'Stochastic Parrots' (a Term Coined by Timnit Gebru) Have Failed Microsoft and Now There Are Mass Layoffs in What Microsoft Repeatedly Dubbed a Strategic Growth Area
Yesterday we wrote about stochastic parrots and reminded people that Alex Oliva (of Linux-libre fame) had done an article about them*. It's what he called useless LLMs that didn't help Microsoft (in Europe, Yandex nearly exceeds Bing right now in terms of usage; Microsoft has fallen to third place in many countries and Bing had mass layoffs).
Today we see news about thousands of Microsoft layoffs (again), so there's clearly a problem. A Microsoft-sponsored writer (media operative basically) euphemised these mass layoffs as the "latest move to control costs" and tried to make it seem like not many people had been laid off (while not taking account/stock of employees inherited through mega-mergers). Meanwhile, Microsoft is over 100 billion dollars in debt and this debt continues to grow.
There is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme going on here. As one comment explained in relation to the media coverage about chatbots, "probably the same majority shareholders of microsoft are the majority shareholders of those media outlets" (hyping up chatbots) and "it's more like a BS wave", not "AI wave" as newly-leaked Microsoft memos call it. █
____
* "AFAIK the term was coined by Timnit Gebru," Oliva told me today, citing [1, 2, 3]