Microsoft lays off the staff who make the money to fund AI that doesn’t
Microsoft is firing 9,000 workers across the company — 4% of all employees. Before this, they laid off over 6,000 in May and another 300 in June. [CNBC] It’s not that Microsoft is doing badly. In Q…
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This is pure speculation, but I get the feeling Microsoft's gonna significantly downsize, if not collapse, by the decade's end.
This recent move's gonna kneecap Microsoft's ability to function as a company, and their heavy investment into AI mean they'll likely take the brunt of the impact when the bubble bursts.
That's fine, they had a "make money by stepping over morals" philosophy from the very start.
That philosophy always ends in stepping into dogshit to try to boost stock prices.
Yeah, it's not sustainable long-term, but they're not in for it long-term anyway.
I'm kind of dubious its effective in any term whatsoever, unless the term is "nothing works but we got a lot of it".
This does sounds like doubling down on a bet.
As a matter of fact, someone's noted Ed Zitron had called this back in September:
There’s something I’ve been wondering about: is the management (of not just Microsoft but really any company who’s pivoting to AI this hard, so also Duolingo and Klarna, &c.) really convinced that there’s going to be a foom event soon and the chatbots become capable enough to actually do the work they attribute to them? Or do Nadella and friends know this is all bullshit and just play along until they can’t anymore and leave the sinking ship?
I honestly can’t tell anymore.
My take is that the Silicon Valley overlords live in a bubble, where they believe that.
From the perspective of the company I work for (not a tech company, but has a pretty large development center) they truly believe that AI will 10x productivity. Not so much the FOOM stuff. Just typical Capitalism.
Standard Business Idiot nonsense. They don't actually understand the work that their company does, and so are extremely vulnerable to a good salesman who can put together a narrative they do understand that lets them feel like super important big boys doing important business things that are definitely worth the amount they get paid to do them.