I demand at *least* "Ultraintelligence". How can I settle for "Superintelligence"?

Or give them a budget and don't micromanage how they work but instead evaluate their results.

Problem is that management would actually have to understand the work and the business, and I suppose that is just too hard.

Even if open, it just wasn't going to happen.

Problem was that it was awkwardly slower than DRAM and more expensive than NAND. Was it cheaper per GB than DRAM? Sure. Was it faster than NAND? Sure. Problem is there wasn't really space in the market for a tier between NAND and DRAM. Embarrassingly obvious as Intel ran around doing things like trying to force a whole different paradigm for application developers to do things awkwardly special to try to take advantage of this tier.

Now we have a scenario where one would think Optane could shine, an industry obsessed with feeding AI models as fast as possible. Except the answer is simply "more NAND in parallel" rather than fundamentally distinct technology.

People didn't like phone trees, and phone trees have endured. AI might finally kill the phone tree.

The decrease in Indian call centers were mostly due to broadening offshoring destinations and increased emphasis on skill at sounding American. Some places did proudly declare their domestic call center status, but lots more anonymous but credible sounding call centers exist.

Here, the accent is whatever they want, the cost is closer to an automated phone tree than a human.... I think this one is persistent, though I will penalize companies that fob me off to LLM even if I have to pay a little more for the ones with actual human assistance. Of course, I almost never contact a company so I may be none the wiser. The only times I contact a company are almost always because I need their authority to make something happens rather than 'help', and the companies are not having the LLMs do anything but try to spew crap out of the knowledge base, and when nothing is there make up something instead, like the ability in the online self-help to do things that aren't allowed to the client.

To an extent, but recently had an exchange with one of these AI chatbots, and the difference is that the chatbot will confidently declare things that are actively incorrect. They will tell you to do things that simply don't exist. E.g. to transfer the case, go online and perform a very verbose set up steps starting with a button that doesn't exist). Note that we had asked to transfer because it misrouted us, and a human would have done it, but the chatbot had some weird imagined procedure for this.

But yes, human support has been pretty bad too, often deliberately prevented from being able to correct an issue. But at least they don't go off on weird tangents made up entirely from nothing.

So I guess a supply chain attack now needs to flag the version bump as 'security' then.

No one can hear the failure of their consumer platform business over the massive flow of money for their cloud and office businesses.

If they shrugged and canned the entire Xbox and Windows things entirely, that's less than 9% of their revenue, and likely an even tinier portion of their profit. They would probably also lose all their consumer Microsoft 365 except people who never check and cancel subscription services, but that's probably similarly tiny in the scheme of the business.

You basically have a story of robust cloud revenue and also as I understand some 'rotation' in the market as investors decide that the AI darlings are probably going to be already as high as they can get for a while, and it's time to cash in and switch to other companies that either seem plausible for share price growth or at *least* actually profitable today with dividends and/or stock buybacks. So the viable quarter came at just the right time to catch investors looking to cash out of their big AI investments for the short term.

But maybe they have?

Windows+Xbox was less than 10% of their revenue. They note it is in decline and looking at the bulk of the revenue, not much of it seems vulnerable to people just not caring about Windows. Their cloud business is the bulk of their business and it is not particularly sensitive to OS selection on desktops.

One might argue that Microsoft 365 is at least in part tied to the Windows platform, but in my experience non-Windows businesses still buy into it, even if their users are largely relegated to browser based access only. At this point they have businesses so scared of not having it, they would have it even if they were just phones and ipads. You *never* want to risk a customer or partner sending you some office document that can't be read, and whether or not other options are actually capable hardly matters in the face of the *impression* that anything less than Microsoft is a risk.

The biggest unknown that I think would be sensitive would be the 'consumer cloud' portion of Microsoft 365. That's going to be mostly people who clicked through the Windows built-in advertising for using Microsoft 365 as storage and backup for their laptop and add-on software from device sales that prod users to up-sell to Office. The release doesn't make it clear what the absolute number there is, but I seem to recall hearing that's actually a pretty small number too.

Microsoft is primarily a cloud and Office company now, and I'm wagering the markets have largely already accepted that.

They have steering wheels.

Yeah, LLM is tricky since sounding correct is the priority, and being correct is a side effect of sounding correct.

Business executive style behavior.

I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying you are applying a rather picky definition of 'cost' to disagree with the assertion that 'using fewer tokens is a strategy being used to reduce AI cost'. The assertion makes sense so long as you don't get very weird about limiting the definition of 'cost'

Code analysis is a bit more unambiguous in terms of value, as long as the findings aren't taken *too* seriously. It has impossible attention span and can spot real issues, or failing that a mistaken issue can highlight something 'off' and inspire a true finding. It will also indicate lots of false positives, but at least the consequences can be limited to wasting your time so long as you take care to analyze.

The code gen is a bit more harrowing since it requires human vigilance to correct the problems in ways that humans are just not good at (the AI makes output that *looks* right, and you have to be really used to people lying about what they think they know to not give such output the benefit of the doubt.

In theory, same way they know the submitted code wasn't ripped of from the contributor's closed-source employer without authorization: they don't.

You can still have a policy to enforce, and in the cases where it is blatantly obvious, then it's easy.

In practice, nothing they can do to police the more subtle scenarios if the contributor flagrantly works to fool the policy. Except ban future contributions if they attempt to submit without disclosure and are caught.

So far the plaintiffs have tried going after the providers, and so far the providers have successfully claimed they aren't to blame, but have asserted that it can happen but that if it happens, it's the user who is liable.

So it hasn't come up yet, but it does seem like a company could come out of nowhere and hit you up for infringement because the model generated too-similar a copy. Despite not knowing, you still are on the hook, at least by the logic of the so far successful defense asserted by the AI companies.

Yes, the open source world really gets the short end of the stick in all sorts of way with GenAI.

You want to use an open source project but don't want to incur copyleft or even attribution? Launder it through CodeGen!

Your project has even two or three codegen fanatics? Congratulations, you now have inscrutable tickets and obnoxiously insistent pull requests that make no sense.

You have code unknowingly violating some closed source codebase? You can get hit out of nowhere, with no way of knowing you infringed.

Closed source code ripped off your codebase? Hard to know since you don't get that same visibility.