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Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

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Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#61

Post by skybrian »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #48
MadDemon wrote: post #17

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…

If only search engine AI output didn't constantly haluciate nonexistent APIs, it might be a net productivity gain for me...but it's not. I've been bit enough times by their false "example" output for it to be a significant net time loss vs using traditional search results.

Using ChatGPT and phrasing it like a search seems like a better way? “Can you find documentation about an API that does X?”

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#62

Post by direwolf20 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #39
direwolf20 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is partly because Google is past the enshittification hump and ChatGPT is just starting to climb up it - they just announced ads.

This. And the wonderful thing about LLMs is that they can be trained to bend responses in specific directions, say toward using Oracle Cloud solutions. There's fertile ground for commercial value extraction that goes far beyond ads. Think of it as product placement on steroid.

You don't even need training — you can add steering vectors in the middle of the otherwise-unmodified computation. Remember Golden Gate Claude?

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#63

Post by haritha-j »

Investor hype bubbles kill technologies. If we let tech mature at a reasonable pace, we would actually get there faster in the long run. There are real applications of AI that aren't ready yet. All the hype bubble has done is push out unnecessary and broken AI, eroding consumer trust, use up valuable resources, eroding public trust, hype up ability to destroy jobs, causing public discontent, and push out unsafe AI that has real societal harm.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#64

Post by an0malous »

glimshe wrote: post #46

When I read HN comments where people say "AI sux, AI is useless, AI is a waste of time", I think I must be living in a different universe. Maybe Hacker News is a dimensional portal between my reality and other people's. Hi there, friends from another dimension! In my reality, there's a cold front coming from the north. Healthcare is expensive and politics are a mess. But AI? It hallucinates sometimes but it's so much…

Likewise I keep seeing all these comments on HN about how AI is revolutionary and all these AI skeptics are just haters. I really want to understand what this gap is between the believers and skeptics.

I have access to all the popular AI tools from work for free, I use them for the same cases you mentioned like search, consultation, a better StackOverflow, and autocomplete. It’s definitely useful but I would describe that as incrementally useful, not revolutionary.

Satya is saying that AI needs to start doing more than vibe coding and autocomplete, there’s probably half a trillion invested into the technology worldwide now and it’s not enough for AI to be a good coding assistant. It needs to replace customer support, radiologists, and many other professions to justify the unprecedented level of investment its garnered.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#65

Post by sjajshha »

linuxftw wrote: post #53

Things AI is already better at than (many/most) humans: Customer service (chat, phone), writing software, writing docs about software, computer graphics (animation, images), driving cars. There are plenty of uses for AI. Right now, the industry is heavily spending on training new models, improving performance of existing software and hardware, and trying to create niche products. Power usage for inference will drop d…

> Customer service (chat, phone)

Only because companies have been cutting costs for decades here. This is not a good argument for AI.

> writing software

If you mean typing characters quickly, yes. Otherwise, there’s still a lot of employed devs, with many AI companies hiring.

> writing docs about software

The most useful docs are there because they contain info you cannot determine from the code. AI is not able to do this.

> computer graphics (animation, images)

If you are producing slop, yes.

> driving cars

True, but only because of its improved physical awareness. ie it’s a mechanical gain (better eyes, ears, etc) not an intellectual one (interpreting that information). Self driving cars aren’t LLMs and not really applicable here. Entirely different field.

> AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0% chance it 'fails' and we return to 2020

Absolutely true. But not for the reasons you think.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#66

Post by shishcat »

I agree with this dicussion, AI should be used for improving, researching, and as he says, do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries. BUT IT'S SATYA NADELLA SAYING IT! The person whose company owns Copilot, Copilot in Bing, Copilot for Word, Copilot for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain...

With all this useless slop, he’s literally arguing against his own point.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#67

Post by coffeefirst »

reilly3000 wrote: post #27

I get it. A stunning indictment of our times… but there is something useful AI could be doing that MS has dropped the ball on: personal finance management. I should be able to have copilot grab all my transactions, build me budgets, show me what if scenarios, raise concerns, and help me meet my goals. It should be able to work in Excel where I can see and steer it. The math should be validated with several checks and…

I have a personal budget app and every so often I try and get the latest model to compare my data against the statements and find any discrepancies.

Every time it hallucinates visits to Starbucks.

I never go to Starbucks, it’s just a probable finding given the words in the question.

This should work. I want it to work. But until it can do this correctly all analysis capabilities should be suspect.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#68

Post by binary132 »

MadDemon wrote: post #17

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…

The difference is that in the past that information had to come from what people wrote and are writing about, and now it can come from a derivative of an archive of what people once wrote, upon a time. So if they just stop doing that — whether because they must, or because they no longer have any reason to, or because they are now drowned out in a massive ocean of slop, or simply because they themselves have turned into slopslaves — no new information will be generated, only derivative slop, milled from derivative slop.

I think we all understand that at this point, so I question deeply why anyone acts like they don’t.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#69

Post by lazide »

skybrian wrote: post #61
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only search engine AI output didn't constantly haluciate nonexistent APIs, it might be a net productivity gain for me...but it's not. I've been bit enough times by their false "example" output for it to be a significant net time loss vs using traditional search results.

Using ChatGPT and phrasing it like a search seems like a better way? “Can you find documentation about an API that does X?”

It will often literally just make up the documentation.

If you ask for a link, it may hallucinate the link.

And unlike a search engine where someone had to previously think of, and then make some page with the fake content on it, it will happily make it up on the fly so you'll end up with a new/unique bit of fake documentation/url!

At that point, you would have been way better off just... using a search engine?

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#70

Post by marcyb5st »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #38
mossTechnician wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy costs have already risen substantially[0], but the increase has been slower, and it's garnered a bit less media attention than the recent leap in PC hardware prices. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

They built an oceanic fiber termination down in South Carolina. Data centers are starting to move in. Now they'll charge you $12/KWh during your peak usage.

You really said 12 USD/KWh? Time to put solar panels/batteries over there. Even if you resell to the grid at 1/10th of that you recoup the investment in O(months) and not O(years)
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