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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

#201

Post by F7F7F7 »

geuis wrote: post #56
unsupp0rted wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

Seriously. It’s like half of the people in this thread are living in a completely different world.

And this is coming from someone who uses LLMs daily at the subscription, API (vscode and 3 nextjs apps) and local level. I have a custom langchain stack, prompt repo, you name it. And regardless of how little or how much I use what I have, or what soup de jour prompt or process (from Keep it simple to Prompt enhancers) I can’t say it’s made a meaningful difference in my life. Even with all of the customization and planning.

It’s a great search engine though.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#202

Post by joquarky »

djtango wrote: post #158
kyle_grove wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes this is exactly how I see it happening - just like how Amazon and Google were computer-native companies

And Sears had all the opportunity to be Amazon

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#203

Post by bsenftner »

petee wrote: post #118
bsenftner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "elephant in the room" is that AI is good enough, it's revolutionary in fact, but the issue now is the user needs more education to actually realize AI's value. No amount of uber-duper AI can help an immature user population lacking in critical thinking, which in their short shortsightedness seek self destructive pastimes.

I spent more time yesterday trying to get "AI" to output runnable code, and retyping, than if I had just buckled down and done it myself. But I don't think you can blame users if they're given an immature tool, when it really is on companies to give us a product that is obvious to use correctly. Its not an exact analogy, but I always like to think of how doors are designed - if you have to put a sign on it, its a bad…

Think of it like you're talking to someone so smart that they answer before you're finished explaining, and get the general idea wrong, or seem really pedantic and your misplaced use of a past tense verb that should have been active tense causes then to completely reinterpret what you're talking about. Think of our current LLMs like idiot savants, and trust them as much.

I don't use AI to write code if that code is not short and self contained. It's great at explaining code, great at strategy and design about code. Not so much at actually implementing code larger than 1/4 to 1/3rd it's output context window. After all, it's not "writing code", it's statistically generating tokens that look like code it's seen before. It's unknown if the training code in which the LLM is statistically generating a reply actually ran, it could have been pseudo code explaining that computer science concept, we don't know.

People seem to want a genie that does what they are thinking, and that is never going to work (at least with this technology.) I'm really talking about effective communications, and understanding how to communicate with a literal unreal non-human construct, a personality theater enhanced literary embodiment of knowledge. It's subtle, it requires effort on the user's side, more than it would if one were talking to a human expert in the area of knowledge you operate. You have to explain the situation so the AI can understand what you need, and developers are surprising bad at that. People in general are even worse at explaining. Implied knowledge is rampant in developer conversation, and an LLM struggles with ambiguity, such as implied references. Too many same acronyms in different parts of tech and science. It does work, but one really needs to treat LLMs like idiot savants.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#204

Post by smw »

kamranjon wrote: post #149
mrtksn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh come on, I'm not an "AI believer", but it regularly does things for me like write complex SQL queries that I can then verify are correct. Just something like that will often save me 20-40 minutes over doing it manually. There is _something_ there, even if it's not going to replace the workforce anytime soon.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#205

Post by Valord »

iainctduncan wrote: post #189

The thing that is driving me crazy in all these threads is that we have invariably a bunch of programmers saying "I use it for coding and I would never go back" but this is orthoganal to the question of whether it's a good business. If you use gen-AI but don't pay the real cost, you're not really a data point on the economics of it. It could be useful to programmers and still be a terrible business if the cost of giv…

My impression is that costs will continue to go down. Large investments are unlikely to be profitable for these businesses. Whoever is dumping billions into this is unlikely to get their money back. The new tooling, models, discoveries seem to be commoditized within months. There are no moats. If things keep going this way there will never be a point where employers (or anybody for that matter) have to pay the real cost.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#206

Post by mvandermeulen »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #35
toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

Microsoft 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…

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…

How close do we need to be for you to help a brother out? Feeling seriously unsupp0rted right now

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#207

Post by saturn8601 »

kamranjon wrote: post #149
mrtksn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have an entirely valid worry and I get a bit scared at my use of AI because of this. I fear that dev jobs might go away or become third world only jobs like electronics manufacturing but in the mean time its scary how much it atrophies your mind. At the same time, it has opened up a universe of answers to questions I wouldn't normally ask because the bar was too high. Everyone seems to have their own unique stories.

For example just today, I dumped a crash log from the Mac version of Microsoft Remote Desktop into it. This damn app locks up 10 times a day for me causing a "Force Quit" event and subsequent crash dump to be generated. Normally what can I do with that crash dump other than send it off to Apple/Microsoft? It identified where it thought the crash was coming from: excessive right clicking causing some sort of foundational error in their logic. Avoiding right clicking has solved the issue for me. Now that I write this out, I could have spent hours upon hours finding a needle in a haystack and that would probably made me a better developer but the bar is too high, there is too much other work I have to get done than to chase this. Instead I would have just lived with it. Now I have some closure at least.

Again it seems like everyone has got their own unique stories. Is AI taking everything over? Not yet. Can I go back to pre-AI? No, its like going back to Windows 95.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#208

Post by apsec112 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

Microsoft 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…

He doesn't actually say that, the (very biased and polemical) article writer seems to have made that up. The actual quote is:

"Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent. Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

That's a completely different statement from "AI is generating no value"!

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#209

Post by smw »

xienze wrote: post #147
unsupp0rted wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't count the number of times I've had a support person confidently tell me something that is obviously not applicable to my problem and makes completely flawed assumptions about cs/physics/networking/logic.

I get a lot of correct answers from llms, but sometimes they make shit up. Most of the time, it's some function in a library that doesn't actually exist. Sometimes even the wrong answers are useful because they tell me where to look in the reference docs. Ask it to search the web and cite sources, makes it easier to verify the answer.

I don't appreciate what's going on with AI art and AI generated slop, but the idea that they aren't a useful tool is just wild to me.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#210

Post by red-iron-pine »

joquarky wrote: post #202
djtango wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is exactly how I see it happening - just like how Amazon and Google were computer-native companies

And Sears had all the opportunity to be Amazon

Sears also did everything it could to annihilate itself while dot-com was happening.

their CEO was a believer of making his departments compete for resources leading to a brutal, dysfunctional clusterfuck. rent seeking behavior on the inside as well as outside.

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