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683

Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value (ca.finance.yahoo.com)

submitted 17 hours ago by jeena@piefed.jeena.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

82 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent," he added. "Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

Needless to say, we haven't seen anything like that yet. OpenAI's top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail's pace and requires constant supervision.

(page 2) 33 comments

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[–] sighofannoyance@lemmy.world 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

And crashing the markets in the process... At the same time they came out with a bunch of mambo jumbo and scifi babble about having a million qbit quantum chip.... 😂

[–] seejur@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

Tech is basically trying to push up the stocks one hype idea after another. Social media bubble about to burst? AI! AI about to burst? Quantum! I'm sure that when people will start realizing quantum computing is another smokescreen, a new moronic idea will start to gain steam from all those LinkedIn "luminaries"

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[–] makuus@pawb.social 31 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Very bold move, in a tech climate in which CEOs declare generative AI to be the answer to everything, and in which shareholders expect line to go up faster…

I half expect to next read an article about his ouster.

[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

My theory is it's only a matter of time until the firing sprees generate enough backlog of actual work that isn't being realised by the minor productivity gains from AI until the investors start asking hard questions.

Maybe this is the start of the bubble bursting.

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[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 225 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

Correction, LLMs being used to automate shit doesn't generate any value. The underlying AI technology is generating tons of value.

AlphaFold 2 has advanced biochemistry research in protein folding by multiple decades in just a couple years, taking us from 150,000 known protein structures to 200 Million in a year.

[–] DozensOfDonner@mander.xyz 19 points 14 hours ago

Yeah tbh, AI has been an insane helpful tool in my analysis and writing. Never would I have been able to do thoroughly investigate appropriate statisticall tests on my own. After following the sources and double checking ofcourse, but still, super helpful.

[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 13 points 15 hours ago (5 children)

Thanks. So the underlying architecture that powers LLMs has application in things besides language generation like protein folding and DNA sequencing.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 12 points 10 hours ago

Image recognition models are also useful for astronomy. The largest black hole jet was discovered recently, and it was done, in part, by using an AI model to sift through vast amounts of data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1lssgsEGY

This thing is so big, it travels between voids in the filaments of galactic super clusters and hits the next one over.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 45 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

alphafold is not an LLM, so no, not really

[–] dovah@lemmy.world 23 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

You are correct that AlphaFold is not an LLM, but they are both possible because of the same breakthrough in deep learning, the transformer and so do share similar architecture components.

[–] Calgetorix@lemmy.world -4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

And all that would not have been possible without linear algebra and calculus, and so on and so forth... Come on, the work on transformers is clearly separable from deep learning.

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[+] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world -12 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

A Large Language Model is a translator basically, all it did was bridge the gap between us speaking normally and a computer understanding what we are saying.

The actual decisions all these "AI" programs do are Machine Learning algorithms, and these algorithms have not fundamentally changed since we created them and started tweaking them in the 90s.

AI is basically a marketing term that companies jumped on to generate hype because they made it so the ML programs could talk to you, but they're not actually intelligent in the same sense people are, at least by the definitions set by computer scientists.

[–] weker01@sh.itjust.works 12 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

What algorithm are you referring to?

The fundamental idea to use matrix multiplication plus a non linear function, the idea of deep learning i.e. back propagating derivatives and the idea of gradient descent in general, may not have changed but the actual algorithms sure have.

For example, the transformer architecture (that is utilized by most modern models) based on multi headed self attention, optimizers like adamw, the whole idea of diffusion for image generation are I would say quite disruptive.

Another point is that generative ai was always belittled in the research community, until like 2015 (subjective feeling would need meta study to confirm). The focus was mostly on classification something not much talked about today in comparison.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Wow i didn't expect this to upset people.

When I say it hasn't fundamentally changed from an AI perspective i mean there is no intelligence in artificial Intelligence.

There is no true understanding of self, just what we expect to hear. There is no problem solving, the step by steps the newer bots put out are still just ripped from internet search results. There is no autonomous behavior.

AI does not meet the definitions of AI, and no amount of long winded explanations of fundamentally the same approach will change that, and neither will spam downvotes.

[–] weker01@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

Btw I didn't down vote you.

Your reply begs the question which definition of AI you are using.

The above is from Russells and Norvigs "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" 3rd edition.

I would argue that from these 8 definitions 6 apply to modern deep learning stuff. Only the category titled "Thinking Humanly" would agree with you but I personally think that these seem to be self defeating, i.e. defining AI in a way that is so dependent on humans that a machine never could have AI, which would make the word meaningless.

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[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 8 points 14 hours ago

It's always important to double check the work of AI, but yea it excels at solving problems we've been using brute force on

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago

AI is just what we call automation until marketing figures out a new way to sell the tech. LLMs are generative AI, hardly useful or valuable, but new and shiny and has a party trick that tickles the human brain in a way that makes people give their money to others. Machine learning and other forms of AI have been around for longer and most have value generating applications but aren't as fun to demonstrate so they never got the traction LLMs have gathered.

[–] match@pawb.social 5 points 14 hours ago

I'm afraid you're going to have to learn about AI models besides LLMs

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[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

That’s standard for emerging technologies. They tend to be loss leaders for quite a long period in the early years.

It’s really weird that so many people gravitate to anything even remotely critical of AI, regardless of context or even accuracy. I don’t really understand the aggressive need for so many people to see it fail.

[–] Furbag@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I just can't see AI tools like ChatGPT ever being profitable. It's a neat little thing that has flaws but generally works well, but I'm just putzing around in the free version. There's no dollar amount that could be ascribed to the service that it provides that I would be willing to pay, and I think OpenAI has their sights set way too high with the talk of $200/month subscriptions for their top of the line product.

[–] Killer57@lemmy.ca 4 points 8 hours ago

$200 a month isn't enough to keep open AI profitable

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[–] ToaLanjiao@lemmy.world 33 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

LLMs in non-specialized application areas basically reproduce search. In specialized fields, most do the work that automation, data analytics, pattern recognition, purpose built algorithms and brute force did before. And yet the companies charge nx the amount for what is essentially these very conventional approaches, plus statistics. Not surprising at all. Just in awe of how come the parallels to snake oil weren't immediately obvious.

[–] Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 18 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I think AI is generating negative value ... the huge power usage is akin to speculative blockchain currencies. Barring some biochemistry and other very, very specialized uses it hasn't given anything other than, as you've said, plain-language search (with bonus hallucination bullshit, yay!) ... snake oil, indeed.

[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Its a little more complicated than that I think. LLMs and AI is not remotely the same with very different use cases.

I believe in AI for sure in some fields, but I understand the skeptics around LLMs.

But the difference AI is already doing in the medical industry and hospitals is no joke. X-ray scannings and early detection of severe illness is the one being used specifically today, and will save thounsands of lives and millions of dollars / euros.

My point is, its not that black and white.

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[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 0 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

For a lot of years, computers added no measurable productivity improvements. They sure revolutionized the way things work in all segments of society for something that doesn’t increase productivity.

AI is an inflating bubble: excessive spending, unclear use case. But it won’t take long for the pop, clearing out the failures and making successful use cases clearer, the winning approaches to emerge. This is basically the definition of capitalism

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[–] iamjackflack@lemm.ee 3 points 11 hours ago

Well duh

[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 11 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Is he saying it's just LLMs that are generating no value?

I wish reporters could be more specific with their terminology. They just add to the confusion.

Edit: he's talking about generative AI, of which LLMs are a subset.

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