Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

bloomberg.com

71–80 of 349 posts

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

#71
post #56

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…

Just in the past couple months there have been a number of "I am a senior/principal engineer and this is how I use LLMs". I would agree that the tools are not optimal yet but every iteration has improved for me.

Maybe whatever language you are coding it or whatever project you are working on is not a good fit? It is an equally perplexing situation for myself when I hear anecdotes like yours which don't align with my experience. The fact that you say everything is garbage calls into question either how you are using the tool or something else.

I can reliably use cursor's composer to reference a couple files, give a bullet list of what we are trying to do and point it to one of the better models and the output is junior engineer level or better output. When I say junior, I mean a junior who has experience with the codebase.

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

#72
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here Microsoft has all the context in the world just waiting for exploitation: Microsoft Graph data, Teams transcripts and recordings, Office data, Exchange data, Recall data(?), while not context per se even the XBox gaming data

I’m sorry but what are you saying. How are any of these unique competitive advantages over iCloud, App Store, Safari, and just generally more locked-in high margin mobile platform users than anyone?

If the money is in providing AI to businesses, to do things humans were previously paid to do - then Microsoft would be in a much better position than Apple, because they already have a big foothold whereas Apple has never really targeted business use.

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

#73
post #60

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.

It's not "good enough", it's mostly overhyped marketing garbage. LLM models are mostly as good as they're going to get. It's a limitation of the technology. It's impressive at what has been done, but that's it. It doesn't take billions of dollars and all human knowledge to make a single human level intelligence. Just some hormones and timing. So LLMs are mostly a dead end. AGI is going to come from differenst machine…

It's pretty good for a whole class of problems that humans currently do.

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

#74
post #56

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…

I have a similar experience. Tried to use it for real work and got frustrated by the chat’s inability to say “I don’t know”. It’s okay for code snippets demonstrating how something can be used (stack overflow essentially), also code reviews can be helpful if doing something for the first time. But they fail to answer questions I’m interested in like “what’s the purpose of X”.

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

#75
post #71
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just in the past couple months there have been a number of "I am a senior/principal engineer and this is how I use LLMs". I would agree that the tools are not optimal yet but every iteration has improved for me. Maybe whatever language you are coding it or whatever project you are working on is not a good fit? It is an equally perplexing situation for myself when I hear anecdotes like yours which don't align with my…

What kinds of projects are you working on? My experience is jot very good with these tools (expanded in a sibling comment).

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

#76
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…

In fact most of the industries out there are still slow and inefficient. Some physicians only accept phone calls for making appointments. Many primary schools only take phone calls and an email could go either way just not their way. It's just we programmers who want to automate everything.

Given how bad some of the apps and websites are I am not sure phone calls are any worse! They are also less prone to data breaches and the like.

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

#77
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also gets all of these things wrong, like not paying attention to models of toilets and quirks for their repair, often speaking with an authoritative voice and deceiving you on the validity of its instructions. All of the things you site are available via search engines, or better handled with expertise so you know how much of the response is nonsense. Every time I use AI, it's a time waste.

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.

AI is a lossy data compression technique at best. One can always tell when an AI cheerleader/ex blockchain bro has hitched their financial wagon to this statistic based word vomit grift.

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

#78
post #57
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…

> Meanwhile huge orgs like the NHS run on fax I thought this was a German-only thing?

Not convinced.

In 2018:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/health-and-social-care-se...

> Matt Hancock has banned the NHS from buying fax machines and has ordered a complete phase-out by April 2020.

The NHS is quite federated. Hell many parts of it are independent companies. Some trusts have decent modern systems though - I had to go for a test just before christmas - I'd phoned up my GP in the morning got an appointment for half an hour later, he ordered a test, said go to one of these 8 centres, so I went to one about half an hour away (I live a fair way away from a major town). Had the test, by the time I'd had lunch and driven back home I had another call from the GP asking me to come in that evening, the appointment was created by the GP and read seconds later at the hospital, the test was done there and results reported back again at the click of a system at the GP.

But that's just my local trust. Go 10 miles west and it's another trust and they have different systems. And I had to go to one of the test centres in the trust, I couldn't go to one in a neighbouring trust as they have different systems and there's no/limited interconnects.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple can pull off "Siri with context," it will completely annihilate Microsoft's first mover advantage. They'll be left with a large investment in a zero-margin commodity (OpenAI).

Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here Microsoft has all the context in the world just waiting for exploitation: Microsoft Graph data, Teams transcripts and recordings, Office data, Exchange data, Recall data(?), while not context per se even the XBox gaming data

> Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here

I'm sure MS will provide AI to business, but if Apple get things right, they'll be the biggest provider of AI to the masses.

With a Siri that knows your email, calendar, location, history, search history, ability to get data from and do things in 3rd party Apps (with App Intents) and if it runs on your phone for security, it could be used by billions of consumers, not a few hundred million MS office users.

What was that restaurant I went to with Joan last fall? Send linkedin requests to all the people I've had emails from company X.

Of course they could take too long or screw things up.

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

#80
post #56

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…

> 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.

It's very difficult to measure productivity of most people, certainly most people in office jobs, so while you can have a gut feeling that you're doing better, it's no more measurable than pre-AI individual productivity measurement was

Post reply on HN