[Video] Microsoft's Future is Just Vapourware and False Marketing Thereof
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LLM Plan B Amid Big Losses
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THE debt of Microsoft - not its real value - grows fast. They really want us to think that this is normal and they will turn things around, finally managing to make money out of LLMs (right now it's just colossal losses with no end in sight).
The other day I began seeing mindless puff pieces about the latest brand incarnation of LLMs. Now they call it "Copilot Pro" and tell you that you can get "monthly subscription for advanced AI features" (completely useless nonsense) for $240 a year. What sane person would try this? In my video I explain some of the useless gimmicks they put forth.
"You'll Soon Have to Pay $20 a Month to Access Copilot's Coolest Features", says another spammy site (this year Gizmodo and Engadget spew out SEO SPAM quite a lot! Not always, but still a lot).
A friend showed me this and said Microsoft can't afford to keep the scam afloat any more, "so data centers will be closed."
This friend insists that Microsoft's Azure was such a failure (I can concur, based on what I saw when I worked full time in this industry) that the layoffs and datacentre shutdowns will carry on... unless they can convince shareholders to keep letting them run LLM stuff in there, despite having no prospect of profit (people would not pay for stuff that performs this badly and has no viable utility in industry).
This Microsoft-funded site lies by saying "Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot assistant launches for small businesses and consumers". No, it did not launch. Microsoft just keeps re-announcing the same thing over and over again, each time pretending it is "news" so "go check it out!" They've done this about 5 times already and they keep rebranding. To quote, "Microsoft Corp. is expanding access to its Copilot virtual assistant, making it available to users of its Office suite of productivity applications."
People won't pay for it, so now Microsoft is just tying it (bundling) to a bunch of stuff like "Office suite of productivity applications."
Can Microsoft convince shareholders that this will actually help sell "Office suite of productivity applications" rather than make them more bloated and less secure? It is a resource hog at the server side and the client side, worsening the experience and increasing costs.
The whole "branding" nonsense has gone 'mainstream' (Google does this too; like "Slack" riding Slackware Google rides "Gemini" and then makes "Gemini Pro") and it has become so laughable that now they use the words "Copilot Pro" and even "Turbo". To quote: "Microsoft's Copilot Pro, a $20 monthly subscription, will provide access to more features like a GPT builder and GPT-4 Turbo, as well as enhanced image generation."
Well, "enhanced image generation" as in plagiarism (with source/attribution concealed). Risk getting sued for using it. How lovely. Same as with code and prose (loads of lawsuits).
We're fully aware that Microsoft has its quarterly "results" soon (another chance to defraud investors), so it may be desperate to show that there's some prospect for profit or a business model in LLMs. Signing some words on paper with Vodafone is just a cheap PR stunt. Vodafone does not need vapourware. Microsoft just needs some stunt with a multi-billion figure somewhere in it. It gives a false impression of progress... something to do with "hey hi" (AI).
"If LLMs usually regurgitate verbatim excerpts of what they ingest during training," a friend told me, "then trying to use them for coding can result in copyright infringement and (where applicable) software patent infringement."
Spewing out larger, human-written chunks of code or text would improve their "performance", but then it is no longer GPT, just plagiarism thinly veiled as "machine logic" or GPT[number]. No matter if it is "Pro" or "Turbo", it'll still end up using large portions of people's work without their permission.
Microsoft isn't the only company doing this. Yesterday I saw this article:
Stability Hey Hi (AI) releases Stable Code 3B to fill in blanks of AI-powered code generation
At only 3 billion parameters, Stable Code 3B can run locally on laptops without dedicated GPUs while still providing competitive performance.
As I note in the video, the idea of computer-powered code generation isn't new. It was a popular concept back in the 90s when I was a teenager and merely encouraging people to plagiarise other people's code isn't "code generation"; it's just the latest marketing ploy from the company that started with Bill Gates literally fishing out other people's code from an actual dumpster. █
"Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in it. Even as two major, terrifying wars rage around the world, every newspaper has an above-the-fold AI headline and half the stories on Google News as I write this are about AI. I’ve had to make rule for my events: The first person to mention AI owes everyone else a drink. It’s a bubble. Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way."