally or purposefully exfiltrating data via AI usage. Microsoft is working hard to build in guardrails there and Intune allows companies to block Siri intents, so Apple would have to do a lot to reassure corporate customers how they'll prevent Siri from sending data to a search engine or such.
But you might be right. I think it's way too early to tell, and that's why so much money is being poured into this. All the major players feel that they can't afford to wait on this.
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nadella is looking for the world to grow at 10% due to AI enhancement, like it did during the industrial revolution. That seems like a low bar because it already is- it's just not equally distributed yet. My own productivity has grown far more than 10% thanks to AI, and I don't just mean in terms of dev. It reads my bloodwork results, speeds up my ability to repair a leak in my toilet tank, writes a concise "no I won…
All I hear is anecdotal statements from people claiming LLMs have made them some percent more productive. Yet few actually say how or demonstrate it. For the last year, I've tried all sorts of models both as hosted services and running locally with llama.cpp or ollama. I've used both the continue.dev vscode extension and cursor more recently. The results have been frustrating at best. The user interface of the tools…
I agree with the other commenter that said if you're "vastly" more productive as a developer due to AI, you probably weren't that good to begin with. Otherwise, please provide concrete examples.
Myself, I do find it quite useful in a few respects. First and foremost, as a "better Google/StackOverflow." If something's not working, I can describe my exact scenario and usually get pointed in the right direction. Sometimes the LLM just wastes my time by very confidently telling me some function/library that solves my exact problem exists when in fact it doesn't.
Second, IntelliJ's local LLM is sort of a smarter autocomplete. It makes some outright wrong suggestions, but when there's areas where I have to do a lot of repetitive tasks that follow a simple pattern (like for instance, mapping fields from one type of object to another), it does a pretty good job of making correct suggestions. I definitely appreciate it but it's certainly not doing things like writing a significant portion of code in my style.
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also gets all of these things wrong, like not paying attention to models of toilets and quirks for their repair, often speaking with an authoritative voice and deceiving you on the validity of its instructions. All of the things you site are available via search engines, or better handled with expertise so you know how much of the response is nonsense. Every time I use AI, it's a time waste.
Every time I contact an enterprise for support, the person I'm talking to gets lots of things wrong too. It takes skepticism on my part and some back and forth to clean up the mess. On balance AI gets more things wrong than the best humans and fewer things wrong than average humans.
The difference is that a human will tell you things like "I think", "I'm pretty sure" or "I don't know" in order to manage expectations. The LLM will very matter-of-factly tell you something that's not right at all, and if you correct them the LLM will go and very confidently rattle off another answer based on what you just said, whether your were telling it the truth or not. If a human acted that way more than a few times we'd stop asking them questions or at least have to do a lot of "trust but verify." LLMs do this over and over again and we just kind of shrug our shoulders and go "well they do pretty good overall."
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is using AI seriously? I’ve tried to use it as a web search replacement and often the information is generic or tells me what I already know or wrong. I’ve used a code suggestions variant long before OpenAI hype started and while sometimes useful, rarely is it correct or helpful on getting over the next hurdle. Any code from my coworkers is now just AI slop they glanced over once. Then I spend a long time review…
In my case its coding real world apps that people use and pay money for. I no longer personally type most of my code, Instead I describe stuff or write pseudo code that LLMs end up converting into the real thing. It's very good at handling the BS part of coding but also its very good at knowing things that I don't know. I recently used it to hack a small bluetooth printer which requires its own iOS app to print, usin…
I see, for single operator, no customers products it works nicely. You may find you use it less and less and will actually require that Bluetooth knowledge eventually as you grow a product.
LLMs so far seem to be good at developing prototype apps. But most of my projects already have codegen and scaffolding tools so I guess I don’t get that use out of them.
I predict that once you release your embarrassing app, you will find all the corner cases and domain secrets come rearing out with little ability of the LLM to help you (especially with Bluetooth).
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is using AI seriously? I’ve tried to use it as a web search replacement and often the information is generic or tells me what I already know or wrong. I’ve used a code suggestions variant long before OpenAI hype started and while sometimes useful, rarely is it correct or helpful on getting over the next hurdle. Any code from my coworkers is now just AI slop they glanced over once. Then I spend a long time review…
In my case its coding real world apps that people use and pay money for. I no longer personally type most of my code, Instead I describe stuff or write pseudo code that LLMs end up converting into the real thing. It's very good at handling the BS part of coding but also its very good at knowing things that I don't know. I recently used it to hack a small bluetooth printer which requires its own iOS app to print, usin…
“Before AI I would have to study how Bluetooth works now I don't have to.”
And
“It's very good at handling the BS part of coding…”
This is the part that I think is difficult in a team situation.
Learning and understanding is the important part, and certainly isn’t BS.
I understand that it really can make it seem like velocity has increased when you really are shipping things that more or less “work”, but it’s really a good practice to understand your code.
I’ve had to spend a significant amount of time fixing work that was admittedly generated using AI by other engineers, and I really fear engineers are beginning to trade deep understanding for the high of getting something that “works” with little effort.
It might “work” but you might be ignoring the work everyone around you is doing to clean up your brittle code that doesn’t scale and wasn’t thought through at inception.
Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
#150Earlier 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.
Honestly, I think the mode that will actually occur is that incumbent businesses never successfully adopt AI, but are just outcompeted by their AI-native competitors.