The Great LLM Delusion - Part II: What Are LLMs Anyway? (To Microsoft, a Pump and Dump Scheme)
I HAVE written a great deal and commented on this topic before, but this is a relatively short introductory part from the perspective of someone who worked with "AI" since age 20.
In Part I of this series we mentioned Microsoft's dependence on "AI" hype. It is a dangerously strong dependence because, in case the bubble bursts, Microsoft needs to quickly hop on (or create) another hype wave, no matter if they call it "automation" or "robotics" or "fifth industrial revolution" (whatever that actually is).
At the moment, working for Microsoft means a high risk of suffering layoffs. Most Microsoft workers wish to work somewhere else, given the choice. Currently Microsoft is the world leader in tech layoffs. No company in tech laid off more than Microsoft (so far this year). Forget about mainstream media serving to distract from all this with a perception of company "value". Remember Enron and Worldcom?
Anyway, what is this "AI" thing Microsoft keeps talking about? Actually, it is not AI at all. It is SCIgen on steroids (more code and more computational power, lots of plagiarised data). It is false marketing. In later parts, which we'll publish for a contributor, we shall explain why, but basically when they say "AI" they typically mean a chatbot that is plagiarism as a service. Ignore pseudo-academic work funded by Microsoft "Research". ChatGPT is 99% plagiarism and 1% "logic" or "glue". It's taking bits and pieces from many sites and presents those to users without links, without attribution, and without any understanding of what those bits and pieces mean, especially in conjunction, i.e. when seamed together.
One associate keeps reminding me that all this chatbot hype serves as a distraction from the empty server farms of Microsoft. I saw it where I worked; almost nobody uses Azure, unlike AWS, but the media helps Microsoft lie and it repeatedly makes false statements (in the case of OpenAI, it's Microsoft "buying" from Microsoft, i.e. Microsoft faking demand by becoming its own "customer").
What a swindle! Those grifters rely on people investing their money in this bubble.
Based on all my investigations, there is very little demand for Azure and Microsoft insiders kept telling me that Azure staff was being laid off and datacentres shut down. They are actually closing datacentres, but they keep quiet about it while making a ton of noise each time - however rare - they open a new one in some country. These "clown computing" companies seldom give a map of their locations, for security and logistical reasons. In the case of Amazon, the list had to be leaked to Wikileaks.
How many locations does Microsoft have datacentres in, how many machines run in each, and how many are used only by Microsoft (or proxies like OpenAI) itself? Based on the latest Netcraft survey of Web servers, which was released last week, the number of Microsoft machines is going down. I've been reminded that "there is not enough electricity in the world to power all of whatever they try to sell" (chatbots in everything) and trying to stick chatbots into everything - partly to fake demand for them - is driving people away from Windows and into GNU/Linux. This isn't going to end well. The "giveaways" and "discounts" cause Microsoft's debt to balloon. █