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.
Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go,
or more like their user experience was already so garbage, adding AI to it doesn’t make any noticeable change lol
I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.
Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.
And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.
Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience
It turned out that it’s incredible easy to order as guest at other sides
Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).
There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.
Google has let AI divisions take over both search
I fucking bing’d something the other day to get a better search result. What the fuck google.
Try Kagi. Paid search engines are the future in order to extract yourself from the enshittification of “free” search engines.
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.
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
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.
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Oooh la la
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
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But that’s also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.
We’re living in a late stage capitalistic hellhole and you’re advocating faith in the free market.
What. The. Fuck.
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.
Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now
Not really, unfortunately, because of the sheer mass of the internet the infrastructure to just support the index of it requires massive funding. Even other giants like MS with Bing struggled with this. Short of a radical new way to run a search engine without a massive index, I just don’t see it happening.
It’s kind of curious to me about search because honestly my Internet world has only grown smaller and smaller. Where I used to use Google to find new websites, I feel like most of my searches on Google are now to search a handful of sites I already know. Ironically if Reddit had a better search function, a lot of my Google usage would fall off as I’d just go directly there, as it’s still the best place I’ve found for troubleshooting support and real reviews of lots of products. A competitor to Google wouldn’t really need to index the entire web for most people, but rather a relatively small number of website super giants like Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.
Kagi literally provides the same quality Google used to.
They pay Microsoft for access to the bing index
They stopped using Bing a year ago.
You’re right, my bad. (Source: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html)
Kagis ok, it’s better than Google now, but not the Google of the past and only if what you were looking for is recent and indexed. If not, it just falls back to the same Google results. Good if you want separation and not having Google know what you’re searching for, but beyond that…meh.
I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.
Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.
Yeah competition won’t work in a market where some competitors have such massive amounts of wealth. This is a failure of unrestrained capitalism and it’s bad for consumers ultimately.
If the AI boom is a dud,
Whaddya mean, “if”? Emperor wears no clothes…
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago. Now all we have is latecomers with FOMO. It’s gonna be all incremental gains from here on.
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago.
A simple control algorithm “if temperature > LIMIT turnOffHeater” is AI, albeit an incredibly limited one.
LLMs are not AI. Please don’t parrot marketing bullshit.
The former has an intrinsic understanding about a relationship based in reality, the latter has nothing of the likes.
I can see where you’re getting at, LLM don’t necessarily solve a problem, they just mímic patterns in data.
That is indeed exactly my point. LLMs are just a language-tailored expression of deep-learning, which can be incredibly useful, but should never be confused for any kind of intelligence (i.e. logical conclusions).
I appreciate that you see my point and admit that it makes some sense :)
Example where I think pattern recognition by deep learning can be extremely useful:
- recheck medical imaging data of patients that have already been screened by a doctor, to flag some data for a re-check by a second doctor. This could improve chances of e.g. early cancer detection for patients, without a real risk of a false detection, because again, a real doctor will look at the flagged results in detail before even alarming a patient to a potential diagnosis
- pre-filter large amounts of data for potential matches -> e.g. exoplanet search by certain patterns (planet hunters lets humans do this as crowdsourcing)
But what I am afraid is happening for people who do not see why a very simple algorithm is already AI, but consider LLMs AI, is that they mentally decide to call AI what seems “AGI” / “human-like”. They mistake the patterns of LLMs for a conscious being and that is incredibly dangerous in terms of trusting the answers given by LLMs.
Why do I think they subconsciously imply (self-)awareness / conscience? Because to not consider as (very limited) AI a control mechanism like a simple room thermostat, is viewing it as “too simple” to be AI - which means that a person with such a view makes a qualitative distinction between control laws and “AI”, where a quantitative distinction between “simple AI” and “advanced AI” would be appropriate.
And such a qualitative distinction that elevates a complex word guessing machine to “intelligence”, that can only be made by people who actually believe there’s understanding behind those word predictions.
That’s my take on this.
I work at a big EU company, MS top partner / strategic account etc. We wanted to implement MS Dynamics CRM in one of our newer business lines, we barely got a reply to our official emails.
After some informal discussions, we were told that salespeople are now only incentivized to sell Copilot, so they don’t really bother with the rest.
If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.
To be fair, you can be their Platinum Ultra Tier Level Partner or whatever, and they’ll still not reply to you for a week. And when you get the reply it looks like it was written by ChatGPT anyway, and says nothing.
It was written by copilot, thank you very much
They are purposely enshittifying windows already, they don’t give a shit about making a functional OS anymore and are in the milking their products for all their worth phase and right now Ai is the hot seller.
Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.
Wow you just shined a ton of light on a problem my company had. We wanted to implement a medical imaging system from one of their subsidiaries, and it took an average of 3 months for the salesperson to respond to EACH of our emails
Sounds like a really good opportunity for competitors to sweep in and start attacking
How do I short MS, hm
I am stuck with Windows 10 & 11 at work, on multiple various machines. Also some versions of Windows Server.
It honestly feels hostile towards the user now. For myriad reasons. It’s a constant battle for me to turn pointless crap off that it keeps turning back on with the next big update.
Linux is waiting for you. You know you want it.
I realize gaming on Linux is already very doable (I have a steam deck), but for me specifically, I need the majority of the mod developers to have shifted over to Linux gaming before I can switch. I primarily play games that tend to be heavily modded and it’s really common to need to run some sort of 3rd party tool to mod. One that is often not Linux compatible. I realize there are utilities that can sometimes help with this, but between extremely spotty mod documentation and my own lack of familiarity with Linux, that kind a tricky ask for me to accomplish. I’ve pretty much given up on playing modded games on my steam deck for now. I hope someday most of the gaming world will switch, but until then I feel somewhat chained to Windows if I want to enjoy my hobby.
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Run them with wine on Linux or search the internet to check if others have tried running that software under Wine. I had very good luck with small, single-purpose software.
It honestly feels hostile
Very well put. I have the same feeling and it gets worse with every iteration.
Reading stories in which MS shoots itself in the foot, I am so glad there are 0 Windows 11 installations at home and Windows 10 installations are old (up to date but every install is at least 1 year old) so they don’t become enshittified.
Man, the disclaimer at the bottom that Business Insider is partnered with OpenAI to allow them to train on their articles is really the cherry on top.
That’s a shit circle. I figured most of their articles were already written by LLMs.
It might be, but to be fair, that’s what the glorified autocompletion is actually good for, if it’s actually used a supporting tool, and not to pump out quantity over quality.
It could be that microsoft was just the bootloader to closedAI
Microsoft is having its IBM moment
Copilot is going to want 50 gigs on YOUR computer’s hard drive to store snapshots. MS also wants you to buy dedicated AI hardware to run a few of their apps. They’re going to steal your computer’s storage and processing resources to create a worldwide AI and surveillance network.
No thanks. I finally switched to Linux. Microsoft can become Skynet without my help.
Isn’t that a good thing? The best job in the gold rush was selling shovels. Nvidia is already doing that, so I guess the second best thing is providing lodging, which is what Microsoft is doing.
They own like half the company, so wouldn’t OpenAI’s success be their success?
It’s the “all your eggs in one basket” problem.
Boeing turned to shit after acquiring another company (not sure of the name), and it changed the culture and leadership
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Success . . . . yes. Yes that’s it.
Windows Recall did it for me. I switched to Pop!_OS Linux and have been pretty content so far.
Great os, I switched a year ago, no complaints! Plays games, edits videos, no crashes, to anyone reading, get it!
Paywall
Some Microsoft insiders worry the company’s AI strategy has become too focused on its partnership with OpenAI.
A few even grumble that the software giant has turned into a glorified IT department for the hot startup. These comments were part of a recent exclusive story from Business Insider in which Microsoft insiders shared candid views on the company’s AI future and its new Copilot tools.
The group at the center of this is Microsoft’s AI Platform team, run by Eric Boyd. This sits within Scott Guthrie’s Cloud + AI organization.
Insiders say Microsoft is focused less on the internal services that previously made up Azure AI Services and more on the Azure OpenAI service.
One former executive who left as a result of the changes said products like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure AI Bot Service, and Kinect DK are practically gone. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said these services exist in some form but either aren’t part of the Azure AI org, have been renamed, or have been bundled with other products.
“The former Azure AI is basically just tech support for OpenAI,” a former Microsoft executive said. "Eric Boyd is effectively maintaining the OpenAI service. It’s less of an innovation engine
I cant stand microsoft I have to use windows at work and it drives me nuts.
Only reason I like using windows at my work is the only other choice is Mac, and my work mac is only sorta barely usable for what I need
I’m in the opposite boat, I have to use macOS for work, and I much prefer Linux. But macOS is way* better than Windows, so I don’t complain too loudly.
And judging by the recent Claude Sonnet 3.5 results, OpenAI may not even be the top AI company anymore.
Nah, it hasn’t changed. It’s garbage.
No shocked pikachu?
