I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn’t produce quality results.
It gave CEOs an excuse to do layoffs even though they knew it would hurt their human capital long term, and that they would probably have to hire back a lot of those positions long term at higher wages. In the short terms it gave them a few quarters of increased profits. It also let them push out blatantly unfinished products on the promise of future improbable improvements. This will hurt companies reputations long term, but in the short term is let them juice the stock price.
They needed the increased profit and the pie in the sky growth promises to game the stock market, say all the right buzz words and show an improving price to earnings.
Sure they made the companies worse and less sustainable long term, but, they got huge compensation packages right now thanks to the markets, and they probably won’t be running these companies long enough to see the true fallout.
I hope the stock market craters.
We need to do away with capitalism completely, or put it on a very short leash.
He looks from company money perspective. And I think AI is difficult to monetize. A google paper explained a long time ago that big company cannot easily have a huge competitive advantage because new techniques exists in the open source world to learn incrementally on top of costly models. Mainly you don’t need millions to make another good quality LLM.
That being said. LLM add some value, but as everything hyped to no end the real value is negligible comparatively to the « market expected value ».
This is honestly a trash article. It can be summarized as:
“Microsoft, a trillion dollar corporation that makes around $150 billion in pure profit, every single year, is tempering expectations around AI, BUT then why are they still investing $12B dollars in it, that makes no sense!”.
Like, they’re tempering expectations around AGI revolutionizing the economy, not saying AI is trash and theres no value whatsoever in it.
as others have pointed out, this article is from February, which is like a year ago in techbro-time. If Nadella truly meant what he said, Microsoft would have scaled back AI spending by now.
I don’t see where he admits what the headline claims.
Victor Tangermann February 22, 2025 3 min read
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has had it with the constant hype surrounding AI.
During an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s show this week, Nadella offered a reality check.
“Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me,” Nadella told Patel.
Instead, the CEO argued that we should be looking at whether AI is generating real-world value instead of mindlessly running after fantastical ideas like AGI.
To Nadella, the proof is in the pudding. If AI actually has economic potential, he argued, it’ll be clear when it starts generating measurable value.
“So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let’s have that Industrial Revolution type of growth,” he said.
“The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent,” he added. “Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry.”
Needless to say, we haven’t seen anything like that yet. OpenAI’s top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail’s pace and requires constant supervision.
So Nadella’s line of thinking is surprisingly down-to-Earth. Besides pushing back against the hype surrounding artificial general intelligence — the realization of which OpenAI has made its number one priority — Nadella is admitting that generative AI simply hasn’t generated much value so far.
As of right now, the economy isn’t showing much sign of acceleration, and certainly not because of an army of AI agents. And whether it’s truly a question of “when” — not “if,” as he claims — remains a hotly debated subject.
There’s a lot of money on the line, with tech companies including Microsoft and OpenAI pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek really tested the resolve of investors earlier this year by demonstrating that its cutting-edge reasoning model, dubbed R1, could keep up with the competition, but at a tiny fraction of the price. The company ended up punching a $1 trillion hole in the industry after triggering a massive selloff.
Then there are nagging technical shortcomings plaguing the current crop of AI tools, from constant “hallucinations” that make it an ill fit for any critical functions to cybersecurity concerns.
Nadella’s podcast appearance could be seen as a way for Microsoft to temper some sky-high expectations, calling for a more rational, real-world approach to measure success.
At the same time, his actions tell a strikingly different story. Microsoft has invested $12 billion in OpenAI and has signed on to president Donald Trump’s $500-billion Stargate project alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
After multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk questioned whether Altman had secured the funds, Nadella appeared to stand entirely behind the initiative.
“All I know is I’m good for my $80 billion,” he told CNBC last month in response to Musk’s accusations.
Old news.
Same CEO now claims to use Copilot to summarize podcasts, emails, and Teams messages. Speedrunning dead Internet theory for all forms of communication…
This is from February
But it destroys jobs!
I don’t think people are going to stop with AI stuff. We saw that new AI video tech release just recently, and they’re already showing it can replace commercials in terms of cost/time investment.
Commercials will 100% be AI going forward. Assuming these costs stay the same, there’s no timeline where they stop doing it unless the law deems it illegal to do so. Or unless the public hates it.
I think it’ll continue forward regardless if we like it or not. We’ll have to adapt in our own ways to this tech. I don’t like it, but unless there’s a major shake-up, I think we’re stuck
Today’s “AI” remind me of the versificator, both in terms of slop and in terms of lack of thought and creativity.
What they are trying to say is that open source and libre solutions have rendered their investments shitty.
If it were generating that much new value, where is the associated bump in wages ( hint: working class issues circa 1970)? Dunno why people are pushing this so hard to generate someone else more value while making everyone else miserable in the process.
