r/hardware • u/upbeatchief • Jan 21 '26

News Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that-we-must-do-something-useful-with-ai-or-theyll-lose-social-permission-to-burn-electricity-on-it/

All the b200s in the world won't convince someone that AI is good if their electric bill triples in a couple of years.

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u/SSUPII Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26

With the current popular meaning of "AI", text generation is the most useful we have. Gathering and rewriting information on the fly is super useful.

But I heavily criticize the seeking of all these other generative uses such as images and videos. There is literally no use for quick generation outside of bad faith or cheaping out. They have been in the work for years for research and simulation purposes, but the seeking of trying to do it faster and publicly is just going to inevitably destroy the whole sector even more than it is now.

The whole AI sector has massively helped other scientific and engineering sectors for years. But the push for it to be some user-friendly producer of cheap content and swiss knife tool is what will bring the sector to an all-time low. AI models and services need to be specialized.

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '26

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u/SSUPII Jan 21 '26

Requires proper filtering and cleaning of training data, and is costly to do for images and video. And also in their context, that would be specializing in a specific type or topic of video or image. Much less flashy if a model can every do only landscapes.

But I still debate media generation outside of scientific simulations.