Nadella is Killing Microsoft. Slop Kills It Even Faster.
"AI spendings" or "AI investment" became a catch-all excuse for losing a ton of money
Nadella did not save Microsoft. He transformed it into a Ponzi scheme which pretends to have growing value while shedding off real market share and replacing licensing ('sales' or 'subscriptions') with promises and "prospects". In the past 6 or so years Microsoft embraced "AI" as a buzzword, not a concept (machine learning or ML), and it has bombarded the media with ads that say "AI" (well before LLM chatbots became "a thing").
In Windows, Microsoft takes users who just want to use some Windows application and forces them to swallow slop. Now, in Twitter ('X'), MElon is trying to force people to swallow slop (bots pretending to be users and Grok as LLM) even if they don't want that. They exercise control over minds, involuntarily. They are faking "demand" for their "latest and greatest" stuff, whether the users want it or not. Recently, Microsoft admitted slop wasn't useful for any real work, it was just for "entertainment". Entertaining its shareholders, who lose a lot of money (soaring debt) for the sake of promises that cause mass layoffs [1, 2, 3]?
Slop is not a "transformative technology"; neither was "metaverse" nor "blockchains".
Lots of hype and high quantities of fake excitement (the media is paid to play along and generate excitement based on no actual substance) won't change the facts on the ground.
Chatbots are not intelligence and marketing stunts which refuse to show their data are just bland PR.
Slop isn't replacing people's jobs, a rotting economy certainly does. Greed is costing people their jobs. "AI" is an excuse, shouldered by media owned by those who stand to benefit from such excuses.
In the context of medicine, there is no "hey hi" (AI). Voice dictation is nothing new, chatbots' LLM slop gives really bad medical advice (notorious bad, sometimes fatal), and automation in the form of robotics is neither ML nor new. The hype is new. Each patient is different and requires complex intricacies that cannot be easily implemented and cheaply with affordable and widely accessible robots (not the same as slop, they're more about automation). On top of this, precision and quality control is vital for a human to do, as lives are at stake/risk.
Don't fall for this hype about so-called 'AI'. Bernie Sanders fell for it, but he misses the point on many levels. This is an economic issue. Cory Doctorow gets it.
Now, back to Microsoft.
Nadella has already admitted the term "slop" merits usage and widespread adoption. He cannot forever deny that the so-called 'investment' in it just baloney, or merely smoke and mirrors because the real "market share" of Microsoft is declining and there are problems with payroll (hence the efforts to lay off many thousands experienced workers who are paid well).
A decade from now we'll look back at slop like we look back at skateboards. █