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Microsoft’s $440 billion wipeout, and investors angry about OpenAI’s debt, explained (fortune.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)

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[–] 5 points 9 months ago (8 children)

That's cool. I did all of that without AI coming from a similar place as you. AI didn't open up a new path for you, it just showed you a path that already existed, which isn't any different from what a regular search engine can do. There was nothing stopping you from finding that path on your own except your unwillingness to look.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Willingness to look is a pretty important factor. LLMs reduce the personal cost incurred to look up information, similar to how search engines saved us from having to go to the library for every question we had.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    They also introduce much more uncertainty and remove your ability to judge the trustworthiness of the information you're receiving. That's not to mention the social and environmental costs.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    You could say the same about people who used the early 2000s Google by entering full questions with natural language and clicking "I'm feeling lucky". There are always going to be wrong ways to use a tool. But we're discussing whether there exists a right way. And that right way includes verifying the information you receive, just like you would if you found it through a regular search engine.

    The social and environmental costs are real. That's not the criticism you gave and not what the responses are disagreeing with.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    They presented to you a reasonable use case (assisted learning) and your response was "lol, you're just lazy. Do it on your own. I did it, so can you".

    I am in a similar position, networking is Martian to me and if I search guides on how to do stuff, it's full of people that go "just use X to do a reverse proxy", as if I have 200h of experience under my belt. I'd rather have a chatbot explain to me like I am 5 in some cases.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I don’t consider myself a “proponent” of ai and I think it gives dependent and lazy people brain damage lol

    But these people seem like complete contrarian Luddites who just want to insist it’s bad because they don’t like it and have seen too many negative memes about it

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago

    You are being lazy. If "I have to learn how to do this" is too high of a bar to clear for you then maybe you're just not supposed to do that thing. Setting up a self hosted environment is pointless if you don't know at the least the basics about how it works. It will break sooner or later and if you just typed whatever random characters your computer told you then you'll never be able to fix it. You won't even be able to describe to ChatGPT what the problem is.

    AI is making learning harder, not easier. It's flooding the internet with bullshit and you're acting like that's a good thing. When you're learning something new you need to know that your teacher knows what they're doing. An AI summary might be pulled from a network engineers blog or it might be the sanitized ramblings of a schizophrenic pedophile who tries to host CSM on his smart toaster. As a beginner, you can't tell the difference, especially when an AI rewrites the crazy and presents it in an authoritative manner.

    Yes, learning new things can be hard but the internet is already the shortcut. Quit trying to outsource even more of it.

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