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Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI' (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 242 points 4 months ago (52 children)

All of big tech is really worried about this.

Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple's scientists put out a lot of solid research.
Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it's the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn't belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don't worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored...
Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they're still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there's a real concern that they'll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn't sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Monopolies don't care about the user experience, only profit. The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter. The continued degredation of the user experience is a likely indicator of an increase in revenue as function of successful application of AI.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter.

Do you possibly mean "The AI evangelists" or something similar?

Like, I could totally understand it in the "software will also include the biases of those who wrote it" kind of way (a la Amazon's failed attempt at automating job candidate search). If the only incentive you're given as a programmer is "make it make money", then yeah, your AI is going to bias towards that end.

Just couldn't tell on first reading

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I'm not actually asking for good faith answers to these questions. Asking seems the best way to illustrate the concept.

Does the programmer fully control the extents of human meaning as the computation progresses, or is the value in leveraging ignorance of what the software will choose?

Shall we replace our judges with an AI?

Does the software understand the human meaning in what it does?

The problem with the majority of the AI projects I've seen (in rejecting many offers) is that the stakeholders believe they've significantly more influence over the human meaning of the results than exists in the quality and nature of the data they've access to. A scope of data limits a resultant scope of information, which limits a scope of meaning. Stakeholders want to break the rules with "AI voodoo". Then, someone comes along and sells the suckers their snake oil.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

its a function of paying their employees less for more work relatively speaking and extracting more profit from consumers through ads and enshitification in general

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But that's also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

We're living in a late stage capitalistic hellhole and you're advocating faith in the free market.

What. The. Fuck.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

I'm saying it's happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't remember anything ever in history undermining faith in the free - from regulation, but not from jailing crooks, - market.

It's not as if anything lefties claim to be that were free. And when one talks about what is needed to make it free, one can hear screeching of the "reeeeeee useful idiots for capitalism reeeeee you just want poor people to die reeeeee we should all vote for 8 hour work week and peace on Earth reeeeee what do you mean it's not enough to vote reeeee" kind.

Even Ponzi schemes are usually about everyone being conscious it's a scheme, but thinking they are very smart and will fool some other suckers, and those suckers think the same in turn. That is covered by the "jailing crooks" part.

And various cartels and trusts and such usually make government regulation their instrument. They benefit from it.

I mean, all this has been said and proven many times.

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