He’s gotten too used to his digital dumbass constantly saying “That’s an excellent observation” to him.
No, we think it’s great, keep going.
“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”
talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.
oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.
one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.
being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.
in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.
and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.
Never mind any of that - does no-one do market research anymore? Did anyone bother to ask customers if they actually wanted any of this AI crap before billions of dollars was commited to it? Not to mention the damage to the environment.
What’s funny is its not the first time Microsoft has found itself out of touch with customers.
Users of consumer Windows are not Microsoft’s customers in any real sense. Microsoft’s customers are huge enterprises who want this stuff and smaller companies who are trapped into using the MS ecosystem by needing to have interoperability with other people/businesses who use MS products.
“The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me."
That’s your killer feature? “But you can converse and it can make any image!”
“But you can converse and it can make any image!”
So can any toddler.
He says it like no one has seen the party trick yet. Like, yeah dude, we were all impressed with it in 2022. Then we learned that it’s all smoke and mirrors.
Some of us weren’t even impressed in 2022 because we don’t want to talk to a computer or create shitty images.
I was not impressed in 2022 either when it was frequently wrong, didn’t back up anything it said with facts, sources or evidence, and business people kept hyping it immediately as some sort of revolution.
I spent a lot of time having an existential crisis before I realized I was not alone.
Plus, the “you shouldn’t expect exponential improvement” gaslighting has begun. Like, for the amount of imaginary dollars being thrown at machine learning, where the fuck’s the Brave New World being sold to investors?
This is exactly it.
I am still impressed with it.
But I’ve never had any desire to have any meaningful conversation with it, and it’s still a fight to make AI do valuable things.
I work with AI, just today I finished another AI tool integration (it’s actually very cool, but proprietary). The “trick” to making ai useful is to create useful tools for annoying tasks then let AI deal with those tools for you. And even that’s sketchy.
It is so easy to get hyped by the benchmarks but there are only two real benchmarks that matter: do people actually want to use it, and can it do what you promise it can.
For 99% of AI integrations the answer to both is a resounding no. Maybe when models are smarter that’ll improve, but so much AI crap is just devs trying to check a box, and not actually what users would want.
Yes, and no. It’s not all fake, there’s stuff going on, it’s just not what they’re selling it to be, and highly pushed into places it needs to stay away from, for safety and for inability. My takeaway on him being surprised as how people aren’t impressed isn’t the LLM factor of what it can do (well or not), it’s that HE isn’t aware that other LLMs are doing better than Microsoft’s version. He really is deep if he doesn’t know what the competition has. That’s why there’s a lackluster interest (as well as burnout of AI “solutions” for every damn thing, often worse than just doing it like before).
My coworkers use Co-Pilot. When they have downtime, just for amusement, just to see how badly it mangles things it ought to be good at doing. Never mind the fringes where an LLM isn’t suited at all.
In true tech bro dumb dumb fashion, instead of recognizing failure and learning from it, he doubles down and blames the critics.
Explains why windows has been such garbage. Remember when windows 10 was advertised as the last windows? Lol
Well they weren’t wrong, for me at least. 🐧
I’m mindblown at him being mindblown.
Oh wait, I’m not. Because I know those CEOs are completely detached from reality, and take users for dumb cattle ready to be herded.
Funny but insightful comment from the link:
“Never get high on your own stuff. A lesson this guy doesn’t seem to have learned…”
Fediverse, please enlighten me - is Windows a drug? …on a more serious note, “don’t overestimate the desirability of what you’re trying to sell” is sensible advice.
is Windows a drug?
No. Drugs can give you a good time. Windows can’t.
That’s the thing, for many Windows users it has been giving you a good time for years. Windows 10 was actually pretty nice to use when it came out; it’s life has been a classic death-by-a-thousand-cuts of becoming spyware, but the users are so used to it they aren’t aware that their delicious drug isn’t giving the same high and is now fucking them up.
It’s not a drug, it’s a virus.
No, there’s just a very serious reason to push AI - to help out their rich buddies by discrediting any possible Epstein connections (and also any other evidence down the line)
It’s not that we aren’t impressed. It is impressive. It’s just not useful. Certainly not useful enough to be crammed into every piece of software and platform in existence.
The simplest things will mindblow the stupidest, most idiotic, brain amputated people.
That is the thing about general purpose LLMs. They really are impressive to people with below average experience and knowledge in a specific field.
People who actually do know something; academics, professionals and hobbyists realise that they are completely useless for their specific use case.
Unfortunately then they use it for something they are ignorant about and then they forget how useless they are.
I have yet to find any application for AI. I certainly won’t put any money into those products and I turn off anything that tries to introduce them without my consent. They are the equivalent of intrusive ads to me. If it can’t block, I stop using the application.
