Technology

59390 readers

2617 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

675

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]

117 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [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] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

And people will still say AI isn't a bubble.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There is a bubble in AI, AI isnt a bubble. In the same way there was a bubble in e-commerce that lead to the dotcom crash. But that didnt mean there was nothing of value there, just that there was too much money chasing hype.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think it will hinge on one thing: Will AI provide an experience that is maybe worse, but still sufficient to keep the market share, at lower cost than putting in the proper effort? If so, it might still become a tragic "success"-story.

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

It's very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn't generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren't going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.

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

That's what I suspect, too, but I'm not entirely sure in my research so far. The question I am still unsure about: Is it as costly in running, or is the real costly part "just" the "training our model" part? I wondered that, because when I was messing around, things like generative text models could run on my potato PC with a bit of python scripting without too much issue, even if not ideally - as long as I had the already trained dataset downloaded.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can't really answer the expense trade-off until you look at concrete use cases, something general AI is allergic to...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

You've got a great point there, actually

load more comments (49 replies)