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Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

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

#91

Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value - https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value Bit of a click bait title, but it certainly seems like the realization is setting in that the hype has exceeded near term realistic expectations and some are walking back claims (for whatever reason; honesty, derisking against investor securities suits, poor capital allocation, etc). Nadella appea…

Lining up for whatever the next thing is. "Look, we know we said AR/VR was the next big thing in the late tens and LLMs were the next big thing in the early 20s, but quantum is the next big thing now. For real, this time!" (Not entirely sure what the next fad will be, but some sort of quantum computing thing doesn't feel unlikely. Lot of noise in that direction lately.)

Curiously, all of these three (VR/AI/QC) are limited by hardware. But AI is the only one that has seen meaningful progress by just throwing more contemporary hardware at it. Sure, future hardware might bring advancements to all of them. But if you're making an investment plan for the next quarter, the choice is pretty obvious. This is why AI rules the venture capitalist sector instead of fusion or other long term stuff.

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

#92
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked in equity research, and an accusation of FUD is an accusation of intentionally malign behavior. Getting reporting wrong is not the same as FUD.

When you double down on the incorrect reporting instead of retracting or correcting it, as Bloomberg did with their ludicrous spy chip story, it becomes FUD regardless of your initial intent.

To what purpose? Enron spread FUD to further its goals.

We can INVENT goals here, to FIT the conclusion we have already reached - that Bloomberg is spreading FUD.

But this is because we have already concluded, and are now finding things to fit our conclusion.

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

#93
post #53
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…

> 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…

But why are these sort of orgs slow and useless? I don't think it is because they have made a conscious decision to do so - I think it is more than they do not have the resources to do anything else. They can't afford to hire in huge teams of engineers and product managers and researchers to modernize their systems.

If suddenly the NHS had a team of "free" genuinely phd-level AGI engineers working 24/7 they'd make a bunch of progress on the low-hanging fruit and modernize and fix a whole bunch of stuff pretty rapidly I expect.

Of course the devil here is the requirements and integrations (human and otherwise). AGI engineers might be able to churn out fantastic code (some day at least), but we still need to work out the requirements and someone still needs to make decisions on how things are done. Decision making is often the worst/slowest thing in large orgs (especially public sector).

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

#94
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…

Is this the transcript of the interview (podcast) with Dwarkesh?

https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella

Because if so,

> He doesn’t necessarily believe in fast takeoff AGI (just yet)

the term "fast takeoff AGI" does not appear in the transcript.

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

#95
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…

[deleted]

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

#96
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 think its about scope and expectations. I have had some form of AI code completer in my neovim config for 3 years. It works flawlessly and saves me tons of keystrokes. Sure sometimes it suggests the incorrect completion but I just ignore it and keep coding as if it didn't exist. I am talking about line by line, not entire code blocks, but even that it does well at times.

From what I have seen the people that have the most success have AI building something from scratch using well known tooling (read: old tooling).

The problem is that doesn't immediately help most people. We are all stuck in crap jobs with massive, crusty code bases. Its hard for AI because its hard for everyone.

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

#97
post #53
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…

> 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…

As a first order of business, a sufficiently advanced AGI would recommend that we stop restructuring and changing to a new ERP every time an acquisition is made or the CFO changes, and to stop allowing everyone to have their own version of the truth in excel.

As long as we have complex manual processes that even the people following them can barely remember the reason why they exist, we will never be able to get AI to smooth it over. It is horrendously difficult for real people to figure out what to put in a TPS report. The systems that you refer to need to be engineered out or organisations first. You don't need AI for that, but getting rid of millions of excel files is needed before AI can work.

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

#98
post #83
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the 'grow at 10%' refers to the incremental part of the entire world/market. during the industrial revolution(steam/electricity/internet), the world was growing, there're trains, cars, netflix bussiness grown with productivity growing, even so, we lived through 2 world wars and dozens of economic crisis but now is very different, when you repair the tank with LLM's help, when the labour value of repairers is…

> let's assume robotics become to a extremely high level, everything humen work can be reduced to 1/100 with help of robots, what will happen next? We work 35 hour years instead of 35 hour weeks?

Lol, ever the optimist I see.

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

#99
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…

If LLM chatbots are making you vastly more productive in a field, you are in the bottom 20% of that field. They're still useful tools for exploring new disciplines, but if you're say a programmer and you think ChatGPT or DeepSeek is good at programming, that's a good sign you need to start improving.

This. I shudder to think of the hubris of a programmer who doesn’t understand pointers prompting an AI model to generate low-level system code for them. Sure it might generate a program that appears to work. But is that human reading the code qualified to review it and prevent the model from generating subtle, non-obvious errors?

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

#100
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…

But why are these sort of orgs slow and useless? I don't think it is because they have made a conscious decision to do so - I think it is more than they do not have the resources to do anything else. They can't afford to hire in huge teams of engineers and product managers and researchers to modernize their systems. If suddenly the NHS had a team of "free" genuinely phd-level AGI engineers working 24/7 they'd make a…

IMO it comes from inertia. People at the top are not digital-native. And they're definitely not AI-native.

So you're retrofitting a solution onto a legacy org. No one will have the will to go far enough fast enough. And if they didn't have the resources to engineer all these software migrations who will help them lead all these AI migrations?

Are they going to go hands off the wheels? Who is going to debug the inevitable fires in the black box that has now replaced all the humans?

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