Microsoft Cancels Leases for AI Data Centers, Analyst Says

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.

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 is just awful. The output of any models from Deepseek to quen to Claude to whatever other model is mediocre to useless. I literally highlight some code that includes comments about what I need and I even include long explicit descriptions etc in the prompts and it's just unrelated garbage out every time.

The most useful thing has just been ChatGPT when there's something I need to learn about. Rubber ducking basically. It's alright at very simple coding questions or asking about obscure database questions I might have, but beyond that it's useless. Gotta keep the context window short, or it starts going off the rails every single time.

And Henry Ford would reply: "Who is going to buy the cars?"

We have been living in a fake economy for quite some time where money is printed and distributed to the "tech" sector. Which isn't really "tech", but mostly entertainment (YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, ...).

Growth of the economy means nothing. The money that has been printed goes to shareholders. What the common man gets is inflation and job losses.

If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and reduce the cost of living.

You should be curious why Nadella is looking for the world to grow at that rate. That’s because he wants Microsoft to grow into $500B/year in revenue by 2030, and it will be challenging without that economic growth to grow into that target. You can grow into a TAM, try to grow or broaden the TAM, or some combination of both. Without AI, it is unlikely the growth target can be met.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/26/microsoft-ceo-nadella-said-r...

What is your personal productivity metric by which you have more than 10% increase? More money earned, less money spent, fewer working hours for same income, more leisure time? It needs to be something in aggregate to mean something related to what Nadella meant. There are many individual task which LLM system can help with. But there is also may ways for those gains to fail to aggregate into large overall gains. Both on personal level and on corporate, and economy wide level.

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 decreased, there's no addition value are produced

there's a very simple thought experiment abt the result of productivity growing alone:

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?

Going to safely assume you've never worked at an enterprise.

Because improving the productivity of every employee by 10% does not translate to the company being 10% more productive.

Processes and systems exist precisely to slow employees down so that they comply with regulations, best practices etc rather than move fast and break things.

And from experience with a few enterprise LLM projects now they are a waste of time. Because the money/effort to fix up the decades of bad source data far exceeds the ROI.

You will definitely see them used in chat bots and replacing customer service people though.

It also gets all of these things wrong, like not paying attention to models of toilets and quirks for their repair, often speaking with an authoritative voice and deceiving you on the validity of its instructions.

All of the things you site are available via search engines, or better handled with expertise so you know how much of the response is nonsense.

Every time I use AI, it's a time waste.

A fellow degenerate gambler I see. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, trade with caution. Being early is the same as being wrong.

I think its probably foolish to short nvidia until theres at least echoes of competition.

AMD wants it to be them, but the reality is that the moat is wide.

The closest for AI is Apple, but even then, I’m not certain its a serious competitor; especially not in the datacenter.

For Gaming there’s practically no worthwhile competition. Unreal Engine barely even fixes render bugs for Intel and AMD cards, and I know this for fact.

FD: I’m recently holding shares in nvidia due to the recent fluctuation, and my own belief that the moat is wider than we care to believe, as mentioned.

Using “bubble” sort? ;)

it's very dangerous, shorting in a market where a gamma squeeze can occur is extremely dangerous

other markets s like Taiwan are preferable

It's not "good enough", it's mostly overhyped marketing garbage. LLM models are mostly as good as they're going to get. It's a limitation of the technology. It's impressive at what has been done, but that's it.

It doesn't take billions of dollars and all human knowledge to make a single human level intelligence. Just some hormones and timing. So LLMs are mostly a dead end. AGI is going to come from differenst machine learning paradigms.

This is all mostly hype by and for investors right now.

"You're holding it wrong" only goes so far.

I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”.

You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire “Bob” who joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee, interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can use all your software in whatever state it’s currently in.

It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world is brownfield.

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.

In fact most of the industries out there are still slow and inefficient. Some physicians only accept phone calls for making appointments. Many primary schools only take phone calls and an email could go either way just not their way.

It's just we programmers who want to automate everything.

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).

> Meanwhile huge orgs like the NHS run on fax

I thought this was a German-only thing?

Counterpoint: the PC.

The minicomputer revolution was meant to replace all the big iron in the basement with computers shared by teams. This lasted a decade until we got computers meant for one person and we've used that format of computation for nearly 50 years now.

Everyone is talking about how AI will replace people.

It won't.

AI without HI is useless. However, HI with AI is much better at handling all the bullshit office work that needs to get done—anyone who doesn't understand this is either an idiot, a troglodyte, or already has an expendable army of minions doing their work.

The surge in AI demand won't be top-down but bottom-up. That stupid office birthday wish card being passed around? I can Shakespeare the motherfucker. And that email to the big boss telling him the project is doomed and that he needs a compass to find his own ass? Let's ask R1.

>My boss is a moron who can't find his ass without a compass. His latest tech initiative will cost us millions and make the best staff leave. Write a professional letter that covers those points without being harsh.

---

Subject: Request for Review of Upcoming [Tech Initiative]

Dear [Recipient Name/Team Name],

I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to share some thoughts regarding our upcoming [Tech Initiative Name], as I believe open dialogue will ensure its success while aligning with our team’s strengths and long-term goals.

While the initiative’s intent to innovate is commendable, I’ve observed several potential challenges that may impact its effectiveness:

Financial Impact: Based on preliminary analysis, the projected costs appear to be significantly higher than initially estimated. A detailed cost-benefit review or phased rollout might help mitigate financial risk while allowing us to test feasibility.

Team Retention Concerns: Many of our top performers have expressed reservations about the initiative’s current structure, particularly around [specific pain point, e.g., workflow disruption, lack of clarity]. Retaining their expertise will be critical to execution, and their insights could refine the plan to better address on-the-ground needs.

To ensure alignment with both our strategic objectives and team capacity, I respectfully suggest:

Conducting a collaborative risk assessment with department leads.

Piloting the initiative in a controlled environment to gather feedback.

Hosting a forum for staff to voice concerns/solutions pre-launch.

I’m confident that with adjustments, this project can achieve its goals while preserving morale and resources. Thank you for considering this perspective—I’m eager to support any steps toward a sustainable path forward.

Best regards,

"should "

But often not.

That was the point in the parent. How this is being reported is bit skewed.

And also there is the problem that nobody reads corrections. Lies run around the globe before the Truth has tied its shoelaces, or some quote like that.

You think they would spend 500B without thinking there will be any demand?

If history is our guide, that's never going to happen.

Unfortunately Siri remains near useless at times even with Apple Intelligence™®

Apple will not beat Microsoft in any capacity here

Microsoft has all the context in the world just waiting for exploitation: Microsoft Graph data, Teams transcripts and recordings, Office data, Exchange data, Recall data(?), while not context per se even the XBox gaming data