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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

#321

Post by carlosjobim »

jollyllama wrote: post #5
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…

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

Do they think or do they know? I thought that Microsoft was over after the complete failure of Windows phone and Windows 8 and Office ribbon. And that was 20 years ago...

Subpar companies selling subpar products can be massively successive, because they know their customers.

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

#322

Post by carlosjobim »

flohofwoe wrote: post #314
Workaccount2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, as a search engine replacement it's totally fine and works reasonably well, but this is also because Google as search engine has regressed dramatically since it's aggressively pushing products at the top of the search results instead of answering questions. But "a slightly better search engine" sounds much less interesting to investors than "will completely transform human civilization" ;)

Search engines did completely transform human civilization, and will continue to be needed.

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

#323

Post by mizzao »

grim_io wrote: post #55

What can you even do in the ms enterprise ecosystem with their copilot integration? Is it just for chatting? Is it a glorified RAG? Can you tell copilot co to create a presentation? Make a visualisation in a spreadsheet?

Gamma.app is what people use for that now. And it definitely doesn't feel like PowerPoint with AI slapped on.

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

#324

Post by trollbridge »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #224
trollbridge wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?

Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are…

The problem is when paying $20 or $40 a month is what's expected to pay for inference that costs $50 or $80 a month to provide. Electricity is not going to get cheaper.

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

#325

Post by trollbridge »

sensanaty wrote: post #316
Workaccount2 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are…

> 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo Or better yet, you just need 100 people paying 400 million each to get the same amount! > "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" That only works if the product is actually good. The average person isn't going to be paying EIGHTY dollars a month to generate recipes or whatever, that's just delusional

For $960 a year, you could probably buy a recipe-ingredients-tracker-app.

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

#326

Post by drw85 »

kentm wrote: post #274
gdulli wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but 99% is being very generous.

A big task my team did had measured accuracy in the mid 80% FWIW. I think the line of thought in this thread is broadly correct. The most value I’ve seen in AI is problems where the cost of being wrong is low and it’s easy to verify the output. I wonder if anyone is taking good measurements on how frequently an LLM is able to do things like route calls in a call center. My personal experience is not good and I would…

I think these kinds of problems were already solved using ML and to a pretty high accuracy.

But now everyone is trying to make chatbots do that job and they are awful at it.

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

#327

Post by drw85 »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #14
jollyllama wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

I think this time is the first time that it will actually hurt all the large corps investing gazillions of dollars into AI infra.

Shipping some ads in windows? Doesn't really hurt you, it makes you extra money. Sure, some customers get a little annoyed, but who cares.

But this time they invested huge amounts of money to chase something that will likely never get profitable and return enough to pay off.

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

#328

Post by drw85 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #224
trollbridge wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?

Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are…

I personally don't know a single person that would pay $80 for some LLM. Most people i know pay nothing, or got a 1 year sub of a phone purchase or similar.

Also, everyone here conveniently always forgets the huge hardware and datacenter upfront investment that MS have already made. That cost alone will never be recouped with current prices.

If you can't even run the thing close to profitable, then how will you ever actually profit?

But don't worry guys, your robotaxi will recoup your tesla purchase within a year while you sleep.

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

#329

Post by adammarples »

neRok wrote: post #297
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".

About 2 years ago I was using Whisper AI locally to translate some videos, and "hallucinations" is definitely the right phrase for some of its output! So just like you might expect from a stereotypical schizo: it would stay on-task for a while, but then start ranting about random things, or "hearing things", etc.

A hallucination is something that is experienced internally. Confabulation is better because it's the act of telling a porkie externally.

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

#330

Post by drw85 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #289
gitremote wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. False. Training happens once for a time period, but inference happens again and again every time users use the product. Inference is the main money sink. "according to a report from Google, inference now accounts for nearly 60% of total energy use in their AI workloads. Meta revealed something even more striking: within their AI infrastructure, power…

They get paid for inference, those tokens might as well be monetary tokens.

This is exactly the problem.

Companies currently are being sold that they can replace employees with little agents that cost $20 to $200 a month.

But then they realize that the $200 last for about 3.5 hours on day 1 of the month and the rest will be charged by the token. Which will then cost as much or more than the employee did, but with a nice guaranteed quota of non determinism and failure rate included.

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