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Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

bloomberg.com

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

#231

Post by mplewis »

qgin wrote: post #129
typewithrhythm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a resource problem; everyone inside the system has no real incentive to do anything innovative; improving something incrementally is more likely to be seen as extra work by your colleagues and be detrimental to the person who implemented it. What's more likely is a significantly better system is introduced somewhere, NHS can't keep up and is rebuilt by an external. (Or more likely it becomes a inferior syste…

I think this is where the AGI employee succeeds where other automation doesn’t. The AGI employee doesn’t require the organization to change. It’s an agent that functions like a regular employee in the same exact system with all of its inefficiencies, except that it can do way more inefficient work for a fraction of the cost of a human.

What you are describing is science fiction and is not worthy of serious discussion.

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

#232

Post by outside1234 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #226
aresant wrote: post #185

- This is a proper MSFT resource allocation commentary, not an industry wide canary in coalmine - MSFT CapEx is up 45% YoY, positioning for inference dominance - MSFT is prioritizing AI inference for millions of customers over massive AI training for OpenAI - Losing inference demand risks clients moving to AWS/GCP - MSFT taking bet that industry overbuild will lead to more attractive leasing terms in future vs owning…

If they are taking the bet that industry will overbuild, how is it not a canary in a coal mine? There is almost certainly at least one person in Redmond working on this that’s smarter and better informed than you, just going off probability.

Or that person is this person

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

#233

Post by mikesurowiec »

qgin wrote: post #22

A few things from the Dwarkesh interview with Satya: * He sees data center leases getting cheaper in near future due to everyone building * He’s investing big in AI, but in every year there needs to be a rough balance between capacity and need for capacity * He doesn’t necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet) * Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation * It won’t…

I expect data centers will become more expensive precisely because everyone is building at the same time. Supply chain crunch

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

#234

Post by echelon »

aresant wrote: post #185

- This is a proper MSFT resource allocation commentary, not an industry wide canary in coalmine - MSFT CapEx is up 45% YoY, positioning for inference dominance - MSFT is prioritizing AI inference for millions of customers over massive AI training for OpenAI - Losing inference demand risks clients moving to AWS/GCP - MSFT taking bet that industry overbuild will lead to more attractive leasing terms in future vs owning…

Nailed it. Nadella's commentary is essentially this.

Dwarkesh's interview is fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GLSzuYXh6w&t=348s (timestamp for "where is the value created?" question)

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

#235

Post by snapcaster »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #226
aresant wrote: post #185

- This is a proper MSFT resource allocation commentary, not an industry wide canary in coalmine - MSFT CapEx is up 45% YoY, positioning for inference dominance - MSFT is prioritizing AI inference for millions of customers over massive AI training for OpenAI - Losing inference demand risks clients moving to AWS/GCP - MSFT taking bet that industry overbuild will lead to more attractive leasing terms in future vs owning…

If they are taking the bet that industry will overbuild, how is it not a canary in a coal mine? There is almost certainly at least one person in Redmond working on this that’s smarter and better informed than you, just going off probability.

>There is almost certainly at least one person in Redmond working on this that’s smarter and better informed than you, just going off probability.

this isn't the actual test though right? it's surely true, and yet companies make bad decisions all the time. It needs to be conditioned on "someone smarter and better informed than you _with influence in the organization sufficient to enact change_"

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

#236

Post by kragen »

mistrial9 wrote: post #197
kragen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancient Egypt was neither imperial nor a slave state; though it did have slavery, most Egyptians were not slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt

These pages are somewhat out of date, but they confirm what I said: "Ancient Egypt was a peasant-based economy and it was not until the Greco-Roman period that slavery had a greater impact."

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

#237

Post by ethbr1 »

qgin wrote: post #61
djtango wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

> I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”.

Exactly. The problem with the AGI-changes-everything argument is that it indirectly requires "plug-and-play" quality AGI to happen before / at the same time as specialized AGI. (Otherwise, specialized AGI will be adopted first)

I can't think of a single instance in which a polished, fully-integrated-with-everything version of a new technology has existed before a capable but specialized one.

E.g. computers, cell phones, etc.

And if anyone points at the "G" and says "That means we aren't talking about specialized in any way," then you start seeing the technological unlikeliness of the dominoes falling as they'd need to for AGI fast ramp.

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

#238

Post by xienze »

smw wrote: post #209
xienze wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm not saying it's not useful, I'm saying that we hold humans giving us answers to a much higher standard than LLMs.

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

#239

Post by llm_trw »

sharpshadow wrote: post #171
llm_trw wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fixed the hinge in my oven by giving perplexity.com the make and problem. I saved an hour on the phone calling people to organise a visit some time in the next week. Maybe you should stop using the Ai slop tools that don't work?

Very likely you would have been as successful without AI to fix your oven hinge yourself, there is tons of content about that online.

No. I'd already spend 30 Min looking at how to solve it myself. The search on perplexity was a hail marry before I started calling handymen.

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

#240

Post by Earw0rm »

dnissley wrote: post #216
lazide wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, that isn’t a brownfield solution. These orgs could hire someone who could solve these issues right now (and for the last decade) if they would allow those people to exist in their org. The challenge is precisely that those people (or people with that capability) aren’t allowed to exist.

"Bob" in this example is just some other random individual contributor, not some master of the universe. E.g. they would have the title "associate procurement specialist @ NHS" and join and interact on zoom calls with other people with that title in order to do that specific job.

Right, but these jobs are inefficient mostly because of checks and balances. So unless you have a bunch of AIs checking one another's work (and I'm not sure I can see that getting signed off) doesn't it just move the problem slightly along the road?

There's an argument here something like.. if you can replace each role with an AI, you can replace multiple with a single AI, why not replace the structure with a single person?

And the answer is typically that someone has deemed it significant and necessary that decision-making in this scenario be distributed.

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