Bubbles Popping, "Hey Hi" (AI) a Passing Fad
In Microsoft's MSN right now:
From the article: "The numbers remain dismal. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best-performing AI agent, which was Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time. And this summer, OpenAI released its ChatGPT agent, promising that it can “do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish.” But in reality, users found the experience lackluster, calling it “not very useful,” “shaky,” and “slow.” As such, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft is struggling to sell its enterprise clients on its own take on agentic AI. As The Information reports, the company’s Azure salespeople are seriously struggling to meet some extremely ambitious sales growth targets, cutting quotas by up to 50 percent earlier this year. Microsoft’s stock sank over 2.5 percent on Wednesday, showing that investors are unimpressed by the tepid sales results."
We're gratified to see a lot of the media shifting its "views" (rather than paid-for jingoism) regarding "Hey Hi" (AI). Usage is declining, optimism gets replaced by sorrow and excuses, and we're seeing far less LLM slop disguised as news in recent weeks.
Looking at Google News last night, we didn't (and still don't) see much slop anymore. We assume it's not because Google is culling slopfarms. Google News just doesn't find many. Some become inactive, less active, or go offline for good.
This is "LJ" (Linux Journal) in Google News:
WPN and some other slopfarms in Google News attempted to rip off the originals, but the real articles are still more dominant and prominent. The slopfarms will never succeed. They were doomed to fail right from the beginning, but the hype charmed them.
This one from WPN also shows up last night:
They seem to have changed provider for their slop images (to accompany their LLM slop). Perhaps the former provider is already defunct, drowning in losses (debt) and/or beginning to charge fees that WPN cannot afford or is unwilling to shell out. █