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Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#211

Post by mrob »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #207
mrob wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no scenario where AI is a net benefit. There are three possibilities: 1. AI does things we can already do but cheaper and worse. This is the current state of affairs. Things are mostly the same except for the flood of slop driving out quality. My life is moderately worse. 2. Total victory of capital over labor. This is what the proponents are aiming for. It's disastrous for the >99% of the population who wil…

What is the motivation for killing off the population in scenario 2? That's a post-scarcity world where the elites can have everything they want, so what more are they getting out of mass murder? A guilty conscience, potentially for some multiple of human lifespans? Considerably less status and fame? Even if they want to do it for no reason, they'll still be happier if their friends and family are alive and happy, wh…

It's not a post-scarcity world. There's no obvious upper bound on resources AGI could use, and there's no obvious stopping point where you can call it smart enough. So long are there are other competing elites the incentive is to keep improving it. All the useless people will be using resources that could be used to make more semiconductors and power plants.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#212

Post by gjmveloso »

"They just have no taste" - Steve Jobs

Microsoft had a great start with the exclusive rights over OpenAI tech but they're not capable of really talking with developers within those large companies in the same sense Google and AWS are rapidly catching-up.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#213

Post by PenguinCoder »

aabajian wrote: post #176
fainpul wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in an ideal world, one could report this as a bug or improvement and get it fixed for every single user without them needing to do anything at all.

Well, it isn't every user. We use a version of Epic called Epic Radiant. It's designed for radiologists. The tab that always opens is the radiologist worklist. The thing is, we don't use that worklist for procedures (I'm an interventional radiologist). So that tab is always there, always opens first, and always shows an empty list. It can't be removed in the Radiant version of Epic.

I'm sure you have, but try be bringing that up to Epic, not introducing AI slop and Data gathering into HIPPA workflows.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#214

Post by rsynnott »

layer8 wrote: post #74
didibus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, it's hard to predict what can be done and what breakthrough or minor tweak can suddenly open up an avenue for a profitable use-case. The cost of missing that opportunity is why they're heavily investing in AI, they don't want to miss the boat if there's going to be one. And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?

> And what else would they do? What's the other growth path? Are you arguing that if LLMs didn’t exist as a technology, they wouldn’t find anything to do and collapse?

_Number would not go up sufficiently steeply_, would be the major concern, not collapse. Microsoft might end up valued as (whisper it) a normal mature stable company. That would be something like a quarter to a half what it's currently valued. For someone paid mostly in options, this is clearly a problem (and people at the top in these companies mostly _are_ compensated with options, not RSUs; if the stock price halves, they get _nothing_).

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#215

Post by cleandreams »

For the first time I have begun to doubt Microsoft's chosen course. (I am a retired MS principal engineer.) Their integration of copilot shows all the taste and good tradeoff choices of Teams but to far greater consequence. Copilot is irritating. MS dependence on OpenAI may well become dicey because that company is going to be more impacted by the popping of the AI bubble than any other large player. I've read that MS can "simply" replace ChatGPT by rolling their own -- maybe they can. I wouldn't bet the company on it. Is google going to be eager to license Gemini? Why would they?

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#216

Post by lostphilosopher »

xnorswap wrote: post #53
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…

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.

This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#217

Post by rsynnott »

gwerbret wrote: post #201

A bit tangential and pedantic, but: > At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual. "Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".

I mean, neither is a great term, in that they both refer to largely dissimilar psychological phenomena, but confabulate is at least a lot _closer_.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#218

Post by delecti »

gwerbret wrote: post #201

A bit tangential and pedantic, but: > At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual. "Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".

The bigger problem is that, whichever term you choose (confabulate or hallucinate), that's what they're always doing. When they produce a factually correct answer, that's just as much of a random fabrication based on training data as when they're factually incorrect. Either of those terms falsely implies that they "know" the answer when they get it right, but "confabulate" is worse because there isn't "gaps in their memory", they're just always making things up.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#219

Post by sensanaty »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #146
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

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…

Are your mother's cooking recipes gonna cover the billions and even trillions being spent here? I somehow doubt that, and it's funny to me that the killer usecase the hypesters use is stupid inane shit like this (no offense to your mom, but a recipe generator isn't something we should be speedrunning global economic collapse for)

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#220

Post by oblio »

somat wrote: post #186
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is wrong with stock buybacks? Genuine question, I don't understand the economics of the stock market and as such I participate very little (probably to my detriment) I sort of figure the original theory went like this. "We have an idea to run a for profit endeavor but do not have money to set it up. If you buy from us a portion of our future profit we will have the immediate funds to set up the business and you…

My view is that you don't want more layers. Chasing ever increasing share prices favor shareholders (limited amount of generally rich people) over customers (likely to be average people). The incentives get out of whack.
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