Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

Given how things go when past bubbles have popped, this is likely to be "both" I think. Just not all at once

When the bubble pops you see things collapse

Then it becomes a feeding frenzy as companies and IPs get bought up on the cheap by whoever has a bit of money left

When the dust clears, some old players are gone, some are still around but weaker, some new players have emerged that resemble conglomerates of the old players, but overall a lot of the previous existing power is consolidated into fewer hands

My theory:

- OpenAI and Oracle partnership: When Microsoft is 'at capacity' more demand can go to Oracle, so now Microsoft don't need to rapidly add capacity with leases (which likely have a lower ROI than Microsoft owned and operated centres).

- Longer term investments are still going ahead: Microsoft aren't cutting back on capex investment. They don't want to lease if they don't have to, but long term still see a huge market for compute that they will want to be a key supplier of.

I think Microsoft's goal here is to focus on expanding their capex to be a long term winner instead of chasing AI demand at any cost in the short term. Likely because they already think they're in a pretty strong position already.

Yep. Investors are shifting capital out of the market. Always happens. The little guys end up paying for the losses.

> * He doesn’t necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet)

This is so based... I would probably have given slow take off a 1% chance of happening 10 years ago, but today I'd put that somewhere like 30%.

I've been using Amazon Q Developer as it was provided and approved by my employer. It has been pretty good with Python codebases, Kubernetes configurations, and (not surprisingly) CDK/Cloudformation templates. I can pretty much just ask it "here's my python script, make everything I need to run it as a lambda, hook that lambda up to x, it should run in a vpc defined in this template over here", and it'll get all that stuff put together and its normally pretty solid code it generates. It seems to pull in a lot of the context of the project I have open. For instance, I can say "it should get those values from the outputs in other-cf-template.yml" and it knows the naming schemes and what not across templates, even if it didn't generate those templates.

I might go back and tweak some stuff, add some extra tags and what not, but often its pretty good at doing what I ask.

Sometimes its suggestions aren't what I was really wanting to do in my codebase, a handful of times it has made up methods or parameters of even well-known libraries. But usually, its suggestions are better than a basic IntelliSense-style autocomplete at least in my experiences.

I haven't used many of the other developer assistant plugins like say GitHub Copilot. I couldn't really say which is better or worse. But I do think using Q Developer has made me faster in many tasks.

I wouldn't expect a tool that doesn't have access to the context of my editor and the files I have open to be very useful for actually coding. There's a lot of context to understand in even a basic application. If you're just asking a locally running app in ollama "give me a method to do x", don't be surprised if it doesn't know everything else happening in your app. Maybe it'll give you a halfway decent example of doing something, but devoid of how it actually plugs in to whatever you're making it might be entirely worthless.